SORE HEADS, FULL HEARTS, CAN’T LOSE
With the Arsenal Fun Boat having finally docked at its destination on Tuesday after a 22-year voyage, attention on Wednesday turned to Aston Villa’s Crazy Train as its passengers alighted in Istanbul. Having passed away last summer, Ozzy Osbourne, whose famous anthem serves as Villa’s walk-on music, was not present to see his team lift Bigger Vase but the ease with which they strolled to victory would certainly have met with his approval. In spanking three goals without reply past Freiberg, Unai Emery’s side ended a trophy drought that stretched back 30 years and for their Spanish manager it marked a fifth success in the competition with three different teams. It is a state of affairs rendered all the more remarkable by the weird quirk that each of them has ‘villa’ in their names.
“The king set the gameplan out for us,” said Matty Cash in the game’s aftermath, apparently oblivious to the fact that a certain celebrity Villa fan who was present is only heir to the throne. Truth be told, in a contest that was cagey for 30 minutes but more or less over as a contest by half-time, Freiburg didn’t take a great deal of beating but were still in the contest until they conceded two worldies. “Right now, there is no happiness,” sighed Freiberg’s head coach, Julian Schuster. “We lost a final. That hurts. I said before the game, we came into this believing we could win. For 40 minutes we did well and then it changed.” Having arrived in Istanbul hoping to win the first trophy in their history, Freiburg can console themselves with the knowledge that they were beaten by a Premier League outfit whose wage bill is significantly larger than theirs.
While Scotland’s manager, Steve Clarke, may have clutched his pearls at the sight of John McGinn practising celebratory post-match knee-slides with his young nephews , Emery was happy to let his hair down, in so far as any man can when their hair is slicked back and cemented with a high-gloss pomade. Reluctantly paraded before ecstatic fans on the shoulders of Emi Martínez at full time, the 54-year-old was otherwise a study in humility and predicted that for Villa, this is just a platform on which to build. “It’s really something fantastic,” he said. “My dream when I arrived here was to play in Europe and play for trophies. This is the first one we are achieving and it confirms how we are progressing.”
With Bigger Vase won and Bigger Cup qualification secured, Villa’s campaign is all but over, but they still have one Premier League match to play. Should they lose at Manchester City on Sunday, there’s a very real chance the Big Cup qualification door could be kicked down by unlikely candidates Bournemouth or Brighton on the season’s final day. But if both seaside clubs are hoping Villa might do them a favour by adjourning to the metaphorical beach, they hadn’t counted on the self-discipline of Emery’s team. “I’m going to party for the next however long, the next couple of days,” a bleary-eyed Cash told reporters before an early-morning fight back to Birmingham, where a victory parade awaits. Simply getting his players out of bed and on to the Etihad pitch in time for kick-off may be the height of Villa’s short-term ambition before potentially greater days ahead.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It was their moment to be together, watch it themselves and just see what the outcome would be. I went home, went outside to the garden, started to build some fire and started to do some barbecue. I didn’t watch any of it. I was just hearing noises in the background and the living room. Then the magic happened. My oldest son opened the garden door, ran towards me, started to cry, gave me a hug and said: ‘We’re champions, Daddy’” – Mikel Arteta: elite Arsenal manager, affectionate father and apparently keen not to steal the limelight in victory. Why, then, does this story rankle?
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
“Regarding songs to play during VAR decisions (Football Daily letters passim) how about Rise by Public Image Ltd, featuring the oft repeated line: ‘I could be wrong I could be right’?” – Adrian Bradshaw.
“Why stop with VAR music to fill dead spots in games? Imagine, the next time a player goes down, hearing that memorable opening line from Johnny Cash, “I hear the trainer coming!” What? Oh” – John Nielsen-Gammon.
