United they fall

Foul Play has written in these pages before of the difficulties posed in taping a football match and then having to avoid the result all night before you get home, to whack on the video itself.

There are few more annoying things than stumbling in the door, ready for a pre-recorded feast of football, and having somebody blurt out the result to you within seconds – which is exactly what happened to me on Wednesday night, thereby scuppering my entire evening’s entertainment.

Not that “entertainment” would have been the apposite word with regard to Bayern Munich’s 2-1 slaughtering of Man United. I will leave it to the reader to imagine my disposition after being informed (a) of the score and (b) that my boys had received a fearful rogering at the hands of the Jerries.

However, against my better nature, I sat down and subjected myself to the whole thing anyway.

It was awful shite, with an essentially workmanlike Bayern team being made to look like assured worldbeaters by a pallid United side who would probably have fared better if they’d stuck that Ken Stott lookalike who invaded the pre-match team photo up front at the expense of Andy Cole.

Naturally, the next day’s papers were full of op-ed pieces about which United players will be headed for the revolving doors this summer, and their mooted replacements.

The usual suspects were singled out: Gary Neville, Phil Neville, Mikael Silvestre, Nicky Butt, Andy Cole, Mikael Silvestre, Dwight Yorke, Mikael Silvestre… basically everyone who’d been on the pitch in Munich, in fact, bar the untouchables like Keane, Barthez and Jaap Stam.

Butt, a good Premiership player who always pops up with six or seven goals a season, has never been proficient enough for the sharp end of the Champions League, and in this respect, Wednesday’s match will hardly have told Sir Alex anything he doesn’t know already.

I have always had a sneaking soft spot for Gary Neville, because whatever reservations one might harbour about his defensive capabilities and technical strength, he is surely second only to Roy Keane in terms of his psychopathic desire to pulverise the opposition for the good of the club.

The Old Trafford career of Silvestre, though, is surely not long for this world if Fergie is serious about making a wholehearted stab at the Champions League in his swansong season. The same goes for Dwight Yorke, who has looked a shadow of his former self ever since he began hanging around with Sheringham’s ex, the amply-endowed glamour model Jordan. You could have said he was out of his depth in Munich, but by the time he trudged off to be substituted with 25 minutes left, he probably wasn’t aware that depths came this deep.

It was about half past midnight before I was done watching the Bayern match, and by then, only Clive Tyldesley’s ferociously Man U-biased commentary was keeping me awake. Like his predecessor Brian Moore, whose predilection for all things Arsenal was legendary, Tyldesley has never seemed too bothered about allegations of favouritism being hurled in his general direction, allowing himself to be interviewed on the official Man United video of the 1999 win over Bayern (and yes, the club did release a full 90-minute tape of that most deadly dull of footballing encounters, and yes, I did buy it myself).

Back then, the ITV man’s claim to posterity was that he uttered the admittedly rather prescient sentence “Is this their moment?” just as Beckham was shaping to take that second corner-kick in the Nou Camp. Last Wednesday, though, he seemed to be self-consciously trying to live up to that immortal soundbite, with predictably disastrous results.

“We’ll try not to mention that famous night in Barcelona,” he vowed as the game kicked off, before launching in the first of about 22 mentions of it. Later on, Roy Keane’s subsequent crude bodycheck on Bayern’s Willy Sagnol brought an approving chuckle from Tyldesley and his co-pundit Big Ron. I mean, Jesus, I like United as much as the next fan, but a line has to be drawn, and that line stops considerably short of chuckling away to yourself whenever one of the opposition is clearly fouled.

With about a quarter of an hour left, and the home side casually stroking the ball around to take the sting out of United’s desperate efforts to peg back the 3-1 aggregate lead, he had the gall to suggest that “the situation must be agonising for Bayern”.

And as the game ticked into its third minute of stoppage time, with Foul Play’s eyelids fighting a battle that could only ever see one winner, Tyldesley bowed to the inevitable: “They’re not going to do it, Ron, are they?”

For some reason this made me laugh.