When seeing is disbelieving
If you haven’t already heard his reaction to the Fernando Torres goal against Barcelona, then do yourself a favour and check it out online. While Sky’s match commentator was doing his best to keep it strictly professional as the much derided striker rounded Victor Valdes to put Chelsea through to the final of the Champions League, the mic was picking up the most extraordinary sound emanating from his co-commentator’s mouth.
Somewhere between an adolescent boy’s voice breaking and a hyena which has just been told a truly terrible joke, it was a weird undulating yodel, half animal, half human, which will take Neville some time to explain and even longer to live down.
Since he hung up his boots, the former United captain has been a like a window thrown open in the often stale room of football punditry, a dismal place where the wall is always doing its job and any chap who takes a shot on goal has only one thing on his mind.
Sharp, smart, insightful and not at all inhibited about speaking the truth, Neville has gone straight from the dressing room to the top of the analysts’ charts.
But on Tuesday night, when Torres ran half the length of the pitch to net the goal which gave the beast victory over beauty in the Nou Camp, words finally failed Gary Neville and, instead, we got this sound that was beyond language but not entirely beyond understanding. In fact, it might well never be topped as Neville’s finest hour behind the mic, a moment when a banshee wail somewhere between intense pleasure and excruciating pain was the only possible response to what he was seeing unfolding before his eyes — not just the mighty Barca being turned over but all football logic being turned on its head.
Also on Sky, Graeme Souness, another of the sharper tools in the box, later described the match as “the most remarkable game, I think, I’ve ever seen.” And this from a Liverpool captain who saw his former team come back from the dead against AC Milan in the final of the Champions League just six years before.
Like Souness, I had the strong sensation watching the game on Wednesday that Chelsea’s elimination of Barca was of another, more baffling order altogether.
After all, the odds had been stacked against the Blues from well before the first leg and, having smashed and grabbed that one, few expected them to could buck those numbers a second time. But especially not in the Nou Camp with Gary Cahill lost to injury and then John Terry lost to the mindlessness of seemingly trying to prove Johnny Foreigner doesn’t like it up ‘em. At two goals down and reduced to 10 men, even that exquisite Ramires away response looked like it could never be enough to see them over the line.
But, instead, disbelief was heaped upon disbelief, as Messi missed a penalty and, in the absence of clinical finishing by Barca, clinical defending by Chelsea was the order of the night. Until, in the decisive and climactic act of a ridiculously dramatic evening, Fernando Torres came out of hibernation to keep his composure while Gary Neville proceeded to lose his.
The news that Pep Guardiola is calling it a day at the Nou Camp reinforces the sense of era’s end for Barcelona and reminds us too that even the greatest teams have their natural lifespan. Which is not to say, of course, that the Catalans won’t bounce back next year to wow us all again, but merely to observe that at least for now, one reign in Spain is at an end.
And, in truth, for all the chances they created against Chelsea over the two legs, there was something merely predictable — as opposed to brilliantly predictable — about the increasingly laboured and ineffectual way Barca sought to break the visitors down on their own turf. And it was a reminder too that if Messi isn’t fully engaged, and Iniesta is also short of va va voom, then — to paraphrase a colourful expression I once heard used about another team by a venerable English sportswriter — it can be a case of too much foreplay and not enough, ah, consummation.
Wednesday brought further pain for Spain — though not for Catalonia — with Madrid’s elimination in the other semi-final by a deserving Bayern Munich, as Ronaldo followed Messi into the penalty hall of infamy. And who’d a thunk we’d have been writing that line at the start of the week? But that’s football. As Gary and Souey and Jose and Pep all know it’s the game that passeth all understanding. Cast-iron predictions for Monday in Manchester, anyone?
