BORE DRAW
The Fiver quite likes an interesting tactical battle. The moving and shaping without doing much actual football ignites feelings of joy like no others. Therefore, it is only just that we wax lyrical about last night’s big Big Cup game. Forget
Chelsea’s 1-1 draw at PSG and do not even consider goals. It was all about the intriguing duel between
Shakhtar Donetsk and Bayern Munich, who played out a [insert range of favourite superlatives here] scoreless stalemate. Repeat after me: This is football! This is football!! This is football!!!
“Our task was to restrain Shakhtar’s quick players from unfolding counterattacks. I am happy that we coped with this as they had zero goal chances,” said Bayern Munich’s tactical genius and innovator in chief, Pep Guardiola, who outsmarted Mircea Lucescu because his team had one shot on target compared to Shakhtar’s zero. Not everyone at Bayern was satisfied, though. “If you’d offered it me beforehand I wouldn’t have been satisfied,” guffawed the club’s sporting director, Matthias Sammer, perhaps remembering the opposition were a team who last played a competitive game on 10 September and issues away from football have affected them.
Anyway … if that tactical feast was a delicious main course from a Michelin-starred restaurant (not that the Fiver has ever frequented such a high-end eatery), tonight’s offering will seem like a dodgy doner kebab from the not-so-fine establishment around the corner from Fiver Towers because, unfortunately, there will be goals which, obviously, makes football less tactically interesting. Boo!
Basel/Basle/Baaarrl versus Porto, meanwhile, has been billed by some as the worst Big Cup knockout tie ever – before a ball has been kicked. But the Fiver agrees because both sides were far too entertaining (only Chelsea scored more than Porto) in the group stages and that is just not interesting. Indeed the Fiver may not even bother tuning in, instead choosing to rewatch David Alaba’s 83 passes in Lviv last night from a multitude of angles.
SEPP STEPS IN
After Chelsea fans were filmed singing a r@cist chant and preventing a black man from boarding the Paris Métro last night, Uncle Sepp is here to kick r@cism out of football. “I condemn the actions of a small group of Chelsea fans in Paris. There is no place for r@cism in football!” tweeted the Fifa president, perhaps forgetting the time he said “there is no r@cism” in the game
during an interview in 2011.
Still, it’s a little more action than we’ve seen from Uefa, which has declared it “can act on r@cism by players or club staff wherever they happen” but for “fan misbehaviour, only inside or around a stadium.” At least police are treating it very seriously: officers in Paris have launched an investigation into crimes of racial violence on public transport, with Scotland Yard to study footage in a bid to identify those involved.
LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE TONIGHT!
QUOTE OF THE DAY
YOUR MUNDANE ENCOUNTERS WITH FAMOUS PEOPLE, CHAPTER 923
“I was working in Liberia just prior to the elections in 2003 and met John Fashanu, who was there supporting his mate George Weah. Fash’s grasp of his friend’s campaign priorities underlined why so few footballers are successful in politics” – Felix Edwards.
“Back in the vintage Premier League season of 1993-94, my brother and I got wind that a professional footballer had recently moved to our road in rural Leicestershire. Early one Saturday morning we skipped down to the house three doors down, knocked on the door for an autograph but instead of meeting Coventry centre-back and soon-to-be Irish World Cup superstar Phil Babb we were met by a lovely and apologetic blonde lady in her nightie. She very kindly popped upstairs and returned with an autograph for us, before we happily returned home. Later that afternoon, said lovely blonde was walking her dog by our house when my mum invited her in for being so nice, when after a tea and chat her not-so-lovely dog pooed on my mum’s new living room carpet. As many Liverpool fans soon became used to doing, mum blamed Babb for this poor showing and she still enjoys replays of Babb’s goal-post clash a little more than she perhaps should, such is the elephant-memory of wronged football fans” – Jimmy Mayer.
“Going back a bit here but in 1967 I was 13 years old and more than a bit impressionable. I was allowed, on special occasions, to stay up late and join the clientele in the bar (my mother and father ran a pub in the New Kings Road at the time) and this particular evening I was told by my father that the best player in the world had just arrived in the pub. So you can imagine my disappointment when I saw Chopper Harris propped up at the bar talking to this fella who I didn’t recognise. Plenty of Chelsea players used to frequent our pub in those days and I thought my old man must have been on the sauce if he thought Ron was the best player in the world! It turned out the man he was talking to was Eusébio who had just turned out in a friendly for Benfica at the Bridge that evening. Apparently Chopper was a good friend of his and although Eusébio had no English, Ron was more than fluent in Portuguese and the Mateus Rose was flowing like the wine it isn’t” – Ross Dunning.
“I hadn’t intended to send this one in, but it’s no more desperate than some of the ones that have been printed. Some years ago, we were driving through Hampstead, when we noticed the extremely expensive car in front of us was being driven by Patrick Vieira. He was accompanied by a young woman, who was eating a 99 ice cream. “I wouldn’t let her eat that in there,” observed my wife, “not with that upholstery.” Believe me, she knows about car upholstery and foodstuffs, what with our backseat being permanently stained by the multiple blackcurrant Fruit Shoots our son once vomited up inside the car on the A412. Perhaps one of the serious football reporters could ask Mr Vieira if any of his own cars have ever suffered similar stainage” – Michael Hann.
“Uncle! Uncle! Make the madness stop! Please I beg you. Even these mundane encounters are far too pedestrian for a tea-timely email that normally lacks any humour, let alone any other redeeming quality. Imagine how low the Fiver has become. You are no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel, you have broken through it and are quickly digging to that spot near the Antipodes Islands off New Zealand in the South Pacific” – Steven Mintz.
FIVER LETTERS
“As an American soccerball enthusiast (USA! USA!! USA!!!), it’s taking me some time to get up to speed on the lingo that your MBM correspondents use. From time to time, some of your writers will refer to a tackle as being agricultural in nature. During the Bayern/Shakhtar game, Ian McCourt referred to a challenge as being industrial. What’s the difference between the two, and were I playing in a game, which one should I fear most? And at what point would a tackle be referred to as technological – and would that trump agricultural and industrial?” – Ted Lee.
“Was free-kick man (yesterday’s last line) meant as a Subbuteo reference (I thought it was corner-kick man myself) or have I missed something? Either way it made me think of our own heady days on the green baize. We couldn’t really afford much in the way of accessories but lusted after the
scoreboard. Cunningly we spotted that the half-time scoreboard was about a quarter of the price and duly sent off a postal order – we thought we’d spotted a loophole and could add a full-time, or indeed any time, score while striking a blow against corporate greed. Imagine our eight-year-old dismay when we received a bit of old fence with half the alphabet on” – Tom Levesley.
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BITS AND BOBS
Hats off to the BBC, who when given the choice between putting West Brom v Aston Villa (distance between the two clubs: four miles) and Manchester United v Arsenal (distance: 193 miles) in the logistically tricky FA Cup Monday night slot,
of course chose the latter. Well done Auntie Beeb!
In a bid to make Luís Figo’s campaign for the Fifa presidency even more handsome than it already was,
David Beckham has jumped on board. “I welcome the candidacy of my friend Luís for
Fifa president,” Becks “y’knowed”.
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IT’S LIKE HERDING CATS
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