THE PUDDING PROBLEM
Before today’s Big Cup draw, Bayern Munich midfielder Mario Götze was asked who he’d most like to end up playing. “We can’t influence it, so we’ll just take it as it comes,” he said. After the draw, his manager Pep Guardiola was asked what he thought of the outcome. “The draw is the draw,” he said. “All teams have a special quality.” If involved in a kickabout with Götze and Guardiola, The Fiver would face certain humiliation, but if that really is the best they can come up with, it may be that if it came to a Big Cup talk-off we’d have half a chance. Though maybe the Bavaria-based duo just weren’t very inspired by the whole thing. Not just the factory-farmed faux-glitz of the draw, but the very competition itself. For there’s no doubt the latter stages of European football’s most bovine of cash-generators is lacking a certain something these days.
Clamber aboard your giant footballing time machine to shoot back precisely 30 years – Manchester United fans may well feel that, given the kind of guff they’ve spent most of the season enduring, they did that back in August (only without the Cup run) – to the latter stages of the 1984-85 European Cup. Back then, the quarter-final draw pitted Juventus against Sparta Prague, Bordeaux against Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, Austria Vienna against Liverpool and IFK Gothenberg against Panathinaikos. Eight teams representing eight nations, and none of them had ever faced each other in competitive action before (though some older fans may have recalled that Liverpool played a friendly against the Viennese side in 1934).
This year’s draw sees Atlético Madrid play city rivals Real for the seventh and eighth times this season, their 22nd and 23rd meetings since 2010. Also drawn together were PSG and Barcelona, who meet for the third and fourth times this season, two years after they last met at the same stage of the same competition. Now imagine if, after dinner tonight, you were served a generous portion of sticky toffee pudding (stickytoffeephobics can insert an alternative dessert of their choosing). It would probably be delicious. Then imagine if, after tomorrow’s evening meal, you got another generous portion of sticky toffee pudding. Well that would be amazing – after all, the only thing better than a bowl of sticky toffee pudding is two bowls of sticky toffee pudding. Then imagine getting sticky toffee pudding on Sunday night too, and then again on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On occasions it might be a little bit dry, on others a bit bland, but mostly (and a lot of time, effort and resources are going into making it as good as sticky toffee pudding can get) it’s a delicious, rich, unctuous and tooth-achingly sweet treat. It comes out of the kitchen again on Thursday, and next Friday too, plus both days of next weekend, the entire following week, every night in April and daily throughout May and June.
Most of the time, as you put down your spoon, hoist your serviette to dab the corners of your mouth and contentedly pat your sated and swollen belly, you can’t help thinking how lucky you are. Sticky toffee pudding is, after all, nearly always amazing. You think back with a shudder to previous generations, and the stories they tell about rationing. It was a different world then, of course, and it’s hard to argue it was a better one. But sooner or later it’s going to cross your mind that, however good he is at making sticky toffee pudding, the chef really needs to take a long, hard look at himself.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It’s great I resisted the temptation to get rid of him last January because perhaps he wouldn’t be the star he is for Tottenham. I would never have allowed him to be sold when I was there. It’s ridiculous that you let your homegrown players go. I thought it was poor that [Jake] Livermore and [Steven] Caulker should leave. It’s wrong for clubs to continually waste money on investing in new players that you don’t know are going to settle. They should trust the people who know football within the club and not listen to outside influences who are trying to flog them a player. If they had brought in somebody last January and his name ended in an ‘I’ or an ‘O’ the fans would have been very excited, but I’m not sure he would have given the same output as Harry Kane has given” – Tactics Tim was never going to shy away from taking credit for the forward’s rise, was he now?
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Barry Glendenning’s latest video interview took him to Kevin Davies’s house, where the occasionally sharp-elbowed former Bolton striker admits he thought it was a “wind-up” when he got a call-up for England. Listen to the full audio interview here.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Here’s the latest edition of Football Weekly Extra, in case it’s failed to reach your ears thus far.
FIVER LETTERS
“Having read yesterday’s Fiver on Slip, Crash, Guffaw football, I was planning to point out that English football isn’t all that bad. Then I read on to see that Mr Roy’s England squad includes Jones, Smalling and Shaw. Touche Fiver, touche” – Iain Plummer.
