Different players, different approaches. But in the battle of the face protectors this week, there was surely only one winner. Cast your eyes, if you dare, on Diego Costa of Chelsea, squeezed behind that black, fibreglass gimp mask — a terrifying vision, the highwayman from hell, the Zorro of your nightmares.
Now take Harry Kane of Tottenham in his modified safety goggles. He looks like a fifth-former in the chemistry lab whose bunsen burner has just gone out. Worse, from some angles and given certain facial expressions, he appears, for reasons that seem to remain mysterious even to himself, to have put his head inside a jellyfish.
Needless to say, Costa ran riot at Norwich on Tuesday and scored — his third goal in five matches since breaking his nose on someone’s head during training — to help Chelsea win 2-1 and continue their belated surge into the top half of the table. Kane, by contrast, fired a blank as Tottenham lost at West Ham and blew their chance to replace Leicester on goal difference at the top of the league.
Obvious fashion tip: if you’re accessorising with a face mask this season, you go black. You definitely don’t go clear. Especially if you’re trying to win the Premier League.
Detail matters, of course, and the best demand the best, and no doubt Kane’s face-saver was meticulously sourced and fitted, even though it looks like it was grabbed off the shelf at Boots. Yet we were slightly surprised to learn that Costa flew all the way to Milan to have his mask made. Milan is fashion central, obviously, but even so: can’t you get this kind of thing done any closer to home and without having to get out the private jet?
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Indeed, isn’t Britain globally revered for its mastery in the art of theatrical and surgical prostheses — envied by Hollywood, even, in this area? As memory serves, a Brighton-based company called Essential Aids provided a post-operative Craig Revel Horwood, the Strictly Come Dancing judge, with a sequinned crutch and Zimmer-frame combo a couple of seasons ago. Couldn’t they, or someone similar, have been commissioned to come up with something suitably durable for Costa to keep his nose in for a match or two?
This certainly would have been a boom time for an enterprising business offering sports-appropriate facial protective services in the west London area, and may still be. Four Chelsea players have worn face masks this season alone, and 11 have done so within recent memory, leading some observers of the football scene to wonder whether face masks are the new gloves. Either that or cheekbones are the new metatarsals.
Anyway, in the meantime: want that goals-guaranteed, highwayman-from-hell look without flying to Milan? Make it yourself at home with our easy-to-assemble Diego Costa mask kit. You will need: a pair of scissors and some sticky-back plastic. (Younger readers: get a supervising grown-up to provide some Blue Peter jokes at this point.) In the absence of sticky-back plastic, gaffer tape will do just as well. Attach the end of the tape to the bridge of your nose and then, holding the end in place with your right thumb, use your left hand to pass the roll around your head in a horizontal plane, being sure to bind as tightly as possible. Then scissor or tear off and seal.
Now attach the end of the tape to your upper lip and again pass the roll around your head as tightly as you can before again sealing off. Next place the end of the tape under your chin and this time pass the roll around your head in a vertical plane, once more squeezing your face as much as possible. Finally tear off and seal.
Job done: you’re Diego Costa. And you’re very definitely not Harry Kane.
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Football’s ‘big five’ clubs are far from kings of the jungle
Whatever else it was, this week’s meeting of English football’s “big five” at the Dorchester Hotel in London certainly wasn’t part of a broader campaign for hearts and minds. As executives from Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City (only two of whom were in the top four at the time of meeting, and one of whom wasn’t even in the top ten) gathered to discuss cementing their supremacy over coffee and biscuits, even their own fans were twisting their legs with embarrassment.
If I were one of the “big five”, I would be worried about that punctuation. Lion, elephant, rhino, leopard, buffalo — nobody ever tweezers the big-five status of those guys into quotation marks. At present, in safari terms, this footballing “big five” is, more or less, zebra, colobus monkey, okapi, parakeet and domestic goat. And how inconvenient that this should have been the week that nearly all of them, in their various fixtures, looked about as useful as a giraffe.
And no, they weren’t discussing a breakaway league and the denial duly came. But they do seem to have been discussing ways in which they could sew up entry in perpetuity to the Champions League, which is pretty much the same thing.
If someone had come up with this great idea to lock it all down back at the end of the 1970s, Europe’s elite competition would be offering annual opportunities to see Nottingham Forest, of the Sky Bet Championship take on the likes of Malmo and Hamburg, and Manchester City wouldn’t even have made it into the car park. All of which seemed perfectly fine at the time, but that’s the point. Status without the burden of proof, and football without the possibility of fallen empires, aren’t status and football at all.
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Boycott has friends around the world
Just because Steve Denison, the chairman of Yorkshire, doesn’t want Geoffrey Boycott back on the board at the club, that doesn’t mean that there is no important role for the opinionated former batsman with the organisation that he served with such distinction as a player for 24 years and, between 2012 and 2014, as president.
Denison made this much patently clear when, after urging members not to vote for Boycott as a director at this month’s annual meeting, the chairman said: “Geoffrey does an excellent job supporting the club when he’s on his travels around the world and we want him to do that again.”
Moving words, those, from Denison in Boycott’s support, and I’m sure we’re not intended to hear an even faint echo of the famous Tony Hancock line about the benefits of working on radio. “I’ve got friends all over the world,” Hancock said. “None in this country. But all over the world.”
● In rugby’s great tackling debate, enlightened words flowed, as ever, from Sir Clive Woodward, who, although he stands (like everybody interested in the game) firmly in the pro-tackling lobby, cogently argued this week that “the sport must not stick its head in the sand” over this issue.
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We wholeheartedly agree. Or, at least, if the sport does stick its head in the sand, it should certainly make sure to go in at the right angle, thereby to some extent moderating the impact on the collarbones and shoulders. Because, on reflection, we wouldn’t want to see sticking your head in the sand removed from the debating game entirely — either at school level or beyond. Debating wouldn’t be the same without it. Ditto fence-sitting. Yes, it has its dangers, but overall it’s safe, if it’s taught and practised properly. And those who seek to ban these things absolutely are just joyless fearmongers with their own agenda.