Smash hit

Al Ahly, the Egyptian team who had already lost to a side who had then been eliminated, and Adelaide United, who were out and had no reason even to be present, not being continental champions.

It could be one of the great tournaments, but in Fifa’s dead hands the Club World Cup too often resembles a lousy party that nobody is allowed to leave. It was the same yesterday, Gamba Osaka and Pachuca, of Mexico, meeting before the final for the right to claim an irrelevant third place. There is greater dignity in permitting a losing team to depart. Fifa has created a knockout tournament from which it is impossible to be knocked out, which is why so many see it as lame.

Arsenal’s board games

Peter Hill-Wood, the chairman, has always been a useful presence for Arsenal. In the days when the biggest clubs in England were agitating for the breakaway that ended in the formation of the Premier League, Arsenal were no less Machiavellian in their actions than their grasping fellow travellers. Yet when Hill-Wood stood up to speak at a meeting, the voice of old money and old Eton echoed across the room and it somehow persuaded even those with least to gain that here was a club with style, a club that did things the right way. Meanwhile, in the shadows, David Dein, the vice-chairman, one of the most driven politicians that football has produced, was pulling more strokes than Matthew Pinsent.

So it should be no surprise that as the financial stakes have risen, so the Arsenal directors have shown their true colours. Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith may have a name straight from a novel by Evelyn Waugh, but her sudden exit should be no shock. Arsenal were always nearer to The Sopranos than Brideshead Revisited.

Palace told off a strip

Looking at the way modern football has gone, barring the intervention of an oligarch, Crystal Palace are likely to remain an unspectacular club. Some years they will be up, some years they will be down. This is increasingly the fate of the also-rans, which is why it has been wonderful to see Palace reclaiming some of their old verve and identity by wearing the sash strip again. There is nothing like it in England — at a glance, that shirt belongs to only one club. And next year they will abandon it once more. No imagination, some people.

Platini's prize guys

The teams qualifying for the group stage of the Champions League have shared out, on average, in the region of £40 million. Fine in England, where four teams benefit and the domestic league remains open, but what of those countries where only one team enter and what of next season, when Michel Platini, the Uefa president, gets his way in letting a greater number of small teams through? What will this season’s share, passed to BATE Borisov, have done for the dynamic of the Belarussian league?

Meanwhile, after the torpor of the group stage, the draw for the first knockout round has thrown up some riveting matches. Further evidence, if any is needed, that the way forward for this competition is to become more elitist, not less.

Rugby in Moore strife

Leafing through the newspapers the other day, I was struck by a headline. “Football has much to learn from rugby.” It was the usual guff. Brian Moore, a former England rugby union player turned columnist, who rarely resists a chance to have a pompous pop at football, had noticed alarming signs of dissent in a game between Stade Français and Harlequins. He wrote of “the need to stamp on these signs of football players’ behaviour”.

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• Graham Spiers