Seeing the big-hitters get a bloody nose reminds us the soul of our beautiful game is still alive & kicking
IT felt as though, for a couple of days, the Ghost of Football Past looked at the machines changing the face of the game and lobbed a Luddite spanner into the works.
Qatar’s Barcelona aristocrats coming to Abramovich’s Fulham Road mansion was supposed to be the only story in town this week.
One that would make us realise how lucky we are to follow a game that’s been transported to new heights with the advent of petrobillions, science and technology. And it wasn’t bad.
But it was up in Lancashire’s cobbled mill towns, where throwback scenes to the mad old, bad old days, reminded many of us why we first fell in love with football and its anarchic soul.
It was as though the champions of VAR, who want to bring order to onfield chaos, and the Big Six chairmen who want the lion’s share of TV riches because they believe their teams are the only ones who attract the audiences, were given a Kick up the Eighties.
Spurs and Manchester City, who last week stood in foreign stadiums being serenaded by the Champions League anthem, as the eyes of Europe were on them, were dragged brutally down to earth by Rochdale and Wigan. Mauricio Pochettino’s side being caught late on by a “big man up front”, who looks like he has a soft spot for Scouse pies, and Pep Guardiola’s team seeing their quadruple dreams binned by a man whose name sounds like a chain of northern pasty shops.
Rochdale’s manager rubbing salt in Spurs’ wounds by refusing to condemn Dele Alli for what looked like another easy tumble, preferring to talk up how his side, which props up League One, easily deserved their trip to Wembley.
A Wigan team with a starting line-up that cost £800,000 defending superbly and beating one that cost £360million. A £52m full-back taken to the cleaners by a journeyman.
Post-match pitch invasions, players scrapping with fans, fans scrapping with police and the most revered manager in the world petulantly storming away from the offer of a warm can of Skol to drown his sorrows. Like a dog sticking his head out of a car window with a hat on, most of that couldn’t fail to bring a smile to your face. Those two glorious games of football were not about proving the “magic of the FA Cup” still exists, even though the BBC, whose cameras were present, will never tire of telling us so. They signalled something bigger. They told us you can have armies of nutritionists, pedicurists, softtissue therapists, cutting-edge performance measuring machines, the most sophisticated coaching apparatus, coaches paid £13m salaries and players with their own private jets and over a season that will triumph. But on an imperfect pitch in a hostile environment, with the right attitude, anything can happen. They told us that, when honed, VAR technology may correctly interpret the laws of the game, but never the spirit or the emotion of this imperfect tribal obsession. They told us that football may be on an unstoppable journey to make the richest clubs wealthier and more powerful as the rest are left behind. But it is still basically 11 men from mostly working-class backgrounds playing a game with strong workingclass roots, whose beauty lies in its unscripted drama. A timely reminder that football is a mad, passionate ball of chaotic unpredictability played by, organised by and watched by fallible humans. And if we really don’t want the magic to disappear, we should never forget it.