Growing the game

Cowering in the corner, the Carabao (nee League) Cup is whipped into action this week, serving its sole purpose to ensure that a week doesn’t go by without any football being played, or rather, broadcast. 

There has been talk of the competition being withdrawn, some of it by Pep Guardiola, but how exactly would that help, oh master - surely you can’t be advocating a bit of breathing space for the players and supporters, to actually miss the game for a bit, appreciate it?

What people don’t understand is that if you’ve got a good thing going you have to flog it to death before the subscribers, er supporters, lose interest. You’ve got to create overloads, press to the point of strangulation, bully them with goodness.

More is more, momentum the holding midfielder keeping it all together. It’s about educating people. The Super League revolt was a terrible disappointment, and a sad indictment of the average fan’s intelligence. It’s like they don’t want to be force-fed Real Madrid v Juventus twice a season every season! Just harming themselves really. Some people are even against the FIFA Club World Cup! You’d think they’d be grateful to have something on in the summer while we hang around every other year waiting for a World Cup or a Euros or a Copa America or an AFCON or a Confederation Cup. Think of the boost to economies. Of employment. More travel, more accommodation, more games, more pundits - more opinion creating more emotion. Another underwhelming Spurs or Aston Villa player from the 2000s having their scripted say. Can people not see the social media rollercoaster? It’s a tornado of football comment; it’s so clear people need this, yet some choose to deny themselves, to deny others. Only today there have been millions of posts on the subject of injured players.

Sky Sports provides the perfect model. Listen to friend of the game, and friend of the world, Richard Keys, reassuring viewers tuning in for the inaugural Monday Night Premier League episode (Season One.) “Depressing Mondays are a thing of the past”. Now look, we have Friday Night football, 12:30 Saturday football, 5:30 Saturday football, not to mention the enlarged European feasts spread throughout the week - a working week that now brings comfort instead of overrated anticipation. There was once an advert, in between a comedy sketch show, highlighting all the football all of the time. Values that chime perfectly with the modern day.

Reductions should only be made when necessary, and you can see that the Carabao Cup is proof that sacrifices have been made, two-legged games cut, replays banished. It’s a two-way process. We listen. We understand our cherished top teams need to rest the top players so that they are ready for that beautiful expansion of those European games. There’s examples of this in the FA Cup too, a competition where fan priority is again evident: it is there, in the hotly anticipated draw for the next round taking place while the current round is still ongoing. None of that preposterous stuff of (thankfully) old, making people crowd round a radio on a Monday lunchtime - nearly 48 hours after the last piece of action - as if in some desperate scramble for bread. One vision of the future is to stop games mid-flow to make that draw, perhaps during a VAR check. We know there are tedious critics of the VAR system, and once more, here’s a solution. Hear it again: the FA Cup draw read out during a VAR check. It’s mind-blowing, I know.

It’s also called growing the game.

Something borrowed, something claret and blue

 Is the Aston Villa team that beat Bayern Munich 1-0 at Villa Park in the Champions League on Wednesday better than the Aston Villa eleven who beat Bayern Munich 1-0 in Rotterdam to win the 1982 European Cup Final?

Comparing eras is difficult, I understand, (during his co-commentary of England-Argentina at France ‘98, Kevin Keegan said that after a period of even five years such a thing was pointless, let alone forty two), and for a start this year’s Villa have entered the competition after a fourth placed finish in the Premier League, while the ‘82 vintage went in as champions of the First Division (the only other English club joining them was Liverpool, courtesy of having won the cup the previous season.)

You could argue that finishing fourth behind the Manchester City empire and an Arsenal team just two points behind them, followed by a good Liverpool, was as equal to the achievement of winning the top flight in ‘82, but it’s not just budget and power that’s the difference, it’s also about not being allowed to get pissed in the build up to the biggest game of your life or, as Ken McNaught did, go on a long run the night before it. Different times, different tools, different culture.

The names of the players involved in the goals perhaps underlines the disparity: Gary Shaw (RIP) to Tony Morley to Peter Withe in Rotterdam, Pau Torres to Jhon Duran in Birmingham. Withe’s shot went in off the post despite him being only a few yards out; Manuel Neuer was caught out being 20 yards removed from the goal line. 

Bayern, for once, didn’t win the Bundersliga last season - didn’t even come second - and would you say Harry Kane is as effective as Karl-Heinz Rummenigge? Is Joshua Kimmick at the same level as Paul Breitner? Seems it is good not to compare and just enjoy the respective eras. But you can, though, appreciate the echoes of Emiliano Martinez’s save-heavy performance standing between victory and something else on Wednesday, just as the largely unknown Nigel Spink did when coming off the bench for the injured Jimmy Rimmer to keep Bayern at bay in the 1982 Final. Martinez undoubtedly has a bigger ego than Spink, but he also owes the surge in his career to an injury, sustained by Arsenal’s then No.1 Bernd Leno at Brighton & Hove Albion in the Covid-hit season of 2019-20, which introduced the 27 year old perennial loanee/ reserve Martinez to Arsenal’s first team, impressing as they went on to win the FA Cup under Mikel Arteta, who had replaced the sacked Unai Emery in November, a situation that has suited both parties, with Emery now leading Villa back to the grand stage via a successful rehabilitation at Villarreal. 

The season that Villa won the European Cup, they finished 11th in the league but won the Super Cup against UEFA Cup winners Barcelona. The following season they went out in the Champions Cup quarter final to the Juventus of Platini and Boniek and most of the Italian World Cup winning team, including top scorer in ‘82 and European Footballer of the Year, Paolo Rossi, who was substituted in the Final that they lost to West Germans Hamburg thanks to a goal by Felix Magath, former boss of Fulham, where Leno now plays in goal. Four years later, Villa were relegated, a jet-propelled decline that would later be matched by Blackburn Rovers (Premier League winners 94-95, relegated 98-99) and Leicester City (Premier League winners 2015-16, relegated 2022-23.)

Two seasons after Leicester’s title win, Hamburg were relegated from the Bundersliga for the first time in their history, but perhaps one day there will be a Champions League match-up between themselves and Juventus - a 1-0 win for the home side maybe. Impossible though it seems for a Villa or a Hamburg to win their respective leagues, the modern format at least gives hope for romantic reunions, if only because it’s in the past that romance exclusively lives.