Manchester United, Coventry City, the letter and the spirit of the law
The state of the FA Cup semi-final between Manchester United and Coventry City felt like a microcosm of everything that's wrong with the game, with tantalising reminders of how great it could be.
A large proportion of the audience settling down to watch the FA Cup semi-final between Coventry City and Manchester United were expecting a car crash, but they might not necessarily have predicted this. Because this was a storm so perfect that it played out as though written by scriptwriters who’d spent the previous nine months observing the absolute state of English football this season and who wanted to satirise in the grimmest possible terms where we are as the 2023/24 season comes to its conclusion.
For those who prefer their memories to come from the short-term, the announcement that the FA Cup replays were being jettisoned because a handful of clubs need more time to fly around playing friendly matches and because the Premier League and the FA hate football, this was an opportunity for the competition to remind a large watching audience why this tournament retains allure more than 150 years after it was first played despite everything that has been done to it since, particularly in recent years.
And those with longer memories (and hints of sickos.jpg about them) could settle down to see if Manchester United could continue their ten-year long stint of the Premier League’s laughing stocks, the punchline to a joke to which no-one has yet quite come up with the correct opening line. The loose cannons of the Premier League could shine, but also they could also completely dissolve in the Wembley sunshine. As things turned out, they kind of managed both.
As the clock ticked past the hour mark at Wembley, United led 3-0 and it felt as though we were watching Doctor Jekyll United rather than Mr Hyde United. But seasoned watchers of this strange beast already knew that this could change at more or less any moment. They were already plenty aware that the psychedelic concoction created over the last two seasons by Erik ten Hag could easily manage both in the course of 90 minutes. Nothing is to be taken for granted when you support Manchester United. Not these days.
Sure enough, after 71 minutes, there it was. Ellis Simms scored for Coventry and suddenly Manchester United cracked yet again. From out of nowhere, the whites of 22 of their players’ eyeballs quickly became highly visible as the team from the Championship fought their way back into the game. Is it even possible to coach in order to mitigate the sudden urge to attempt to try and run in four directions at the same time with your hair on fire?
Eight minutes later the deficit was reduced to one thanks to a shot deflected off Aaron Wan-Bissaka which dropped under the crossbar at a very rakish angle indeed. By this time in proceedings, those in the stands could probably smell the panic among the United players as much as they could see it. And then, in the fifth minute of stoppage-time, it came. Handball against the unfortunate Wan-Bissaka and a cool, calm and composed penalty from Haji Wright completed the comeback and took the match into extra-time.
In stoppage-time at the end of extra-time came the moment that would cause so much conjecture. Again. Wright was put through on the left and his cross was turned in by Victor Torp, only for the robo-ref to stick its shiny metal beak in and decide that no, actually, this sort of nonsense couldn’t be allowed to stand and disallowed the goal, snatching away what would surely have become one of the truly really great FA Cup moments and replacing it with a penalty shootout script that we’ve all seen a thousand times before.
This wasn’t the first or last piece of luck United had enjoyed throughout the afternoon and it wouldn’t be the last, either. A couple of minutes earlier, a shot from Simms had thudded out from under the crossbar. After the 120 minutes had been played, Casemiro took United’s first penalty with the gait (and, as it turned out, the end result) of someone who didn’t really care whether United played Manchester City at Wembley next month or not.
If big clubs are advantaged over smaller clubs through spending hundreds of times as much money as clubs a division below them, then these advantages are all the more accentuated when it comes to such moments. The more expensive players should be both more technically gifted and more used to taking part in a shootout of this nature in front of 90,000 in the stadium. Eventually, Coventry wilted.
But even then, there was more. Supporters flooded social media with messages expressing their unhappiness at United’s performance. Antony, a player who may have issues with dealing with respect for others, ran off cupping his hand in the direction of the supporters of a club who’ve been to hell and back in ways that the most pampered players of the modern age would scarcely believe possible. At the end of the shootout, it was down to Harry Maguire to make his first port of call the shattered Coventry players, to offer commiserations and a handshake. To act, in other words, in a captainly way.
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So, in the cold light of the morning after, what are we to make of all this? Well firstly (and everything that follows here is a rehash of arguments that have been made for many years), it is difficult to see what the purpose of the offside rule might even be. Wright was offside by a fraction of a toe when he’d been clearly trotting back to try to get himself back into an onside position in the first place.
And then there’s the broader question of what the point in watching sport even is, when those who are running them seem so determined to suck every ounce of joy possible out of the experience. We could have had one of the genuinely great FA Cup moments yesterday afternoon, but instead it was snatched away by a game that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Law places great importance upon the balance between the letter of the law and its spirit. To obey the letter of the law is to follow the literal reading of the words of the law, whereas following the spirit of the law is to follow the intention of why the law was enforced in the first place. Good law should balance these two occasionally differing interpretations. It is a sign of how bad football rule-making has become in recent years that we long ago jettisoned the spirit of football’s laws in favour of protractors, lines on television screens, and squinting at players’ toenails.
Because that’s what this essentially all is. When the letter of the law is all you’ve got, it’s because you’ve frittered away the concept of the law having a ‘spirit’. All that matters is the money, of being right. It’s a joyless sporting world, and particularly in the case of football over the course of the last few months, they haven’t even been able to get that right all the time, not even with the amount of money that’s been thrown at it.
And for all this failure, the fact that FAs, leagues and other governing bodies can just do damn well what they like means that your limited to just going along with it all and trying to put it to the back of your head or just walking away from it altogether, or at least a level at which all these camera lenses aren’t constantly butting in to look out for their best interests, even if this involvement makes games demonstrably worse experiences to watch.
The time is surely approaching when people start to give up. If you were a Coventry City supporter glumly heading back up the motorway last night, reviewing the events of the afternoon, how are you even supposed to parse it all? Because “what’s the point of all this?” is becoming an increasingly valid question to ask at the end of frankly too many football matches.
This sort of decision-making in this sort of match is proof in itself of the extent of that brokenness, of the extent to which too many of those who’ve been paid extremely handsomely by football for too long have lost the actual point of what the game should be about, to the point that the professional game is doing little more than cannibalising itself. And when folk start to sever those ties and fall out of those habits, the overwhelming majority of them will not be returning.
But the final word on this piece should go to Mark Robins and Coventry City, a club put through the wringer by malign owners for years, who dropped as low as League Two, who were effectively rendered homeless by owners of the club on two separate occasions, but who came back because of that that very spirit which keeps people coming back, and the absence of which feels so noticeable when it impacts on matches in such an intrusive way.
When everybody does finally lose their patience with this perpetual stream of administrative diarrhoea and fucks off altogether, the buffoons running football may well wonder where they’ve gone. All they have to do in order to get a definitive answer to this question is look in a mirror. Should these bloody vampires even have a reflection in one, that is.