How Many Times, How Many Lies

Still with the fall out from our FA Cup penalty defeat today.And there's one piece which is so bad that I have to give it a post of its own. This from James Lawton in The Independent who really just plain makes stuff up to have a go at us, his first paragraph:

I know we are all expected to rejoice in the polyglot splendour of English football, but wasn't that quite tough on Sunday when the FA Cup, which was supposed to be experiencing another Lazarus-like recovery of vital signs, was discarded by Manchester United as though it was one of those cheap trinkets on offer at a fairground shooting gallery?

Yes, we're entirely responsible for the downfall of the grand tradition of the FA Cup. It's true. Oh wait, hang on. Sorry, I was assuming James Lawton was right when he said that the FA Cup was "experiencing another Lazarus-like recovery of vital signs", then I remembered about reality. Here's a story from The Guardian of March 7:

Questions about the decline in profile of the FA Cup are likely to get louder after new figures revealed average television audiences for the competition have dropped by more than a third.
FA executives are likely to be concerned about the downward trend. If ITV's average audiences are compared with the BBC's last season, there is still a sizeable drop. In the third round they fell from 6.2m to 4.4m, in the fourth from 4.5m to 4.1m and in the fifth from 4.6m to 4m.

And from the blog on the same day:

The makers of the Championship Manager game conducted a survey and learned that 63% of the 5,000 fans polled were in favour of weakened teams being selected for the FA Cup if their club decided that priorities lay elsewhere. These findings were no shock. Who, after all, was surprised by Arsène Wenger's irritation at having to meet Burnley tomorrow, a mere three days ahead of Arsenal's return leg with Roma in the Champions League? ...

It even looks as if the ruling body itself went too far in wringing cash out of the tournament, in a package also containing the rights to England's home fixtures. There was glee when the current television deals, which run until 2012, were signed. In total, they are worth £425m, a 42% increase on the previous contract with Sky and the BBC.

This seeming coup turns out to have come at a cost. Too little emphasis appears to have been placed on the nature of the coverage. The intensity of an FA Cup weekend has been dissipated, with fixtures, until now, dragging on to Monday night.

People also complain about the perfunctory analysis and discussion of games when there is always a commercial break to be accommodated. In the wake of its announcement last week of a £2.7bn loss, ITV cannot be reproached for that since life is already tough enough without limiting its own revenues.

All the same, the FA ought to have gone further in stipulating to potential bidders the way in which the Cup was to be presented. Most people will follow it on television and they have to be given the impression that this is a prestigious event. Without that, income will collapse in the future.

I could go on trawling my archives for other examples of such talk, but why bother. To actually claim that, before we ruined everything, the FA Cup was experiencing an upturn in fortune, is laughable. Take a look at that figure as well - 63% of people thought playing a weakened team acceptable. So why all the papers do their silly shock routine because we played a young team, I really don't know. I would even go so far to say that if one checks out column inches on the FA Cup this weekend, Sir Alex's team selection has perversely gone a long way to raising the profile of the competition.
Back to James Lawton, and he is still in the land of malicious make-believe when he says:

It wouldn't be quite so bad if United hadn't already dealt historic damage to the tournament which, whenever it suits one of its leading participants who just happen to be down on their luck in other branches of competition, is invested with all of its old romance.

That wasn't, of course, the case when United hit their peak of achievement in 1999 with the treble of Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup. With the glory still running on a high tide, United refused to defend the Cup in favour of a cheapjack, Fifa-sponsored World Club tournament in South America.

OK. With no hint of looking for a piece that supports us, I went to Google and looked at the first likely looking report that came up, from The Independent, June 29, 1999:

Although United's intentions are still to be confirmed, their chairman, Martin Edwards, said yesterday that the club had been placed in a "no- win situation", with little option but to withdraw after being put under huge pressure from both the Football Association and the Government to travel to Brazil in January for the inaugural World Club Championship.

United have been told that England's bid to stage the 2006 World Cup will be in jeopardy if they fail to take part in the new tournament, which is the brainchild of Sepp Blatter, the president of the game's world governing body, Fifa. Only by forgoing the defence of the FA Cup can they squeeze the eight-team event into an already-overcrowded fixture list and the FA have willingly offered them an unprecedented exemption. ...

