Back from a brief European sojourn in time for absolutely no club
football this week, Chelsea supporter Giles Smith uses this week's
column to assess recent changes by the game's administrators, and to
influence their future policy…
I didn't expect to care so much. After all, it was only the Super
Cup, which is, let's face it, basically a posh Community Shield. So, if
you had told me that, in Prague last Friday night, I would spend two
entire periods of extra-time in a state of high anxiety, and that, when
it came, a last-second equaliser by the opposition would feel like a
kick in the stomach from a fully-grown horse, I'd have said, 'I don't
think so. After all, it's only the Super Cup which is, let's face it,
basically a posh Community Shield.'
Yet that's what happened. The match became important in ways that
perhaps we weren't necessarily expecting - the result of the intensity
with which it was played (nobody seemed to have used the phrase 'posh
Community Shield' near any of the players) and the circumstances
arising, with the sending off, leading to the long rear-guard action,
culminating in the manager wheeling his arms at us to encourage us to
suck the ball up our end for a while and relieve some of the last
moments of pressure.
In that context, the equaliser really did come as a blow, compounded
soon afterwards by the disappointment in the penalty shoot-out. Yet, at
the same time, the deflation hardly lasted a moment. In fact, we left
the stadium on quite a high.
After all, it was only the Super Cup, which is, let's face it,
basically a posh Community Shield. And we had seen two staggeringly good
goals, a display of almighty and enormously promising excellence
against last season's Champions League winners, and a demonstration,
just four games into the season, of team spirit so thick you could
virtually reach out and hug it. It wasn't really about the Super Cup, in
the end, then. It was about so much more.
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