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Premiership hype machine blows its top
Comment Malachy Clerkin



THE idea of there being such a thing as The Best League In The World has always seemed a little oily, has it not? A little too much like there's something being sold here that can't quite stand up on its own merits and so needs a description that's equal parts indefinable and undisprovable.

To hear it claimed has always been to feel as though someone's protesting too much, as though it should read The Best League In The World (No, Really, Honest It Is).

Because after all, how can something as unwieldy and misshapen as the week-byweek activities of a collection of a few hundred footballers be properly adjudged to be better or worse than their equivalent in another country? It's really no different from claiming that, say, one country's mechanics are better than another's. The pool goes too deep, the criteria so wide that there's no way of saying definitively that they are or they aren't. So it means nothing.

It's a media thing, of course.

Not content with watching the actual competitions taking place in front of our eyes, we somewhere along the way decided we needed to compare and contrast various twains that could never meet.

Harmless enough when you're theorising over how Tyson and Ali would have fared out against each other. Just a little oily when Sky are tapping you up for your PremierPlus season ticket for just Euro27.99 (No, Really, Honest It Is).

Well, they got their dream combination of results last week. Three of the four semifinalists in the Champions League is, on the face of it, all the proof required to back up claims of the Premiership's pre-eminence. But this is precisely where how little the label actually means comes into play. Those claims would hold much more water had they not been being made for the Premiership this time four years ago when there were three Italian teams in the final four and before that in 2000 when three La Liga clubs made the semis. Can't have it every way, can they?

It's worth pointing out, too, that for most of the Champions League's history, whatever claims the Premiership might have laid to being the best of Europe's leagues, it has been inescapably and definably the richest. That it has taken this long for English teams to dominate the final stages of a competition so indelibly linked to financial firepower is probably as damning an indictment of those clubs' performances through the years as any.

Indeed, considering the various tactical overhauls and adaptations English teams have had to undergo in order to reach this stage, the financial aspect of life in the Premiership could be said to have been just about its only plus point.

Certainly, none of the teams got their continental grounding playing against Bolton.

If we must have a pissing contest between the leagues, then at best, what Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United have proved in reaching the semi-finals en masse is that at its highest end, the Premiership currently boasts some of the continent's outstanding managers.

That's about the only debate that can properly be had. Rafa Benitez, Jose Mourinho and Alex Ferguson have updated their credentials over and over and have once again risen to the top. Arsene Wenger isn't exactly flavour of the months just now but last year's final appearance and some of the ball his side have played through this season buys him a seat at the top table as well.

Were any of these four managers to become available over the summer - and Real Madrid's presidential election is currently predicated on the idea that, contract or no contract, every manager is available - the rush to employ them would be ferocious. Cristiano Ronaldo apart, there aren't a whole lot of players in the Premiership whose availability would send the transfer market into meltdown.

Mourinho's exit, should it transpire, would have the effect of alienating legions of Chelsea supporters and, it seems likely, more than a few players. So popular is he that were he forced out the future would look an awful lot more uncertain at a club which will, after all, live or die on the whims of one man. If one of those whims is to banish such a gem as Mourinho, what else is he liable to do?

With Benitez having had to answer the Madrid question as well over the past months - not to mention Wenger doing so in the past - the truth is that few outside England look longingly at the Premiership for anything other than its money and some of its managers. The past week hasn't changed that.

If anything, it's reinforced it.




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