Kind Of Blue

Right, okay, it may be time to admit that the shit has hit the fan. As prophesied incessantly for the last few months by a multitude of my Manchester United-supporting mates, the wily old bugger they call Fergie has held his nerve and kept his head, while many months’ worth of magnificent football on City’s part would appear to have been in vain, a truly hideous March having presented the Red Devils with the sort of lead they are historically disinclined to surrender.

The league table now makes for painful viewing, as does a glance at the two clubs’ remaining fixtures. Nonetheless, there is, as they say, plenty of football still to be played. Am I about to throw in the towel at this stage? No fucking way.
I write in the immediate aftermath of United’s visit to Blackburn Rovers, who it must be said gave them a right go before buckling under to two horribly cruel late strikes from Messrs. Valencia and Young, ensuring that United now have a five-point cushion to play with as we enter the Easter weekend’s festivities. Their unconvincing recent ‘victory’ over Fulham owed much to a gobsmacking refereeing decision of the sort that invariably smiles on them at this time of year, and it isn’t exactly paranoid to make the working assumption that there will be more where that came from before the season has run its course.
In all likelihood, Roberto Mancini’s men are now in a situation whereby they will need to storm the Emirates and beat an in-form Arsenal who boast the best striker in England, then outwit Fergie’s forces in an enormously high-pressure fixture (assuming the race is even still alive by that stage) and pray that United find it within themselves to fuck up one other match somewhere along the line. It all seems a bit much to realistically hope for, and you need to go back to 1992 to find the last time United wilted in the white heat of a title race. Their springtime record since then speaks for itself. To put this as bluntly as possible, I am no longer expecting City to ascend the summit.
This wretched turn of events has taken a hefty financial as well as emotional toll on Foul Play, who had perhaps naïvely taken it as something of a given that City’s blitzkrieg assault on fortress Old Trafford (6-1, if I may remind you) heralded a permanent changing of the guard. Nonetheless, a certain degree of emotional disengagement is necessary at times like this, and I am determined to view the final few weeks’ combat as a pleasure to be enjoyed to the full, win or lose, with Bill Shankly’s oft-quoted maxim about football, life and death having been well and truly shown up by recent events involving Fabrice Muamba and Stiliyan Petrov.
Football can drive you absolutely round the bend at times, but it’s there to be loved unconditionally, regardless of whether events on the field are unfolding as one might have wished. And of course, this summer holds out the prospect of riches untold, with Ireland’s looming involvement in the Euro 2012 party. I am at least as excited now as I was in 1988, 1990 and 1994; with a mere two months’ waiting-time left, it has recently started to sink in that this is really happening, and the feeling can only be described as magical. You can’t put a price on that.
There is also plenty for us to sink our teeth into between now and then. The battle for Scottish League supremacy may not be an especially riveting one this time out (Celtic need one point from their final six matches to seal the deal, a feat which I reckon is well within their capabilities) but south of Hadrian’s wall, the scrap for Champions League spots, the promotion chase and the relegation dogfight should offer plenty of diversion.
I managed to more than quintuple my weekly gambling allowance on the weekend just passed, chiefly courtesy of Rangers, Newcastle and Spurs. The easiest part was foreseeing yet another afternoon of toil, trauma and torment for Liverpool, who disintegrated hideously in the course of a trip to Tyneside which ended with Andy Carroll screaming obscenities in the general direction of his manager Kenny Dalglish, whose halo among the Anfield faithful appears remarkably un-tarnished despite mounting evidence of absolute meltdown, with six defeats in their last seven games indicating that they are every bit as far removed from contention as was the case under Roy Hodgson and during the dying embers of Rafa Benitez’ reign.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out why Dalglish is afforded such latitude. The man attended about 90 funerals in the immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy and displayed extraordinary human decency at a time of unimaginable agony for so many; on the pitch, he was Godlike in a way rarely witnessed before or since. If anybody (bar Fergie, of course) has earned the right to be above criticism at any club, it is Dalglish at Liverpool. Still, it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that he is not exactly showing much sign of being able to reverse the club’s apparently irrevocable decline.
A mind-blowing amount of money has been squandered in the last 15 months on some frighteningly ordinary players (the only genuinely impressive recruit having unfortunately outed himself as a noxious racist); a haul of 36 goals from 31 League games is not far short of relegation form, and it might be mildly stated that there is some room for improvement in Kenny’s dealings with the media.
Rarely in living memory has a football manager cut such an unimpressive figure in the vicinity of cameras and microphones. Indecipherable Glaswegian mutterings, scruffy demeanour and atrocious haircut aside, the man’s tendency to snarl and bare his teeth at reporters asking perfectly reasonable questions has become a sort of comic sideshow, reaching its nadir during the Luis Suarez affair where Dalglish horribly misjudged the mood of the moment and was forced into a humiliating public climbdown, his statement that, “I did not conduct myself in a manner befitting of a Liverpool manager” sounding as if it had been dictated by the boardroom, and suggesting that he may be living on borrowed time in the Anfield hot-seat.
‘King Kenny’ remains venerated by the fans, but the suspicion is that the owners are becoming increasingly unimpressed with every passing week, and the theory that he is inherently ‘unsackable’ may well be severely tested in the coming months. Increasingly, Kenny’s reign is beginning to carry disturbing echoes of another legendary Scot who played a colossal part in the club’s glory years before taking over as manager and leading them down the tubes.
Graeme Souness, of course, has long since quit the management lark and successfully re-invented himself as an incisive and forthright pundit, and I am in no doubt that (perhaps with the aid of subtitles) Dalglish’s morose, caustic wit would be a massive asset to any sports studio, in the unlikely event that he ever feels inclined to go down that road. It sounds outlandish, but to quote the great Ruud Gullit, “In football you never know”.