Bottoms Up!

Sorry for the woeful delay; I've had to sing the Mozart Requiem about seven hundred times this week for pocket change to buy bags of rice to feed my family of twelve. The red pulpy mass where my larynx used to be cannot swallow for the pain, but it's nice to see my bastards feed.

Moving along, the Premier League is over. When a season spans the second week of August to the second week of May, it's hard to think of football say the way one thinks of a television season, with a beginning middle and end with great character development and an elliptical story arc with hilarious guest stars week to week. Try as they might, those photo albums and timelines and 'How the League was Won' website retrospectives serve only to remind football fans of some cracking fixtures last September they'd probably already forgotten in the white heat of May (Villa beat Chelsea! We showed you Mourinho!).

In any case, there was something amazingly anti-climactic about the whole exercise even with the photo-finish at the end (albeit between two very very wealthy super-clubs). The sad hops at the rain-sodden JJB seemed to underline the point. Does winning the Premier League matter any more? Is that all there is? Thirty-eight games, millions and millions of pounds spent, and for what? A jump-about resembling my grade eight dance when House of Pain came on and some wasted plonk on a muddy pitch in Wigan?

Meanwhile the desperation at Fratton Park was ELECTRIC. Portsmouth v. Fulham would normally be the Grade Z choice in the minor Canadian skirmish over Premiership rights, but I found myself switching to lowly old Sportsnet when the banality of Chelsea's and Manchester United's 'sense of entitlement' contest and the unearned superlatives coughed up by the bored announcers became too much to bear. Who in muggy August 2007 would of thought old Roy Hodgson would end up the man of the hour in the Premier League on May 11 2008? These are the mysteries of league football that still make it worth watching in the age of corporations.

I have an old DVD of the 'Best Games of the Premiership.' There are some greats on it, Liverpool v. Newcastle 1996 comes to mind, but the best has to be relegation-threated Oldham pulling it out against a sadistic Le Tissier-led Southampton 4-3 at the close of the 92-93 season. The fear. There is nothing like the fear of a club staring down relegation, and in the Premiership where a dollar amount is tied to every toss and turn of the league cycle, falling out the bottom can cause a microcosmic depression at a local ground. Joe Royle's frantic procession up and down the stairs at Oldham as Le Tisser scored and then scored again symbolized the ups and downs of a club both in and out of its element in the top flight.

Fulham never really deserved to be in the Premiership...except a Danny Murphy header away from home after an equally unlikely win against Birmingham ensured they DID. The tit-for-tat moaning that goes on endlessly among the top-four plastics, the goading perfectionism and yards of officious text cannot touch this sort of undeserved, inconsistent glory that cannot justify itself but doesn't need to because it's so beautiful. There are now three leagues in the Premiership, one for the elites, the other for the flavour of the month where Villa and Everton now sit, and the last for those cannibals at the bottom, feeding off eachother for precious points. It is the latter where, paradoxically, football still manages to live.