The Fiver | The world is now totally jiggered

In today’s Fiver: one-sided tiki-taka, bench-emptying brouhahas, and more

Twenty-five years ago is, by any common metric, a very long time. Back then, Big Cup was known as the European Champion Clubs Cup. The Queen’s Celtic had won it more times than Barcelona. Indeed, the Catalan giants were mainly famous for throwing hands, launching absurd two-footed lunges, missing quite a lot of penalties, and losing all the time to Dundee United. But time passes, money gets spent, and things change. The world is now totally jiggered, competitive football isn’t in much better nick, and neither are the Queen’s Celtic. Barcelona, meanwhile, keep winning Big Cup every other year. They’re pretty good to watch, to be fair, though in The Fiver’s book, 90 minutes of predictably one-sided tiki-taka is beaten every time by a donnybrook culminating in a studs-first high-kick to the chest. Oh for it to be 1983 all over again.

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