Monday, April 19, 2004
All football today, and it's all depressing too. Warning: I really need to rant, and I'm going to do so here. This will probably be very long and very boring if you don't care about football, so just skip this if you don't care. I just need to get this off my chest!
We start withnews that Diego Maradona, officially tied (says FIFA) as Player of the Century with Pelé, is in intensive care. Whether it's a drug overdose (as rumoured) or not is irrelevant; Maradona has been in awfully poor shape for years now. And it's very very sad, because I believe he was better than Pelé. Pelé was certainly very good, but he gets an awful lot of extra credit because he wasn't just a great player, he was also a great person and a true ambassador for his country and his sport. Maradona, on the other hand, is an unlovable bastard. He's almost Michael Jackson-esque in a sense: His current grotesque state masks and really takes the gloss off the sheer brilliance of him in his prime. And his deterioration is shocking. Admittedly, the likes of Roberto Baggio and Lothar Matthaüs playing on to the age of 38 is a rare sight in football, but when you consider Maradona is only 43 it's pretty unbelievable to see how far he's fallen. And yet, on what he's given us... I still rate him as the finest of all time.
The other depressing football subject is (guess what?)... Liverpool. We're just blowing chances left, right and centre to grab the coveted 4th place in the league. The thing is, I'm not even sure grabbing that 4th place will be a good thing for us. No doubt you're probably confused right now, so give me a minute to explain.
Liverpool have had a bad season, and are definitely out of the running for the league title. We also have no hope of finishing any higher than 4th. Sounds like it's pretty much all over, right? Right. And wrong. Because while we may not win anything this year, the top four teams in the league gain entry to next season's European Champions League. Entry to the Champions League is ridiculously important because mere participation in it -- much less success -- means you're suddenly entitled to a fortune in TV fees. Big clubs NEED to be in the Champions League every year to maintain big budgets and expensive squads.
Look at the fall of Leeds United as an example. They reached the Champions League, and then spent millions of pounds on an expensive team thinking they'd be in it every year. Except when they missed out the next year, they went into freefall and have only just been rescued from going bankrupt. The team itself is a shell of its former self and is currently fighting off relegation.
There are also knock-on effects. Because of the prestige (and the money), players want to play for clubs in the Champions League. You're playing against Europe's elite, and you're with Europe's elite clubs. If you're not in the Champions League, that means you're not in the top four in your country. And let's face it, if you're not in the top four you're not exactly likely to win anything next year are you? Being in the Champions League can also change a team's destiny entirely. Look at Chelsea. They beat us to the Champions League on the last day of the season last year, and it's been widely acknowledged that Roman Abramovic only really took to Chelsea because they were in the Champions League. And would the likes of Veron, Crespo, Mutu and Makalele have switched to Chelsea so quickly had they not been in the Champions League? Despite Abramovic's money, I'd argue they'd have definitely thought a lot longer and harder about it.
For us, we've got a direct ultimatum from Auxerre's brilliant young defender Philippe Mexés, who I reckon is the answer to all our current woes and is also the finest young defender on the continent: I won't sign for Liverpool unless they reach the Champions League. And then there's plenty of talk that Michael Owen will walk away from Liverpool if we fail to reach the Champions League... and can you blame him at all? I can't.
So, it seems imperative that we should reach it, right? Well... maybe not. There's something not right at Liverpool. It's strange, because just two years ago things were going perfectly. In 2001 we clinched a Cup treble (UEFA Cup, League Cup, FA Cup) -- OK, nothing like Man U's 1999 Treble, but still a leap ahead of anything we'd done since our last league title. And the next year we went one better by bumping Man U out of the top two for the first time in YEARS to finish second to Arsenal with a points tally that'd have won us the league more often than not. So all seemed well, especially when we sprinted off to an early Premiership lead in the 2002-2003 season... but then we collapsed. I kept faith, thinking it was a blip, but it's the same story this year. Something isn't right, and nobody can put their finger on exactly what it is ("a lack of consistency" is not in itself a reason, because it doesn't actually tell you what's wrong -- it's like saying "not winning" is why we're doing badly). So whatever happens, we need to address our problems. But the thing is, if we finish 4th... will we really overhaul the team and take a long, hard look at what went wrong? Or will we patch things up slightly and pretend that there are no serious problems? I have a feeling it'll be the latter.
Except it's no guarantee that scrapping the current team and the current manager will actually result in a better end product. It might just be that -- since we STILL have all the pieces of our successful teams of 2000-2002 -- we need a bit of refitting and a new focus to kick the current team back into the groove they were in almost two years ago now (was it really that long ago?). So I'm stuck in a quasi-pseudo-dilemma here... I'm rooting for Liverpool to hit that fourth spot naturally, but I get the feeling we're still totally doomed. But the alternative of rooting AGAINST Liverpool in the hope that a complete overhaul gets us back on track and back with some hope is also too agonising to think of. I'm doomed, really.
So, so depressing.
Posted at 11:37 PM
