Down, Down, Deeper And Down

Connoisseurs of good football would be well advised to avoid Match Of The Day and The Premiership like the plague over the coming weeks.

With the championship race all over including the shouting, and the two other Champions League slots surely on their way to Arsenal and Liverpool, it is the grisly mess at the other end of the table that is concentrating minds at this stage.
Consequently, the producers of the aforementioned shows must give top billing to the Premiership's lower orders between now and May... although I suspect that they will still hold off on showing an Everton game until the very last possible moment. A line has to be drawn, after all.
This year's relegation scrap was turned on its head early doors, when two of the three
promoted sides, Charlton and Ipswich, attached themselves limpet-like to the top half. Southampton have similarly been assured of
safety all season. If they weren't going to go down, who would?
Conversely, few of the bottom ten sides could afford to relax until relatively recently, with Leeds, Chelsea, Newcastle, Spurs and West Ham all under threat at one stage or another. Now it's the turn of Aston Villa, who could find themselves sucked inescapably into the maw of the bottom three with terrifying speed. But probably not.
Relegation scraps are always great craic if you aren't emotionally involved (and no, wanting to see a particular team go down out of sheer spitefulness doesn't count). And, because my affections belong to Celtic and Manchester United, I have never had to watch these desperate dog-fights from any vantagepoint other than one of casual voyeurdom.

How well Foul Play remembers the final day of 1997-1998, when he sat with Stuart Clark and Barry Glendenning in a city-centre hostelry, watching Everton fighting for their Premiership lives against Coventry (who, for once, had secured their own top-division tenancy weeks earlier).
As I recall it, Everton needed to get a better result than Bolton, who were away to Chelsea. They went about their task in typically elegant fashion, surviving a series of goalmouth scares before Gareth Farrelly fired them into the lead. But, within a minute, they made a pig's mickey of clearing their lines, and left Dion Dublin to head home from three yards.
Shortly afterwards, Everton's clogger of a centre-half, Craig Short, made a courageous late bid for the Own Goal Of The Season Award. Matters were made worse because some sadist at Sky Sports decided not to reveal the fact that Bolton were losing at Chelsea until the very last couple of minutes.
The tension for my Toffees-supporting friend was unbearable. Poor Stuart was breathing out of his arse all afternoon. By the final whistle, he looked like an embalmer had been at him.
His already shaky demeanour wasn't helped by our unconcealed support for the Coventry and Bolton cause, or our pre-planned tactic of glancing at each other and shaking our heads balefully whenever Everton lost possession (which was about every 20 seconds). We had even thoughtfully presented him with a Mass card the previous day.
Stung by our schadenfreudian lack of graciousness, Stuart was not slow to point out that his heroes had ended the season with more to be cheerful about than our boys, with United having surrendered the title to Arsenal, and Sunderland having died roaring in the play-offs against Charlton. There was a grain of logic in there somewhere, but none of us was in any mood to search further for it.
The current Everton side are scarcely any better than their illustrious forebears, although uncharitable observers might feel that any manager foolish enough to sign Duncan Ferguson and Paul Gascoigne within weeks of each other has it coming.
During Walter Smith's time as Rangers boss, his behaviour in the transfer market was not nearly as sure-footed as the nine league titles in a row might suggest. I could reel off a few examples like Marco Negri, Seb Rozental, Staale Stensaas, Derek McInnes and Daniel Prodan, but, this being a family magazine, I won't.
The difference is that Everton haven't got a squad remotely big enough to soak up the
negligible contributions of wasters who aren't
trying a leg.
Stuart, my man, I have two seats booked in the International Bar for the weekend of May 5th already, and there'll be a pint there with your name on it. I've told the barmen to hide all the sharp objects, too.

Meanwhile, that massive, massive club, Manchester City, look well and truly fucked. Even when they win a game, they get the piss taken out of them. Gary Lineker greeted their victory at Newcastle by quipping, "Well, a MASSIVE win there for City!", on Match Of The Day.
As City fell to their umpteenth 1-0 home defeat of the season, against Southampton, I cast my mind back to the previous week, when they blithely turned down the services of a 40-times-capped German international.
You might forgive City for saying "Thanks, but no thanks" if Thomas Strunz were some superannuated opportunist in search of an easy buck. But he is 32, and was a key member of the Bayern Munich team that nearly won the Champions League in 1999. The last I heard, he was negotiating with Paris St Germain, which says something.
Yet Joe Royle dismissed Strunz with the immortal sentence, "He's not that different from what we have already."
It might be judicious to remind ourselves that what City "have already" in Strunz's position is none other than our old friend, the great Danny Tiatto. For once, words fail me...