Mud and money

Day and night, night and day …relentlessly the football season slurps on through the January mud — mud and money, slurp, slurp — transfer ‘windows’, raucous headlines, phoney passions torn to tatters, ‘hot’ news stories cold and discarded in a blink. British professional football preens itself as pre-eminent in the culture, and broadcasting and the public prints clamorously whoop up the presumption, but I fancy most of us who happily call ourselves ‘fans’ are only ‘quite interested’ as opposed to being obsessed by the passing show. Although most of the leading players cannot with an innate and comfy ease kick the ball with either foot (once the prerequisite basic talent), for some time they have been ‘bigger’ than their clubs; now the club managers are ‘bigger’ than any player.

At least England is not yet Scotland: up there the championship ‘race’ is once again utterly devoid of any remote competitive interest, so many streets ahead are Glasgow Celtic. Why do the others bother to turn up? At least the outcome of the English Premiership might sustain an interest till April, but (with Bolton Wanderers and Portsmouth leading the also rans with spirit and puff, however forlorn) the four usual suspects are obviously the only ones left in the mix at the top. And two of those could be, to all intents, as good as eliminated from the equation this very weekend because, nicely, they are playing each other – that is, Jose Mourinho vs Rafael Benítez on Merseyside, and Sir Alex Ferguson vs Arsène Wenger in London.

More celebrated than their clubs; more fêted than any player. Some quartet. Manchester’s combative Glaswegian knight still fretfully chews his gum but, coming up to this weekend, the old boy is in the driving seat.