Falling pianos and humping camels mark another Liverpool win

The way that weekend was shaping up the only surprise, really, was that Liverpool didn’t win the bloody Eurovision Song Contest, because they were winning every-bloody-thing else.

Champions League final still to come, League Cup already in the bag, FA Cup picked up on Saturday, and then, come Sunday, you'd a notion the Premier League might be heading their way too after Manchester City went two down to West Ham.

As Sky's David Jones put it at half-time: "Well, well, well . . .", although the person who chose the caption "Bow wow" to mark Jarrod Bowen's first-half double should surely now be heading to the Jobcentre.

Ahead of the Leinster v Toulouse semi-final on Saturday, BT pundit Ben Kayser wondered how much those 100 minutes against Munster would have taken out of the French lads, reckoning their forwards in particular would "feel like a piano fell on them".

Rematch? This auld heart would definitely not be able for it

---

Mary Hannigan’s TV View: the weekend has again shown us that sport is diabolically cruel

---

All in the Game: Gianni Infantino continues to put his foot in it

---

All in the Game: Frankie De Tory goes viral

---

That, incidentally, is a little like how Erin Cuthbert looked when she lined out for Chelsea in Sunday's FA Cup final, this couch reckoning she too felt like a piano had fallen on her after an interminable season during which she made the Energizer bunny appear to possess all the qualities of a sloth.

Beaut

The confident prediction, then, was that the campaign had caught up with her, so she’d have little impact on the final, during which she scored a beaut and was named player of the match after helping Chelsea complete the double and see off Manchester City.

Occasionally, then, couch forecasting can go a touch awry, but no more inaccurate than some of the professionals' prophesying – such as, just as a purely random example, Jermaine Jenas.

"It's shifted, innit," he said of the momentum during the penalty shoot-out required to separate Liverpool and Chelsea, Jermaine convinced that Édouard Mendy's save from Sadio Mané had put one Chelsea hand on the cup. "You can feel it," he told his BBC audience. And then Diogo Jota scored and Mason Mount didn't and Kostas Tsimikas did and Liverpool had both hands on the cup.

By then, Jermaine had declared the game to be one “that had everything”, to which his BBC audience replied: “Everything but a flippin’ goal over its ENTIRE 120 minutes.”

The prospect of a score wasn’t helped, mind, by Mo Salah limping off after 33 minutes. As he trudged towards the sideline the BBC cameras picked out a large tribute banner portraying a drawing of him, lingering on it until one of the team evidently spotted the two camels, well, humping in the background, at which point they swiftly pointed the lens elsewhere. No criticism here, which one of hasn’t spotted humping camels on a tribute banner to Mo Salah?

Minute’s silence

That wasn't, though, the weekend's only oddness. The minute's silence before the Leinster game for the famine had quite a number of people asking "what?" while Sky's Geoff Shreeves informing us that Prince Albert of Monaco was at the West Ham game because he and Mark Noble share a mutual friend had even more folk scratching their scalps 'til they blew bubbles. Also too, Liverpool fans booing Prince William, Abide with Me and God Save The Queen will never not be funny/strange, especially when it produces incandescent-with-fury Sunday headlines.

Anyway, despite City playing in that first half like several pianos had fallen on top of them, Pep Guardiola unable to get a tune out of them at all, at all, they resumed their ivory-tinkling in the second half, getting one back through Jack O'Grealish and levelling through an exceptional glancing header from Vladimír Coufal, albeit in the wrong net. But then Riyad Mahrez missed a penalty and it ended 2-2, Prince Albert, Prince William and Liverpool mildly pleased, for varying reasons; Pep, a bit like the camels, having the hump when he spoke to Sky, looking a little like a piano had fallen on him.

“One more week, one more game,” he said, not crushed quite yet, only Aston Villa to come. Their gaffer, though, you suspect, will be quite up for it.