“Can I be the first of 1,057 fully grown men, who spent the best part of their spotty, lonely, useless-with-girls youths watching sweaty, freakish, flamboyant men in the 1990s grapple with each other (I’m talking about wrestling, not Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer), to commend you on your Kane line (yesterday’s Bits and Bobs). Promise me that if Charlie Austin or Barry Undertaker ever get an England call-up that you’ll dedicate a whole issue to such funnery” – Mike Coxon.
“I am often amused by reading The Fiver. Not because it is funny; but its attempt at being funny amuses me. For some time I have wondered why The Fiver has become an increasingly dark, soulless place. After wading through yesterday’s interminably unfunny Fiver until I reached Bits and Bobs, all became clear. The one attempt at humour (deliberately discounting Fiver Towers) in the England squad listings was clearly penned by a ‘Gooner’, probably in crayon” – Mel Ackerman (not bothered how many others).
• Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is: Iain Plummer.
JOIN GUARDIAN SOULMATES
Chances are that if you’re reading this tea-timely football email, you’re almost certainly single. But fear not – if you’d like to find companionship or love, sign up here to view profiles of the kind of erudite, sociable and friendly folk who would never normally dream of going out with you. And don’t forget, it’s not the rejection that kills you, it’s the hope.
BITS AND BOBS
Louis van Gaal has explained why Manchester United will be his last job: he can’t get on with airport security. “I don’t want to travel. Everyone wants to touch my body in the airports; it is always peeping because I have an artificial hip,” he moaned.
Meanwhile, Radamel Falcao’s former Mr 15% claims that the striker was scared for his safety when asked to play for their U-21s. “We speak many times, and we cry together … he told me: ‘Something like this had never happened to me, I don’t know how to handle the situation. I feel weird!’ He was a little fearful because he is afraid of those matches with the youth teams and of the second and third divisions. In those categories they are used to whacking and going in hard,” honked Silvano Espindola.
Winter World Cup is coming and Fifa has attempted to make clubs a little less miffed about Qatar 2022 by taking the novel approach of giving them more cash. They’ll treble compensation for hard-up clubs who release players to the 2018 and 2022 shindigs to a cool £142m. Kerching!
Hello hipster, here’s your red-hot Big Vase quarter-final draw news: Sevilla v Zenit St Petersburg, Dnipro v Club Brugge, Dynamo Kyiv v Micah Richards’s Fiorentina and Wolfsburg v Napoli.
England U-21 keeper Jack Butland has inked a new deal at Stoke. “I’m delighted that Jack has decided to extend his contract with us and is now committed to the club until at least the summer of 2019,” trilled chief suit Tony Scholes.
Big Sam may not be heading for the good ship Do One after all. “Providing everyone is happy, I would like to stay at West Ham,” he purred. “They are a great club, moving in the right direction and a lot is now in place for sustained improvement.”
And D1ck Advocaat has pitched up at Sunderland, had a look at the wreckage strewn about the place, and figured “something has to change”. Hasn’t it already?
STILL WANT MORE?
Arsenal goalkeeper David Ospina dressed like a Gunners-themed F1 driver for this interview with David Hytner.
What can you look forward to in the Premier League this weekend? This.
Jacob Steinberg recalls that ridiculous volley by Paolo Di Canio, in our latest Golden Goal feature.
“This is payback time,” roars Adam Lallana in this pow-wow with some kids – and then Paul Wilson – in which he talks about Sunday’s ding-dong clash between Liverpool and Manchester United.
Manchester City may be telling half their squad to ship off in the summer, so says Jamie Jackson.
Sid Lowe got his chat on with readers on this weekend’s small matter of the clásico. There was a lot of chat. Never accuse him of lazy journalism.
Oh, and if it’s your thing … you can follow Big Website on Big Social FaceSpace.
SIGN UP TO THE FIVER
Want your very own copy of our free tea-timely(ish) email sent direct to your inbox? Has your regular copy stopped arriving? Click here to sign up.
