SURE ye couldn’t like thon Europa League if you’d reared it. It’s a wrong un’ and the peerless Julian Simmons would probably tell you the same himself from the UTV continuity hot-seat he does all his best work in.
More rounds than a farmer’s bread bin? Check. Reams of teams from obscure hell-holes who couldn’t beat dust off a Turkish rug? Check. Liverpool? Check. Tongue-twisting team names two vowels short of a sultry half-smile from Countdown’s immovable Susie Dent? Czech again.
The proof of the pudding, when not in the eating, is always in the viewing. And Thursday night’s Round of 32 highlights package on UTV didn’t disappoint in delivering what Channel Five used to excel at – disappointing football coverage of the highest order.
For starters there was that anchor Mark Pougatch in a fuchsia pink shirt (sorry for the language). Then there was perennial v-necked ‘banalyst’ Glenn Hoddle. And while the ‘black-suit-no-tie-only-here-before-I-head-somewhere-edgier-and-smokier’-type presence of Slaven Bilic perched on a slick cream leather sofa strived to save the day, we were in big trouble from the off.
First up was a Wayne Rooneyless Manchester United away to Danish champions Midtjylland (Mee-cha-laan). Commentator Sam Matterface didn’t appear to fancy the former English giants against a club from the crusty bunion of Scandinavia who were founded just 17 years ago – that very same year United legend Clive Tyldesley won the treble all by himself.
Yet no sooner had Dutch letdown Memphis Depay opened the scoring after 23 minutes with the scruffiest of deflections off his bedraggled left sideburn or thereabouts than something was soon rotten in the state of UTV’s camera cables in deepest Denmark.
With Mee-cha-laan about to equalise before naturally going on to win the first leg 2-1, the screen immediately turned whiter than, say, Louis Van Gaal in a post-match post-mortem or, say, Ryan Giggs with his brother dandering up the stairs.
Big Julian, though, never sleeps. He waits. Within 40-odd seconds, Havelock House’s answer to Red Adair was all over the gremlins like a rash, apologising profusely for the loss of sound (no talk of the picture) here on UTV ‘due to circumstances entirely beyond our control’.
“Please rest assured we’re doing all possible to rectify the situation,” he informed anyone who still cared.
Julian (above) was true to his word too. Eighty-seven seconds later he was pleased to reveal that we could return to the “Europa Uefa Europa League highlights as the situation has now been rectified”.
Rectified and then some. Mee-cha-laan’s Pione Sisto was telling us all about wanting to make a big miracle and they did it, before United short straw Michael Carrick stated without a hint of scundernavia that the Red Devils still feel confident about going through to the next round if they can play well enough at home.
With Liverpool’s boring goalless draw with German throat infection Augsburg and Jurgen Klopp’s intense hyperactivity still to come – not to mention Tottenham’s yearly trip to their holiday home in Florence – it was much too much for a drained man in his pyjamas and slippers to be bearing with.
It was all Julian’s at that point as far as this voyeur was concerned. Hopefully the big lad didn’t have to leave his seat again to hold an aerial booster before making a very smooth handover to the International Tarmac Rally highlights from county Galway. In the Republic of Ireland.
