It ought to have been hard to top the sheer sporting ecstasy of last fortnight, when Dublin claimed the All-Ireland and the Manchester derby went like a dream, but in its own way, the events of last Sunday topped it. Foul Play and a bunch of like-minded ne’erdowells spent a lovely few hours luxuriating in the magnificent surroundings of the refurbished Wembley Stadium, consuming heroic quantities of beer, watching the legendary Gene Simmons belt out a unique version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ before settling down to watch the godlike Adrian Peterson put the Pittsburgh Steelers ‘dee-fense’ to fire and sword while a ridiculously cute gaggle of Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders strutted and shimmied cheerfully for several hours. It was Foul Play’s NFL debut, and it absolutely rocked, and it will most certainly become an annual fixture from now on.
 
The low point of the fortnight, 24 hours previously, was being stuck in a room with no television and unable to establish any sort of Internet connection while Clare and Cork went at it hammer and tongs in the All-Ireland hurling final replay. As a result, I had to listen to it on the fucking radio, which is obviously no sort of way to consume what turned out to be, by the sounds of it, possibly the greatest hurling match ever played.
I watched highlights later on the RTE player, but it really wasn’t the same. Heartiest congratulations go out to both sides for cooking up an absolute classic to do justice to the most memorable Championship in years, which had absolutely everything (apart from Dublin winning the thing, but I’m sure it’ll happen next year).
Just when we’d written off the hurling power-balance as permanently set in stone, with Kilkenny a million miles ahead of all-comers with only Galway and Tipp even within sniffing distance, a revolution has taken place, with none of the aforementioned trio even reaching this year’s semi-finals. Long may this state of affairs continue.
Since we last touched on the subject, the Trapattoni era has finally drawn to a close, though the early momentum behind Martin O’Neill’s candidacy appears to have evaporated and there is little evidence that the FAI are in any great hurry to appoint a replacement (deferring the decision saves them a few quid in wages).
In the interim, Noel King takes over the good ship Ireland, with a rather daunting assignment (away to Germany) first up. A glance at the respective quality of the personnel available to the two teams would suggest that there is every possibility of another 6-1 evisceration.
It may be that Germany, having already all but qualified, are unlikely to bust a gut, but so frightening was the gap in quality the last time we met that this is unlikely to be a pleasant experience. Still, the fact that Trapattoni and Tardelli are no longer there glowering on the sidelines threatening to drop anybody who dares to try anything vaguely ambitious is a blessed relief, and with any luck, the players will look like liberated men.
The general pessimism over the team’s future may be misplaced: the fear is that we may be gradually following Scotland, Wales and the wee North into complete irrelevance, but this is to overlook the fact that (for better or worse) the Euros are about to expand to a 24-team finals, which greatly increases our chances of making the cut. Though perhaps not the force he was four or five years ago, the return of Andy Reid to the fold is a welcome indication that doors are no longer being slammed in players’ faces and everyone will have a clean slate henceforth.
Back over in Blighty, the Premiership is taking on a wide-open look this year, with six plausible champions as opposed to the three that we may have suspected pre-season, and all the teams displaying vulnerabilities of one sort or another.
The only exception to the general outbreak of parity is at the wrong end of the table, where Sunderland and Crystal Palace seem to be doing their level-best to get relegated by Christmas. Palace boss Ian Holloway, Foul Play’s pre-season tip to ‘win’ the Sack Race, was beaten to the punch by Il Duce himself, Paolo di Canio, whose utter unsuitability for the job in the first place continues to beg severe questions about the sanity of Black Cats owner Ellis Short.
At the other extreme of the table, although Southampton, Everton and even Hull have started like bats out of hell, we can almost certainly pronounce it a six-horse race for the title. Foul Play stuck a reasonably hefty wad on Manchester City at 9/4 to win the whole thing the night before opening day, and the jury is still out on the wisdom of said decision. At times this season, most notably in the 4-1 demolition of United, City have looked utterly sublime. Certainly, they are overflowing with attacking options. However, the defensive solidity of the Mancini era is no longer in evidence, and defeats to Cardiff and Aston Villa don’t augur particularly well. I didn’t see the Bayern Munich match, being mid-flight at the time, but it sounded like a grisly affair indeed.
Much as it pains me to suggest it, for those of you contemplating a bet at this point, you could probably do a lot worse than take a speculative punt on the accursed Red Devils, now available at an unprecedented 6/1 to rise above the rest and have the last laugh, fourth in the pecking order behind City, Chelsea and Arsenal. There has been more doom and gloom surrounding United’s general state of health in recent weeks than at any time since about 1989, but the table at present shows that they are six points off the pace with 31 games still to play, hardly an irreparable predicament.
They have taken 10 points from a seven-game spell, which, while hardly commanding form, isn’t exactly without precedent. Even under Fergie, there tended to be sustained passages in any given season where points were squandered fairly freely; invariably, they would bounce back with a ferocious winning run.
It is true that Fergie appears to have left behind a less-than-stellar squad with its share of problems, and the midfield is particularly pedestrian by United’s exalted standards. It doesn’t matter: any United team should be shorter than 6/1 to lift the title, and the tossers who have already pronounced David Moyes a failure after a month-and-a-half of football are best ignored.
On a related note, the boneheads who have spent the last few years questioning Arsene Wenger’s managerial abilities seem to have gone a little silent of late, with the reborn Gunners resplendent atop the table. Football has a habit of making the ‘You Don’t Know What You’re Doing’ brigade look and sound deeply, profoundly stupid.
With the arguable exception of the now-departed Signor di Canio, it is probable that every single manager plying his trade in the Premiership knows exactly what he is doing, or at the very least, knows a whole lot more about the mechanics of how to select, train, motivate and organise a football team than the drunken arseholes who spend their time ringing Sky Sports phone-ins to voice their anger at some perceived tactical misjudgment or other.
In the latter 18 months of old Trapattoni’s reign, as results fell off a cliff and it became utterly impossible to overlook the countless shortcomings of the Italian septuagenarian’s approach to the job, I was as opposed to his reign as anybody, but neither do I have a whole lot of time for the armchair pundits who, with less than zero history of personal practical involvement in football, freely pontificate to anyone who’ll listen about what line-up they’d select and what formation they’d deploy if they were in charge.
You can expect to hear much more of this sort of chit-chat in the months to come, as speculation intensifies over the identity of the next Ireland manager. Whoever gets the gig, can we keep things civil and afford him the respect to which he’s entitled? (In the event of Glenn Hoddle getting the job, an eventuality currently rated a 25/1 shot, please disregard everything I’ve just said and prepare to storm the FAI’s Abbotstown headquarters en masse).
Till then, take care.