Too Good for the English Game

For some reason, it’s a hard-wired rule of English football that pundits and co-commentators have to have played for one of the teams that are on the telly that day.  There’s no obvious logic for this – they’re either decent at the job or they’re not – but then there’s no obvious logic for the taxpayer paying Zoe Ball £1.3m a year.  Some things we just unthinkingly accept.

The cast is familiar at the top end.  Carragher for Liverpool, Gary Neville for United.  You might get a Crouch or a Hoddle for Spurs.  Obviously the well gets a bit shallow the further down you go, and eventually you find yourself taking them on trust that the man in the studio for the Burnley game is in fact Tom Heaton.

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I don’t know why this practice came about.  It’s not as though a player who played for a club 5-10 years ago has any special insight into the current team.  If they did, I suspect they wouldn’t be giving it away for free on Super Sunday.  Maybe TV executives think it will warm the hearts of supporters to see one of their “own” in the studio.  Either way, it’s a cruel fate that Manchester City get landed with Steve McManaman.

Always Steve McbloodyManaman.  Every single Champions League game for as long as I can remember.  For these precious years that City get to battle Europe’s elite, games are always played out to the backdrop of Steve McManaman, analysis escaping out of him like steam from an old kettle.

There are no positive associations between McManaman and Manchester City.  Even the press conference announcing his move to the club struck an oddly sour note.  McManaman’s nose was put out of joint by a line of questioning and he responded tersely, listing out all of the trophies he had won at Real Madrid.  McManaman concluded to his audience that he had nothing left to prove in the game.

Unfortunately for Manchester City, he was proven right.  McManaman played 35 games for the club and was shit in every one of them.  Didn’t score a single goal in two seasons.  Couldn’t run, didn’t look like he wanted to.  Just trousered one the best salaries at the club and then retired.  His ongoing relationship with Manchester City via the intermediary of BT Sport has now lasted many times longer than his actual direct association with the club.  Like the haunting spectre of a best forgotten ex-girlfriend becoming bezzies with your wife, he just won’t go away.

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I could have easily gotten over this by now.  Fifteen years of wishing Gary Neville would get swept away by the tide didn’t stop me swooning pretty much instantly once Red Nev took to the studio.  But McManaman’s just so bloody bad at this job too.  It’s as though the gears are jammed and he’s stuck in exasperation mode.  He’s never seen anything ordinary.  Listening to him observe a short corner is like a child describing Disney World.  I honestly thought the ball hitting the corner flag and staying in play against Olympique Marseille was going to tip him over the edge.  The acts of a game of football are rarely side-splittingly hilarious.  And yet, for reasons best known to himself, “Macca” chortles his way through ninety minutes plus stoppages like an ageing relative who’s just discovered memes.

Life isn’t fair sometimes, but you wonder if it has to be this unfair.  When a burglar defecates on one of your rugs, you’re left thinking what was wrong with just bagging up the iPads.  United don’t have Carlos Tevez co-commentating on their matches.  No-one’s inviting Sol Campbell into the studio for Tottenham games.  Why must City be singled out for such perverse suffering?

Indeed, it would be a bit less galling if Sky weren’t up to the exact same trick.  In a weirdly similar gambit, Sky have the temerity to wheel out Robbie Fowler as Manchester City’s “representative”; a man who also turned up at City overweight in 2003, several years past his best, was lazy beyond belief and picked up huge wages.  It’s as though television executives are on a bizarre but subtle crusade to highlight the mismanagement of the late-Bernstein era.

It all rather begs the question why we even have partisan pundits in the first place.  If the idea is that they’re lending us their expertise, surely they’re doing us a disservice if they strive for anything other than the strictest accuracy?  There’s no place for a misty-eyed retelling of the game.  Don’t flannel me with false positives if the truth is we were awful.  I need to know, man.  Gaslighting me into believing we deserved all three points isn’t doing me any favours.

