KEVIN Keegan was a little off the mark when he labelled the Premier League "great but boring" on Monday. What he meant was that there was no longer any room for smaller clubs to make a quixotic tilt at the title by playing cavalier and adventurous football, and hence a lot of the romance had gone out of the game.
In fact there never was much room for such challenges. In the history of the Premier League/Premiership/ruthless money-grubbing breakaway, call it what you will, only his Newcastle team ever matched that description, and they finished as also-rans.
The last teams to win the title outside the big three of Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea were Blackburn Rovers and (in 1992, the last season before the launch of the new format) Leeds United. You would have to have a particularly rose-tinted pair of hindsight specs to regard the teams of Kenny Dalglish and Howard Wilkinson as romantics. If their particular brand of football was still successful in the Premier League then Keegan's adjective "boring" would have some merit.
The huge impact of cash on the top flight, the subsequent broadening of squads and the influx of world-class foreign players has made it impossible for the kind of reductive football that Leeds and Blackburn mastered to prosper. Traditionalists may decry that state of affairs, and lament that football is now described as a "product", but they can hardly quibble about the relative quality of that product compared to the early 1990s
Get beyond the sloping playing field of their immense resources and it is difficult to deny that Manchester United and Arsenal, and to a lesser extent, Chelsea and Liverpool, have served up some enthralling football this season. If there isn't widespread glee that either United or Chelsea will end up as champions, it's because so-called neutrals find that the details stick in their craw, rather than because anyone believes that either team is thoroughly undeserving of the title.
One of the glories of football is that it provides so much fuel for emotive reactions based on personalities, incidents or gestures. Offered a panning shot of Manchester United's season you can only admire their attacking verve, their defensive poise, their decisive focus on key matches (Liverpool, Arsenal, Barcelona).
Zooming in a little closer, you pick up less-appealing details, not least their manager's complete disregard for respect, courtesy, and sportsmanship. United's beauty has its flaws. Cristiano Ronaldo is an obvious example. Alan Shearer in Blackburn's title season in 1995 was the last time a forward had so much influence on an English season. His brilliance is impossible to ignore, but it is equally impossible not to be irritated by his constant histrionics, his exasperated tumbles whenever an opponent deigns to challenge him, and most of all by that appalling crossed-arms, stern profile gesture he employs when he wants to be adored. Ronaldo won the players' and the writers' awards this year, but any poll of Premier League fans would make him one of the least popular players in living memory. As if he cared.
Keeping that camera close, edging back a little in the United formation you find the eternally estimable Paul Scholes. Scholes might be the last of the great plebeian amateurs, a player completely hostile to all notions of celebrity. At the end of a match, say a Champions League semi-final in which he has won the game with a comic-book scorcher into the top corner, he flicks the mud off his boots, strings the laces together and catches the tram home to the missus (only a small part of this is metaphorical). Even the most vehemently unhinged of United-haters will make an exception for Scholes.
Chelsea's resolve in pursuit has also been admirable, even if they are rarely as stylish as United. In the last four months their key player has been another whose personality is not geared to winning friends and influencing people. To be fair Michael Ballack is merely the latest arrogant self-assured international to emerge from a country where image consultancy has yet to gain a toehold. Avram Grant was certainly slow to warm to him. Possibly because Ballack, with customary lack of diplomacy, loudly lamented Jose Mourinho's replacement by the Israeli.
Grant is more impressed now. That Chelsea remain title contenders on the last day of the season owes a lot to Ballack, and not just the two goals that defeated United earlier this month.
Never a player capable of a lightning surge like Ronaldo, Ballack goes in for intelligently-applied stamina, shifting position constantly and effectively. Like Ronaldo his celebration strut and patent self-love make him one of those great players who will never be held in much affection.
Back to Keegan's analysis. He would love it if smaller clubs could have a more substantial say in the title race. On the last day of the season, two of them will at least get to be key witnesses. Manchester United and Chelsea's final opponents, Wigan and Bolton, are the same sort of no-nonsense pragmatic northern clubs that Leeds and Blackburn were back in the day. They can upset the leaders' hopes this weekend, but would you really want either of them to be anything other than plucky makeweights?
The full article contains 898 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
