By the time the shoot-out in Durban was over, Paris Saint-Germain were already 2-0 up in Munich. That was annoying to miss because you only have one Champions League final a year, whereas the United Rugby Championship (URC) never ends.
But it was impossible to leave the concluding stages of the Sharks v Munster contest, partly because it was brutally riveting, partly because you wanted to be sure that Jaden Hendrikse recovered from the cramp that laid the poor fella low, delaying Jack Crowley’s shoot-out turn by a couple of minutes. And partly because, after he winked at Crowley, you needed to know if the Munster man had kicked Hendrikse between the posts.
Alan Quinlan thought the behaviour of Hendrikse and some of his colleagues was “shocking”, our Premier Sports host Ross Harries describing it as “pretty unsavoury”. But Stephen Ferris and Simon Zebo loved it, Stephen especially. “We want more of this. It’s more hits on social media, it gets a bigger viewership, that’s what we want.”
But the upshot was, despite all the social media hits, Munster’s season was done and dusted, the one relief being that Hendrikse had sufficiently recovered from his excruciating cramp to be able to dance around the Kings Park in celebration minutes later like there was no tomorrow. Lazarus, that lad.
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On to the semi-finals Leinster go, though. Not an entirely convincing display against the Scarlets at the Aviva, granted, but anyone who tuned in late to RTÉ would have thought from Jamie Heaslip and Donncha O’Callaghan’s post-match summing up that Leinster had been Northamptonised and were out.
“The Monday review will not be good,” Heaslip sighed, O’Callaghan feeling for the small crowd that bothered to turn up. They would, he said, have been more entertained if “a load of bouncy castles had been put out there”, with “first communions jumping on them”. “It was bad, it was really bad.”
Why so? Well, he reckoned “management” had a lot to answer for. “You have players like Jordie Barrett, one of the greatest to ever play the game, you have the likes of Hugo Keenan and James Lowe, and all we’re seeing is them kicking the ball. It’s like having Ferraris and using them to spread silage.”
As it happened, Simone Inzaghi got much the same criticism as Leo Cullen; the Italian press, in so many words, accusing the Inter boss of being a silage-spreading Ferrari-misuser after Inter Milan’s 5-0 thumping by PSG. “È come avere delle Ferrari e usarle per spargere l’insilato,” according to Google Translate, which sounds much more like a declaration of love than savage castigation.
Now there were those who billed this final as Qatar Saint-Germain v Oaktree Capital Management Milan. That would have been accurate enough, although some of the same folk would have billed Saudi Newcastle’s League Cup triumph this season as a “fairytale”.
No matter, most of us tie ourselves in knots these days trying to justify savouring the sporting unjustifiable, instead opting to swoon over performances like the one young lad Désiré Doué produced in Munich on Saturday night.
“I got chills,” Rio Ferdinand said when Doué set up Achraf Hakimi’s opening goal, and they were multiplying by the time Doué scored twice himself.
Darren Fletcher thought it was all over at 3-0, which prompted a cheeky grin from Steven Gerrard. But it was indeed as good as over, two more goals wrapping up Inter’s humiliation. “This,” Ferdinand said, “has been a butcherin’.” “Absoluuuuuuly,” Ally McCoist agreed.
“La débâcle,” Italy’s La Stampa described it, going all multilingual on us, France’s L’Équipe giving Doué a decidedly rare 10 out of 10, and Inzaghi a barbaric two. And to top it all, the reports from Italy said that just one Inter fan – Marco – turned up at the airport to welcome Inter home. “I’m the only idiot,” he said, his team on course for a quadruple a handful of weeks ago, their season ending trophyless.
“Some might say this is a win for football,” Ferdinand said, finding romance where there really was no romance at all. Like he’d just watched, say, Cowdenbeath FC slay Real Madrid, rather than a club that had a couple of billion pumped in to it, since Qatar took the reigns, finally breaking its European duck.
Which leaves us on the couch having to blank out the grimness of the state of today’s sportswashery, so we can purr at the likes of Doué, Vitinha, João Neves, Ousmane Dembélé and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. It’s a bit like stepping over the silage to take your Ferrari for a ride.
