Shove yer Champions League up yer Arsenal!

(sigh)

(Sniff)

(Sob)

(WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLL!!)

I’m so glad I don’t have Sky.

Soooo relieved - nay - DELIGHTED that, by staying in my ain hoose the nicht, there is no way I can even accidentally flick onto a TV channel showing highlights of Internazionale versus Rangers.

Did I say “Rangers”?

Sorry. I meant, of course, to say that I’m glad my measly NTL package affords me absolutely no danger of erroneously happening across even a smidgen of live televised action from the football match taking place this evening involving Internazionale of Milan, at the San Siro, Giuseppe Meazza stadium, located in Umbria’s largest conurbation, in the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final against Rangers.

Doh!

I mean Inter against Villarr…rr…rr…rrRangers.

Oh, GROW UP!

It’s Villarreal isn’t it. Inter are at home to Villarreal this evening because, as we said on that beer-lagged, jet-lagged, result-lagged, truncheon-lagged Wednesday after the monumental Tuesday night before, Villarreal were the better side and deserved to go through. It was tight but they earned it. Rangers were MAGNIFICENT but only by our own narrowly insufficient standards. The Yellow Submarine is trying to torpedo one of the giants of the game tonight and they have earned that right.

However, it’s only human nature for every Bear and Bearette to be thinking tonight “But for a Kris Boyd mis-kick” that could have been us. In reality, pinning it on one missed chance is as realistic as saying “but for losing both legs 5-0 we could have been playing Inter tonight”. An excuse is an excuse is a delusion is an if, but or maybe.

Alternative scenarios for past footballing events are like ghosts: Even if they are real they still mean nothing.

But the unreal, the imaginary - especially when we’ve witnessed a truth so closely resembling it - sustains so many of us when reality hits you hard. With apologies to the cast and crew of Britain’s Most Haunted (oh aye - I don’t have live Champions League coverage on a Wednesday night but I’ve got Living TV on my NTL package! Woop-de-fekin-doo!), the painful psychological scars of pivotal football defeats are much more real to me than some spectre which someone once thought they heard someone else say they saw pissing about in the shadows of a churchyard where a murder of a milking wench took place in 1756, allegedly.

Some folk get their romance, their emotional sustenance, from believing in ghosts - organised religion cashes in on this - but we football folk get the same sick kind of supernatural sensation from thinking of how close we came to defeating Villarreal this season, Bayern Munich in the Champions League of 99/2000, Marseille in the Velodrome in 93, Feyenoord at De Kuip in 2002 … and using the proximity with victory of the results those nights to feed a fantasay of the untold glories which lay beyond an obstacle we patently couldn’t get beyond because we blatantly weren’t quite good enough.

Believe in ghosts and ye like being scared. Believe in football and ye like being frustrated.

Arsenal, last night. How great were they! What a performance! Wearing a Torino strip, they tore Juventus to pieces. Wearing what was the original inspiration for the Nottingham Forest strip, Arsenal took a huge step to joining that elite of which Forest, now safely ensconced in English football’s third flight, are proud members, their card stamped twice. And they did so against a club who took their strip from … Notts County! (it was neither a Turin nor Trent derby but had echoes of both)

That’s the thing with the Champions League - with the European Cup: It makes club’s great for eternity. Forest can struggle to stay in Coca-Cola League 1 but they’ll always have one - or two! - over the second most successful club in Premiership history. Brian Clough won it in 1978 and 1979 - the Rangers helped him the first time by knocking out, believe it or not, Juventus! And Forest are a memeber of that great list of 21 clubs with their name on the biggest prize in club football and the hardest tropy on the planet to win. And so are Celtic.

Our Champions League record dwarfs Celtic’s. We’ve played in it 7 times, they’ve managed just 3 group stages. They’ve gained one point away from home in their entire CL history - we drew three of our four away games just this season. But getting yer name on the trophy itself is what it’s all about and the fact our seperated brethren have done so is one traditional reason why Champions League absence pains a Bluenose so.

But - let’s face it - it’s just such a bloody great competition that you would ALWAYS want to be in it! Sod the bitterness aspect, it’s just such a breathtakingly glamorous tournament that I freely admit I’m dying with envy when I watch any of this week’s quarter finals.

The historical scenarios are always there - facinating patterns emerge under the powers of great players and clubs which hold our gaze:

Benfica and Barcelona clashed last night - a re-match of the 1961 final, with Benfica’s manager Ronald Koeman having famously scored the only goal of the 1992 final, for Barcelona and Barca’s gaffer, Frank Rijkaard, having scored the only goal of the 1990 European cup final … against Benfica! Juve may be about to crash against England again as they did to Liverpool last season, Arsenal could well emulate the Anfield club’s 2005 heroics by turning domestic torpor into European glory but Liverpool of the Premiership only have European glory whereas Arsenal’s place in the history of the game lacks only the European Cup which their list of great past players will be retrospectively honoured by: Rangers fans share that yearning with Arsenal fans: We know we’re great, we know we’re huge but we just need to win this competition once to make sure everyone else on the planet gets the message!

Rangers did us proud and kept the pain of absence minimal by only missing a few rounds this year - two of the preliminaries and three of the latter ones. The best ever season for Blue presence in the big one was 92/93 when we missed but one round, the final. (okay, Mr Anorak, there was a preliminary round in the late summer of 1992 but only six clubs took part in that!) Watching Marseille play an out-of-sorts Milan in Munich just as we would have - sense of adventure and esprit de corps defeating greater experience and skill - made it all the more painful. But we watched because - HEY - what else would you want to do?!

If it’s through tears of pain or eyes greened by envy, a football fan still has to watch the Champions League - it’s only so painful because we did so well, because we brought it just close enough to home for adoration to become affinity.

(Fuck it - I’m off down the pub to catch the second half … of Lyon-Milan. Ye can SOD watching the Inter game … because, erm, I’ve seen Inter already this season - yeah - been there, done that … that’s the ONLY reason I don’t want to watch the Inter game … the fact that the only away match in this year’s CL I didn’t go to was at the San Siro doesn’t make me feel like I was DESTINED to go back there with The Gers … not at all! … nah, nah nah - I’m not bitter …nooooo. But, if they’ve got the Inter game on in the pub I’ll be coming straight back home … to watch Derek Acorahs Ghost Towns.)

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Published:
03.29.06 / 7pm
Category:
News