Enda McEvoy: Will the Queen's death decide the title race?
UNPRECEDENTED: Manchester City's Erling Haaland celebrates scoring their side's second goal of the game during the UEFA Champions League Group G match at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester. Pic: Martin Rickett/PA Wire
Amid the hundreds of thousands of words lavished on the demise of Queen Elizabeth II, and its implications for the monarchy and for Britain and for the entire universe, one important avenue of discussion went curiously unexplored. Could her death end up deciding the destination of the 2022-23 Premier League title?
It probably won’t. Norway aren’t going to Qatar.
Therefore Erling Haaland can’t get injured there. Therefore he’ll spend the second half of the season in the same manner he spent the first half of the season, banging in goals at an unprecedented rate. Therefore Manchester City will retain the trophy in a hack canter.
Still, of all the seasons where the world’s most prominent Arsenal fan could have shuffled off the mortal coil she chose this one, simultaneously the longest and the most cramped. Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United are among a bunch of clubs with two fixtures to make up, while her own lads have a game with Haaland and co to rearrange.
There will be implications of some sort, then. There were implications here too.
For many Irish people it was an odd week, with all sorts of thoughts and emotions to be reconciled. How to strike the right note of respectful sympathy and good neighbourliness, avoiding perfunctory politeness at one extreme and sycophancy or shoneenism at the other?
One can have admired the Queen as an individual, in particular on foot of her state visit here, a trip that now looks positively halcyon in view of the Brexit fallout, without being a fan of the monarchy or the British state. One can have been impressed by the pageantry of the obsequies, and the mass public affirmation of identity, while being taken aback at the sight of apparently normal people dutifully parroting the phrase “God save the King!” in the third decade of the 21st century.
And these were entirely natural reactions and not at all mutually incompatible.
Naturally Twitter was more than usually cesspit-y, prompting the thought – not for the first time – that some folk should simply be banned from tweeting for the sake of their unfortunate families. But happily there was one Nat Guest, who tweeted thus: “Can’t believe they are going to make a MAN queen. This woke nonsense has gone too far.” Even funnier, loads of people did not get the gag.
Talking of people not getting anything, the soccer authorities across the water didn’t either.
The cricket went ahead. The rugby went ahead. Over 60,000 people gathered in Newcastle for the Great North Run. Even the polo went ahead, for heaven's sake. In the clearest example imaginable of It’s What She Would Have Wanted, moreover, the St Leger took place on Sunday, 24 hours later than scheduled.
It soon became clear that the Premier League and Football League, presumably terrified of being monstered by the tabloids and the Tories, had jumped the gun. The fact that seven PL fixtures were scheduled for this weekend constitutes a tacit admission of previous overkill.
The fixtures in question will feature a minute’s silence, a rendition of God Save the King and, after 70 minutes, a round of applause. Perfect. Communal grieving and solidarity that is dignified and tasteful without being mawkish or over the top.
It was the same at the London Stadium prior to West Ham’s Europa League game on the evening of the Queen’s death, where for good measure they flashed up a picture of her presenting Jules Rimet to Bobby Moore. It wasn’t a right ole cockney knees-up but it was the next best thing. You’d imagine it too was what she would have wanted.
All of which brings us by wildly circuitous routes to Jonathan Wilson’s new book on the Charlton brothers. Although he doesn’t make a big thing of it – it’s a one-paragraph digression, nothing more - Wilson posits an intriguing theory about Don Revie’s Leeds United.
The reason Leeds kept coming up short at the death, he argues, was not because they were unlucky, or cursed, or not good enough, but rather because they were good.
“They were a side whose consistency, whose ability regularly to go deep in every competition, demanded a much larger squad and the sort of rotation that wouldn’t be common practice for another three decades.”
Leeds kept reaching the business end of the FA Cup and the League Cup and Europe, all while competing for First Division titles. They kept getting bogged down in replays. Eventually, season after season, they kept running out of legs and bodies.
Ponder this and zoom half a century forward. Manchester City and/or Liverpool – and we already know it won’t be Liverpool – keep winning matches. They remain undefeated in the domestic cups. They’re sucking diesel in Europe.
But the matches keep coming and though the spirit remains willing the flesh begins to weaken. The men who came back from Qatar are not quite the same men who went to Qatar, a la Mo Salah after the African Cup of Nations last January. Even Haaland, impervious to the syndrome, cannot quite compensate for the drop in collective output and City, forced to play four times in the final week of the season, are chinned on the finishing line.
Fanciful? Probably. If the events, and non-events, of the past week turn out to have consequences next May it’s likely to be on the race for third and fourth.
Yet now more than ever we have a season that will be a marathon rather than a sprint, with the January transfer window bound to be a whirl of conspicuous consumption. A few clubs who spent big during the summer will reload and splurge again, as Chelsea have made it clear they’ll be doing. Clubs who don’t add bodies will risk running out of them in April.
It could be the early 1970s – when, incidentally, the purchase of Rodney Marsh one March was cited as the reason Manchester City a title - all over again. Can’t wait.
Eamonn Cregan didn’t attend the 2018 All-Ireland hurling final. He’d been in Croke Park for too many Limerick disappointments, some of them downright disasters, since 1973.
Here was a man who couldn’t take it any longer. So he spent the afternoon hoovering Anne Cregan’s car instead.
He was still engaged in this worthy pursuit when Caoimhe Cregan texted to say that time was all but up and Limerick were all but home and hosed, upon which he decided it was safe to go back into the water. Or at any rate to the television in the living room.
(Narrator’s voice: Time wasn’t quite all but up and Limerick weren’t quite all but home and hosed…)
For what happened next chez Cregan, and much more besides, check out the latest offering from Hero Books, by Arthur James O’Dea. Rather than make each of the nine figures (Cregan, Mick Mackey, Tom Ryan and so forth) the subject of a standalone chapter, the author braids them through the narrative - harder work on his part but more rewarding for the reader.
O’Dea also does well to feature less obvious figures like Joe McGrath, Shane Fitzgibbon, who drew up the under-age coaching blueprint that laid the groundwork for the glories of the past few years, and Ger Hegarty, of late better known as Gearóid’s father.
The book can be viewed as a companion piece to Henry Martin’s mighty but for obvious reasons is a considerably more cheering read. And Eamonn Cregan is probably good to see – or avoid seeing, should he so choose - Limerick win a couple more All-Irelands yet.
Carlos Alcaraz: Teenage US Open tennis champion, the youngest number one in the history of the world rankings and Rafa Nadal’s successor in so many ways.
Michael O’Leary and Willie Mullins: Reunited and it feels so good. Older readers may be tempted to start humming Peaches & Herb.
Robert Sarver: The Phoenix Suns owner was banned for a year and fined $10m for misconduct, including “words and actions that offended his employees”. One assumes he can afford it.
Mathieu Raynal: French referee who, with Australia leading in Melbourne and the clock nearly in the red, gave the All Blacks a dubious scrum for time-wasting. You can guess what happened next.
