AS an image to symbolise the arrogance, excess and utter crassness of the Premier League, it could not have been more cruel or more perfect.
Here was a photograph which summed up the disdain shown by the greed-is-good top flight towards the rest of English football.
And the chasmic disconnect between its multi-millionaire players and the real-life people who pay to watch them.
Here was Antony — Manchester United’s preening, £85.5million, one-trick pony, a manchild who personifies everything that’s wrong with the shameless shower of sewage which is England’s top flight.
And he was cupping his ears, taunting Coventry City’s players after his lower-tier opponents had been robbed of the greatest FA Cup comeback victory in history.
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Mugged by VAR — a system which values forensic justice over the spontaneous joy which made football the world’s favourite sport for more than a century.
Antony had arrived from the subs bench with United 3-0 up.
In the final minute of extra-time, they had fleetingly gone 4-3 down before a toenail offside decision between two players who would have been considered ‘level’ and therefore onside, for the previous century.
Antony didn’t take one of United’s five shootout penalties. Not surprising, given his record of two goals in 34 matches this season, one of them against Newport County.
Antony is the worst value-for-money transfer ever seen in this shopaholic league and has nothing to be smug about.
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Yet when United got lucky, Antony’s first instinct was to goad heartbroken opponents. To rub their noses in the dirt.
Antony seems to be a vile individual but this column isn’t really about Antony. Because Antony is merely a symptom of the hideous sickness within England’s top flight.
And a toxic culture which lionises people like Antony. Which encourages them to behave as Antony did at Wembley on Sunday.
Happy St George’s Day, everyone. Let’s have a look at this nation’s saving grace, its ‘greatest export’, its pride and joy. The Premier League.
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After our elite clubs persuaded the FA to completely scrap Cup replays — which gave us Ronnie Radford and Ricky Villa and Ryan Giggs — without due recompense or reasoning with the rest of English football, here was a weekend of contemptuous self-interest.
The previous day, after his Manchester City side had defeated Chelsea in the other semi-final, Pep Guardiola whinged about the fixture scheduling of TV companies who effectively pay much of his £20m salary.
“I don’t understand how we survived,” whined Guardiola, after 90 minutes of football against a team whose only outstanding player is one of his own cast-offs.
Chelsea, oh Chelsea.
The one-time plaything of a Russian oligarch now owned by financially incontinent venture capitalists who have piddled £1billion on a squad of players who fight like weasels in a sack about who should bask in the personal glory of scoring the penalty that puts them 5-0 up against Everton.
Up at Wolves, Guardiola’s friend and rival Mikel Arteta was playing the same sad song about fixture congestion, despite his Arsenal side having played two fewer games this season than Coventry — who don’t have £50m squad players to rotate with.
It’s as if these people actually think we might have sympathy for them.
As if we might think, ‘Those poor little lambs, having to play football twice a week for wealth beyond all dreams of avarice’.
As if supporters of other English clubs actually want schedulers to bend over backwards so that they might stand a better chance of advancing in Europe.
As if they give a stuff about the coefficient standings which might allow a fifth English club to play in the Champions League next season.
City, with 115 charges of financial wrongdoing hanging over them for more than a year. And Arsenal, another of the breakaway European Super League ‘snakes’. You think anyone else in England was actually cheering you on in Europe?
Do you have any idea what you sound like to real people, who know what hard work really is and whose families sustained your clubs for generations?
Yet, among football’s elite, who gives a monkey’s about match-going fans?
Take VAR, that hateful system which doesn’t even have the decency to inform match-going punters what is going on while it robs them of fantastical moments such as Victor Torp’s stolen last-minute ‘winner’ for Coventry.
It was introduced because, at elite level, football became too important, and too expensive, to rely on the drama of a referee’s instantaneous decision.
Oh, and if you’re a match-going Premier League fan worried about whether you can afford your next season ticket after another above-inflation price hike, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Fifa may soon relax rules which insist domestic matches must be played on home soil.
So, if you want to watch Wolves versus Crystal Palace live, you might have to purchase a return airfare to Los Angeles or Bangkok.
At least former Premier League chief Richard ‘Dick Dastardly’ Scudamore only advocated one round of matches being played abroad — the ‘39th game’ which would have bastardised the perfect symmetry on which league football has been based since 1888.
And then there’s Nottingham Forest, who once won back-to-back European Cups on the genius of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor but who now scattergun money on legions of signings under the ownership of Evangelos Marinakis, a lookalike of Monty Python’s gluttonous Mr Creosote.
An owner who is now issuing official statements suggesting corruption among referees.
Forest claim Stuart Attwell should not have been the VAR official for their ‘points deduction derby’ at Everton because he supports Luton, who are in the relegation zone, one place below Forest.
As if none of the many officials now employed at every Premier League match can ever have shown allegiance to any other club who may have the slightest possible interest in that fixture, for fear that they won’t have the integrity to judge it fairly.
Even though Everton were only one point ahead of Forest before kick-off and therefore Luton fans would probably have preferred a draw rather than an Everton victory.
And even though two of the three penalty claims turned down by ref Anthony Taylor and upheld by Attwell were not ‘clear and obvious’ errors, while the third needed slow-mo replays to prove that it was wrong.
Forest employ Mark Clattenburg as a referee’s analyst, who I presume pointed out Attwell’s Luton allegiance.
And a national newspaper also employs Clattenburg, who wrote a column about the decisions in the Everton-Forest match as if he might have been an unbiased expert.
It’s starting to look like banana- republic stuff. And it appears it stems from a system which has allowed any old Tom, Dick, Aristotle or human-rights-abusing hereditary monarch to buy English clubs.
Oh, and did we mention the league’s rampant hypocrisies yet?
Of players wearing rainbow laces to support LGBTQ rights while being paid by regimes which outlaw same-sex relationships.
Of a league which preaches about the environment by embracing ‘Green Football Weekend’ yet waves away Tottenham and Newcastle on a planet-bothering flight to Australia for a fixture-congestant of a post-season friendly.
And a league which gorges on the sponsorship of bookmakers. Then bans players like Ivan Toney for betting. Then hails him as a returning hero.
And decks him out in a shirt with a bookmaker’s logo.
Still, over at Fulham, you’ll soon be able to take a half-time dip in an open-air swimming pool in a new stand where season tickets cost three grand a pop.
Pricing out most of those supporters who sustained that club while it was playing in the fourth tier with Craven Cottage under threat of demolition.
And you mean to say you were actually shocked when Antony cupped his ears and taunted the little guys?
