Boro v Sheffield United an absolute stormer
Five minutes into the second half and this is the minute by minute text commentary on the BBC. Looks like quite a game. Click for big…
Weekend thoughts
Arsenal weren’t interested in the FA Cup game on Saturday. United deserved the win but Arsenal fans deserved more from their team. While people talk about psychological advantages and all that, the extra game or games that United have to play might be telling.
Sheffield United v Boro was worse than Chelsea v Liverpool last week. The only bright spot was United’s unsual free kick routine which seemed to involve making it look like they were having an argument. Beattie’s shot hit the post in the confusion. It’ll be interesting to see what they try next.
Preston were unlucky against Portsmouth but miss penalties against higher league opposition and you’re always asking for trouble. The own goal was a little cruel.
Liverpool - well, what can you say? They battered Barnsley but still got beaten. Sucker-punched right at the end. Nothing is going right for Benitez and with Inter Milan on the way it could get worse. It wouldn’t be beyond Liverpool to beat Inter though but you have to think the FA Cup was probably their best chance of silverware this season. If you take away the remarkable Champions League win the Spaniard’s record is not great the league title the Liverpool fans so desperately want still looks light years away.
Also, why the calls for DIC to take over from the Americans? It’s just one group of speculative investors after another. If the fans think DIC will be any different from Gilette and Hicks I think they’re mistaken. They probably do have a bit more welly behind them though.
Spain - Real Madrid beaten by struggling Real Betis. Barcelona grind out a difficult away win at Real Zaragoza. The gap is down to 5 points. It’s getting interesting.
Your thoughts on these points, or any others, most welcome.
FA Cup Weekend is here!
The FA Cup 5th round has a fantastic glow to it in 2008 with no less than ten of the 16 clubs who have made it this far coming from the Coca-Cola league and, if the draw is kind to those who are left standing, it is not totally inconceivable that one of the ‘minnows’ could find themselves at Wembley come May. If we are to assume that all of the top-flight sides progress against those in the divisions below, there will still be three league teams flying the flag. Who says the magic is dead? I will try to make that the only cliché.
Despite the big four still being in the competition, this year does represent the best chance the league cliental may ever have of winning the fabled cup again. West Brom will be chief amongst the contenders if they come through their derby clash against Coventry, while Sheffield United, who dumped out Man City in the last round, have an extremely winnable game with Middlesbrough in front of them. Incidentally, the Baggies are a best-priced 40/1 to win the FA Cup, so if you fancy an optimistic flutter, now is the time.
Those in the upper echelons of the Premier League (and even those in the lower: I’m looking at you Dave Kitson) may have a blinkered view of the competition, but in the bread and butter of the football league, it is proving a year to remember. Do you think there are any shocks on the agenda?
FA Cup review
‘The magic of the cup’ is as much a football cliché as ’sick as a parrot’ or ‘it’s a game of two halves’, but it holds true in some cases.
Havant and Waterlooville had the day of their lives against Liverpool, taking the lead twice before the Premier League team’s extra class showed through. That they were applauded off the field by the Anfield crowd tells its own story and it’s great that they got a nice reward for beating Swansea rather than a trip to Plymouth, or something.
Sheffield United beat Man City - you wonder with so many Premier League teams going out if the cup has lost something due to the amount of foreign players in the game. In other countries the cup competitions aren’t taken anywhere nearly as seriously as the FA Cup is in England. Could this be a factor?
With just 6 top flight teams left in the 5th round there are going to be some smaller teams making it further than they might have thought. Which is good for the competition. It’s hard to see beyond the big 4 as winners but some other clubs involvement will make it interesting. It’s 1995 since a club outside of Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea or United has won the cup - will this be the season of spectacular giant killing or will it be more of the same?
