BRIAN GLANVILLE
writes for worldsoccer.com each week.
MANCHESTER MAYHEM
21/05/08
Manchester and Moscow. Two disastrous choices. Though you could hardly blame UEFA for the first. Who was to know that Rangers would limp their way into the UEFA Cup Final and bring their intimidating hordes of supporters with them?
Moscow was another matter. It should never have been chosen in the first place, given the deeply repressive nature of the Russian autocracy. Huge prices for transport and abysmally limited accommodation. And, though UEFA again could have hardly known it at the time, a stadium with an appalling pitch which was still in a state of disintegration after being re-laid for the second time, when the Final happened.
There was alas no way anyone could stop the blue hordes, in their herd like invasion, descending on Manchester though why in all logic they should have decided to do so was bewildering. Only 30,000 of them after all were going to be able to get into the stadium. That left 120,000 or so milling around with no tickets. Putting up three screens on which to watch the match in three of Manchester’s largest squares backfired at once when one of them conked out just before the match was to begin. But experienced soccer revellers can tell you that such screens can be a mixed blessing, concentrating huge numbers of fans as they do in a relatively restricted space with all the possibilities of violence, even if all those fans follow the same team.
Yet would it not have made so much more sense – if sense has anything to do with it – had those deluded thousands stayed at home to watch the match in its entirety on television? A pathetic, almost superstitious, to be close or relatively close to the action seemed paramount. And of course, in cockney parlance, things “went off” after Rangers had lost. The so-called minority of thugs looked a pretty large one. Some 200 them, kicking a copper when he was down. Though, knowing the reputation for heavy-handed methods of the Manchester police from fans elsewhere, I am prepared to believe – and indeed we saw something of it on our screens – that they were not entirely blameless.
As for the game – “Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play?” – it was good for football to see such a talented Zenit team prevail against ultra defensive Rangers. True Rangers had been subjected to a deplorably demanding programme, but we had seen in Florence what a miserably negative approach they have to the European game. Ally McCoist, who would in his playing days surely have given them a very different profile – made the excuse that Rangers were entitled to adopt those tactics that worked. Tactics which however rightly elicited the scorn of the Fiorentina manager Cesare Prandelli, who saw his team succumb, as Rangers appeared to have planned, to penalties after extra time, after Rangers in the previous 120 minutes seemed to have no ambition to score.
By contrast Zenit – however strongly may deplore the racial bigotry of their supporters, preventing them from signing black players – were a highly entertaining attacking team, thrashing their previous two German opponents, banging in four goals in their return leg semi final in Saint Petersburg against the supposedly powerful Bayern Munich. I’ve no doubt that had their usual high scoring centre forward Pogrebnyak been available rather than suspended, Zenit would have won far more easily. His Turkish deputy fired blanks. But in the wily and accomplished playmaker Andrei Arshavin, he himself suspended from the victory over Bayern, they had the best and most creative player on the field. Walter Smith the Rangers manager didn’t have to keep Darcheville alone up front for so much of the game, as he showed when he desperately threw on, however vainly, other attackers.
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Does Paul Jewell live a charmed life? After his pathetic Derby County team, which never won a game under his aegis, had surrendered yet again their last League match at home to Reading??? He reportedly lambasted his invertebrate team. Yet, since he took them over, they failed to add a single victory to the solitary win they had obtained without him. True, he was left with a difficult hand to play, but how impossible really was it?
I ask myself that especially because in the space of four days I saw Derby surrender six goals at Chelsea then rise splendidly from the ashes, to lose only 1-0 at home to Manchester United. True, that one winning goal might have been three or four, but, by the same token, United held on to three points only thanks to a couple of magnificent saves from their young keeper 25-year-old Ben Foster, almost incredibly playing his first League game for so many months after severe injury. In parenthesis, I do wonder what will happen to this splendid keeper now; my hopes are that we shall quickly see him playing first team Premier League football somewhere or other, even if it be on loan where he worked wonders as we know for Watford. For me, he still looks England’s best keeper.
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History repeats itself, wrote Karl Marx, the first time as tragedy the second as fast. So, when Cardiff City’s butter fingered goalkeeper, Peter Enckelman. Could the shade of poor Danny Lewis, watching from on high, have chuckled wryly at the sad spectacle? For Lewis it was – a Welsh international too – who notoriously fumbled the ball over his goal line in the Cup Final of 1927, to give Cardiff their famous 1-0 victory. And when it comes to missing chances in a Final, what of the astounding blunder of Nwanko Kanu, even if he did eventually atone by exploiting Enckelman’s blunder, when he actually strolled past the keeper; then hit the outside of the goal with his shot?
In that 1927 Final, Charlie Buchan, the £100 a goal star and skipper of the Arsenal team, admitted standing with his centre forward, Jimmy Brain, each waiting for the other to knock the ball into an empty net and letting the ball and the chance go. Then, of course, there was the notorious last gasp miss in the 1983 Final by Brighton’s Scottish inside left Smith – now Chairman of the Scottish Football Association – which let Manchester United off the hook. To waltz 4-0 through the subsequent replay.
Overall, a thoroughly mediocre 2008 Final, redeemed for me chiefly by the bright and lively promise of the 17-year-old Aaron Ramsey, when Cardiff put him on as a second half substitute. He is wonderfully precocious, calm and ration in possession, skilful on the ball. There was a glorious late moment in the game when, receiving the ball in a crowded penalty area, he calmly twisted away, rightwards, from two challenging opponents, before laying the ball off. He may have come on as a putative right-winger, but in fact he was constantly found in the middle, wherever the action was.
One also remembers a significant moment when having given the ball to a colleague, he stood in the centre, arms confidently raised, asking for it back again! I don’t suppose Cardiff, alas, can afford to keep him, given their parlous financial plight and the looming figure of their former owner, Sam Hamman, who wants his money back. But what a coup for whatever Premier League team that can buy him; and what a discovery for Wales!
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