The Usual Suspects Ride Again

Game on! I realise it has been at least two months since I wrote a word about football, during which time the title race has become a little more clear-cut. We would appear to be in the familiar position of watching a two-horse race between Man U and Arsenal, though I wouldn’t underestimate the fragility of either side, and would not be wholly gobsmacked to see Manchester City make major inroads into a gap which at the time of writing stands at seven points, with nine games left to play.

A wholly uninspiring recent run might, in normal circumstances, have been enough to finish City off: but this season is anything but normal, and all the top teams seem to be doing their level best to throw it away. Do not, therefore, count City out: the door remains open, thanks chiefly to the vulnerability of the top two.
Man United have just put together back-to-back defeats during which they looked weaker than they have at any time in the last five years; needless to say, Arsenal outwitted them again by failing to dispatch Sunderland at home. If it is a fight to the death between these two, you would be insane to bet against United.
Arsenal are a truly wonderful adornment to the beautiful game, a bewitching spectacle in full flight, an aesthete’s dream. And they are also arguably the flakiest side in footballing history, chronic chokers, always managing to invent new and more ingenious methods of self-destruction, such as the comic Marx Brothers caper which saw them gift-wrap the Carling Cup to the honest plodders of Birmingham City last week.
I am starting to doubt that we will ever actually see Arsenal lift another trophy. They are, of course, very much in the hunt for the title, and will shortly be welcoming United to the Emirates. I would not be in the least surprised to see Arsenal win 2-0 or 3-0, running rings around Fergie’s decreasingly intimidating warriors, annexing the ball completely. Certainly, the United we’ve seen this past week would do extremely well to escape from North London with a point.
And yet, you still sense that Arsenal will find some way to commit hara-kiri. If they were in the position of needing one point from back-to-back home games against Wigan and West Brom to claim the title, I still wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them. By the time you read this, you will know whether they have survived their trial by fire in the Nou Camp: I very much doubt it.
Eagle-eyed readers may notice that I have, until now, stayed curiously silent on the subject of the rugby, having held forth at great length on the subject in my last few bulletins. Basically, I dread to think what it’s been doing to my blood pressure and heart-rate, and it has reached the point where writing, or even thinking, about it is a potentially harmful enterprise.
Ireland’s three Six Nations jousts thus far have been murder on the old nerves, and the best that can be said of the recent Edinburgh set-to is that we did in fact win the match, leaving us mathematically still in contention for the title, though that would require a preposterously seismic turn-around in points-difference.
It is impossible to envisage England losing to Scotland, so we can take it as read that they will be coming to Dublin on closing day in pursuit of their first Grand Slam since 2003. You will recall that on that occasion, they sealed the deal in Dublin, absolutely strangling the life out of us (I think the score was 42-6): we too were chasing the Slam, it was a winner-takes-all showdown, and we were completely, brutally mutilated.
That England vintage was, of course, one of the finest teams in rugby history, an impression confirmed by their epic, near-cinematic triumph later that year in the World Cup. They haven’t come close to scaling those peaks in the intervening eight years, and this England side, for all their honesty of effort, isn’t remotely in the same class. We have won six of the teams’ last seven meetings, and I still look at the respective merits of our squad as against theirs and would be cautiously confident that we will thwart their Slam ambitions, though we will certainly need to desist from giving away 200 penalties per game.
In truth, Ireland have been fluent in attack and resolute in defence for vast stretches of the last two games, a fact somewhat obscured by the utterly maddening penalty count, which has gone beyond the realms of black joke.
We can blame referees all day long, but there’s no evading the fact that Ireland have suffered a damaging collective breakdown in discipline (not least from some of our established best players), are haemhorraging points as a direct consequence, and will need to rectify it post-haste.
While I expect us to beat England, I am actually more worried about the impending visit to Cardiff. Devising a game-plan against Wales must be a nightmare for coaches, since so much spontaneous off-the-cuff stuff goes on. Against England, you know what you’re going to come up against: with Wales, all bets are off. They aren’t world-beaters — and one still senses Ireland are capable of a major improvement on what we’ve shown thus far — but I suspect we may not be jumping for joy after this little skirmish.
I’d also like to extend my congratulations to Ireland’s cricketers on the occasion of their historic smiting of the old enemy, and apologise for not having much else to say about the match in question, for the very good reason that I know absolutely nothing about cricket. I would like to learn to enjoy it, since it is sport and therefore surely a good thing, but I’ve tried to get to grips with cricket on several occasions and have still singularly failed to fall for its impenetrable mysteries.
There’s no nationalist agenda at work here stemming from the sport’s colonial origins: I just find it slow, boring and incomprehensible. I listen to the commentators and they may as well be speaking Swahili. Basically, I have no idea what’s going on, nor does it look particularly exciting as a spectacle even if I did.
No doubt I’m missing out on something absolutely wonderful, and an undoubtedly historic triumph like the one Ireland just registered has surely won over a few new converts to the cause.
The daily newspaper for which I work has a fair smattering of cricket enthusiasts on its sports desk, and has recently been doing its level-best to whip up enthusiasm by devoting eye-poppingly vast acres of space to the sport, though I remain deeply unconvinced that Sri Lanka vs. Pakistan has all that great a grip on the imagination of the Irish sporting public.
Still, there’s nothing I love more than a challenge, and I’m determined to crack this code eventually, and now seems the ideal time to give it yet another try. With plentiful supplies of weed and caffeine at the ready, I intend to sit down and luxuriate in at least some of Ireland’s remaining World Cup battles.
You never know; this time next fortnight, I may be a convert. So if you find me rattling on about yorkers and googlies and backward square-legs in two weeks’ time, please accept my advance apologies.