Virgin Media missed a trick by not having a camera crew in Damien Duff’s livingroom and giving us live coverage, in a little box in the corner of the screen, of him watching Dundalk v Shamrock Rovers snuggled up on his couch in his slippers with springer spaniel Bella resting on his lap. Then again, there’s a chance he opted to stick on a re-run of Only Fools and Horses instead due to the increasingly intolerable tension of this title race.
“And then there were two,” said our presenter Bernard O’Toole, the number of contenders having been whittled down to leaders Shelbourne and the five-in-a-row hunting Rovers after the last round of matches. And if Rovers failed to beat Dundalk, then Shels would be champions with a single game to spare and Duffer and Bella would have been jigging and reeling around his livingroom without us getting to savour the spectacle.
But it’s at tense times like this that gaffers must question their life choices. Del Boy made such a point to Rodney once. “You’ve always been the same, even at school, nothing but books, learning, education – that’s why you’re no good at snooker.”
And Rodney might have been happier being good at snooker, as might Duffer and Rovers manager Stephen Bradley, instead of being engulfed in this Crucible of League of Ireland war.
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Eoin Doyle and Ian Morris, Bernard’s pundits, were confident Rovers could see off the challenge of already-relegated Dundalk, thereby sending the title race down to an excruciating final day. As was Keith Treacy, Dave McIntyre’s guest in the commentary box on a decidedly grim Oriel Park evening.
But? 0-0 at half-time, Dundalk coming closest to scoring when Jad Hakiki nigh on removed Rovers’ crossbar with a volley. Eoin and Ian were flummoxed by Rovers’ performance, wondering if they actually knew there was a title at stake.
They did, though, as evidenced by Dylan Watts’ 58th-minute goal and the subsequent celebrations, Duffer and Bella left gutted. And that’s how it stayed, so it will, indeed, go down to an excruciating final day. “Mange Tout,” in the words of Del Boy.
For all those who were title contenders at one stage or another but will, ultimately, miss out on the big prize, there’ll be a whole pile of what-ifs. Guillem Balagué engaged in a mountain of them after Saturday’s El Clásico on La Liga TV, coverage of which Premier Sports brought to us.
“This game could have gone a completely different way if two or three of those chances were two centimetres the other way – we’d have been talking about a different story.”
This, of course, was the punditry equivalent of ‘if the Queen had wotsits, she’d be the king’. You’d imagine, from Guillem’s analysis, that Barcelona had scraped home with a single scruffy goal, instead of pulverising Real Madrid 4-0 in, of all places, the Bernabeu. And majestic as Robert Lewandowski was, he went out of his way to avoid scoring a hat-trick, like he’s run out of room for match balls.
But Barca were, frankly, glorious. Bold prediction: Lamine Yamal has a future in the game. “Seven players,” including Yamal, “arriving in the counter-attack for Barcelona in the 90th minute – my God,” as our co-commentator Chapi Ferrer put it. “Unbeleebable.”
As, incidentally, is Cole Palmer. Sky interviewed Gianfranco Zola before Chelsea’s game against Newcastle and he lyrically waxed about Palmer’s habit of “already looking to do what is next” when he receives the ball. And then Palmer looked to do what is next after receiving the ball and sent a 60-yard pass to Pedro Neto, much like a dart hitting the bullseye, Neto setting up Nicolas Jackson’s goal.
Thomas Tuchel was, no doubt, watching from his couch in his slippers, imagining the open-top bus parade through London after winning the 2026 World Cup.
Palmer was appreciative of Zola’s praise afterwards, but you had a sinking notion that so young is he, he wouldn’t know Gianfranco Zola from a pineapple. “I know he is an icon on Fifa so he must have been good,” he said of the computery game. “Everyone says he was a great player, so thank you.” Mange Tout, we’re old.
