The folly of Sky’s great expectations
Oh dear.
If the film-makers had taken Spurs versus Manchester United rather than Tolkien as their template, the movie would have ended with the Hobbits arriving within sight of the summit of Mount Doom only to decide, ah, to hell with this, we’re knackered, let’s just keep the silly ring and go home.
With the wizards all gone AWOL, anti-climax was the order of the day, and already well-signposted by the arc of the narrative at Anfield, one which began with a heady peak of emotion and then steadily went downhill.
The contrast between the full-throated rendering of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ before kick off and the muted applause which greeted the final whistle, pretty much summed up the story of a dull, draw-filled day in the Premier League.
At least the Merseyside derby was played in the usual 100mph spirit, as ever more like a cup-tie than a league match, but not even four goals and a brace of comebacks could disguise that here was an error-strewn slugfest played out between two decidedly average teams.
The Kop had rolled back the years to give Kenny Dalglish a rousing homecoming but, given the lack of star quality on the pitch at Anfield these days, it was all a bit like a formerly great lead singer coming out of retirement to front a tribute band, a distracting novelty to be sure but hardly a recipe guaranteed to get you back to the top of the charts.
Liverpool have still to find able replacements for Alonso and Mascherano and when the team is then stripped of the power of Gerrard and the passion of Carragher, as it was yesterday, not even a brilliant cameo or two from Fernando Torres is going to be enough to lift it out of the ordinary.
In short, Liverpool might have their Gerry back but no-one is about to mistake them for pacemakers.
Which is the role Manchester United continue to fulfil in the Premiership, despite yet another under-whelming outing yesterday.
We didn’t need the Sky hype machine to have us primed for entertainment at White Hart Lane but, as on Merseyside, romance soon gave way to realism.
All the potential match winners – Rooney, Bale, Berbatov, Nani, Van der Vaart – failed to catch fire and though the experts had a case for handing the champagne to the wonderfully elusive Luka Modric, it should really have been shared by Vidic and Ferdinand, by some distance the most influential players on the pitch.
That the post-mortem will have been dominated by dissection of another refereeing howler – the entirely undeserved sending off of Rafael by Mike Dean – tells you all you need to know about a game in which the absence of a cutting edge was as glaring as it was unexpected.
Still, United won’t be complaining – or at least not as much as they would have been had their ten men failed to hold out for a point.
And they will take heart from the fact that they went to the home of a Spurs side which has been transformed under Harry Redknapp and, while never threatening to dominate, rarely looked all that uncomfortable either.
Defensive discipline underpinned this valuable point for United. We might want more thrills from them but, as they continue to eke out crucial results, Alex Ferguson will settle for an absence of spills – especially when all the other title contenders are prone to costly lapses.
By contrast, failure to beat United at home, especially with a man advantage, will only reinforce the sense that, for all the extravagant joy of their football on the better days, this Spurs team are still short of that quality of battle-hardened know-how which marks out the real contenders.
United certainly have that but it says everything about declining standards at the top of the Premier League that while they remain unbeaten they still seem anything but unbeatable.
Put it this way: looking in on north London yesterday, Europe would hardly have trembled.
