It’s a strange world that makes you yearn for the days of Ted Croker, Bert Millichip and Gordon McKeag. Football seemed so simple then. And to think that they once seemed absurd in their pomposity, with their velvet bag in the wood-panelled Football Association committee room at Lancaster Gate. The draw for the Champions League group stage, though, was something else, a festival of glitzy vapidity in which we had to be told over and over again how exciting it was that we were about to learn which pot-four side would be getting hammered by Manchester City.
And through the veneer of Euroschmaltz came the distinct sense of how broken is the competition. City’s triumph in Istanbul last season should have felt like the culmination of a great quest, but it was hard to conjure much sense of jeopardy when Internazionale were led by a 37-year-old forward City had binned off eight years earlier. It’s a paradox of excellence that hammering sides, as City did to RB Leipzig, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, tends to diminish the sense of achievement.