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Hope springs eternal of course, and new blood may be just around the corner for City fans.  Fresh from a managerial stint at Fleetwood Town, there’s no way Joey Barton is going to swerve the allure of prime-time punditry.  And by crikey we’ll get some searingly honest analysis for our buck then.  Barton has never shied away from speaking the cold hard truth, even when the justice system isn’t compelling it from him.

That’s for the future, though.  Before he can light up our screens, Barton still needs to be extensively media-trained and, ideally, taught how to count to ten.  For the present, on those big European nights, we’re wedded to sharing the experience with Stevie Mac.  A tinnitus-inducing hinge on an old door, speculating excitedly about some of the more basic premises of the game.  Wide-eyed exclamations on a sport he’s supposed to be familiar with.  An expert, even.  Although, judging by his time at the City of Manchester, you would never have known.

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Ever wondered how long a dream lasts?  A minute?  An hour, maybe?  What about 67 days?  That was how long Sam Allardyce’s England dream lasted before it spectacularly imploded in the puff of a tape-recorded evening meal.  A lesson learned the hard way: it’s not what you don’t know, it’s who you don’t know.

You hear of lottery winners who, drunk on their windfall, find themselves back in the same office chair eighteen months later.  Big Sam probably admires that kind of longevity.  Like a ball thrown vertically upwards, stopping only momentarily at its apex, Allardyce quickly found himself back in the middle reaches of the English game.

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There was something comforting about seeing Allardyce back on domestic duties at Crystal Palace.  Sam was in his natural habitat once more.  Back in the galleys, battling relegation and ironing out defensive frailties. 

Allardyce had no sooner returned to the civic stage than he was tearing into the Watford mascot, Harry the Hornet, demanding he be given a 3-game ban for mocking a Palace player for diving.  Utterly incensed and shaking with anger in the mixed media area, Allardyce implored the self-same Football Association that had shattered his England dream to take disciplinary action against a man dressed up as a bumble bee.  It felt like slipping on an old pair of trainers.

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A year at Palace was followed by a year at Everton.  Most people thought that was our lot for the Big Sam Experience, but after two years out of the rap game we’re being treated to a swansong.  He’s back, baby.  Chewing gum in the dugout of another unfashionable corner of England.  This time, it’s his hometown of West Bromwich.

You have to think this will almost certainly be Allardyce’s last gig and for that reason alone we ought to cherish it.  When all said and done, Sam is the very essence of English football.  Like the English game itself, he’s both a relic and an innovator.  A man who simultaneously brought us Jay-Jay Okocha and Kevin Nolan.  Beautiful yet ugly, like Mariah Carey.  There might be other managers who snigger and pretend to be baffled at the concept of the “West Ham way”, but it takes a special person to do so while actually managing the club at the time.

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Critics are already writing off West Brom’s chances of survival this season but I’m not so sure.  Sam’s on familiar ground here.  He’s got an entire team of players you wouldn’t recognise in the supermarket and a midfielder who recently scored an own goal from 25 yards.  And yet, despite this, West Brom managed to take a point off the reigning champions at Anfield in only his second game in charge.  Two more losses followed but the Baggies have now registered their first victory under Sam, a battling 3-2 away win at Wolves.  He’s only got to rein in Brighton and Fulham for fuck’s sake.  This is distinctly Allardyce-able.

Don’t forget, winning minor parochial battles is all Allardyce has ever known.  In his autobiography, Sam casually mentions that as a younger man on the Midlands dating scene, the love rival for his now wife was snooker player and fellow Brummie, Tony Knowles.  It was nip and tuck for a while on which way the future Mrs Allardyce would go, but Sam eventually ground his opponent down.  Just like he always does.

It’s a great snippet, reflective of a man whose best skirmishes were always resoundingly domestic.  Allardyce was never meant to be England manager.  Hot summer tournaments stuffed into a blazer were never going to be his thing.  Sam’s got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.  He just wants to beat the local snooker hotshot in a best-of-35 frame game of love and get the missus safely back down to balk.  Except now Tony Knowles is Brighton & Hove Albion and Lynne Allardyce is premier league survival.  

