FICKLE OLD ARSE
ONCE upon a time it was simple – your club won a cup and you celebrated. You got pissed, spewed up, went home, had a slash in the wardrobe and fell asleep upside down on the couch.
The next day, you bought a bit of cup-winning tat – a crap T-shirt, a mug, a scarf – and headed to work to give the bird to rival fans. Nowadays it’s not so simple. Your team wins the Carling Cup – Mickey Mouse. Your team wins the FA Cup – not what it was.
So well done football’s moneymen. You’ve said it enough times that it has become true, it’s the mantra – finishing fourth is the new winning a cup.
Forget success, forget glory, it’s all about the revenue streams. Only it isn’t, is it? hirty years from now, when you’re dishing out the Werther’s Orginals to the grandkids, what will be the footy tales that fall out of your brain?
The year your team finished fourth? The season your club’s finance men were bashing the bishop over the millions headed
Tfor the coffers because they had reached the Champions League?
What about that year your men beat relegation? Well worth passing up a trip to Wembley by playing the stiffs in the semi, eh? Ah… the memories.
No, it’s the cup final stories that will make little Johnny’s eyes widen with envy.
It’s the coach trips with mates, the banter with the away fans, the scarfs, the flags, the banners, the laughs and the ale. It’s the moment your favourite player clutched the cup and held it aloft at the national stadium.
It’s the time you looked into your star man’s eyes and for once felt you were on the same level.
Everyone was happy. You’d done your bit and they had done theirs. Ask Liverpool fans right now if the think the Carling Cup is Mickey Mouse. Ask Dirk Kuyt, who celebrated his first silverware with the Kop club like he’d won the World Cup. r ask Jose Mourinho. The League Cup was the Special One’s first trophy in England in 2005 and he didn’t mind winning it again amid the Premier League titles and the FA Cup. There’s no lap of honour for fourth is there? No medals. No open-top bus.
It’s a fallacy created by modern football.
It’s crap spouted by managers to disguise the culture of “resting players” for cup games – a culture which is piss-taking of the highest order.
The real fans, the die-hards, want to see their club try to win EVERY competition.
F*** priorities. F*** rotation. And f*** f***ing fourth. It was all about the silverware, it is all about the silverware and it ALWAYS will be all about the silverware.
A QUICK correction to the weekend’s football
results. The game at the Emirates in fact finished Arsenal 6 Tottenham The 2.
sixth goal (90+3 hours) was a lovely
finish by Charlie Adam from 12 miles
away.
OFOOTBALL fans are first to point the finger at players for not doing their job, but too many supporters don’t support.
You know the type – they boo their own, call them a prick, a c***, a tool, a tw*t.
The Emirates Stadium is seemingly a magnet for such behaviour. Theo Walcott got dog’s abuse in the first half of Arsenal’s match with Spurs.
Two goals for the speedy winger later and the same people were applauding him off. The word fickle doesn’t do it justice.