About the beautiful game / Dave Farrar / 08 April 2009 / Leave a comment

Dave Farrar is full of praise for the likes of Mon Mome and Trevor Immelman who defied the stats and indeed the odds to deservedly secure their names in sporting history. But who can be their equivalent in the "beautiful game", he wonders.

European football rarely moves away from the centre of my sporting world, but this weekend I'll be riveted to the US Masters for four nights, and those late night La Liga games may have to pay the price. The Masters is one of those events which is made for television, the idea of being transported to an impossibly beautiful place while grabbing the edge of your sofa is so enchanting that, rather like the Cheltenham Festival, you spend the day after the final round counting down the minutes until next year.

All has not been well at the Masters in recent years, and I was fascinated earlier on this week to read one of the country's leading golf writers suggest that, if the course alterations which have been made in the post-Hootie Johnson days at Augusta lead to one of the games' big names winning a Green Jacket, then that will mean a huge sigh of relief for the sport, as well as for those that run Augusta National.

They are sick of producing what they call "second tier" Champions, bored of the likes of Mike Weir and Trevor Immelman. While I accept that the at times ludicrous lengthening of Augusta has been a bad thing, and has made Sunday evenings a little duller, the distaste for winners that somehow aren't supposed to win in the natural order of things is elitism at its worst, and contrasted rather neatly with what happened at Aintree last weekend.

The Grand National had become rather predictable as a trends race, and was beginning to look like a fairly easy to call long distance handicap. That was until Saturday, when Mon Mome's win gave the race a boost that will last for the next decade, and those two quid each-way punters will get involved again next year in the knowledge that miracles can happen. We all like seeing superstars in action, but winning outsiders keep sport honest, and remind us all just how good the greats have to be to stay at the top. That's why, in the context of a single event, Mon Mome should mean as much as Kauto Star, and Zach Johnson as much as Tiger Woods.

In recent seasons, the Champions League has taken on the look of a US Masters with the names of Woods, Mickelson, Harrington and Ogilvy permanently at the top of the leaderboard. The last time that we had shock finalists was in 2004, and that year there was a feeling among those who are always described as "football purists" that somehow Porto playing Monaco in European Football's showpiece was a bad thing.

It wasn't: it was a reminder that what we watch is a genuine contest, not simply a series of steps leading to the coronation of the anointed ones. I felt the same attitude filtering through on Tuesday night of this week. How dare Porto affect the natural order and even dream of putting Manchester United out? Everyone knows that it simply has to be a Manchester United v Barcelona final in May, and the minnows oughtn't to get in the way. Much though I like having great champions, and much though I enjoy watching a 1994 Milan or a 2006 Barcelona in action, shocks are a great thing for football, as they are in Golf, Horse Racing and any other sport.

They're a great thing for punters too, with Porto having traded at [540.0] to win the Champions League, and elsewhere in Europe, Marseille at [21.0] and Bordeaux at [30.0] for the French League, and Wolfsburg at [180.0] to win the Bundesliga. Have a look at what price all these I've just mentioned are now. If the end of the season roll call around Europe doesn't automatically read Manchester United/Lyon/Inter Milan/Barcelona and Bayern Munich then we should celebrate the fact that football is still strange and diverse enough to produce results over a season which can amaze and entrance, not complain that the wrong team won.

So, in the same way that I cheered Mon Mome home last Saturday, I'll be with a whole host of players at fancy prices at Augusta this weekend. Forget Tiger at [3.35] and Lefty at [10.0], and raise the roof for Justin Leonard, Hunter Mahan, Rory Sabbatini and KJ Choi, to name but four of the players who are in the image of Weir and Immelman, of Porto and Mon Mome.

They're all available at three figure prices, and all have a realistic chance of winning. And if one of them does, we should revel in the madness of it all, not complain about how it devalues the event. And on the theme of devalued events, the UEFA Cup offers the best value anywhere in football right now. The eight remaining teams are impossible to split, and for that reason, Paris St Germain and Udinese, the two outsiders, must be backed at [9.8] and [11.5]. Somehow both clubs are perceived as unfashionable, as unwelcome as a journeyman winning a major. And yet both have a massive chance of lifting the Cup aloft.