So Wednesday night sees the first Champion’s League football for Manchester City and United. City at home to Lyon and United away in Switzerland playing Young Boys.
With their usual consideration for supporters UEFA have scheduled these games to kick off at the same time meaning anybody wanting to watch both, can’t.
This is a variation on the previous night’s games which saw Inter Milan and Tottenham Hotspur kick off at 7:00pm whilst Liverpool and PSG started at 9:00pm. No doubt there will have been football fans around Europe who wanted to see both matches and this timing will have made that possible.
Not so if you happen to be from Manchester and want to see how the two teams fare. Still, at least now United fans can join City fans in their accusation of UEFA having an agenda against their club.
We prefer neither…..
Sky Sports News, with their usual naiveté, ran a poll asking football fans which front three they would prefer before Liverpool’s game against PSG. Obviously the players in question were Salah, Mané and Firmino on the one side and Cavani, M’Bappe and Neymar on the other.
The last time we tuned in for a couple of minutes the poll had the PSG trio at 64% and the Liverpool threesome at 36%.
We do not think this is necessarily representative of the general footballing view. Sky, which is obviously not only presented by people with single figure IQs, it is also run by people with the same handicap, appear to fail to realise that all their poll has achieved is to prove that 36% of the people who voted are Liverpool supporters and 64% aren’t! QED.
And finally…..
Beattie in his Ipswich days, (were there any others?)
RIP Kevin Beattie, who has died, aged 64, of a heart attack. A great player for Ipswich Town in the ‘70s and ‘80s whose promising career, particularly at international level, was hampered by injury.
Apparently, as a teenager, he was granted a trial with Liverpool but, when nobody appeared to meet him at the station, he went home to Carlisle. Bobby Robson did not make the same mistake on his arrival at Ipswich.
One ex-player who doesn’t remember Beattie too fondly is Kenny Clements, the former Manchester City centre half. He had his leg broken in a vicious tackle by the Ipswich Town player and lamented to our Editor shortly afterwards that he hadn’t even had an apology.
In fairness to Clements his mentality was always that of an artist, (at which he was actually quite talented), so apologising, for him, would have been natural had the situations been reversed whereas Beattie always struck us as a no-nonsense player who would have been far more likely to say, “stop whingeing and get on with it”. He would have considered the injury as being “part of the game”
He was widely respected in and out of football and remained in Suffolk even after retiring from the game.
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 