SPECTATOR SPORT
Cup tied
FRANK KEATING
After the Lord Mayor’s show.... It is back to the humdrum for football today following last week’s allembracing showstoppers in the FA Cup. Two or three years ago, we know-alls were writing off the world’s most antique annual tournament (est. 1872) as a geriatric diversion far past its sell-by date. Winning it offered no access to that licence to print money, the European Champions’ League, so once the strutters of Manchester United didn’t even bother entering. The supposed pre-eminence of the Premiership had moved things on, so the very idea of ‘dragon-slaying minnows’ was as preposterous in possibility as it was convoluted in metaphor.
But Manchester United are desperate now for the FA Cup. So are Sky television, who had not blinked an eye when the BBC, in extremis, had bagged the bulk of the Cup’s broadcasting rights. Sky would dearly like them back exclusively, its wall-to-wall Premiership coverage having seriously lost its zing as Chelsea’s domination enters its third commanding year. Rouble-rich Chelsea have dulled all competition; the phoney battles are for place money, and the only watchable catfights, between the usual relegation suspects, are as graceless and gruesome as ever. At least the celeb swank of the majority of soccer’s Babel-towered gravy-trained stars — as well as the hype in the public prints — is mercifully dimmed. The most fruitful way to enjoy domestic league football is on the televised highlights programmes which seduce you with 40-second snatches of glittery tinsel-wrapped goalmouth chunks. In between, in reality, are hours of laboured dross. For theatre, the FA Cup is best seat in the circle now: I haven’t yet seen last week’s third-round television ratings, but unquestionably they will obliterate this weekend’s for the routine league fixtures when tomorrow Chelsea, aptly somehow, meet rockbottom Sunderland — a prime no-contest with knobs on. As the Cup gathers even more pace into the spring, be assured its appeal will grow — last season, against all trends, the two semi-finals drew their third largest crowds in the past 35 years — and so will its viewing figures. On the BBC alone, last year, 12.8 million watched the final itself, a far greater audience than sat at their hearths for any of England’s qualifying matches in the World Cup campaign.
Meanwhile, Chelsea will roll on regardless of the Cup or Europe. Their strange glamour in the Premiership is not a sustained and sparkling vivacity but (appealing in its own way, sure) a pragmatic predictability. They do what a team’s gotta do. That is enough. Then one bloke makes way for another in blue, just as steadily keen and able. In 2005 Chelsea made an astonishing 109 substitutions in 37 games, only two short of the possible maximum of 111. Alas for the future of league competition, Chelsea seem far more secure and studied in their superiority than did, in previous eras of top-dog dominance, Liverpool, Manchester United or Arsenal, who were more flaky and, because of it, much more fun. Not that they wanted to be, mind. They wanted to be as ruthless as Chelsea. More than 30 years ago, when Liverpool began hogging everything, a mate next to me at the post-match chinwag in the Anfield boot-room accused Bill Shankly of attempting to make his Liverpool teams far too drearily predictable. ‘Aye, you’re a smart one, laddie,’ rasped darling Shanks. ‘I want to make them as drearily predictable as Joe Louis predictable at knocking big men to the floor, so they never get up again.’
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