Mud and money
FRANK KEATING Day and night, night and day . . . relentlessly the football season slurps on through the January mud — mud and money, slurp, slurp — transfer 'windows', raucous headlines, phoney passions torn to tatters, 'hot' news stories cold and discarded in a blink. British professional football preens itself as pre-eminent in the culture, and broadcasting and the public prints clamorously whoop up the presumption, but I fancy most of us who happily call ourselves `fans' are only 'quite interested' as opposed to being obsessed by the passing show. Although most of the leading players cannot with an innate and comfy ease kick the ball with either foot (once the prerequisite basic talent), for some time they have been 'bigger' than their clubs; now the club managers are 'bigger' than any player.
At least England is not yet Scotland: up there the championship 'race' is once again utterly devoid of any remote competitive interest, so many streets ahead are Glasgow Celtic.
Why do the others bother to turn up? At least the outcome of the English Premiership might sustain an interest till April, but (with Bolton Wanderers and Portsmouth leading the also rans with spirit and puff, however forlorn) the four usual suspects are obviously the only ones left in the mix at the top. And two of those could be, to all intents, as good as eliminated from the equation this very weekend because, nicely, they are playing each other – that is, Jose Mourinho vs Rafael Benitez on Merseyside, and Sir Alex Ferguson vs Arsene Wenger in London.
More celebrated than their clubs; more feted than any player. Some quartet. Manchester's combative Glaswegian knight still fretfully chews his gum but, coming up to this weekend, the old boy is in the driving seat. His team has settled into some zippily attractive ball-passing routines, but in the long run will those be as significant a show-stopping production as that being scrupulously prepared by Arsenal's sallow boffin, Wenger, who unveils almost by the week a rich cast of vibrant young understudies (none of them homegrown) with a carefree zest, speed of thought, and an ability to play passes at the perfect angle into the very full-pelt stride of the receiver? Arsenal vs United could well be worth staying in for on Sunday; just as Arsenal to win successive Premierships in 2008 and 2009 could well be the punt of the year. Chelsea at Liverpool promises more angst. Suddenly, it is the champions' once cool, combed Mourinho who is prickly and panicking, almost in a daily bait about injuries and luck — 'our ball seems all the time to be bouncing straight to an opponent's legs'. To be sure, might Jose be on his way this summer even before Liverpool's gloomy, ruddycheeked pouter Benitez, whose mulish selections have forfeit, barmily, two insurance-deal domestic cup runs and who ponders only on the Ides of March and a daunting match-up in the European Cup with Barcelona? What chance there a month after you've let in six against Arsenal's teenage reserves?
All over in Spain, too, for Mr & Mrs Becks: Hollywood and a dizzying fortune. Leytonstone, Manchester, Madrid, Malibu. No mud there, just money. The End. A peerless Pacific sunset. You know it makes sense: they speak the lingo, the weather's wonderful, the water's warm, the paparazzi gushingly generous; for Victoria the freebies are fabulous, the shopping just dandy. Another cocktail, darlin'? End it like Beckham. Perfick. The nice young man deserves nothing less.
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