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New normals featuring ruffled former Football Weekly panellists

A BIG CUP OF CHAOS?

In the depths of lockdown, The Fiver attempted to better itself. There was a three-month self-imposed Tin ban, now long forgotten amid a blizzard of park-bench swilling not seen since the days The Fiver was a fan of The Levellers. The front garden at Fiver Towers was set for the Capability Brown treatment and yet long weeds grow among cigarette dimps and discarded Frazzles packets. Inside, box-fresh copies of Philip Roth and Dostoevsky lie unthumbed on the shelf, as the complete works of Jeffrey Archer have been devoured as comfort reading.

And an attempt to become better versed in statistics amid the barrage of log files and seven-day averages of Covid-19 has also failed. Standard deviation is still what Weird Uncle Fiver gets up to of an evening. The grey matter is not what it was way back in those happy, carefree days of February when the world’s biggest worry was how Nigel Pearson might get on at Watford. It may not just be The Fiver whose senses are dulled. The Big Cup and Big Vase tombola on Friday was a shambolic affair to suggest that any new normals are going to feature panicked, disorganised chaos. Even smooth-talking erstwhile Football Weekly panellist Pedro Pinto looked ruffled as a series of video links crashed, and various Euro football club bigwigs defied social distancing guidelines in those brief moments when Zoom was actually working properly.

Related: Manchester City to face Juventus or Lyon if they beat Real Madrid

The Big Cup’s quarter-finals and semi-finals will be played in Lisbon, the Portuguese capital that currently has 19 districts locked down due to a Covid-19 surge, a move that echoes the NBA’s decision to stage its Project Restart in, er, Florida. The Big Vase will be staged across Cologne, Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Gelsenkirchen in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, the state that was recently home to a fresh outbreak in a slaughterhouse. Oh.

But what of the tombola itself? For the Big Cup, salt-and-pepper-haired dreamboat Paulo Sousa pulled out a selection of balls that gave hope to those underdogs left in the competition, since one of Leipzig, Atalanta, Atlético and souris d’église PSG is guaranteed to be in the final while Real Madrid, Lyon, Juventus, Manchester City, Napoli, Barcelona and Bayern Munich must slug it out to face them. Oh, and there’s Frank Lampard’s Chelsea too. They have the small matter of a first-leg deficit of 3-0 to overcome against Bayern in their unfinished round-of-16 tie.

The Big Vase tombola, as drawn by Thomas Helmer, threw up the prospect of Manchester United v Wolves in the semi-final if United can hold off LASK, 5-0 down from the first leg, then beat one of FC Copenhagen or Istanbul Basaksehir and Wolves can beat Olympiakos and then one of Sevilla v Roma. Got all that? It had The Fiver reaching for a soothing copy of Lord Archer’s False Impression.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I thought, ‘I don’t want the first penis I’ve stitched to be Steven Gerrard’s’ – but it was” – club doctor Andrew Massey reveals the gruesome patch-up job he had to perform on the former Liverpool captain’s little soldier to get him through 90 minutes in 2014. Oof!

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Football Weekly Extra is here here folks, so get your ears round it now! And don’t forget to give our Forgotten Stories pod a listen; this week, part one of our look back at Dundee United’s Big Cup glory days.

FIVER LETTERS

This means more... or less... or absolutely nothing at all” – Tony Crawford.

“Re: Barrow’s new manager (Thursday’s bits and bobs). Beyond this… and this … what else did David Dunn do?” – Ben Hall.

Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And you can always tweet The Fiver via @guardian_sport. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is … Tony Crawford.

RECOMMENDED LOOKING (AND BUYING)

On the eve of what would have been a Euro 2020 final almost certainly not featuring England, buy a classic European football photo from tournaments past from this lovely collection.

NEWS, BITS AND BOBS

Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson will miss the rest of the season because of knee-knack but he should be fit enough to lift the Premier League trophy. What a trooper!

Tammy Abraham has pressed the big blue button at Stamford Bridge that activates one-year contract extensions. Meanwhile, Subbuteo-sized Chelsea midfielder Billy Gilmour has been ruled out for four months following surgery on his knacked knee.

José doesn’t like being in the movies. “I don’t like the feeling of being in Big Brother but I try to forget them [the Amazon documentary makers],” blathered Mourinho. “I have no idea what is there, I have no concerns. Nothing is fake, everything is real. Am I going to watch it? No. No I’m not.”

Daniel Farke does not want to play the blame game when Norwich slip back into the Championship. “When we don’t win you can’t divide the team into winners and losers,” he sniffed. “That is not the way we judge.”

And Fifa has taken control of the implementation of VAR from member associations and made scary former man in black Pierluigi Collina its sheriff. “It is important to have consistent implementation of the laws of the game in general and VAR in particular all over the world,” peeped Collina, before warning refs not to show the “wrong kind of solidarity” with colleagues by failing to correct their mistakes.

Pierluigi Collina
Pierluigi Collina: laying down the VAR law for Fifa. Photograph: Srđan Suki/EPA

STILL WANT MORE?

Mason Greenwood is cool enough to avoid the Exciting Teenage Talent implosion, toots Barney Ronay.

Word is spreading about Aston Villa Women and what we are trying to achieve, writes the club’s sporting director and Big Website columnist, Eni Aluko.

Barcelona’s other team were relegated at an empty Camp Nou, a cold and cruel final blow to a season that crumbled painfully, writes Sid Lowe.

Sad times for Barcelona’s other team.
Sad times for Barcelona’s other team. Photograph: Álex Caparrós/Getty Images

Oh, and if it’s your thing … you can follow Big Website on Big Social FaceSpace. And INSTACHAT, TOO!

‘I’VE HAD MY INDICATOR ON SINCE LEAVING CREWE’