Brilliant! I’ve just learned that Steps, the millennial errr… well… not quite ‘super’ group, more… sort of… like… oh yeah, total waste of space, time and AIR!!!, are having a retrospective type thing to ‘get people moving in Lockdown’. Because most people are totally unaware that sitting on a sofa for 16 hours eating chocolate biscuits and drinking extra-strong lager, all alone, in front of the tv, is not very good for you. So well done Steps! The band who, almost single-handedly, represented the demise of popular music from being a wonderful expression of creativity to the karaoke show they produced. With hand movements. In case you don’t feel inspired to just, kind of, dance. Music for the dancably challenged. Anyway, its brilliant!! And you just have to either go walking to the soundtrack of their ‘what the future holds’, or you dance to it, (they show you the moves, obviously, wouldn’t be proper music otherwise) and then put it on tik-Tok so everyone can hate you, revile you and make your life more of a misery than it already is. Brilliant! Love Steps. And it raises money for charity too.

But I want to talk about ‘romance’. Not, like in the Mills & Boon type way, not, sort of Mr Darcy in a threesome with several Bronte sisters, not ‘proper’ romance, but ‘the romance of the Cup’. The FA Cup. You can barely mention that esteemed competition, the oldest national football competition IN THE WORLD!!!, without some tattooed Millwall thug bursting into tears, the Shed End at Chelsea wellling up or Mesut Özil crying into his millions. It’s the ‘romance’. Innit.

And that comes from BIG teams playing ‘minnows’. That only happens in the cup. When Premiership high flyers play non-league amateurs. And that’s where the romance comes in. You don’t get it when Everton play Leicester. You get it when Liverpool play Dagenham & Redbridge. When Manchester United play Yeovil Town. And you get it when Leeds play Crawley.

Because the ‘romantic’ bit is that these lowly teams can actually win. And, on very rare occasions, they do so. Man United, Arsenal, Newcastle, have all been the giant victims of the giantkilling over the decades.

But I’d just like to say, there is NO romance in losing. For little teams there can be nobility, valiant attempts, brilliant opposition, to the inevitable which brings them no shame. For the big clubs who fail to beat the underdogs there is plenty of shame. And a distinct lack of romance as even Leeds players’ wives probably would’t talk to them after Crawley thrashed them on Sunday.

Lowly Marine FC who played Spurs on the same day made £400,000 from the day. Probably enough to keep them going for 5 years. Or they could have Kevin De Bruyne for a week.

There is no place for romance in football. Unless you can count it, put it in the bank, and keep you afloat.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx