Football, eh. Just when you’re tired of its long, straight road to perdition, with a series of awful things from FIFA corruption, to hideous owners being sold as respectable, to money-making becoming the whole of football’s topography, along comes a Crystal Palace cup win.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the game and result was not even on the pitch. Almost nationwide, there was a burning desire, near-unanimous, for Palace to win and for City to lose. The win was important, the loss even more so.
Few things have given most people as much enjoyment during this somewhat decrepit season as the surely temporary decline of City. This has nothing to do with City per se, the club of Trautmann, Marsh, Bell or Goater, but the widespread, though sometimes not even articulated, sheer bloody hatred of their autocratic ownership, how it has operated at the club and how it has taken a leading role in changing the competitive nature of football from a sporting to a financial one with their money.
READ: 16 Conclusions on Crystal Palace winning the FA Cup: Glasner, Pep, De Bruyne, Mateta, Haaland…
City was part of the shift to greed, limitless spending and moral-free ownership regimes. And most, though not all, hate that with a burning passion. City and Chelsea and others altered everything. They put a dog turd in a cauliflower cheese, polluting and perverting the whole thing. Making it almost pointless to try and compete, creating that ‘there’s no point’ feeling that didn’t exist before.
Existential ennui has become the norm. It has ruined aspects of top-flight football and caused some to seek football elsewhere, offended by the whole thing. Not virtue-signalling poseurs, just people who are disgusted and offended to their core.
We’re all used to it now but as good as some players are, it’s hard to enjoy them because of the nature of the wealth that is intrinsic to their presence, even if they’re from the academy. Some would have you believe we have bred a new generation of kids for whom this is the norm and they swim in different waters these days. But I don’t believe that; the joy at Palace’s win was too widespread and near universal.
Seeing Pep behaving like a spoiled kid at full-time was a bit rich. He knows all about benefiting from poor decisions; his whole career at City has benefited by the poor decision to allow a nation state to own the club. Remember who you are, son, and who calls the shots. You’re just a lackey doing a murderous state’s bidding and you can’t say you’re not. Dean Henderson should have floored him with a Whitehaven wallop.
And while we’re used to it and, to a degree at least, accept its existence, that doesn’t mean we like it on any level.
So when Palace hold them at arm’s length, like a big brother holding a fighty brother at bay by just a hand on the forehead, it allows us to wallow in defeat of the evil empire for once. As part of the forces which have corrupted the game, City are perhaps especially egregious.
Fans obviously want to support their club but most don’t go as far as batting for such a horrible regime, especially on the basis that other horrible regimes exist, so why not? Separating ownership and club without supplicating to the former and certainly not excusing the many and well-documented human rights violations which are so terrible that we are lucky they’re not visited on us, shouldn’t be difficult and I know many have.
To dismiss them out of hand is to do the work for the regime at making the unacceptable acceptable and taking a seat at the top football table and exercising soft power.
Perhaps the depth of our feelings surprised even ourselves. In these cynical times of alternative facts and outright lies, many of us choose to tune it all out or retreat into more sympathetic and amenable territories, just to protect our mental health. It’s easy to think we’ve all just given in and are no longer bothered. We’ve all just swallowed it down for so long. That is what they hope. They are wrong. Saturday proved it.
I can’t be alone in saying that I just can’t really cope with so much evil right now in absolutely everything. Football was a way to escape but not now. City is part of that, destroying our very faith in humanity and part of the destruction of the sport we love. It’s still advancing, there’s no appetite to stop it – quite the reverse – and just celebrating one win won’t change destiny, but it shows everyone where our hearts are.
It’s important that the ownership knows this. They are not acceptable despite being accepted. And of course I know this is just a bump in their road but you take the joy when and where you can. And the widespread joy in Palace’s win and the desire for them to win, showed how deeply our hatred of City’s ownership model goes. The bad guys lost. Yay!
This wasn’t just a win for an underdog, though it was that as well, it was a victory for the forces of good and all that is wholesome against the sulphurous, murderous shroud that smothers the game we love and bends it to its will.
Johnny is famously a prolific writer of crime novels and thousands of people love them and not just Teessiders. Get them from Amazon, his website as Kindles or from your local bookshop.