Arrivederci, Ranieri
FRANK KEATING
The immediate future in Europe looks none too rosy for English soccer. In next week's decisive semi-finals of both the Champions' League and the Uefa Cup, Chelsea and Newcastle need to play thunderously well against French opposition to reach their finals. Both are complex, moody sides of flickering self-belief. But don't rule out famous victories, for each have a schizophrenic streak capable of soaring from glum sullenness to sudden foot-tapping heights — gee, folks, let's do the show right here!
Chelsea particularly seem to have pallidly squandered the joy and defiance they displayed in beating Arsenal in the quarters with a gormless surrender in the first leg of the semi in Monaco when their nice, harassed Italian manager Claudio Ranieri barmily meddled with the team formation. From his eyrie in the stand, Chelsea's boyish Russian zillionaire pouting,ly watched in his opennecked shirt, his monstrous yacht moored in the Med behind him, and there was a mina cious curl to his lip which served as an ominous thumbs-down from the emperor. You sensed the bodyguards around him also had their eyes on the lonely fretful soul on the touchline as they too eagerly fingered their holsters. Arrivederci, Ranieri.
Meanwhile hello, dolly Delia. The telly cook is on the board at Norwich City and her Canaries are back in the Premiership where, they fancy, they belong. Tractor-boy neighbours Ipswich should go up as well, so winter has been anything but cold and flat in East Anglia — and Liverpool Street Station must have been busy if you recall this corner's theory last month that new Londoners' allegiance to a football team was fixed by the terminus at which you arrived to set up your first bedsit digs in the city. Just as I did at the other end of town in the 1950s when this cricket and rugby nut from soccer-free Glos took a tube from Paddington and was at once lumbered with watching Jimmy Hill at Fulham.
Come to think of it, for once it has been a bonny soccer season for Paddington's dear old GWR line. Plymouth Argyle are up from the Second Division, with Bristol City and Swindon odds-on to join them. Torquay have had a terrific run in the Third, as have darling Yeovil which, typically, faltered only because of excitement when their WessexyWurzels supporters' song — 'Day or Night, I'm Green an' White/ For I am Yeovil Town, ooh aargh!' — reached a heady No. 36 in the UK Top 40 pop-record charts. Meanwhile, in the non-league Conference, at GWR's borders' extremity, Hereford were bullishly first to 100 goals. 69 of them, astonishingly, in away matches, and Exeter City, bless 'ern, are not only giving the playoffs a real good go but are flying over Brazil's first team to mark their centenary.
A glance at the birthdays' list in the daily papers ages you fast. Last week, one-time wunderkind Trevor Francis was 50. He was a Plymouth lad, bought by Birmingham at 16 and, with 52 England caps, I daresay the West Country's best footballer along with the two Exeter boys of the 1920s, Arsenal speedster Cliff Bastin, who inspired Brian Glanville to take up sportswriting and who posted his first FA Cup winner's medal back to his old Devon headmaster, and Bolton's safe, flat-capped goalie Dick Pym (three Cup Finals, not a goal let in). Cliff retired to run a sad corner shop in Neasden. Dick went back to Topsham and a contented long life minding different nets as a fisherman. Wise guy.
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