FANTASY FOOTBALL
While it was hardly Boca Juniors v River Plate at La Bombonera, Sunday’s eagerly anticipated match between Liverpool and Manchester City rated about 8.5 on the official Football Daily feist-o-meter by the Premier League’s comparatively tame standards. The visitors walked out to a loud chorus of pantomime booing and some mildly amusing banners reminding them of their serial cheating, there was some defiant “doing” of the Poznan in the away end and … er, that was about it. For all the faux media concern, one of the most hyped Premier League matches of all time passed off without anything much in the way of flashpoints. We’ve seen more rancorous, heated physical exchanges at the judging of the best Victoria sponge at the local church fete.
Following a first half that will probably live no longer in the record books than it will in the memory of anyone forced to watch it, City eventually won doing handstands after Liverpool were reduced to 10 men. The visitors’ fans, players and head coach have since been criticised for milking their win, although given the simmering hostility they were subjected to, their smugness in the face of emphatic victory was more than a little understandable. While it is true that the vast majority of City’s current players are not tainted by direct association with the financial chicanery perpetrated by their club’s owners until it came to a conveniently abrupt halt on the final day of the 2017-18 season, it is fair to say the presence at the club of many stars responsible for embarrassing Liverpool is not entirely unrelated to the skulduggery which preceded their arrival.
Away from the pitch, the most fascinating aspect of the match was the manner in which it was covered, specifically by a network that has spent decades insisting the now irreversibly tarnished product on which it spends and makes billions is The Best League In The World™. Perhaps having witnessed Joe Cole desperately mugging on City’s guilty verdict the previous day on TNT Sports, Sky had assembled its Heavy Artillery O’Punditry in Jamie Carragher, Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Micah Richards and Daniel Sturridge. Each of them made a reasonably decent fist of toeing the fine line between condemning City for their cheating, without making the obvious observation that, for the past 17 years, their employers have been selling subscribers what many have long suspected was a massive lie.
“If you could take me off Manchester City games moving forward for the next few months until the verdicts have been heard, I would be absolutely delighted,” parped Neville. “At the end of the game it is quite hard because you are imagining, basically, if these guilty verdicts are confirmed, there is going to be a huge cloud hanging over the whole league.” Obviously, the irritating pedant in Football Daily behoves us to clarify that the guilty verdict has already been confirmed, but is now simply subject to appeal. In the meantime, we are left watching a multibillion-pound mirage where every match featuring City feels like that McFly family photo in Back to the Future, with various games, goals, trophy lifts and victory parades fading in and out of existence until we get a final, definitive decree.
LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE
Join Daniel Harris at 8pm BST for hot Premier League updates from Coventry City 1-2 Newcastle United.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Nobody’s in the frame, nobody’s connected to the job, at the minute there’s no vacancy. At the moment, we’re going to try something new, we’re going to see how it goes and we’ll see where it goes … We like where we are, we’re going to see how it goes, maybe for a few games, maybe for a month. The coaching team have been doing the heavy lifting anyway” – Forest Green Rovers owner Dale Vince decides to press on without a manager after Robbie Savage did one to Peterborough. Not that this approach worked particularly well at the weekend, what with Hartlepool ending a six-match losing run by heading down and winning 4-2 in the National League.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
Fair play to Xavi Simons for taking a business course (Friday’s Football Daily, full email edition), but if he’s serious about ‘using his time in the best way possible’ he should read What they Teach you at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton and What they Don’t Teach you at Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack. As the joke goes, these two books contain the sum of all human knowledge” – Pål Jørgen Bakke.
As José Mourinho has already, in the space of just two months, done his infamous ‘por qué’, printing out a piece of paper to ‘prove’ he’s right to the media and refusing to show up at the press conference after Vinícius Júnior rightly, and hilariously, had a great goal chalked off and was sent off in the same move for hair-pulling, it’s good to see that, like all great artists of the past, he’s just ended up as a bad tribute act to his former self, doing a farewell tour and churning out all the hits” – Noble Francis.
Is there a word count for submissions to Football Daily letters?” – J Russo [no, not at all, not in the slightest, there absolutely isn’t – Football Daily Ed].
If you have any, please send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s prizeless letter o’ the day goes to … Pål Jørgen Bakke. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we run them, are here.
This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
