The Devil In Me

With six hours to go I cannot with any sense of honesty say that I am all that confident. Barcelona are highly, highly likely to score which leaves us in the position of needing to score more. The more we attack, the more space we will leave at the back and they have a who’s who of attacking players with pedigree at exploiting defensive errors.

If they win they will deserve to go through, it really is that simple. I only wish I hadn’t said something similar about Stamford Bridge and the title…

It was a delicious story at the time, an ego-centric clash of the titans, money defeats charisma, and back stabbing galore. Yet there will be few football fans who would stake their mortgage on the argument that Jose Mourinho’s departure could be anything other than a loss for English football. Chelsea would fall into disarray, the power would shift back up the M6 and Manchester United would begin a slow, predicatble march towards the sextruple. Or so we thought. What nobody expected in those heady days of September was that the 2007/2008 season would turn out to be one to savour, remember and cherish.

The cups have had a far more dramatic effect on the league this year than in others and that, despite the protestations of the managers, has been a great thing. Whilst the Carling Cup exposed the more machiavellian machinations of the Glazer regime at Old Trafford (through the outcry over forced ticket buying for season ticket holders) it brought salvation for Spurs too. A team widely tipped to trample its way into the top 4 wheezed into the season and seemed almost bad enough to go down at one point. Yet they have now won one of the better finals seen in this country for a while, and a trophy escapes the clutches of the aforementioned four for the first time in far to long.

The FA cup has also rediscovered its huff and puff. If anybody had said to us 8 months ago that a non-league team called Havant and Waterlooville would, before the ides of March set in, restore their faith in the sport. Perhaps we would have recommended that they seek immediate psychiatric care. Yet it came to pass and the team who took the lead twice at Anfield are now part of Cup legend. The situation of a final involving a Welsh team has even seen Michel Platini need to step in and say its okay for the them to play in the UEFA cup next year should they win. Great exposure for the competition.

The Premier League is often criticised as being a collection of three mini competitions and whilst this is largely the case, can we not enjoy how tight those three battles have become? At the top Liverpool have been undone by the kind of behind the scenes efforts that belong in the court of Hamlet whilst Arsenal have dished out some great football to lead for much of the season before running out of steam. The imperious Manchester United have begun to wobble at precisely the right time to make it interesting and Chelsea have risen from Jose’s ashes to irk us all once more, it has been great stuff. Even the battle for fifth will now go to the wire as Everton and Villa scrapped out a 2-2 draw over the weekend.

The gloomy reality of relegation has so far only managed to darken Derby’s season and with two matches to play three points separate four teams and six could still technically go down. The games just played showed that the sides who are fighting for their lives know how to fight. Birmingham took points from Liverpool where Fulham rallied from nowhere to defeat Manchester City and can now taste fairytale on their cornflakes.

So what has made this season more eye-catching than perhaps the last two or three? You would have to say that it could be the pressure placed on all of the teams. Eight managers have so far jumped on or off the merry-go-round and the ascendancy of Roy Keane along with the return of Kevin Keegan means that nobody can complain of being bored. We are even in the ridiculous situation where Avram Grant and Sven Goran Eriksson are under geniune pressure to hold onto their jobs. Can anybody think of two other managers who have achieved as much as those two in their first seasons? I think not.

Looking around the European leagues you will see that the title has been pretty much decided already in France, Spain, Germany and Portugal yet in the premier league there are still ten teams left with something to play for. Whether or not the English Premier league is the best in the world or merely the richest is not a argument that concerns me. At the moment it is definitely the most interesting and I for one, am still watching.

The world seems to be a different place after this weekend. Usually the onset of friday afternoon accompanies huge swathes of relief and relaxation which gently carry us into the calm of saturday and sunday. But this football fan busines is causing me all sorts of stress at the moment. It is no exagerration to say that I aged approximately a decade during a two hour period on saturday and I expect more over the coming weeks.

Courtesy of Jono our term du jour is ‘bananaskin’ and he has rightly spotted another one coming up in the shape of Blackburn. With foresight like this I wonder if history would have been re-written had there been a Callaway on the Titanic’s lookout deck. The Lancashire sheep are certainly no mugs and Roque Santa Cruz is a player that can unsettle a Vidic-free defence.

Fortunately the nouveau London pinstripe brigade have managed to pile the pressure on themselves. Heskey for England. Alas, I fear Everton are a team deflated and that Chelsea will dispatch them fairy easily, Everton may yet relinquish fifth to an in form Portsmouth.

So again it is down to winning at the Bridge, I honestly believe that if we do this that there can be no debate over who wins the title. The bananaskin in this equation is Nou Camp sized and sandwiched around that fixture. Europe I fear, rests on the squad juggling of certain Mister Ferguson. For the sake of our health I hope he gets it right.