Jose will send out his team to make a tear-soaked city proud. The game really does matter
IT is painfully, essentially unimportant, but it matters.
Who wins is essentially unimportant, who loses is essentially unimportant, but a game of football – the game of football – matters tonight.
Innocent joy, victimless sadness, the celebration of team spirit, the thrilling embodiment of childhood dreams and aspirations, the sense of achievement, the freedom.
Those things, which these abominable creatures are trying to crush, find – in a small, maybe trivial, way – a bastion in football.
Pride will never be stripped from Manchester and from every city that lives its life with defiance and diversity.
It will be redoubled and in Manchester, like in so many of those cities, football clubs are towering symbols of pride.
In Stockholm, where a wound of terrorism is still healing, Jose Mourinho will send out his team not just to try to win the Europa League final, not just to try to make sure of a place in next season’s Champions League… but to make a tear-soaked city proud. Win or lose. Had this match been called off because the pain and sorrow of many back home are only starting their journeys to unimaginable depths, that would have been understandable.
Had it been called off because young men with young families in Manchester were coming to terms with the abhorrent enormity of what has happened in their environment, no matter how cocooned their perceived existence, that would have been understandable.
The home is a sanctuary at times like this. Footballers’ families worry like the rest.
But it could only have been postponed – because football, like so many strands of civilised society, brandishes the shield of normality against this heinous abnormality.
That is why this final goes ahead and that is why no one should feel ashamed of the normality of enjoying or despairing at a major footballing occasion.
Yes, again, the result is essentially unimportant, and we already knew that without the prompting of the indescribable horror of Monday night.
But it will still be acceptable to wonder, in the case of a United defeat, if Mourinho has lost his mojo.
Still acceptable to discuss whether a loss would mark one of the biggest troughs in his career after two seasons of domestic mediocrity.
Still acceptable to consider how only a win will keep him in the vanguard of a modern coaching elite.
Still acceptable to lionise those who might inspire victory, whether it be a young Mancunian or whoever.
Still acceptable to lament anyone who has the misfortune to underperform on a grand footballing stage.
That is what we do, what every fan does – more crucially, what every fan has the freedom to do.
For this cowardice to stop the playing of football would be unthinkable, nor should it stop the way we feel about football, the way emotions become extreme in victory or defeat.
You are insulting no one by caring about the game and a team.
There was only solemnity about Mourinho (left) and United’s players as they walked around the Friends Arena in the weak, sympathetic sunlight of a Swedish early evening.
Maybe they were thinking about friends at home who have been directly affected by this atrocity.
But if they smile, shout and scream in celebration here 24 hours later, that’s fine.
If they hang heads in desperation and unhappiness, that’s fine.
If you go overboard in praise or criticism, that’s fine… because it is what we do.
It is our wonderful, liberated normality.
In his statement, Mourinho spoke of the sadness, going into such a big occasion.
It remains a big occasion, though. We have a job to do, says Jose.
They do. With Ajax, they will remind us that, while in life’s grand scheme who wins and loses is essentially unimportant, a game of football matters.
The game of football matters.