Champions League, you're havin' a laugh

Goodness me, what a palaver! It seems that with each passing year the latter stages of the Champions League become ever more bloated and self important. It is a competition that reminds me of all those ads for washing powder, a substance that somehow manages to become ever more fabulous regardless of how fabulous the manufacturers had claimed it to be in the first place. Is there no limit to the bounds of fabulousness?

I have to admit that I didn't really see the game between Manchester United and Schalke. It was on the telly and I was in the room but I was busy doing something else so I came out the far end knowing little more about it than the score. However, the following night I put in a bit more effort and sat down to watch Barcelona take on Real Madrid with nothing to distract me other than a chicken Jal-Farezi and a niggling sense of guilt that I hadn't, as promised, succeeded in mowing the lawn that afternoon.

But what an appalling event it turned out to be. It was by turns nasty, cynical, pompous, and whatever you're having yourself. Players from both sides threw themselves to the ground clutching their faces at the slightest hint of contact and at every turn the referee found himself surrounded by seething members of whichever team happened to have had the whistle blown against them at any given moment. While it is a much over-used phrase, the atmosphere could genuinely have been described as poisonous.

And the most infuriating aspect of it all was that these were some of the best players in the world, representing two of the greatest clubs in the world, performing in what purports to be the greatest competition in the world. Surely even the worst player on the pitch that night had so much more to offer the watching world than that? Shouldn't this have been a celebration of what is best about the beautiful game? Well, no, not really. What it should have been, and what it was, was the perfect barometer of where the modern game is at.

As I watched the RTE panel struggle to fully express their anger at what they had just seen, I was reminded of how I felt in Paris a year and a half ago when Thierry Henry became an international symbol of football's ingrained dishonesty. I remembered how disgusted I was by the unashamed celebrations of Luis Suarez when his handball sent Uruguay through to the World Cup semi-finals instead of Ghana. And let's not forget what it felt like to watch the Netherlands betray their countries great tradition as they set about hacking through a startled collection of Spanish footballers in the final itself. Chuck Norris would have been proud.

Nor was the ugliness confined to the ninety odd minutes of football. It rumbled on into the following days with the post match comments of Jose Mourinho and Emmanuel Adebayor proving that there is little or no sense of personal accountability at work here. And then there is the prospect that these teams must meet again at the Camp Nou for a second leg that will do well to rise above the negativity that will now surround it.

Thank God for Lionel Messi, one of the few personalities to emerge from the whole farce with any sense of credit. His two goals shone out like ivory in a coal pit but, more importantly, the best player in the world today carried himself with dignity. This is the one commodity that seems to have been jettisoned at the higher levels of the game.

Plainly, massive amounts of money and the unconditional adoration of millions do not provide ideal conditions for a healthy perspective on anything and we have gotten used to the fact that modern players lead lives that all too often reflect their bizarre personal circumstances. But when the game is also governed by people who lead lives of almost obscene privilege, we can only hope that some spectacularly well centred individuals will somehow rise to the top and lead by example. All that needs to be said on that score, sadly, is FIFA. The omens are not good.

So perhaps, in some ways, we should be grateful that the League of Ireland lies at the opposite end of the scale. Yes, the game here has been financially neglected and mismanaged, and it can fairly claim to have been abandoned by its own public. I'm not proposing that these are good things, just that they are clouds that do have a silver lining.

The players here are not consumed by their own sense of self importance, they are not separated from us by enormous piles of money, and they are not thoughtlessly adored from the terraces for acts of gross dishonesty. Sure, we all know of players that might go down a tad easily and there will always be games where cynicism pokes it's head above the parapets. But by and large we have the privilege of watching honest footballers whose personal agendas do not rise above that of their team. Personal pride is still palpable, feigning injury is not admired or condoned, and delusions of grandeur are seldom suffered silently.

Is it hopelessly naive to imagine that when the world created by celebrity and riches crashes and burns it will be the more modest pockets of world football that remain standing? Just as some remote Amazonian tribes might survive should the world slip into nuclear meltdown, could the LOI soon stumble out of the wilderness to find that themselves at the centre of the new world order?

Okay, I may be straying a little too far into the world of fantasy there. The world of the LOI is far from perfect but at least we are not asked to indulge the kind of egotism propagated by the likes of Mourinho. Last night I went to Belfield to watch UCD play Sligo Rovers confident that Richie Ryan was not going to shoot anyone with an air rifle, that Paul Cook would not be found calling Martin Russell out for a scrap behind the bike sheds, and that I would not feel like I needed to take a shower afterwards. No, I'll save that for after I've mowed the lawn, which reminds me...