Minnows Dominate Heroes And Villains

It’s been an unforgettable weekend in the FA Cup as Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham all perished to lower-league opposition. What better way to celebrate their demise than with a special fourth round installment of Heroes and Villains…

HEROES

There are no words for what Bradford City did this weekend. Beating Chelsea would have been heroic enough, but to beat them in their own stadium and to do it from two goals down simply beggars belief. Whether it will count as the greatest FA Cup shock of all time, though, is open to debate. Colchester, vanquishers of Don Revie’s Leeds, and Wrexham, conquerors of reigning champions Arsenal, will both have something to say about that. For now it is enough to know that even when the gap between rich and poor has never been greater, football still has the power to shock.

You have to feel a little sorry for Middlesbrough. On any other FA Cup day, their story would dominate the back pages. Like Bradford, they beat one of the nation’s most expensively assembled teams. Like Bradford, they did it away from home. Unlike Bradford, they’re not in the third flight. They were excellent though, fully deserving of their victory and highlighting why they are one of the smarter bets for promotion to the Premier League this season. They could have won by more too. Lee Tomlin’s wonderful turn-and-shot deserved a better result than a dull thud off the post.

Middlesbrough’s shock of Man City was upstaged by Bradford but they why they’re fancied for Prem promotion this season.

The portents for a remarkable weekend were evident as early as Friday night. Louis van Gaal’s Manchester United, assembled at the cost of a manned mission to Mars, were held to a goalless draw by a fearless Cambridge United, put together for the same price it cost you to read this article. The home side, who came so close to making up the inaugural Premier League in 1992 before sliding down the divisions into obscurity, were magnificent and a replay at Old Trafford will transform their bank balance. Perhaps one day they will be close to the big time again.

What a performance from Jeff Schlupp! That’s certainly what the Ghanaian camp will be thinking over in Equatorial Guinea. Schlupp was supposed to be playing in the African Nations Cup this month but pulled out with a knee injury. Ghana manager Avram Grant will doubtless be delighted to see that he has made such a swift recovery and was able to tear Tottenham apart with his relentless running and a deft last-minute finish that made Michel Vorm look almost as silly as whoever it was who said Schlupp was injured.

When they compile the statistics on this column at the end of the season, one man will stand out as the most heroic hero. That man is Alan Pardew. I know. I’m as confused as you are. He’s been attacked, pilloried and driven out of Tyneside, but he’s found his spiritual home in South London and it appears that his spirit animal is Marouane Chamakh. Two goals from the incredibly coiffured Moroccan put Southampton to the sword and gave Pardew four straight wins since taking over at Selhurst Park.

VILLAINS

Jose Mourinho warned on Friday that it would be a disgrace if Chelsea lost to Bradford this weekend. Chelsea duly lost and he was right; it was a disgrace. Mourinho has, on occasion, sought to deflect blame from himself and his players by blaming all manner of external factors for failure, but at least here he invited the world to line up and take a swing at his team to punish them for their uselessness. It is not an opportunity at which we will turn up our noses. No Premier League team, least of all a Mourinho team, should allow a third-flight side to come back from two goals down.

Manuel Pellegrini insisted that it made no difference but surely Manchester City‘s late return from the Middle East had some effect on their performance against Middlesbrough. You know what it’s like when you’ve been on a long haul flight: you’re stiff and tired, having spent seven hours reading a banal celebrity autobiography that even the man at the airport bookshop warned you not to buy. The last thing you want to do is go and play football in the cold. City can deny it all they like, but you suspect that an important lesson has been learned here.

Vorm doesn’t get many minutes for Spurs these days. After his crucial error vs. Leicester, it’s easy to see why.

As a back-up goalkeeper, life can be perilous. Sure, it’s well-paid, but there’s no pressure quite like it. Men like Tottenham’s Michel Vorm know well that you don’t get many chances to impress, so you have to take them with both hands. You have to take weak, last-minute shots with both hands too. Otherwise they slip through and your team goes out of the cup and everyone shouts at you and they’re still furious the next morning and you’ve never felt so alone.

We all get frustrated when things don’t go our way. We all feel that rush of blood, the rising, roiling magma of fury when a bad day suddenly gets worse. But listen, Gylfi Sigurdsson, you can’t just go postal on passers-by. You have to control it; you have to rise above it. Running up behind people and kicking them up in the air like Charlie Brown finally getting hold of that football… that’s not allowed. It is funny though.

Radamel Falcao‘s agent, the ubiquitous Jorge Mendes, has claimed that his client would get more game time if Sir Alex Ferguson was still the Manchester United manager. The sad truth is that Falcao wouldn’t get more game time if his mum was the Manchester United manager. This is the striker who was wanted by every major club in Europe before his knee injury. Now he can’t even make an impact against Cambridge. Something’s wrong with this picture.