Spectator Sport

30 May 2009

Passion and promotion

There’s nothing easier than betting with hindsight, but you have to say that Coral’s offer of 3-1 on the four teams in the Premiership relegation scrap — Hull, Sunderland, Boro and Newcastle — failing to win was of a generosity to make even the Commons Fees Office blanch. Sure enough they all did even worse and lost, giving every impression of playing some of the crappiest football of the season. Newcastle looked dire, and Middlesbrough have been feeble all season, no matter how nice Gareth Southgate clearly is. I suppose it is just about fair that Hull stayed up, underdogs and all that; and Sunderland deserved it because Niall Quinn is a rare shaft of light.

Thank heaven for Burnley, who played their hearts out to win the promotion play-offs in a match described by one American commentator as ‘the 100 million dollar game’. Afterwards their heroic central defender Clarke Carlisle picked up the man of the match award and in a short and graceful interview gave every sign of being one of the most impressive human beings on earth. Moved to tears, he spoke with wisdom, articulacy and passion about the game, the players, the supporters, and his own personal journey through a host of injuries as well as alcoholism, even thanking Tony Adams’s Sporting Chance clinic. If ever anyone should carry the torch for all that is great and good in the beautiful game it’s Clarke Carlisle. An utterly charming man, he also once won the title of Britain’s Brainiest Footballer — get that man into Downing Street asap.

What joy the play-offs are. They got rubbished when someone invented them a few years ago, but now they are a sensational tail-piece to the season. I couldn’t put it better than my friend Simon, a man of the Medway and a lifelong Gillingham supporter, who last Saturday saw his beloved Gills beat Shrewsbury to move up to League One. This is a text message, by the way, so imagine how long this took to thumb out: ‘Fans of Premier clubs just don’t know what they are missing. If Man U win the Champions’ League, will their supporters even come close to experiencing what 35,000 Gills fans went through... when your little team has come all this way, it’s the 90th minute, they’ve given their all but the opposition goalie’s stopped everything, the Shrews are coming back into it, and it’s Wembley, and the sun is out, and it’s a million miles from Priestfield, and extra time is looming, and with it, you fear, a great injustice, and your nerves are shredded, and then you somehow win a corner, and your star striker, who up till now has been invisible, heads it in and then it’s pandemonium and you’ve got 3 mins of stoppage time to hang on, and then finally it’s all over and you’re hugging your neighbour and looking forward to a trip to the Valley next season. What can possibly beat that?’ What indeed?

In another part of the footballing forest, a few of us were in a pub back in the last century, watching a European game, when a very distinguished lady television writer, who hadn’t been paying much attention, suddenly looked at the screen and exclaimed, ‘Good grief, who is that? Captain Fabulous from Planet Gorgeous...?’ and watched transfixed till the end of the game. He was of course Paolo Maldini, who this week retires from AC Milan, after 901 appearances, 25 seasons in the first team, more caps for Italy than anyone else, the most appearances in Serie A, eight European Cup finals, five times on the winning side, and seven Serie A titles. He will be much missed, not least, with those insanely good looks, by the world’s women.

More articles from: Roger Alton | this section

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