United, They Fall

So, the Treble has gone up in smoke, prompting enormous sighs of relief from all those of a non-United persuasion – and sending the venerable Sir Alex into a paroxysm of rage.

While Nani’s sending-off was certainly debatable, it was impossible to suspend disbelief when the red-nosed one started fulminating about hostile referees. Sympathy for his predicament does not come all that naturally, in view of the fact that the men in black routinely gift his team a good 10-15 points per season. There is no doubt whatsoever that Ferguson is one of the greatest managers who ever lived and quite possibly the greatest, but the 71-year-old sounds about a tenth of his age when he starts playing the victim.
Amidst all the kerfuffle that accompanied Real’s escape act, it seemed to be overlooked that United were 1-0 ahead at the time of the red card, not 4-0, there was half an hour still to play, and there is every reason to suspect that Mourinho’s men would have turned it around even without an extra man.
Foul Play doesn’t do impartiality when it comes to United, so I could perhaps be accused of bias, but it was a pounding great pain in the ass to listen to the fallout the next day, a goodly portion of the Red Devils faithful clearly having made up their minds that they all but legitimately won the 2013 Champions League, as opposed to crashing out in the last 16 against a team with superior firepower, wit and creativity when it really mattered.
With the Premiership title almost certainly on its way back to Old Trafford, and English interest in the Champions League extinguished before the quarter-final stage (unless Arsenal have pulled off a preposterously unlikely coup in Munich) the much-maligned FA Cup starts to take on more significance than would normally be the case. The decline of this magnificent competition is one of the saddest football stories of the last two decades, a casualty of the colossal financial pressures to thrive in the Premiership.
It may be that the Cup’s lustre used to benefit hugely from the fact that there wasn’t a great deal of football shown on terrestrial television, and live coverage of these death-or-glory knockout ties was a ‘what’s-seldom-is-wonderful’ pleasure to be devoured with maximum relish.
More pertinently, though, it was a uniquely democratic competition, one which almost all clubs attached huge importance to precisely because they had every chance of winning it. A favourable draw and a few good days’ work could catapult even struggling clubs quite a long way (I seem to recall Chesterfield making the semis in ’97 and being denied a place in the Final only by shocking refereeing).
The old pot’s prestige has declined sharply since then, with Manchester United having pulled out of the 2000 edition completely in order to focus on a money-spinning tournament in Brazil. But it isn’t just the bigger clubs who are to blame: clubs fighting for promotion from the Championship, or battling relegation from the top flight, invariably treat the competition as nothing more than a nuisance, fielding severely weakened teams.
Nothing is more damaging for a sport’s spectator appeal than the perception that the participants aren’t too bothered, and the suspicion has arisen in recent years that 90% of clubs competing for the Cup would happily see it scrapped tomorrow morning, an impression hardly dispelled by Wigan fielding a ‘shadow’ side in the weekend’s quarter-final at Everton (they won 3-0, leaving them with a pesky semi-final to further clutter their fixture schedule and distract from their relegation battle).
Worse still is the fact that the heavyweight clubs, while giving every impression of not giving a fuck about the Cup, still end up winning it (Portsmouth’s 2008 triumph was the only time in the last 25 years the trophy has been lifted by a club that could be described as anything less than huge). But this season, with a distinctly lopsided semi-final draw having stuck United, City and Chelsea all in the same half of the draw, and every incentive for all of them to win it, the gloves are off.
Both City and Chelsea have had wholly underwhelming seasons, and in both cases, the Cup holds out the prospect of a kind of salvation. United have gone nine years without getting their hands on it, and while they’ve certainly had no undue cause to lose sleep about this, you don’t doubt Fergie would give his eye teeth to put the situation to rights. The other half of the draw features Millwall, Wigan and Blackburn Rovers, essentially ensuring that this year’s Final will satisfy everyone who loves to get stuck into a good old David v Goliath battle. Bring it on.
Foul Play is about to depart for sunny Lisbon, and will return just in time to tune into Ireland’s World Cup qualifying assignment in Sweden. All the portents are discouraging in the extreme, and it has hit the point where I haven’t got the heart to even think about the Ireland team in its current state.
This doesn’t mean I’m giving up on the cause, but things may be about to turn very nasty, if they haven’t already. I do not think that we will be jumping for joy after the final whistle – and that is all I want to say on the subject for the time being.
Stockholm, here we come.