Giles Smith: The truth is out there.
It wasn’t only a sprightly performance
that caught columnist and season ticket holder Giles Smith’s eye as he
watched last night’s win…
Remember losing? I’d almost completely forgotten about it. And not surprisingly really. I’m pretty sure that the last time it happened, milk still came in glass bottles.
But that was before last Saturday, of course, and that slightly surprising result at Newcastle, the pointless aftermath of which, inevitably, brought back a few distant memories, not all of them entirely pleasant.
That said, once the initial gloom had begun to lift, I personally was quite relieved to have got a defeat on the board at long last.
The talk of a possible ‘invincible’ season (none of it ever coming from Chelsea fans, incidentally) had started up, ridiculously, as early as October, and was just beginning to get irksome. Given a little longer, it clearly had the potential to become a major distraction, possibly even a ruinous one from the point of view of our greater aims.
Going through a league season undefeated, quietly leaving aside defeats in cup competitions, and then awarding yourself the label ‘invincible’ – correct me if I’m wrong, but this was never part of the gameplan for 2014/15, which set its sights on more dignified things, such as trying to win all the available competitions, rather than on a nerdy, fact-checker’s interest in unblemished records.
It would have been entirely unrealistic in any case. I realise that Arsenal did it in 2003/04, but the Premier League was a less complicated place in those days, bearing no resemblance to the collection of variously terrifying banana skins which constitute the top flight of English football today. Indeed, back then, the Premiership was only just beginning to emerge from a period in which a drawn-out two-club stranglehold (Arsenal and Manchester United) had drawn unfavourable and even mocking comparisons with the situation in Scottish football.
In any case, let’s face it, never losing leads only to stagnation and complacency. Better, surely, to enjoy the rejuvenating effect of the occasional (preferably extremely occasional) defeat and convert it, say, into a spritely, born-again 3-1 victory over Sporting Lisbon in the following match (impressively spritely, given that the match was, from our players' point of view, a dead rubber) and, for preference, something similar at home to Hull on Saturday.
Remember bouncing back? It follows logically that that, too, is a distant memory round these parts. But I don’t think any of us would mind being reminded.
Remember losing? I’d almost completely forgotten about it. And not surprisingly really. I’m pretty sure that the last time it happened, milk still came in glass bottles.
But that was before last Saturday, of course, and that slightly surprising result at Newcastle, the pointless aftermath of which, inevitably, brought back a few distant memories, not all of them entirely pleasant.
That said, once the initial gloom had begun to lift, I personally was quite relieved to have got a defeat on the board at long last.
The talk of a possible ‘invincible’ season (none of it ever coming from Chelsea fans, incidentally) had started up, ridiculously, as early as October, and was just beginning to get irksome. Given a little longer, it clearly had the potential to become a major distraction, possibly even a ruinous one from the point of view of our greater aims.
Going through a league season undefeated, quietly leaving aside defeats in cup competitions, and then awarding yourself the label ‘invincible’ – correct me if I’m wrong, but this was never part of the gameplan for 2014/15, which set its sights on more dignified things, such as trying to win all the available competitions, rather than on a nerdy, fact-checker’s interest in unblemished records.
It would have been entirely unrealistic in any case. I realise that Arsenal did it in 2003/04, but the Premier League was a less complicated place in those days, bearing no resemblance to the collection of variously terrifying banana skins which constitute the top flight of English football today. Indeed, back then, the Premiership was only just beginning to emerge from a period in which a drawn-out two-club stranglehold (Arsenal and Manchester United) had drawn unfavourable and even mocking comparisons with the situation in Scottish football.
In any case, let’s face it, never losing leads only to stagnation and complacency. Better, surely, to enjoy the rejuvenating effect of the occasional (preferably extremely occasional) defeat and convert it, say, into a spritely, born-again 3-1 victory over Sporting Lisbon in the following match (impressively spritely, given that the match was, from our players' point of view, a dead rubber) and, for preference, something similar at home to Hull on Saturday.
Remember bouncing back? It follows logically that that, too, is a distant memory round these parts. But I don’t think any of us would mind being reminded.
For a very long time now this column has
been interested in discovering what those additional UEFA goal-line
officials actually do of an evening. I suppose, in a way, it’s become a
bit of an obsession – a life’s work, you could almost say.
But it’s just a feeling we have that, if we ever did find out what officials number five and six are up to out there, standing quite near the goals on these European evenings, and if we wrote those findings up in words right here, it would give us the satisfaction of feeling that this column had made a contribution, however modest, to the sum of human knowledge.
Because nobody else seems to know what those people are for either. This is clearly a new frontier for scientific understanding and whoever gets there first is going to be acclaimed for all time as a pioneer and ground-breaker – the person who first cracked the code and explained to the world the point of the goalline official.
