Awar of words has developed between journalist critics of the Football League, alias the Worthington Cup and the League itself. Henry Winter, well known to the readers of The Sportstar, heaped scorn on the competition, with scathing reference to their incipient tie at Highbury between Arsenal and Manchester United, which he said would be a mere contest between reserve teams. It was time for the tournament to bite the dust. It was no longer relevant and was no more than a nuisance to the major English clubs, engaged as they are in demanding European competitions, plus the Premiership and the FA Cup.
An infuriated response from the Football League insisted that the tournament was not only essential to the financial needs of its clubs - which you will recall inhabit the three divisions of the Nationwide League - but is still quite valid.
Well, I for one have never seen it as such and have from the very outset opposed it as an ill-conceived irrelevance. It was essentially the malformed child of the late Alan Hardaver who as Secretary and main motivator of the Football League - which then of course included the top division, now the Premiership - as would be rival to the FA Cup: the very father of all subsequent competitions.
You may remember that the insular, even xenophobic, Hardaker ("I don't like Europe," he once monstrously told me, "too many Wops and dagoes!") was the man who so bitterly opposed the European Cup at its beginning, bullying Chelsea, who were English Champions in 1955, to refuse to compete in 1955, and coerced the Football Association so disgracefully in 1958 to prevent Manchester United from competing. This, after United, decimated by February's Munich air crash, had generously been invited to take part in Europe as a grand gesture.
The Football League Cup, which has gone through so many sponsored incarnations, the Coca Cola Cup, the Milk Cup, the Worthington, had humble beginnings. The very Final was a mere home and away affair on the grounds of the last two clubs involved. Then Hardaker was inspired, if that be the word, by a couple of grand ideas. First there would be just one final at Wembley Stadium, historically the grand temple of the game, which would and did confer a spurious prestige on the competition. Secondly, he managed to persuade the home and European authorities to guarantee a place in the old Inter Cities, now the UEFA, Cup to the winners.
This never made any real sense. Entry to that tournament, of which more later, was essentially based on League positions. Allowing the League Cup winners to compete in Europe inevitably meant that a club which had previously finished high enough in the League to qualify would now fail to do so. I often equated these two carrots for the donkey to the behaviour of a millionaire who married off his ugly daughter by giving her a generous dowry.
But what of the UEFA Cup itself? Has it been so devalued that it is now of little allure? The Leeds United manager, David O'Leary, recently expressed his doubts and fears about the competition, in which his own team has been obliged to compete this season, having narrowly failed to get a second chance to compete at the higher European Cup level. His remarks have initiated a debate on whether the UEFA Cup, rather than being played on a home and away knock-out basis, should now follow the senior tournament by forming small League groups in which the clubs would play a minimum of several matches.
My own view is that the UEFA Cup has been dramatically undermined by the decisions of UEFA itself. First because, under what might well be called blackmailing pressure by the leading European clubs, the so called Champions League (which Champions? How many true Champions?) the tournament has expanded enormously to take in a plethora of clubs which haven't come close to winning their various Leagues. A development which has killed some dead the once attractive European Cupwinners' Cup which was first seriously weakened by the unavailability of Cup winners which on League basis qualified for the senior tournament, then was abruptly shut down.
A foolish, half-baked and irrational attempt, has been made by UEFA to, one supposes, to beef up the quality of the tournament. But has it? Surely not: allowing clubs which have been eliminated in the early stage of the European Cup is not much more than an insult to those in the UEFA Cup who have at that stage played their way through. The season before last, in fact, the very final, in Copenhagen, was contested by Arsenal and Galatasaray, both of whom had sneaked in by the back door having gone out of the European Champions Cup, after the first real round. Could there have been a more condign commentary on the new UEFA Cup?
Making into a carbon copy of the European Cup itself, with miniature legs and more fixtures, won't do much to improve the tournament or give it higher prestige. The very least the UEFA boffins can do is to keep it as it is and exclude those drop outs from the European Cup itself.
They should also think deeply again about the ghastly irrelevance of the Inter Toto Cup, with its specious prize of a couple of places in the UEFA Cup for the two longest surviving teams, condemned like all the rest to slog through the summer when their already much taxed players should be resting. This was the crackpot idea of the UEFA President Lennart Johansson which should be utterly condemned. The Inter Toto in fact was a Swiss invention conceived solely to enable them to run their football betting pools through the summer. To give it a factitious significance and an ill-conceived couple of prizes at the very time players of quality are under so much pressure amounted almost to a form of sadism.
One tournament which should emphatically not be under threat is the FA Cup itself though Arsene Wenger of Arsenal has deplorably cast doubts upon its relevance. Two seasons ago disgraceful pressure by the British Government and the Football Association itself bullied Manchester United, the holders, into withdrawing from it so they could compete in the utterly meaningless so-called Club World Cup in Brazil which turned into an unbalanced fiasco and has now been aborted; permanently one hopes. The supposed rationale was that England's doomed bid for the 2006 World Cup would be undermined were United not to go. Well, they went, and what happened?
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