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Try to imagine Sir Laurence Olivier stepping on the stage in an am-dram village hall production. Or Pavarotti singing karaoke classics at Dog and Duck.
That’s what it was like to witness the mighty Tottenham Hotspur at the Marine Travel Arena in Crosby yesterday.
And forget about corporate boxes or luxurious hospitality suites: the lucky locals whose semi-finals face the muddy pitch managed to catch the game by perching on the roofs of their potting sheds or straddling their garden fences.
With this being one of the most affluent suburbs in Merseyside, some drank glasses of cold Prosecco (one young woman even had a strawberry in her glass, noted BBC eagle-eye expert Dion Dublin).
As the home team prepared for their fate day, television cameras captured them taking last-minute selfies to show their future grandchildren and nervously looking at their appearance in the dressing room mirror.
Shaking hands with their illustrious opponents before kickoff, one or two of the star players couldn’t resist making a double take.
Was that really Dele Alli, the England international I’ve seen on TV? They seemed to be thinking.
In fact it was. In what was the biggest mismatch in the 149-year history of the FA Cup, part-time Marine FC players (including a bin-man, a plumber-in-training, and an NHS test-and-trace operation) organized the hoity – toity Hotspurs.
Although the two clubs share the same nickname, the Lilywhites, there the similarity ends.
You don’t have to be a devotee of the game to understand the enormity of the division. Spurs of the Premier League are the ninth richest football business in the world, worth £ 1.6 billion. Their highest paid player, Gareth Bale (a mere substitute yesterday) earns £ 500,000 a week. They have won the Cup eight times.
Named after a waterfront guesthouse where they formed in the late 19th century, Marine pays his best players a few hundred pounds a month and generally competes against teams like Pontefract Collieries, eight notches below Tottenham, in the Division Northwest of the Northern Premier League.
Or at least they did, until the latest lockdown forced part-time football to be suspended last month.
If they hadn’t faced ‘elite athletes’ yesterday afternoon, they would have been confined to the couch with the rest of us.
In fairness, Spurs notoriously selfish coach Jose Mourinho went out of his way to be magnanimous in his pregame interview, extolling the romance of the David-Goliath encounters and insisting that his team would give Marine the “maximum respect”.
How it felt, though, as he and his millionaire Fancy Dans were asked to change into a “function suite” rented from Crosby Slimming World (there isn’t a dressing room big enough to accommodate them safely), but we can guess.
The contrast between the self-proclaimed Special One and his counterpart, Neil Young, is off scale.
Mourinho is paid £ 15 million a year, with a lifestyle to match.
Marine’s manager may be the namesake of a rock star, but he works for Mersey Rail and had to take a week off to train his team.
And while the Spurs were generous enough to introduce their backup goalkeeper yesterday, it turns out he’s Joe Hart, who has racked up 75 caps. Standing between the posts for the Marines was Bayleigh Passant, 20, who became popular after the team won their previous FA Cup tie by going straight to the local co-op for the beers … still with her team. dirty.
When his forward and garbage collector James Barrigan found out they had drawn the Spurs in the third round, he was so excited that, he confesses, “he ran screaming around the house.”
Upon learning that the Spurs had opted to spend the night at Liverpool’s luxurious Titanic Hotel, optimistic supporters of the Marines felt an omen. Perhaps the Premier League would also sink without a trace.
Unfortunately, it was not. Almost inevitably, the match was something of an anticlimax.
Although Marine was inches from opening the scoring after 19 minutes, when Neil Kengni, the 20-year-old plumber-in-training, fired a thunderous shot against the crossbar, they were thereafter swept away by men of a far superior class. Not wanting to be cruel to Marine, who fought valiantly and to the end, watching the graceful Spurs players evade their onslaught was like watching ballet dancers tiptoe through a brick gang on a construction site.
The Spurs scored five unanswered, and were it not for the inspired Passant, it could have been more.
But Marine earned an additional £ 150,000 from his share of the £ 75,000 television rights, a £ 25,000 loser prize and thousands more from the sale of 25,000 ‘virtual tickets’ to generous supporters who wanted to make up for the absence of 3,000 fans inside the field.
For a club as small as Marine, it is a huge sum. She will head to a new artificial grass pitch for her women’s and youth teams. However, more important than money are memories.
The Crosby boys will never forget the day they faced off against Jose and his superstars, nor will the people whose prosecco-kissed Sunday afternoon gardens turned into a glorious rostrum.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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