Unfortunately, despite having devoted many hours of close scrutiny to those extra assistants, and having thought extremely hard about their potential function at every moment available, the most plausible explanation we have been able to find for them up to now is: ‘somewhere to hang your coat.’
Which isn’t bad, at this stage of the investigation as early conclusions go. It may well be part of the truth. But my instincts as an experimental scientist tell me it’s not the whole truth, which is what we’re really after.
You’ll understand how excited we became last night, then, during the second half, when – in a development which we believe was unprecedented, certainly in our own experience – the goalline official at the Shed End actively summoned the referee over to him in order to have some kind of consultation.
This was rare: you very rarely see those extra people make a meaningful move or communicate with anyone else connected with the match in any way at all. This has led in some quarters to the theory that the goalline officials are, in fact, cyborgs, sent from another planet. (For the record, we don’t entirely dismiss this theory. But we’d need to see quite a lot more proof before we completely signed up to it.)
Yet, just before Sporting could take the corner kick which had been awarded to them, the extra assistant distinctly appeared to call the referee to him, causing the game to be held up while the two of them put their heads together on the goalline and clearly had some kind of conversation.
At that point, those of us watching seemed potentially to be on the verge of an important breakthrough – witnessing some sort of decisive intervention on the goalline official’s part which might explain their purpose more generally and why UEFA goes to the trouble of flying them all the way from Norway (in last night’s case), putting them in a hotel, feeding them, issuing them with uniforms, etc.
Alas, what happened next was… well, nothing. The conversation went on for quite a long time. The players stood and waited. At the end of the conversation, the referee trotted back to his position on the edge of the penalty area. He then waved for the delayed corner to be taken. He didn’t talk to anyone; he didn’t noticeably address anything that the goalline official might have drawn to his attention. It was if the exchange had never happened.
No wiser, then. No closer to solving the mystery. Still entirely in the dark, in fact. For all we know (and for all the difference it made), the goalline official called the referee over because he had just remembered the punchline to a joke that he had started to tell in the courtesy car on the way to the ground.
But that’s not to say that we’re giving up now. Far from it. We scientists don’t do that. We know the truth may be hard to arrive at. But we push on towards it anyway.
But it’s just a feeling we have that, if we ever did find out what officials number five and six are up to out there, standing quite near the goals on these European evenings, and if we wrote those findings up in words right here, it would give us the satisfaction of feeling that this column had made a contribution, however modest, to the sum of human knowledge.
Because nobody else seems to know what those people are for either. This is clearly a new frontier for scientific understanding and whoever gets there first is going to be acclaimed for all time as a pioneer and ground-breaker – the person who first cracked the code and explained to the world the point of the goalline official.
Unfortunately, despite having devoted many hours of close scrutiny to those extra assistants, and having thought extremely hard about their potential function at every moment available, the most plausible explanation we have been able to find for them up to now is: ‘somewhere to hang your coat.’
Which isn’t bad, at this stage of the investigation as early conclusions go. It may well be part of the truth. But my instincts as an experimental scientist tell me it’s not the whole truth, which is what we’re really after.
You’ll understand how excited we became last night, then, during the second half, when – in a development which we believe was unprecedented, certainly in our own experience – the goalline official at the Shed End actively summoned the referee over to him in order to have some kind of consultation.
This was rare: you very rarely see those extra people make a meaningful move or communicate with anyone else connected with the match in any way at all. This has led in some quarters to the theory that the goalline officials are, in fact, cyborgs, sent from another planet. (For the record, we don’t entirely dismiss this theory. But we’d need to see quite a lot more proof before we completely signed up to it.)
Yet, just before Sporting could take the corner kick which had been awarded to them, the extra assistant distinctly appeared to call the referee to him, causing the game to be held up while the two of them put their heads together on the goalline and clearly had some kind of conversation.
At that point, those of us watching seemed potentially to be on the verge of an important breakthrough – witnessing some sort of decisive intervention on the goalline official’s part which might explain their purpose more generally and why UEFA goes to the trouble of flying them all the way from Norway (in last night’s case), putting them in a hotel, feeding them, issuing them with uniforms, etc.
Alas, what happened next was… well, nothing. The conversation went on for quite a long time. The players stood and waited. At the end of the conversation, the referee trotted back to his position on the edge of the penalty area. He then waved for the delayed corner to be taken. He didn’t talk to anyone; he didn’t noticeably address anything that the goalline official might have drawn to his attention. It was if the exchange had never happened.
No wiser, then. No closer to solving the mystery. Still entirely in the dark, in fact. For all we know (and for all the difference it made), the goalline official called the referee over because he had just remembered the punchline to a joke that he had started to tell in the courtesy car on the way to the ground.
But that’s not to say that we’re giving up now. Far from it. We scientists don’t do that. We know the truth may be hard to arrive at. But we push on towards it anyway.