“Ronnie Radford has been rested today, in preparation for next week’s game at Preston…”
I remember eight or nine years ago when Manchester United declared their intentions to not compete in that season’s F.A Cup, and the percentage of the country that weren’t shrugging their shoulders and telling their friends to ask the bar staff if they had any taxi numbers were high five-ing one another and gleefully contemplating the now increased chance their team had of winning the competition, several national newspaper journalists descended into cheap and gaudy cliché to the point where their every utterance was a platitude concerned with the wonderment of the Football Association Cup, they became convoluted and mocking parodies of themselves and eventually reached the stage where they seemed incapable of expressing any thought, as simple, say, as telling their wife if they wanted Weetabix or Frosties for their breakfast, or whether they wanted one sugar or one and a half with their morning cup of coffee without resorting to some sort of well rehearsed and sorrowful piece of spoken prose bemoaning the end of the ‘Romance of the Cup’. Several of the nation’s foremost football writers were discovered a bloody mess, kitchen knives inserted neatly into their ears, as stressed and irritable partners in their nighties took the only way out they could think of to avoid hearing about Bert Trautrman’s broken neck or the white horse or Nat bloody Lofthouse for the seven hundredth day in a row.
This made football supporters laugh, of course, and was a neat illustration of the gulf between journalist and fan, never clearer than when discussing the F.A Cup. People that pay money to attend football matches know that the F.A Cup, a competition that consists of sleet, rain, open terraces and getting laughed at by Wrexham supporters as their jumped up pub team knocks seven shits out of your boys in front of John Motson and a braying nation of spite faced bastards, is about as ‘romantic’ as a ‘Flares’ bar in Wigan. It makes a quickie behind a bus shelter look like a moonlit walk around Paris, there’s more ‘magic’ to be had watching a tramp having a wank behind a skip, and though cup killings are great fun for everybody that isn’t directly involved with them, to those affected they are debilitating, horrid things which leave you feeling mildly violated. Supporters stumble out of the ground afterwards wondering what exactly to do next with their lives and though the urge to complain bitterly about your “plucky” (read: unskilled thugs), “brave” (read: cheating bastards) and “heroic” (read: red faced nightclub bouncers with shaved heads and British Bulldogs tattooed on their calves) opponents is tempting to the point of it being over-powering is it one that most be resisted; these non-league teams are managed by shell suit wearing goons, they are supported by glue sniffing fourteen year olds taking the weekend off from supporting Spurs and they are chaired by gob-shite, Tory boys fooling nobody with their ‘local boy made good’ routine, but attempting to point this out, no matter how tentatively, will only lead to accusations of spite and bad sportsmanship and before you know it you have Stevenage Borough saying things under their breath about your personal hygiene and telling all the girls that you had an erection in the changing rooms after P.E.
Underdogs are a peculiarly British notion, in any sane country they are derided as the passive aggressive, pity seeking attention whores they quite clearly are, their being lauded as some sort of quirky national institution is another example of the divide existing between those paid to see the game and those paying to see the game but we are long used to that: battle lines drawn, journalists can know everything there is to know about the game, but none of this suggests any sort of understanding of it.
We expect more of our football managers though, and what they need to understand is that though our reasons for loving the F.A Cup are far removed from the dewy eyed and sentimental ones cited by old git journalists, we do actually find it rather splendid, it’s a box of milk tray, a nice cup of tea and a Seinfeld boxset, and if you’re going to try your hardest to be a continental coach with your fancy pants squad rotation nonsense, you can ruddy well do it as far away from this competition as possible.
There’s so much to hate about this trend that I don’t even know where to start. It manages to fuse arrogance with cowardice, a miss-guided insistence that they have a squad good enough to chop and change with a more implicit admission that the grim prospect of another season fighting relegation in the premiership is more important than a series of exciting and involving games for their support, topped off with an alcohol fuelled weekend in sunny may at the nation’s capital. We’re never going to win it, why bother? appears to be the attitude, which, as well as being disgustingly lily livered and pissy pants is also illogical, seeing as how they’re never going to win the Premiership either and yet sniff around the place desperately, like hormonal teenagers at the end of term disco, clawing to dear life at the show laces of the top league.
Games like the Wigan Sunderland one yesterday make a mockery of the whole competition, two reserve teams playing out a desperately dispiriting non-encounter at a near deserted Stadium of Light is presumably not going to make any special grandstands celebrating the cup’s next milestone, but is now far more representative of the tournament’s standing than any extra time Ricky Villia winners. And if the notion of these types of teams treating the cup with such disdain wasn’t so enraging, it would almost be worthy of applause, in a ‘where the hell do these dickheads get the bollocks?’ type way.
