Jitterbugging in hope rather than expectation

IT’S the one that we want! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Eh, sorry about that. You just caught me doing my John Travolta impression.

Or was it Olivia Newton John? Hard to tell sometimes; just be thankful that I didn’t fetch up on Celebrity Jigs and Reels.

This little bout of jitterbugging was inspired by excited anticipation of the Arsenal-Barcelona Champions League final. After all, it’s the one that we all want, isn’t it?

For sure, AC Milan have legitimate grounds for complaint over the perfectly good Shevchenko goal that wasn’t in the Nou Camp, but over the competition as a whole, justice was done with the best team going through.

As for Villarreal, they can count themselves unlucky not to have punished a worryingly inhibited Arsenal in the Estadio El Madrigal, but when it comes to a European final, I think most neutrals would prefer a touch of nation pitted against nation. Not to mention Strawberry Fields Forever over Yellow Submarine.

Classic games need classic teams and classic elements, and this one seems to have it all. Ronaldinho v Henry. Rijkaard v Wenger. One of Spain’s most illustrious clubs against an English club about to open a new chapter in its own history with the leaving of fabled Highbury. The Catalans keen to win the ultimate European prize for only the second time, the Londoners looking to do it for the first time ever. And, best of all, two teams who can play the game the way it is supposed to be played: with an emphasis on skill, pace and panache, fired up by a belief that, to paraphrase Danny Blanchflower, you can win gloriously and with a flourish, rather than simply waiting for the other lot to die of boredom.

Ah, but there’s the rub, and the reason that deep down, there’s a part of me that will always jitterbug more in hope than expectation. And I suspect it’s that part of me that never really recovered from the 1991 European Cup final.

Probably you can’t say off the top of your head what happened in that game. And I can’t blame you. A decade of therapy still hasn’t fully erased the trauma.

Red Star Belgrade and Marseille had both reached the final in Bari in swaggering style. In the semi-final, Red Star had played outstanding attacking football to beat Bayern Munich 4-3; Marseille had scored 14 goals at home en route to the Stadio San Nicola and, like Red Star, had remained unbeaten in their eight games.

Belgrade had star performers like Robert Prosinecki, Dejan Savicevic and Darko Panchev; Marseille could boast Abedi Pele, Jean-Pierre Papin and Chris Waddle, a wing wizard whose legend would be unfairly tarnished by mullets, missed penalties and musical crimes against humanity.

Although Ireland had contracted World Cup fever the previous year, Sky Sports had yet to make soccer on the box ubiquitous, with the result that there were still many waiting to be converted — or, alternatively, have their faith restored — in football’s unique capacity to thrill. A purist’s dream, Belgrade v Marseille, was just the ticket then, and in the days leading up to the final I happily assumed an evangelical role, assuring even folk who couldn’t tell Red Star from a tabloid newspaper that this was a European Cup final which would show them what the beautiful game was all about.

Come the big night, I sat down in front of the telly and over the next two interminable hours courted death through boredom, if death through embarrassment didn’t get me first. Put simply, from the first whistle to the last, both sides played for penalties — and in that, if nothing else, they succeeded. Abandoning all the attacking principles which had earned them a place in the final, they wasted time, fouled, passed every which way but forward and scarcely created a goal chance worth mentioning.

Even UEFA’s official history of the European Cup, a publication which always tries hard to look on the bright side, speaks of a game in which “nerves and caution prevented both teams from giving free rein to their unquestionable creative talents”. The final, it concludes, was “a disappointment”, which is a bit like describing the sinking of the Titanic as a unfortunate boating incident.

A more accurate summation was offered by one of the friends I’d badgered into watching the game, a GAA man who, shall we say, harboured certain suspicions about the rival code.

“Jayzez, that was some pile of shite,” he said, giving me that pitying look the unbeliever reserves for poor lost souls who have forsaken the authentic warriors of Gaeldom for the posturing of cheap foreign imports.

For the record, Red Star Belgrade won the penalty shoot-out, but if there is any way of erasing this one from the record books — and the memory banks — I’d like to know how.

Still, football fans never learn and so, come Wednesday May 17 in the Stade de France in Paris, the faithful will expect Barcelona and Arsenal to put on the greatest show on earth — at least, until the next one.

And you know, whisper it, they just might. But if they don’t, well, we’ll always have Middlesbrough.