BERLIN—Damn you football—I wish I knew how to quit you.
It’s true what they say about soccer being the world’s game. They love it everywhere. And so, every week, it seems, I’m presented with another Trottable football occasion.
This week I was in Berlin with a couple college friends who hail from Chicago, Odom and his wife, Helen. And hit me in the groin and face and call me Shirley if Wednesday night didn’t present another football derby. This game was a biggie: Manchester United versus Chelsea, the English derby for the Champions League trophy. I couldn’t pass it up, especially for my devoted readers in England for whom this was the last big chance of the summer to cheer for their boys. You know, cause the national squad didn’t make the UEFA Euro finals. I swear, chaps, that’s the third-to-last time I’ll bring that up. Promise.
This is the last you’ll hear from me on soccer for a while. Roland Garros hits Paris next week (don’t call it the French Open), and then, uh, the Euro tournament starts, and, um, you’ll be getting football dispatches from me every single day. Frack. It never ends…
Without further ado, the 2008 Champions League Final, via Berlin: Beifall und Spott (ie. cheers and jeers)
Beifall!
To the Alt-Berliner Biersalon in Charlottenburg, a 24-hour bar across from our hotel. The night before the final, Odom and I were practically the only people in the joint, performing late-night chemistry experiments involving combinations of cherry pie and large volumes of beer (Success!). On Wednesday, we arrived forty minutes prior to kick-off and had a hard time finding three seats with a view of one of the twelve TVs (including five projectors). There were at least 300 people there, a perfect atmosphere for the big game.
Spott!
To UEFA, for awarding the final to Moscow for the first time, then setting the kick-off at Luzhniki Stadium for 10:40 p.m. local time (ie. 8:40 p.m. in the more lucrative Western European TV markets). The game didn’t end until 1:34 a.m. in Moscow, at which point it was raining. Why bother bestowing hosting privileges on Russia if you’re going to treat the local fans like they don’t matter? You were worried that English fans wouldn’t be able to frack off work at the ungodly hour of 7:40pm to catch the game? Come on.
Beifall!
To German beer. I swore off beer in Paris last Saturday, after an incident involving long-time Trotter reader Lizou and a €9 pint of the mediocre domestic brew 1664. God bless the Germans for getting the golden elixir right. I drank enough of it this week, at every hour of the day, to eventually necessitate my forceful removal from Libeskind’s stunning Jewish Museum. “Really officer, I’m not drunk, the floors in this place just aren’t level!” OK, that never happened. The museum is amazing though.
Our beer of choice for the final was Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen, consumed from one-litre glass tankards, the kind somebody must have hit Wayne Rooney in the face with at some point in his life. What a mug on that kid.
Beifall!
To smushy-faced Rooney, the only player on the entire Reds squad that I like. And not just because he’s a dead ringer for my friend Odom (Max, you’re the better-looking twin, by far). Rooney hustles, he plays hard, he stays on his feet, he sticks up for teammates without insulting his opponents or the referee, and he does it all with workmanlike efficiency that belies the prima donna reputation he flirted with early in his career. In short, he’s everything Cristiano Ronaldo is not.
Unfortunately, Rooney also isn’t the best player in the world right now, bar none. Ronaldo’s got that on him, especially after the latter’s sublime header off a Wes Brown cross that gave Man U a well deserved 1-0 lead after twenty-six minutes.
(I’d link to the goal, but vigilant Internet protector UEFA hates it when people commit the mortal sin of watching Champions League goals for free. Thanks for saving the day, UEFA.)
Spott!
To Paul Scholes. The other anti-Rooney, in that I hate him. He’s a dirty player, simple as that. In the first half, after one of his signature late tackles, just as my blood began to boil, he followed up with a sneaky elbow to the head of Claude Makélélé in an aerial duel. Imagine my delight when the Englishman ended up with the worst of the challenge—by the looks of it, possibly breaking his nose—and was forced to play the duration of the match with bloody Kleenex rammed up his nostrils. I believe the word for what I felt at that moment is Schadenfreude.
Beifall!
To Chelsea—certainly not my favourite team in the world but the lesser of two evils in this final. Most of the crowd at the Biersalon was with me, perhaps due to the presence of Michael Ballack, one of the leaders of Germany’s national team, on the Blues’ side. Despite Manchester’s clear technical superiority and decisive dominance of the first twenty minutes, Chelsea (the play toy of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich) held tight. And when Frank Lampard poked home a twice-deflected loose ball in the forty-fifth minute to tie the game and cap off an entertaining first half, the bar exploded with cheers.
Spott!
A big whistling jeer to Slovak referee Lubos Michel. It’s Europe’s cup final, the biggest game on the footballing calendar (outside of the quadrennial Euro and World Cup tournaments), so you put your best guy on it, right? For Michel to have got the match so wrong, with wildly inconsistent punishment for dirty and dangerous tackles—which allowed the second half and extra time to descend into a series of petty, chippy foul—is inexcusable. Michel committed the two cardinal sins of refereeing: he made himself a storyline in the game, over-stretching his authority amid the atmosphere of mutual dislike between England’s biggest rivals; and, worse, despite this over-involvement, Michel failed to control the escalating harshness of fouls in the second half that led to the skirmishes marring the extra period. The last of these incidents, where Chelsea’s Didier Drogba delivered a delicate, petulant slap to the jaw of Nemanja Vidic, was all Michel’s doing, and the referee’s decision to send Drogba off for this action was doubly intolerable for it.
Beifall!
To the game itself. Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, this was one of the best finals ever, a tense, offense-oriented affair between two in-country rivals at the top of their games. The Champions League isn’t supposed to produce finals between in-country rivals—the whole idea is to get teams from different European domestic leagues facing off—but with the top-heavy English Premier League producing the continent’s best football of the past three or four years, an all-England final was probably inevitable.
Chelsea and Manchester delivered a contest high on tension and drama. The mark of a great football match is when, at as many points as possible in the match, the teams trade-off on looking like the team-of-destiny—not only trading leads on the scoreboard, but passing the upper hand back and forth.
The penalty shootout was actually a fitting end to the match. Gripe as you will that penalties are a sad and unfair way to end a great final; sometimes, they’re just what’s called for. The two teams had 120 minutes to grab victory, and when neither could claim superiority on the pitch, it came down to a battle of nerves and individual skill. Why not? Even the shootout presented back-and-forth drama, with Chelsea looking like a sure champion after Ronaldo, of all people, was stopped by Petr Cech. But John Terry, the heart and soul of the Blues and the perfect character to wrap up the story, provided one final plot twist when he slipped on the wet turf and hit the post.
And when Dutch goalie Edwin van der Sar dove to stop Frenchman Nicolas Anelka’s penalty in the seventh round of spot kicks, for the first time in the match, one team was sure of victory. Manchester had triumphed with a decisive save from their goalie: a highlight-reel performance that ensured Chelsea won’t be cursed for giving the game away. Both teams deserved to win, but van der Sar’s save will be remembered as the moment when the final card fell Manchester’s way.
Hey, it had to end sometime, and those poor, wet, tired Russian fans had to go home.
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