Where do these fucking nobodies get the nerve? It would be nice to think that Gary Megson, for example, grew up with a steely cynicism for the F.A Cup, acquired and developed as an antidote to John Motson’s soul crushing cheerfulness on anything BBC broadcast, and is finally being given a chance to take the system down from within, using his job in management to gleefully sabotage and reconstruct a competition he’s always seen as over-valued, but that’s unlikely. Chances are, Megson, Bruce and Keane enjoy feeling like proper football managers for the day, imitating what Ferguson and Wenger have done for years, but forgetting the key ingredients, namely, a necessity for rotation borne out of European involvement and a half competent back up selection of players to replace your first teamers with. Without these, any manager not playing a full strength team in the cup just looks like a monumental tosser.
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The Magic Of The Cup…?
I still think that Third Round day is a bit special, regardless of what Dave Kitson says. In a time where it’s all Premiership and Champions League, there’s always room for an upset and bit of tradition in the Cup.
Don’t see too many shocks this year; maybe Oldham will repeat their previous feat against Everton, Burnley could upset Arsenal, but the one for me is Stoke versus Newcastle. The Potters’ front line will be a handful for the Toon’s piss-poor defence and then I reckon it’s one more game for BFS to save his job.
Graham Poll in talking sense shocker
Regular readers will know Left Back is no fan of Graham Poll but he makes sense here.
Well that was crap
Worst FA Cup final ever?
Chelsea played with all the ambition of a non-league team playing Real Madrid. They were lucky that United’s so-called big players went missing in a big game again.
Giggs - appalling. Rooney - not bad in fairness but once or twice his control let him down when he was in very good positions. Ronaldo - invisible and showed why many who appreciate he’s had a really fantastic season don’t consider him the ‘greatest player in the world’ by a long, long way.
Drogba - what a season he’s had. Winners in two cup finals in one season is nice work on top of the 30+ goals in other games.
I wonder will Jose Mourinho enjoy himself tonight or will he be too concerned about the “big threat from the City of London to my dog”. What a really odd man he is.
Does Mourinho ever listen to himself?
Ronaldo is a big player. But if he wants to be a bigger one, he must be fair with his opponents. The final should be played with happiness. I’ll be disappointed if some players are diving and trying to get the opposition red cards on Saturday.
I know he’s trying to make the ref keep an eye on Ronaldo but how can he say that with a straight face when he’s got players like Robben, Drogba, Joe Cole and even Shaun Wright-Phillips in his team?
All the talk of how thin his squad is and how he might have to play Hilario as a striker just makes me think he’s preparing for defeat as much as victory.
United to win on Saturday.
The hug
So, it would appear the ongoing Mourinho-Abramovich feud has now entered into a period of détente, as the two Masters of the Universe engaged in a little man-hugging following Chelsea’s last-gasp victory against Blackburn the weekend. Good on them, I suppose. I enjoy a manly cinch every now and then myself, and it doesn’t even have to be reserved for the ‘I love you, mate’ part of a drunken evening out.
Still, the fact they were at each other’s throats for so long begs the question: was it awkward in any way?
Roman: Uh, okay. He’s grabbing me, pulling me close. Bit tight. Fierce, even. Jeez. Okay, just relax. It’s just a hug, it doesn’t mean anything. I tell you what, it sure as hell doesn’t mean I have to publicly support the man who has guided my personal plaything of a squad to consecutive titles and may yet produce four trophies this year. Nope, that’s not how I roll, brother. Shit, this hug is going on for a bit. I’m feeling, I don’t know, like I’m a bit trapped. I don’t like touch much, never did. Okay, okay, breathe, relax, it’s all right. Be cool, go to the happy place, like the doc says. Right, just remember: you are very rich. Very, very rich. So much money. So. Much. When I’m sniffly, I blow my nose in Vera Wang wedding gowns. I eat panda steaks—weekly. I had my secret lab clone Gandhi so I could beat him at arm wrestling, just for kicks. Soooo rich. I am so rich. And powerful. Never forget the power. I am a big man, yes I am. And rich. Mmmm…
José: Jesus, does he have a hard-on…?