CONGRATULATIONS to the organisers of this week’s draw for the Champions League group stage, which touched nearly all the important bases. It featured a top-class array of Perspex tubs and vases, many of them new to the European scene, it was unstinting in its provision of brightly coloured plastic balls, piles of the things, it introduced into a superficially straightforward procedure at least three levels of strictly unnecessary obfuscation and, lasting more than an hour in total, it was approximately 58½ minutes longer than it needed to be. It was, then, the very model of a football draw ceremony in 2005.
Of course, one can quibble with some of the details. I was disappointed, for instance, to notice the lack of a dance number or musical interlude of any kind. Recent Olympic history teaches us that no publicly conducted administrative occasion is complete until Heather Small gets up to ask us what we’ve done today to make us feel proud.
For all that it sounded a correctly impressive and inspiring note in its own way, Thursday’s draw would have benefited enormously from the inclusion of an international singing artist of the calibre of, say, Sting, performing a specially commissioned, aspirational anthem, When My Ball Drops, I’ll Be Dreaming, or similar.
Nit-picking aside, though, Thursday’s draw, to my mind, amply delivered, and I’ll have none of the carping from certain quarters that the show in Monaco was nothing more than a mark of pomposity, consistent with the Champions League’s allegedly inflated sense of its own worth.
These will be people who can remember when the draw for a football tournament was performed unseen, by persons you had never heard of, with a velvet sack and some marbles. And I suppose there’s no getting round the fact that Thursday afternoon’s exhaustive and exhausting business could easily have been conducted by a solitary Uefa underling in a cupboard in Switzerland, using a single sheet of A4, a pair of scissors and a biscuit tin.
But the problem with these backward-looking arguments is that they ignore what the Champions League has become and its status within the global sporting culture. This is, after all, the greatest club football competition in the world, featuring the domestic champions of Europe and also some teams that aren’t champions. You can’t expect a contest so significant merely to post its group stage draw on the net. There would be uproar.
Indeed, the real question is how the draw ceremony can push on from here and keep pace with the competition’s ambitions for itself. I’ve heard it proposed since Thursday that, what with all the holding up of cards with letters on them, the draw already resembles an underdressed episode of Sesame Street and that, therefore, it wouldn’t hurt to go that little bit farther and get Big Bird on board.
It’s worth considering. I could see the reasoning behind inviting Paolo Maldini along to remove the balls with the team names in them. The great AC Milan defender has a history in this competition as storied as anyone’s and deserved the opportunity to write himself another chapter by giving the balls the best of all possible stirs in Monaco.
At the same time, is Maldini pressing the right pan-European buttons, demographics-wise? And he brought almost nothing to the table in terms of movement and wisecracks. A big, colourful Muppet would have sent a louder message. And Bear from Bear in the Big Blue House would have had still more family-oriented cuteness and more presence.
Other aspects of the ceremony, too, are in danger of seeming tired and stale. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that the plastic fortune cookie device — the unscrewable ball that yields the piece of paper bearing the team name or group letter — has run its course.
It was a delight when it first appeared, replacing the outmoded, bingo-style numbered ball and, what with the additional hand business involved in separating the ball’s halves and unfolding the enclosed paper, it automatically expanded the time required to perform even the simplest draw by a factor in the region of 27. Result! But familiarity has caught up with the device, breeding contempt. The time may have come to think more broadly about what can be done with the balls — perhaps even to wonder about the introduction of those glass chambers used by pilots and astronauts to test lung capacity, wherein the challenge is to blow into a tube and see how long you can keep a ping-pong ball aloft.
Executives representing the poorer clubs could be brought on to the stage and required to blow into tubes in order to discover the identity of their seeded opponent, with the first person to run out of puff going into Real Madrid’s group, and so on, all the way down to Liverpool. It would introduce the competitive element that the occasion so sorely lacks (it is a sports draw, after all), and in an extremely televisual manner — even more so if the chamber could be rigged up so that the dropping of the air pressure contrived to unhinge a bucket of gunk above the unfortunate chief executive.
Boom! Paired with Juventus and covered in orange goo. That’s family viewing, right there. On the topic of which, would it hurt to get Noel Edmonds to have a look at the problem? Here’s someone with a proven track record in family television. Don’t forget that the format for Noel’s House Party was sold across the continent and, in its pomp, pretty much defined what we think of as common ground in Europe.
You can see how such an idea would chime with Uefa, which must already be looking beyond the ratings dead spot of a Thursday afternoon and thinking in terms of the greater exposure and advertising revenues available in a Saturday-night slot. Don’t get me wrong: this week, Uefa did the business. But they can go farther. And they almost certainly will.
- Amazement has greeted this week’s story that the Pope failed to recognise Pelé recently. His Holiness — no close follower of the beautiful game, it would appear — was allegedly spared an embarrassing “And what do you do?” moment by the timely intervention of an aide. And the moment could well have grown in embarrassment if Pelé had chosen to explain that, right now, he is busy campaigning to expand awareness about erectile dysfunction.
Playing their cards right
The overturning of red cards by FA disciplinary panels (three have been annulled this season) is all well and good, but it tends to come a bit late as far as the team wrongly reduced to ten men are concerned. Could the panels not be permanently on hand in a room off the tunnel, enabling the player to go straight to arbitration and then burst back on to the pitch if the panel agrees that the referee got it wrong? Swift justice is smart justice.
