C'mon, you Blues!
FRANK KEATING
1 t is the weekend which once cheered winter's muddied oafs off on their summer hols. Some hope these days! Cup finals at soccer and rugby are now simply tasters for more of the same in the sun, ad infinitum and ad tedium. For barmy measure the Lord's Test match, once sacred to the midsummer skies of June, has already begun. Rugby's plethora of play-offs and finals represents not much more than audition pieces for international tours all over — in England's case a daunting trip to a vengeful Down Under — while soccer's FA Cup final, once the nation's top-of-the-bill showstopper, is no more than a domestic recce on the fitness and form of one or two Manchester United players heading for the summer's biggie with England in Portugal.
Is England the only country which plays its Cup finals outside its national boundaries? In a way it might have been apt that last week's rugby league final was held in Cardiff, seeing how many Welsh players that sport has bribed to 'go north' all down the century and beyond, but in soccer an English Cup Final in Wales must represent a different kettle of confusion to outsiders. (By the by, while Wembley has remained a sad builders' yard of ludicrously exorbitant rubble throughout this new millennium, it is patronisingly rich for Brits to come over all superior and sniffily groan at Greece's tardy preparations for the Olympic Games. It is axiomatic that the Olympics are never going to be ready — except, of course, those of last time's Sydney smartyboots who had nothing better to do — but then they always are, you see.)
In the dear old days it would have made for a delightful little story that Millwall, the (take your pick) dinky doddymen from down the Old Kent Road or the whole brethren's benighted bovver-boy headbangers, should be challenging the strutting swankpots of Manchester United in the final of the FA Cup. But 'delightful' little stories get short shrift in soccer now, and if, as we are told, half the globe passionately supports Man. United, then in football's philosophy it goes without saying that the other half has to hate them with a passion. That's about the sum of it this Sat
urday — so c'mon, you Blues. Meanwhile, rugby's Cup Final at Twickenham promises legitimate bower-boy headbanging all right if the narrow-eyed, strong-armed fellows of London Wasps can get anywhere near the catch-us-if-you-can Frenchies of Toulouse. If their respective, breathtaking semi-finals are any guide, it could be a riotous match-up. Hang on to your hats.
Talking of which, the weekend does tip a titfer to a notable football centenary which will probably be totally overlooked in the domestic fuss. Soccer's world governing body Fifa was born on 21 May 1904 during the Congress of Paris. England had been asked to take the lead in its formation and provide the first president, but the FA's whiskery Lord Kinnaird suspiciously shilly-shallied, then flatly declined. Separate delegations from France, Holland, Spain and Belgium each travelled to London to plead for a change of mind, Fat chance. Despaired Frenchman Robert Guerin at the time: 'Typical to English tradition, they wanted to wait and watch, so seven of us [the others were Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden] undertook Fifa's foundation ourselves and England remained outside looking in.' Which, in many ways, it still does. Sound familiar?
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