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West Brom lie 19^th with a -27 goal difference, but the gap to 17^th is only five points.  Allardyce will need to squeeze every last inch out of Prozone and Sammy Lee to ensure his record of never losing top-flight status stays intact.  Do it, and his legacy will be secured. 

Allardyce spent years dreaming of the Albion job.  Admittedly, the Albion in question was England, not West Brom.  But that’s by the by.   You can’t dwell on regrets at Sam’s age.  His pint glass of wine is half full, not half empty.  Real actors can perform on any stage.  And Big Sam’s got his premier league ballet shoes back on for one last twirl.

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As the temperature looks to dip below freezing tonight, it’s important to remember that a great many sex workers would have died this winter if it wasn’t for the generous contributions of Kyle Walker.  The plaudits have all gone to Marcus Rashford this pandemic, and rightly so, but while Rashford has dominated the front pages with his impressive social conscience on school dinners, Walker has been quietly doing his bit too, ensuring that vital income streams do not dry up during the biggest crisis this country has faced since Steve McClaren’s England reign.  Marcus looks after the kids, Kyle takes care of the mums.  Together – and I’ve thought of a nifty phrase to coin this – they are a CITY UNITED.

It doesn’t end there though.  The North-West has been at the footballing forefront of all things Covid-related.  Back in April, Liverpool F.C. took the brave decision to swallow their pride and furlough support staff.  Sacrificing yourself at the altar of dignity and asking for a hand-out isn’t easy at the best of times.  Imagine, then, some of your payroll earning six figures a week and still having the courage and humility to ask the UK government to step in and pay the wages of your less well-off employees.  Gutsy stuff from the red side of Stanley Park.  And having humbled themselves to exaltation, I feel confident in stating that Liverpool must have subsequently gone on to vote against the greed-soaked power-grab that was Project Big Picture in October without needing to fact-check the matter.

Others are turning their mind to the solution itself, the vaccine.  The great play-off berth back to normality.  It’s here that Sean Dyche is dipping a visionary toe.  Dyche might look for all the world like a mid-ranking UKIP politician – an image not exactly helped by managing Burnley – but it’s all a clever bluff.  The son of a globe-trotting management consultant, Dyche is erudite and thoughtful, and having kept Burnley in the top flight of English football for over half a decade, possibly also a genius.

Dyche’s view is that, once key workers, the elderly and the vulnerable have been given a shot of the good stuff, professional footballers should be next in line.  It’s the sort of statement that you initially dismiss as ludicrously self-entitled, then you start to see the merits of, and probably end up concluding somewhere in between.

The logic of the Ginger Mourinho’s health pitch is as follows: in order to continue playing at the moment, premier league footballers are being tested anywhere up to four times a week, at very considerable ongoing cost.  If that money could be channelled back into the national health system instead, there is a compelling economic argument for having footballers vaccinated early.  And that’s before taking into account the difficult-to-measure but undoubted psychological benefits to the millions (billions, really) who derive enjoyment from watching premier league football.  As we all know too well, the show is only precariously on the road at the moment; the sword of abandonment hangs heavy over the 2020/21 season.

The problem with Dyche’s argument is it slightly misses the point that the fifty year old who dies because Jay Rodriguez was given the vaccine instead of them probably won’t feel all that consoled by Burnley charting course for a sixth straight season in the top flight (impressive, as previously mentioned, though that is).  And while I’m no expert in mental health, it’s difficult to imagine anyone’s psychological lot being improved by the knowledge that Monday Night Football has blood on its hands. 

As it is, these strange times continue for now.  Football, the world, and an army of home boozers keep soldiering on with no obvious finish line to aim for; a bit like forced entrants in the world’s shittest bleep test.  “Catch it, bin it, kill it” used to be the Conservative Party’s policy on immigration, but these days they’re deploying the slogan for health reasons as well.  Here’s hoping they get the ball under control soon.

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