Tommy Martin: How the sporting Gods often make the mighty look silly
NET LOSS: Igor Tudor, who's position as Tottenham boss is under intense pressure after another awful night for the Croatian in the Champions League. Pic: John Walton/PA Wire.
People involved in sport often talk about how it is a force for good. It keeps kids off the streets, stops you getting fat and gives emotionally stunted men something to talk about.
This may all be true, but what they don’t put in the grant applications and public health pamphlets is that it also makes you look silly. Very silly. Like Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper falling on his backside levels of silly.
In fact, it’s hard not to look around the sporting landscape in recent times and not see examples of people looking silly, as if the whole sports industrial complex was a not a very serious, private equity funded industry at all, but rather a bleak comedy being performed for some audience of hidden deities who just like a big laugh.
Sometimes the joke is hard for us mere mortals to stomach, like with Shane Lowry’s recent meltdown while leading in the final holes at the Cognizant Classic. This was when the aforementioned gods thought it would be hilarious for Ireland’s most beloved and cuddliest sportsman to plop two approach shots during the decisive holes of his final round into various annoyingly located ponds.
When Lowry explained afterwards that he had been primed to celebrate his impending victory with his four-year-old daughter, who had never seen her dad win a tournament, you wondered what sort of sicko could script things this way, unless God is indeed a Kerryman and has never forgiven the Lowry clan for their involvement in stopping the five-in-a-row.
But in general, sport prefers to poke fun at the mighty and humble the hubristic. Take this week’s action in the Champions League Round of 16 first leg, which was like some sort of blackly comic morality play, a football-themed take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which involved the greedy and spoiled Premier League characters wandering into the titular establishment and enduring a sticky end even as they crammed their mouths full of gobstoppers.
Various contrivances by European football’s powerbrokers had led to the scenario in which its richest league contributed no fewer than six teams to the Champions League last 16. This can be seen as European club football adopting the private healthcare approach, where those who can afford it get the best treatment, and those who can’t are on a five-year waiting list for a qualifying tie against Levski Sofia.
But, like Willy Wonka, having invited the Prem powers into the secret lair, the Champions League sent them all down the chocolatey river. None of the six teams won a match and all endured some level of cosmic jokery in the process.
Arsenal, for example, kings of the corner kick routine, found themselves hoisted by their own petard when Bayer Leverkusen had the temerity to take the lead from a corner of their own. Leverkusen’s cleverly choreographed manoeuvre should have drawn applause from the Gunners’ own set-piece guru Nicolas Jover, although he may have been doing a photo shoot for Vogue or hanging with Harry Styles and other massive celebrities at the time.
In fact, Arsenal only salvaged a draw from their first leg thanks to a soft penalty awarded late on after a foul on their winger Noni Madueke. The substitute showed rank insubordination by dribbling past his opponent into the penalty box, ignoring manager Mikel Arteta’s instructions that all Arsenal players should pass the ball sideways and shuffle six inches forward until victory by suffocation is achieved.
Liverpool lost their first leg to Galatasaray despite a heartwarming display of Turkish hospitality, in which the hosts kept generously offering members of Liverpool’s attack easy chances to score, like tribal warlords giving succour to weary travellers by roasting a prize hog.
Instead of taking these chances, Liverpool themselves joined in the philanthropic mood, led by big-hearted centre half Ibrahima Konaté, until Galatasaray couldn’t avoid scoring themselves to take a 1-0 lead to Anfield for the second leg. So, the bit of the team that Liverpool didn’t spend any money on let them down, but hilariously, so did the bit that they did spend lots of money on. Wacky stuff.
Spurs' demise was so slapstick that the humour felt a bit basic, as if the entire squad should have arrived at the Metropolitano stadium for their game with Atletico Madrid in a tiny car whose doors fell off as soon as they pulled up. People kept falling over and passing the ball to Atletico players in front of goal, most notably poor goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky, who was hauled off in misery after 17 minutes by interim manager Igor Tudor.
Defending the unfortunate Kinsky, goalkeeping legend Peter Schmeichel accused Tudor of “killing his career” but this is unfair to the Croatian – his job at high-pressure moments like these in Champions League knockout ties is to think not of individuals but of the whole team, all of whose careers he is clearly trying to kill.
As it turned out, Tudor and his Chelsea equivalent Liam Rosenior were both guilty of the same mistake, namely picking second-choice goalkeepers and telling them that they were Andrea Pirlo with gloves. Rosenior may regret his theory that the man to carve open the reigning European champions’ renowned high press was his 24-year-old Swedish backup goalkeeper.
Of course, they are all trying to be like Pep Guardiola, but these days even Pep Guardiola looks silly when he tries to be like Pep Guardiola. You could see the look of amused puzzlement at the Bernabeu on the face of Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois when he looked up with the ball at his feet in the 20th minute of their first leg against Manchester City only to see no City defenders in their own half.
A fresh batch of gambas al pil-pil at the stadium concession stands? A new Picasso retrospective at the Prado? An impromptu gig in El Retiro park by award-winning Iberian songstress Rosalía? What had caused such an evacuation by the City rearguard? Shrugging his shoulders, Courtois took the only option available to him, which was to blooter the ball, Packie Bonner-style, into the City half, where Fede Valverde did the rest.
You need only look at the fortunes of FIFA president Gianni Infantino to see how sport makes even the mightiest look foolish. Infantino’s relationship with US president Donald Trump is one of court jester to bored mediaeval monarch, so we might expect things to get daft between these two. But even Gianni must be wondering if handing the man responsible for kicking off the most pointless war in human history the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize just a few short months ago was a wise piece of judgement.
Maybe it is sport’s greatest good to society of all, this ability to take us all down a peg or two from time to time. It doesn’t always work that way. As I write, the Scottish rugby team are coming to town in the Six Nations, with their winger Darcy Graham claiming that Ireland are there for the taking.
Ye gods, do your worst!
