Football is fundamentally about misery. It is about being fleeced by an absentee owner with an outboard motor and offshore account in the name of supporting a team your dad liked but you loathe. It is sit-ins, walk-outs, own goals and self-harm. The working man’s game is not a Panini sticker album; it’s a half-time swordfish and prosciutto panini. At least it was until this season.
Now we are all winners. Football’s gone retro. This sort of thing used to happen back in the 60s and 70s when no TV meant you could not buy the league, but not now. Yet this week the title race involved everyone losing, apart from Leicester who extended their lead at the top via the unorthodox means of a home draw with West Brom. It is anti-Hollywood fare but no less entertaining for that. There’ll be a new Kasabian album soon, mark my words.
Funnily enough, when Claudio Ranieri messed up that Champions League semi-final against Monaco in his Chelsea days, thus paving the way for the divine right of José Mourinho, one of the old tinker’s substitutions involved throwing on Robert Huth as a potential match-winner. Twelve years later, he is one. Credit to Ranieri for playing the long game.
But if Leicester do mess up, and we must face that possibility, Tottenham might win. No, it’s true. To the neutral, Tottenham are as inoffensive as beige. And Harry Kane is that old-school sort of striker we Melchester Rovers fans like. They would be winners that everybody could happily ignore.
Yet if Spurs collapse – and defeat to West Ham and Kane’s goggles suggests it is on the cards – Arsenal could win. Oh, that would be rich, even joyous given their own fans have been calling for Arsène Wenger to fall on his lectern. Would they boycott the victory parade? How far do you take your angst? Would they stick the sleeping bag he wears in a museum?
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Of course, Arsenal lost to Swansea so they can’t win. Which means Manchester City might. Which would mean their resolutely decent manager would have done the double and delivered a perfect riposte to being sacked (announced by Pep Guardiola, set to become the most nauseatingly fawned over manager since Sralex).
Yet the greatest win of all would be Manchester United. Remember them? Bobby Charlton? George Best? Zoran Tosic? Big in the 90s, their fans have been revolting all year. It’s been like the Xmas Corrie special listening to phone-ins as fans make Morrissey sound like the member of Brotherhood of Man sacked for not deploying the correct level of gravitas. Oh the sheer, unbridled sense of righteous indignation at not winning the league for once. How amusing would it be if Louis van Gaal turned the tables on everyone and won something? Admittedly, it would be funnier still if they went back to the old days when they did not win the league between 1967 and 1993 and truly re-learnt that suffering is fun.
They have certainly got the star of the late season. Marcus Rashford put paid to Arsenal after beating a Danish Scrabble score in the Europa League. United are now on the for the league and European cup double. It’s a mad world.
In other football, we got a new Fifa president. His name is Gianni Infantino. He cannot be any worse, although Manchester United did think that when they ditched David Moyes.
It was another big week for rugby, too, and in his most laughable aside yet, Eddie Jones said he was putting a media ban on himself. This was down to evidently not liking the way he had been portrayed in the media; namely, accurately. England beat Ireland and now face Wales, who beat France, in a potential title decider. If Jones wins he will be regarded as the sort of gritty grand slam guru we needed. If he loses he will be a loud-mouth Aussie. Fine lines and all that, as opposed to fatuous ones.
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The rugby in the RBS Six Nations has been fifty shades of grey. It’s all big hits, no plot, crushing anti-climax. The game might be improved if they take away two players and do away with scrums (is there a more protracted, duller spectacle in sport than the re-set shove-fest?). Oh hang on, that’s been done up north.
Scotland beat Italy in a match some of their old pros billed as their most important ever, which is definitely overstating the value of a dead rubber in an annual competition that they never win.
Elsewhere, Tiger Woods’ problems continued as he was made to watch as an 11-year-old schoolboy trotted onto the tee at his course and promptly made a hole-in-one. It was also a good week for Victoria Pendleton who won a horse race and will be going to the Cheltenham Festival amid some festering chuntering about devaluing the sport. We are all for devaluing sport if it means novelty acts can win. That’s 2016. It’s the year of the bloke playing the trumpet with his ear, of Leicester, cyclists on horseback and a quiet Aussie. It does not get any better than this.