SOCCER:WHATEVER ABOUT the games themselves, the trophy handovers that precede major European club finals are, it was established beyond any doubt in Kilmainham yesterday, strictly for the telly.
Sure the FAI and host broadcaster TV3 sought to bring a little glamour and excitement to yesterday’s proceedings at the Royal Hospital but newspaper journalists left feeling much like the Liverpool fans with tickets for next month’s game at the Aviva Stadium must; the whole thing promised a lot but if they’d known how it was going to turn out precious few would have signed up to attend in the first place.
Standard procedure on these occasions is to import a bit of star quality and having scored the winner in last year’s final, of Atlético Madrid’s Diego Forlan was supposed to top the bill.
It seems like only yesterday that the 31-year-old Uruguay star was standing beside a team bus in Lansdowne Road promising local hacks he’d be seeing them again very soon. In reality, though, it was around three weeks ago and enough had changed in that time (take your pick between an ankle injury and a falling out with club manager Quique Sanchez Flores) for the striker to have become suddenly unavailable.
In his place Atlético’s David De Gea was promised, which was viewed as a decent consolation prize given the 20-year-old goalkeeper is constantly being linked with Manchester United. That, in these parts, is more than enough to make a player topical, but too topical it turned out for his employers, who reportedly pulled him on the basis he might actually be asked about United.
Instead, they sent 21-year-old Alvaro Dominguez in his place. He seemed very nice but go on, you try to think of a question worth asking him for an Irish audience.
Things were little better on the blazer brigade front. Apart from Forlan, last week’s invitations had promised that Uefa president Michel Platini, the FAI’s own John Delaney and Dublin Lord Mayor Gerry Breen would be available for interview.
After clowning around a little for the cameras with Breen (the Frenchman, just to be clear about this, did all the clowning) Platini, who is usually good value in these situations, let it be known to his people, who let be known to us, that he had decided not to talk to the press.
Delaney, meanwhile, let it be known he would be talking with us but only about the Europa League final itself which, given the finalists haven’t been decided and so not a lot really has changed since any of the previous functions held to mark various stages of the game’s approach, did little to set the assembled media’s collective pulse racing.
Attempts to bring up the contractual positions of Giovanni Trapattoni and Marco Tardelli, as well as the scale of the pay cut he himself said he would be taking, were kicked back to May 9th when Delaney said he would take questions again at an association function in Clare.
In the end, his contribution to the proceedings boiled down to assurance that the pitch at what will be officially known for the occasion as the “Dublin Arena” will be better for the match on May 18th than it has been for other games recently and the stands will be fuller – totally full, he insists, although we have heard that one before.
In fact, there is bound to be some concern in the event that Braga and Villarreal both qualify that the 24,000 or so tickets set aside for supporters of the participating clubs will be taken up given that the two cities have a combined population of less than 10 times that number of people.
Benfica against Porto on the other hand, should bring a full house but also security concerns given that most of the recent games between the two clubs have been marred by trouble between rival supporters.
Delaney added that if this game goes well the association might bid to host the European Super Cup in a few years’ time while the idea of hosting an Under-21 European Championship might be revived. Then off he went.
Breen might well have sought to talk then about nothing but his campaign to be elected to the Industrial and Commercial panel of the Seanad but in fact he seemed to choose not to talk at all for he never materialised in the corner of the room allocated to the media.
And so it was left to Ronnie Whelan who, entering into the spirit of things somewhat, preferred not to talk about the campaign by Liverpool fans that led to him and Ray Houghton pulling out of television coverage of the game sponsored by The Sun because of the paper’s coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, to talk the game itself up.
Like most of the organisers (he is an official ambassador) Whelan admits that the absence of an English team and the huge number of supporters a Liverpool or Manchester City would have been expected to bring with them to Dublin might take something away from the sense of the occasion.
Not for nothing, he added though, were the Premier League sides beaten and the former Republic of Ireland international insists that any combination of the remaining four sides are capable of coming here and putting on a show. Let’s hope he’s right. From a reporter’s point of view, though, it’s bound to be better than yesterday.
