A small step and a giant leap

WE quote him all the time but many people don’t seem to realise that Neil Armstrong went all the way to the moon only to fluff his lines.

‘‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’’ he famously said, and his words continue to ring down through the ages. The only problem is that the sentence makes no sense whatsoever. What the first human being on the moon intended to say was: ‘‘One small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind.’’ But, in what was perhaps the most high-profile attack of stage fright ever suffered on live TV, Armstrong left out the crucial ‘a’ and simply wound up repeating himself.

The celebrated astronaut came to mind as I found myself pondering some slightly more mundane matters of language and expression recently. Consider ‘‘cross-channel’’, for example, a phrase still frequently used in this country to mean football in England. But across which Channel, exactly? France, via Dover? Or maybe the St George’s Channel? The latter is indeed the recognised name of a body of water between these two islands but, according to my in-depth research (thanks Google), it seems to be shrinking all the time.

Historically, the name encompassed all the waters between Ireland to the west and Wales and South West England to the east; thus the Bristol Channel opened into Saint George’s Channel. (Attention at the back, please!).

But nowadays it is usually applied only to the waters near the narrowest part of the channel, between Carnsore Point in Wexford and Saint David’s Head in Pembrokeshire. In other words, a pretty good chunk of the English footie is not ‘‘cross channel’’ and never was. But still we persist with the misnomer.

And then there’s the odd matter of ‘‘close season’’, the strange limbo land in which football, um, ‘‘cross channel’’, currently resides. But ‘‘close’’ as in what? Close to the beginning or close to the end? Close but no cigar? And if, as seems likely, it’s a diminutive of ‘‘closed’’ then why don’t we pronounce it ‘‘clothes season’’?

(And, if you’re about to tell me that the better informed already do, then I guess I’m in for the biggest shock I’ve experienced since I was a wee know-it-all football nut who woke up one morning to discover that, oh dear, there wasn’t actually a team in Scotland called ‘‘Patrick’’ Thistle).

But, increasingly, the biggest problem about the ‘‘close season’’ is the fact that it appears to be open all the time. Like, St George’s Channel, it’s shrinking by the day. Time was when the soccer fan endured a long barren summer, enlivened only by hopelessly ill-informed attempts to win the Australian pools. These days, the Irish football faithful are never off the case, with the domestic league in full cry during the very few weeks when the game in Britain briefly cedes space to the cricket and Wimbledon.

And even this summer, when there is no European Championship finals or World Cup to get us through the month of June, thanks to the U-21 finals and the Copa America, the armchair addict is still ensured an ample supply of methadone before getting back on the hard stuff.

And, just this week, he has had a little taste of what’s to come in the form of the Premiership fixtures list. And, already, thoughts are turning to August 11 and the big kick off. But from the boardroom on down, the professionals have been there before him, the close season on the pitch promptly giving way to open season in the marketplace.

Barely had Manchester United and Chelsea put their trophies behind glass than the fresh battles for hearts and minds and players was under way.

Bob Dylan once said that money doesn’t talk, it swears, which may explain why the air in a few Premiership boardrooms has already turned blue. Power, as ever, resides with the most powerful, which is why the ruling ‘Big Four’ continue to thrive as an elite league within the league, virtually untouchable. But further down the table, the presence of billionaire backers at clubs like Portsmouth and West Ham serves only to further distort a market already swollen by vastly increased television revenue.

As a result, players’ agents have once more ratcheted up their demands. Hence reports of prospective buyers intent on targeting a player they knew for a fact to be on twenty grand a week suddenly discovering that, yes, they could have him alright and, really, he’d love to join — but only for double and more his existing wage.

Against that kind of backdrop, Sunderland are a club who can consider themselves doubly fortunate to be re-entering the lion’s den with a figure as charismatic as Roy Keane at the helm. Already a proven winner as a player, Keane showed in his first season as manager that he hadn’t lost the Midas Touch since retiring to the dug-out. But, in a marketplace that’s red in tooth and claw, the club must also be hoping that Keane’s presence alone can act as a compelling draw — just as it did last season when Anthony Stokes, for example, was persuaded to join the Wearsiders.

Assembling forces is only half the battle, of course. The real test begins in August. Reading have already shown that with a good manager and honest players, great things can be achieved in the Premiership without having to break the bank.

Nevertheless, there’s a warning from recent history in the rise and fall of Wigan, a club which, last time around, came perilously close to returning from whence they came. The point is that even one decent season in the Premiership doesn’t guarantee a secure foothold in the top-flight, so it will be fascinating to see how Steve Coppell and his team cope with ‘‘that difficult second season’’ come the autumn.

For Sunderland, the challenges are already writ large in black and white — and I don’t just mean that long-awaited Tyne and Wear derby against Newcastle in the Stadium of Light on November 10. By then, Roy Keane will have a much-clearer sense of how the season is likely to shape up, with the Black Cats having already faced Spurs on the opening day and the likes of Liverpool at home and Manchester United away before September is barely a day old.

When his players cross the familiar white line for their Premiership debut in the Stadium of Light on August 11, it really will be both a small step and a giant leap for the team that Roy Keane is building.