Utter footie madness

10:24am Saturday 6th September 2008

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DESPITE an ecstatic almost manic Manchester City fan cackling “yeah, let’s have a laugh,” top-flight football continues to be anything but funny.

Three weeks into the elite season and it’s absolute insanity. Three weeks in and I do believe the game as it is now being played at the pinnacle of the English strata is dying.

The onset of madness is not solely attributed to the bizarre turn of events at the Eastlands home of Manchester City.

Besides a quite bewildering take-over – still to be ratified as the mysterious process of due diligence has yet to enter completion – there was an astonishing final day of the transfer window, followed just days after by swingeing managerial upheaval at Newcastle and West Ham.

Such has been the zany nature of the past few days that, at times, even the frenzied, over-the-top coverage of Sky Sports has been rendered unable to match the perplexing shenanigans.

Before the first deals of the last day of summer transfer activity got under way, Planet Football began to quiver on its axis at the proposed buy-out of Man City by the cash-drenched Abu Dhabi United group.

City fans were jubilant, though you sensed the glee was tinged with a unique type of fatalism that it could all turn out to be some sort of Arabian nightmare than fantasy.

The gallows humour, so interwoven into City’s folklore fabric, especially when placed alongside the untrammelled success garnered by their Old Trafford neighbours, lessened as the cash muscle of the ABU group started to flex.

A staggering fee of £32 million was agreed for Tottenham’s Bulgarian dissident Dimitar Berbatov, whose dream was to defect to Man United, not Abu Dhabi United. Suddenly the thought that Sir Alex Ferguson’s celtic countenance glowering from ruby red to ribena purple in apoplexy at the prospect of being gazumped by the boys in light blue, offered a delicious tit-bit.

Berbatov, predictably, joined the champions, Sky revealing how Fergie drove to the airport to greet his would-be acquisition. Television pictures later showed the duo shaking hands as viewers were being informed Spurs had given permission for talks between the two parties.

Wonder how loud Fergie will grouse if Real Madrid, or more likely now, Man City come a-calling for Cristiano Ronaldo when the transfer window re-opens.

Whatever Berbatov’s ultimate decision, Man City knocked their rivals into a cocked hat by smashing the British transfer record to recruit Robinho, he of the Brazilian pout, from Real Madrid. There was a player then, whose dream was to go to Chelsea, suddenly opting for Man City and their new paymasters. Wonder if the £160,000 a week salary was the major pull or perhaps UEFA Cup, not Champions League football, was the decisive factor?

No matter, because according to Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim, the front-man for the Abu Dhabi United group, a small swathe of the estimated £550 billion fortune has been earmarked by a take your pick of Europe’s top footballers come the January sales – Fernando Torres, Cesc Fabregas, Lionel Messi, Kaka, the aforementioned Ronaldo and oh aye, the other Ronaldo, the one of the ballooning belly. Whither that Russian pauper now, Roman Abramovich?

Answers elsewhere were definitely being sought on Tyneside and in London’s docklands, where one manager messily and the other tidily left their clubs.

Kevin Keegan’s exit from Newcastle United and a second spell as the Geordie messiah was predictable. Not, as some critics carp, because of Keegan’s past record, but because the club’s replica shirt-wearing owner Mike Ashley inexplicably installed Leeds boss Dennis Wise as director of football 13 days after temping Keegan to a second homecoming at St James’ Park.

King Kev, unable to wheel and deal as the manager with Wise supposedly more responsible for signings, said he had no option to go, this though after several days of will-he won’t-he tears on Tyneside.

Alan Curbishley, similarly slighted by other forces doing the hiring and firing, decided for similar reasons to quit West Ham where he was reared and where he once featured as a player.

Two men, two Englishmen, steeped in our game, now banished by outlandish circumstances as foreign influences thrust tentacles deep into the core of the domestic elite.

Madness, pure madness and all based on the need for instant returns and sheer greed.