EuroTrash
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

The Beautiful Game, Italian style. What a load of shite. Appropriately, the Champions League Final went to extra time and then penalties. All the penalty saves were illegal. If this is the future of the professional game you can keep it. It was football reduced to a cheap version of that cheapest of all junk sports, basketball, where scores are meaningless until the closing minutes. Yeuk.

The setting couldn’t be better: Manchester United’s magnificent stadium. Together with Manchester City’s new home this relegates our city for years to poor relations of Manchester football. At least until the pinkies build their new stadium, if they ever do. We will build nothing, a course which suits only the loonies among us. It is of course the difference between the Can Do mentality and the peanut-sized minds of the Melledrew Tendency and their sour view of the world. While Merseyside nurtures the small-minded whingeing apparatchiks and barrow boy salesmen, Manchester has got things done. The result was a superb venue for European football’s most important club match. It was a credit to the game and the promoters, as was the Commonwealth Games. Missing the wonderful Kings Dock project was a fearful blow to our club and our city.

Of course there is another side to this. The farcical TV commentary was provided by Manchester United supporter Clive Tyldesley and Fat Ron Atkinson, both of whom are now a caricature of Laurel and Hardy. Tyldesley didn’t lose an opportunity to promote everything to do with Manchester. Then again, he had something to promote. Fat Ron on the other hand sounds more and more like a slowly leaking whoopee cushion filled with marsh gas. They were more than mismatched in the booth by sad Des Lynam, Ally everyfuckingwhere McCoist and a Bobby Robson who can’t delay his bus pass much longer. Lynam has fallen a long way since leaving BBC TV and taking the ITV survival course in phoney fast-talk hype, thus losing the kind of natural persona of a suburban Bill McLaren which got him to prominence in the first place. McCoist is merely ineffable while Bobby sounds like an ageing phonograph record of a half time team talk sometime in 1959.

I am trying to avoid writing about the match. I can’t. I wish I could. It was a disgrace to the game.

Anybody who has watched Italian football in the flesh and at length will tell you how predictable was the whole thing. It was no different during the last World Cup. Appropriately too the winner was AC Milan, the club owned and run by the neo nazi crook Silvio Berlusconi. Under him they bribed their way across Europe in the time established tradition of Italian football. In many respects the worst thing is how many great players there are in The Boot. It only emphasises how rotten is their system when you see them playing frightened patacake around the half way line and indulging in what seems like a foul every minute. To hell with them.

Tyldesley of course was a complete arse head. After ten minutes he said the game was “Absorbing.” On twenty minutes he said it was “Engaging.” At the half hour he claimed “The tempo is exciting.” After the half time whistle he wittered it was “Engrossing.” Meantime, Fat Ron talked erudite gibberish similar to a suburban salesman. McCoist prattled that it was “Fascinating” while Bobby backed off sensing professional disaster with “It’s nip-and-tuck.” It was none of these things. It was an absolute and utter bollocks of a match livened only by a superb first half save.

As the second half wore on it got worse, the fouls got nastier and the fear more palpable. Then each team retreated into its own half and started booting long balls up front. The only goalmouth action came when tiredness crept in and cramp took its inevitable toll. It made no difference to Tyldesley who by the hour mark was ludicrously stating the match was “Enthralling.” This was too much even for Fat Ron. You can always tell when he’s about to disagree with his hoppo when he starts a sentence with, “Well, yer know…………” There were a lot of “yer knows.”

Me, I wanted to get both teams together with their coaches and kick the living shits out of the lot of them for bringing the game into disrepute. It was that bad. For a time it even looked as though Berlusconi had bribed the ref, a German dentist, for not booking some of the Milan players for dreadful fouls.

First we got beyond the Silver Goal. Then we got past the Golden Goal. Then we got to penalties. And yes! There was a plethora of illegal saves with the ‘keepers at least a metre off their line when the ball was kicked. Not that it mattered. The penalty kicks were as pathetic as the match itself. The final whistle was a blessed relief. I couldn’t be bothered to watch the presentation.

For us the only light relief was a distant thought that this was the kind of playing company we might have ended up in next season. Superior passing ability would probably have lacerated our midfield and we wouldn’t have lasted long. Then again, Mogadon has the same affect.

The Champions League Final, Italian style? Fuck it, man, fuck it.