“A doff of the cap to the great Unai Emery, who won the Uefa Emery League yet again last night but also achieved a rare, unprecedented double this season as he also got promotion to Primera Federación, the third tier of Spanish football, in April with Real Union, which he has been the owner of since 2021 (his father and grandfather used to play for them)“ – Noble Francis
“Re Steve McClaren and his new role at Rotherham (Football Daily passim, full email edition), do you think he thought it was Rotterdam and he got confused by the accent?” – Dan J Levy.
If you have any, please send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s prizeless letter o’ the day winner is … John Nielsen-Gammon. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we run them, are here.
SAINTS SINNING
Southampton’s appeal against their expulsion from the Championship playoffs for spying on a Middlesbrough training session has been dismissed by an English Football League arbitration panel. The EFL reached their decision despite Saints providing footage of their training sessions to the independent disciplinary commission to try to prove they gained no material advantage from the Spygate saga. But it’s Boro that are now scheduled to meet Hull City in Saturday’s final, although several clubs are now exploring whether they deserve a slice of the £200m promotion pie. Wrexham (who finished seventh) and Millwall – dumped out of the playoffs by Hull – have asked legal eagles to peruse the EFL rulebook in the hope of getting the whole thing replayed. Hull are in the final, but don’t assume they’re satisfied: their owner, Acun Ilicali, wants the Tigers sent straight up instead. Where will it all end? Probably not at Wembley, we fear.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Wrap your ears around the latest episode of Football Weekly, in which Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Archie Rhind-Tutt, Lars Sivertsen and Dan Bardell discuss Villa’s Bigger Vase success and the Premier League relegation battle.
RECOMMENDED SUBSCRIBING
Sign up for The Recap, our weekly roundup of editors’ picks, featuring highlights from our sport coverage over the past seven days and delivered to your inboxes first thing every Sunday morning. Don’t miss it.
MOVING THE GOALPOSTS
Our sister email’s latest edition is out now, and focuses on how a Canadian musician became the owner of Dumbarton FC Women and his radical plans at the Rock.
NEWS, BITS AND BOBS
Europe’s larger nations will no longer face mismatches against minnows in men’s World Cup and Euros qualifying, after Uefa agreed a new format designed to produce more competitive fixtures.
The UK Football Policing Unit will send only three officers to this summer’s Geopolitics World Cup after failing to secure extra funding from US authorities, despite expecting as many as 15,000 England fans at each group fixture.
Bournemouth are racing to complete upgrades to the Vitality Stadium to enable it to stage European football next season.
New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has announced that 1,000 tickets of GWC tickets – NYC population 8.8 million – will be made available to residents of the five boroughs at $50 per ticket.
And Bayern Munich’s Manuel Neuer, 78, has come out of international retirement after being named as the starting goalkeeper in Germany’s World Cup squad.
STILL WANT MORE?
While there is no denying the magnitude of Pep Guardiola’s achievements at Manchester City, his legacy is also tied to politics, propaganda and hard power. Barney Ronay on the complex man who won it all.
Ben Fisher enjoyed Villa’s Bigger Vase celebrations including royal ribbing and ski goggles on the team bus. Meanwhile, Jonathan Wilson hands Unai Emery his flowers and looks at what’s next.
As Arsenal fans’ title party rolls on, Rob Draper gives an ode to Mikel Arteta while the boffins at Opta crunched 10 numbers that led to their title win.
Could we see a new name on the Geopolitics World Cup trophy this summer? Jeff Rueter goes through the contenders, from Erling Haaland’s Norway to Cristiano Ronaldo’s Bruno Fernandes’s Portugal.
And a GWC that does not rip off fans? Not possible. Oh, what’s that? Price-gouging is actually a choice and some cities aren’t following the trend. Leander Schaerlaeckens tells us more.
Despite all this, if you’re excited about the GWC we want to hear from you.
MEMORY LANE
Wolfsburg play Paderborn in the first leg of a promotion-relegation playoff tonight, so let’s look back to better times. Back in April 2009, Grafite made mugs of the entire Bayern Munich defence with a superb solo run and backheel finish, the highlight of a 5-1 win that propelled them to the Bundesliga title.
