Lining up alongside Cup legends at the national stadium proves one thing: Chris Waddle does not track back
The FA Cup is back. As the English football season crunches out of the high-rev festive season and shifts down through the gears for its annual winter slog, it is necessary to contemplate once again the unique demands of the oldest cup competition in the world.
The Cup has undoubtedly suffered in recent years. Shrunk back by competing excitements, increasingly it has seemed a little marooned, a Havisham-ish tournament that makes a fetish of its own grand and distant past. At times you feel what the Cup needs is a touch of forward-focus. As such it is perhaps a good thing that this weekend will see the third round screened in part by ESPN, who have the rights for the second successive season.
The Cup needs to feel wanted. It needs pizzazz rather than ritualistic respect. Perhaps it even needs events such as the one staged by the Cup's new televisual partner ahead of the third round, an 11-a-side promotional match between Cup legends, journalists (including this writer) and competition winners, played out on the turf of new Wembley itself. If only because it is impossible not to feel some imprint of the grandeur of both the Cup and Wembley itself, it was a genuinely extraordinary thing to take part in.
The format for the match was simple: two mixed teams of both legends and mortals competing over 90 minutes ? 90 minutes! ? on the huge, lush, sprawling acres of the national stadium. Legend-wise we seemed to be stacked with options. The ESPN punditry lineup features recent-ish retirees such as Martin Keown and Chris Waddle. Plus there was even some ludicrous talk that Robert Pires, a Premier League player last year, would be turning out, a notion that seemed snortingly improbable right up to the moment I entered the press lounge of a Wembley stadium wreathed in morning mist to see Pires himself hunkered unsmilingly among his fellow legends at the breakfast bar. This, it seemed, was going to be serious. Oh dear.
One of the enduring challenges in the career of the lifelong amateur footballer is exactly how to describe what it is you do on a football pitch to any new set of team-mates. Where do you play? As an infant footballer the answer to this is simply: "Er ? wherever." In time though we all specialise. You may remain a right midfielder or a centre-forward for decades, but as fitness slackens over time it becomes necessary to show greater flexibility. After a long mid-career as a central midfielder I began a while back to describe myself as an "attacking midfielder" (less running, more wiliness). For some time I called myself "a luxury player": don't expect me to track back, don't ask me to tackle, just let me decorate the fringes. Finally, inspired by a spell spent doing no more than patrol the centre circle and point I began describing myself as "a midfield stroller", or more specifically "a bit like the old fat John Barnes", a label inspired by Barnes's own late-stage slow-motion incarnation at Newcastle.
Old fat John Barnes got me through for a while. At Wembley, however, it presented a new and surely unique problem. If you habitually describe yourself as playing "like the old fat John Barnes", how do you respond when the person you're talking to actually is the older, slightly fatter John Barnes, the greatest English player of the late 1980s, who would now be manager of ESPN Blues for the day. "Where do you play?" Barnes asked me, perusing his team sheet. In these circumstances "I play like an old fat John Barnes" suddenly seemed a slightly coarse response, perhaps even a little tactless. So I just said: "Er ... wherever," instead.
Anyway, the Wembley dressing rooms! Swanky doesn't do them justice. They are instead austere and refined. What lockers! What walnut trim seating! What a weirdly cramped and intimate shower area! Changing into my ESPN Blue kit, trying hard not to boggle at the sight of Chris Waddle doing a slope-shouldered warm-up, bantering shyly with the charming, friendly Ray Stubbs, it seemed still inconceivable this was all really going to happen.
It was only really standing in the tunnel with my team-mates while a tinglingly disorientating crowd roar was piped through the stadium speakers, that it was possible to start feeling really terrible about what was about to take place. Although, walking out on to Wembley in a pair of football boots was a wonderful, giddy moment. The pitch is standard size but it looks huge flanked by those vaulting, banked tiers, the sky reduced to a distant porthole in Wembley's hovering roof structure.
Then a disappointment: Barnes wouldn't actually be playing. Instead he would manage energetically from his technical area in jeans and lemon yellow football boots, apparently gripped with a genuine competitive passion, bantering relentlessly, berating the referee, his players and also the amusing and avuncular Kevin Keegan, who was managing the opposition.
Omitted unfairly from the starting XI by a misguided Barnes, I nevertheless soon found myself on and playing at right-back, the duffer's position. There was one major advantage to this: Waddle was playing right midfield. And so there we were in tandem: me and Chris Waddle, perhaps my all-time favourite England player, a dreamily charming, wondrously gifted free spirit. Chris Waddle! He still wanders and drifts and lopes with the air of a man perhaps secretly smoking a pipe behind his turned up collar. He still has wonderful touch and that swaying dribble, even if his stepovers are now performed with all the deceptive elan of a village postman easing a leading leg over his bicycle crossbar.
But let me just say this about Waddle: he doesn't track back. Not at all. No protection for the full-back. As, time after time, I found myself facing two or even three ESPN Whites players galloping across the wide open spaces of Wembley, in the corner of my vision I could make out the meandering Waddle, finding space, loitering helpfully, sharing a joke with Stubbs. It is, if nothing else, a new perspective on England's lost talents of the early 1990s. Exposed, bypassed, nutmegged, for a moment I craved the reassuring hustle of a grafter (where was Carlton Palmer? Or Andy Sinton?). Maybe, just maybe, Graham Taylor was right.
As the ESPN Whites continued to attack I was grateful for the presence of the wonderful Neville Southall in our goal. For all his acquired bulk Southall was still proving an unbreachable wall, pulling off some feline saves, plunging to snatch crosses, commanding his area with portly insouciance. This was entirely necessary, mainly because by the second half Pires appeared to be operating under different physical rules from everybody else present. This is a man who doesn't exactly run: he floats and glides. "Putain," I heard him mutter at one point after some laser-guided flick failed to find its way through another packed and lurching last stand on the edge of our area.
By the end, our early 1-0 lead had been converted, after a long siege, into a 2-1 victory for Team Pires. We trooped off to more recorded crowd noise and even mounted the gantry in the gods to pretend we had lost a cup final. A garrulous presentation ceremony saw Pires rather bizarrely awarded the man of the match trophy (Oh yeah? Really?) which he carried off with an air of incomprehension. After which the rest of us sloped away from Wembley, that great echoey empty lozenge of a thing beached like a supertanker amid the small-scale humdrum of its north London suburb.
Five months from now two teams of FA Cup finalists will play there for real. The cheers will not be recorded. And the occasion will be framed with a genuine grandeur that shines through, as this witness can testify, on even the mildest of imitative junkets.
This weekend ESPN has live and exclusive coverage of three FA Cup third round matches: Birmingham City v Wolves (12pm Saturday), Bristol Rovers v Aston Villa (4.30pm Saturday) and Arsenal v Leeds United (7.45pm Monday)
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/jan/05/wembley-fa-cup-legends
No comments:
Post a Comment