But critics yesterday said that even the World Cup did not justify the FA's willingness to risk the English game's most cherished tradition. Cup legend Ronnie Radford, whose goal for non-League Hereford against Newcastle in 1972 in many minds still epitomises the magic of the FA Cup, said: "It is part of our culture and if you degrade it like this, it is a kick in the teeth for everyone. If we are going to get the World Cup we should get it regardless of whether Manchester United play in a tournament in Brazil." David Sadler, secretary of United's former players' association, echoed that sentiment, blaming a chain of pressure emanating from Fifa through the FA to United. "You don't like to use the word `blackmail' but it seems there is something of that behind this. England's World Cup bid should stand or fall on what we have to offer in terms of staging the event."

And Andy Walsh, the chairman of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association, claimed the club had been put in an unfair position. "This is not Manchester United saying they do not want to play in the FA Cup. This is the FA willing to sacrifice the oldest domestic cup competition in the world at the high altar of TV revenues."

And let's remind ourselves of what James Lawton says happened:

United refused to defend the Cup in favour of a cheapjack, Fifa-sponsored World Club tournament in South America

James Lawton must know what happened in 1999, he is one of those "highly respected" sports journalists isn't he? He's not writing for some Liverpool fanzine. It's The Independent. How can he get away with such misleading statements?

We were told that it was a selfless gesture aimed at currying favour for the 2006 World Cup bid. It did not wash then and nor does it now, when another asterisk goes against an FA Cup tournament denied wholly, or in this case substantially, the best efforts of the nation's most celebrated club.

What he misses is why on earth Man Utd would want to curry favour for a World Cup bid? Surely that would be the FA. The FA destroys (if you want to go stupidly overboard, but James Lawton does seem to...) it's own competition. Back to the article from 1999:

The Government, fully behind England's World Cup bid ... made its position clear through the Minister for Sport, Tony Banks. "It is my estimation that a failure by Manchester United to go to the new competition in Brazil - particularly if they were replaced by Bayern Munich - would do irreparable damage to our 2006 campaign," he told BBC Radio Five. And David Davies, the FA's interim executive director, said: "It would send the worst possible signal to world football at a time when we are in the midst of the 2006 bid to turn our backs on this tournament."

So, no, it wasn't a selfless gesture, it was a forced one.
James Lawton then goes to the pathetic "think of the children!" argument combined with the equally pathetic "the good ol' days of good ol' Blighty:

It is probably true that in today's football the average United fan would have gladly accepted a winning performance from a substandard team, and the retention of huge bragging rights, but we can only imagine how it felt to be a boy taken by his father, or mother, to Wembley for the day of his life, perhaps at a cost that put strain on the family budget.

This should be a priceless moment in the career of a sports fan. Certainly, I will never forget the catch of breath and the beat of the heart when I first saw on a day of spring sunshine the vast, green billiard table of the old Empire Stadium in the company of my grandfather. The thrill was not wiped out by the absence of the heroes we had both come to see.

So much has changed since then, of course, but not, surely, a fundamental duty to the paying customer – nor to teams expected to produce levels of entertainment worthy of national attention.

You can't even argue with such rubbish. If he's going to look at the competition through glasses tinted with the nostalgia of his youth, it's no wonder he's disappointed. And on his last point, our team had quite an exciting look about it, Fabio and Rafael, both quick attack minded full backs, Tevez, Macheda (who was the talk of the papers and everyone was looking forward to seeing) Wellbeck, all young pacey players. My worry before the team was announced was that he'd play a team to overwhelm Everton in midfield, sacrificing attack for stodging up the game. That the attacking play didn't come off was nothing to do with the choice of personnel.
And he closes with praise for Everton:

None of this should minimise the achievements of Everton, who beat Liverpool earlier in the tournament in games that plainly mattered. Again they performed honestly, and if a little disrespect had come their way, along with so much for the meaning of the competition they had put so much into, it was hardly their problem. No, that resided with the club who were supposed to be making an unprecedented move on football history. But instead they sold everyone short – and mostly themselves.

Our team, which was so bad, such a disgrace to the cup, to the game, to the nation, to the Queen, to all our war dead, and to the children not yet born, was taken to penalties, had the better of the game, and could have won had Mike Riley not been such a coward, and yet Everton deserve praise for winning. Genius analysis.