That was one of the more surreal sport-on-TV-watching experiences of our time. A British channel merrily covering the opening ceremony of the Champions League final, their full focus on Camila Cabello and her tunes, while word had already filtered through that British football fans were being treated like cattle outside the stadium.
At first, BT Sport appeared to be entirely oblivious to what was happening at the Stade de France until a Liverpool fan scrambled over to Jake Humphrey and his pitchside panel to tell them that it was calamitous, countless Liverpool fans left in crushed conditions trying to get in to the stadium, some of them, the fan claimed, having been tear-gassed.
Jake didn’t know any of this because BT appeared not to have a single reporter outside the ground, so he carried on asking Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand and Michael Owen about Liverpool’s high line and how risky it might be against Real Madrid.
He did, it should be said, express his firm wish that everyone was safe, but had zero clue if they were or not. So, at that point, it might have been an idea to check. Using more reliable sources than, say, @Mikey5319593715635.
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Camila did her thing, departed, and the teams appeared, half an hour later. Jake was chuffed. “Here we go!” Despite the Liverpool end being pockmarked with empty seats, which probably should have left him asking out loud, “where are they?”
It was like we were watching Uefa TV, the shambles going on outside one of Europe’s big venues at one of the world’s biggest sporting events overlooked lest it detract from The Occasion. Surreal is the only word.
The game? Oh yeah, that. Real Madrid won, but the story of the night, really, wasn’t that Liverpool had to make do with half a quadruple, it should have been about what went on outside the stadium instead of inside, and the treatment of their fans. Just don’t flick on BT to hear it.
Earlier in the day, even Tadhg Furlong couldn’t watch in those closing minutes in Marseille, sitting on the touchline with his back to the play, a fella who wouldn’t have an issue with putting his rear-end in a cement mixer if it helped him win a tackle showing all the apprehension of the mere mortals who follow this Leinster team.
In the end … gut-wrenching. And while the temptation at gut-wrenching times is to point the finger at a person who insisted at half-time that there was no need to panic, nobody should pin all the blame on Matt Williams. Some of it, yes, but not all.
“One thing to keep an eye on,” he said on Virgin Media, “the La Rochelle forwards — they’re puffing so hard they’re sucking in seagulls.”
There will be those of us who don’t know if “sucking in seagulls” is a specific rugby term or just something New South Wales folk do, but we got the gist, La Rochelle would never last the pace. And, certainly, come the closing moments, their goose would be cooked.
So much for that.
People around these parts don’t often give Austin Healey credit, largely because he doesn’t often deserve it, but at half-time he was prescient enough to observe that “Leinster are like a Ferrari that hasn’t had diesel put in it”. True, he said it in a creamy white suit last seen on Saturday Night Fever, but the point stood.
A miserable day, then, for Liverpool and Leinster, both left with nothing to show for their efforts, their seagull-sucking, if you like. Mind you, both left their supporters with some more than half decent memories from their campaigns just ended. There’s always next year.
