Weekend talking points: Old school football almost works for West Ham
West Ham United's Jarrod Bowen celebrates his goal in a 2-2 draw with Manchester City at London Stadium. (Photo by Ian Kington/AFL via Getty Images)
The truth is, I had actually forgotten it was the FA Cup final until just before kick off. Aside from being unprofessional for a football writer, it is indicative of the diminished significance of the cup. Where it was once the absolute highlight of the season, far more important than winning the league, now it's just another game, easily forgotten about if you’re a neutral.
Both sides tried hard enough, Liverpool smothered the blues for the first 20 minutes and should’ve gone ahead, Chelsea did likewise at the start of the second half. Both sides missed chances in a tense stand-off and Luis Diaz was rightly man-of-the-match. They managed to fight each other to a standstill, just as they had in the League Cup final. You have to wonder what the point of extra time is. Both teams were exhausted, surely going straight to penalties would be a better solution than yet another half an hour of football that, in truth, few really wanted to watch. This time at least the penalty shoot out didn’t get into double figures.
After Liverpool had won it and were celebrating the win, they looked like every other cup winning side, delighted to have picked up the trophy and their fans celebrated like all cup winning fans down the ages, but for the rest of us, it will not linger long in the memory. Indeed, both cup finals have already conflated in the mind into one very long goalless game.
So that’s two trophies won for the Reds. That they will end this season having played every game in every tournament they’ve entered is remarkable.
Chelsea have now lost three consecutive cup finals but the club has been sold and a new regime will soon be installed. Thomas Tuchel needs to decide if he wants to work under them and if he does, then, as the final whistle is blown on the season, he needs to decide whether to reshape the team to get the best out of Romelu Lukaku or jettison the expensive striker. There’s no doubt the club has been drifting in the last third of the season, whether this is down to the uncertainty over the ownership or is more player and tactically driven, is not obvious. If they lose their last two games, they could yet finish fifth, but as their last game is at home to Watford, that seems unlikely.
After the game, a radiant Klopp did something only real leaders do. In reference to Sadio Mane’s missed penalty, he told the interviewer he’d said to the player to take the penalty differently to how he’d normally take it, so it was his fault Sadio had missed. Taking responsibility in that way, soaking up the blame on behalf of his player is quietly rather moving, maybe especially so in an era where so many public figures from politicians to CEOs are so keen to divest themselves of blame for anything and everything and don’t care who gets thrown under the bus in order to do so.
If you kick a ball into someone’s arm, someone who doesn’t have a choice in letting it hit their arm, it should never be a penalty. The law used to include the word ‘deliberate’ and that’s the crucial thing. Why should a player be penalised for something over which they had no agency? It is senseless. The law was designed to prevent advantage being gained by deliberately handling the ball, Ashley Barnes had the ball kicked against his arm and gained no advantage. Having your arms in a so-called ‘unnatural position’ is meaningless. What is natural? There is no natural position for arms when you’re playing football. You know what is unnatural? Players defending with their arms behind their back in the Riverdance style. That is the very definition of unnatural. The old law worked fine for over a century. Let’s go back to it and let’s ditch VAR, the cause of these fussy, unworkable rule changes. It is making the game worse and more unfair and not one sane fan ever wanted that to happen.
David Moyes is not an especially sophisticated coach and this worked in his favour for their first goal against Manchester City which was scored, in essence, by booting it long over the City defence for Jarrod Bowen to run onto and score. It was classic old school long ball football that had echoes of Wimbledon in 1988 and City had no defence against its brutal simplicity. It was as though it was an alien lifeform; something they had never seen before. The second goal was also out of the 1980s football playbook. Soucek won a flick-on (very 80s is the flick-on), Antonio knocked it in behind the defence, Bowen ran onto it to drive it home from a wide angle. Football can be a simple game if you want it to be and frankly, most fans would rather see a long boot down pitch for the striker to score, than any amount of self-indulgent tika-taka. At times it is as though coaches just try to make the game more complicated in order to justify their ludicrous money, or to appear fashionable.
It was no surprise when City equalised. They kept the ball for huge periods of time, West Ham only had it for 21% of the game, despite scoring twice. City had 30 shots at goal, 23 off target and the draw was only achieved courtesy of Lucas Fabianski’s penalty save from Riyad Mahrez. It takes City to the verge of the title but if Liverpool beat Southampton on Tuesday, it will go down to the last day. Liverpool play Crystal Palace at home and City take on Villa at the Etihad. If Liverpool win, Steven Gerrard couldn’t snatch an unlikely away win to hand his old club the title could he?
No. Then again…
Anything that can go wrong this season for Leeds has gone wrong. Their squad has been decimated by injury right through the spine of the side. They were behind for most of the game with Brighton and never looked like equalising Danny Welbeck’s first half goal. When Pascal Struijk came on after 83 minutes, it took him just under nine minutes to make his mark on Leeds’ history by nodding in Joe Gelhardt’s cross. Brighton had plenty of chances to put the game beyond the Yorkshiremen with 15 strikes at goal, six on target but couldn’t convert more than one, a familiar problem for much of the season. It took their draw total to 15, three short of the record in a 38-game season. The draw only gained Leeds a point but it took them out of the relegation places with one game to play.
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