Say what you like about Gennaro Gattuso, but it’s not quite as much fun when he’s not around, is it? This much we learnt as last night’s second leg at White Hart Lane passed with no one pounding the turf with smoke coming out of their ears and with equally few people trying to pick up Joe Jordan by the chin at the end.
Instead, for the second time in two nights, we were served the sight of a Premier League side clinging on for dear life against a technically superior but weirdly profligate team from elsewhere. It seems you can cosmopolitanise English football as much as you like (and everywhere else’s, too), but somehow the basic characteristics, like the stains in the Persil ads, are the very devil to shift.
Viewers might have felt that they were watching a slightly less fabric-conditioned version of Barcelona versus Arsenal. Except that, as Arsenal fans would probably point out, they were made to suffer by a team widely considered the best club side in the world, whereas Tottenham Hotspur’s struggles were being induced by a team who, until quite recently, were not even the best club side in Milan. Diminishing returns all round.
Still, who says that punditry is not a properly academic discipline? On the pitch before the match, Gareth Southgate was holding a thick wedge of folders and files and looking like a student between lectures, as if determined to erase the image of the television pundit as someone who casually spurns the chore of research in favour of (for example) putting on a pricey shirt and winging it.
Of course, we don’t know what was in those folders of Southgate’s. It could have been some blank A4 and a bunch of takeaway menus. But let’s assume not.
Advertisement
However, not even Southgate with his notes and Marcel Desailly, with his magnificent velvet smoking jacket, could make a visual case for the seriousness of punditry the way that Rafael Benítez did on Sky Sports on Tuesday night. With his cropped head squeezed into a pair of padded headphones, he resembled a Russian cosmonaut, circa 1961.
For a while, it seemed that all those trials with dogs and chimps were about to pay off and that Comrade Benítez would become the first football pundit to orbit the Nou Camp. And if Sky could achieve that, an anxiously watching ITV must have been thinking, how long before they put a pundit on the moon?
Alas, far from thrillingly expanding the frontiers of man’s half-time analysis, Benitez merely sat on a stool and burbled, leaving it to Graeme Souness to act as a sort of heat-shield on re-entry and bring the project safely back to earth.
Of course, all these people should consider themselves lucky. The Champions League only lasts for nine months and has an appointed ending, in the shape of the final on May 28. The cricket World Cup, on the other hand, has lasted twice as long as that already and will only be terminated, as far as we can make out, by the intervention of the United Nations.
Yesterday, Sir Ian Botham, watching India beat the Netherlands, seemed to have contracted a nasty case of trench foot in week seven of the campaign, yet, yesterday, when he commended the “great atmosphere” in the ground, it was almost with detectable enthusiasm.
Advertisement
When he further noted “people waving flags”, there was a lightness about the observation that suggested an air-drop of rations might have recently got through. However, when Botham then observed that both the crowd and the India team would be “going home happy”, a note of plangent longing entered his voice.
We’d console him with the thought that it will soon be over. But it won’t.