It’s that time of the year again — ie, the wrong time. The Professional Footballers’ Association hands out its coveted awards before the season has finished — indeed, while most of the campaign’s critical outcomes have yet to be decided.
There are decent logistical reasons for this. If it waited until afterwards, everyone involved would have gone on holiday and Jeff Stelling would be in front of an empty hotel ballroom in London saying: “Unfortunately, the entire game can’t be with us tonight.”
To guarantee a quorum, in that circumstance, it would have to be held in Faliraki. The lower-league bits, anyway. The Premier League awards would probably need to be in Dubai.
Still, it does seem a shame. For all we know, Steven Gerrard may be about to have the fortnight of his life, super-humanly pulling out every stop to ensure Liverpool an unforeseen, last-gasp Champions League place and a startling triumph in the Europa League — and it still won’t be enough to earn him a place in the PFA Premier League Team of the Season ahead of Cesc Fàbregas. Or what if Frank Lampard adds five more goals and the Double to the 24 he has scored in a remarkable year of box-to-box performances? Sorry, Frank. They judged it early again. And Darren Fletcher got your slot.
It’s this premature aspect that stands between the PFA Awards night and full and formal acceptance within the culture as “football’s Academy Awards”. After all, films that receive Oscars tend to have been seen in cinemas, complete with their endings. The football season, by contrast, is still in production and could yet be made or ruined in the cut.
Otherwise, the parallels between Hollywood’s globally scrutinised prize-giving and English football’s night of a thousand stars, plus Patrick Kisnorbo, of Leeds United, are obvious and plentiful. For starters, both ceremonies take place in the spiritual home of their respective businesses — Los Angeles, in the film industry’s case, and a swanky hotel in Mayfair, Central London, in the case of football. You can’t get closer to the beating heart of football in 2010, surely, than under chandeliers the size of tractors at the Grosvenor.
And, similarly, both events are a fashion story, as much as anything else, with the world of couture waiting eagerly to see what the evening’s leading figures are wearing. In this area we can report — amid the football community, at any rate — a surge back towards the restraint and security of the traditional black tie. In recent years there had been a concerted breakaway from bow ties and towards cravats, with greys and even bright lilacs and sunny yellows dominating, and with, in tandem, a broad and slightly disquieting nonchalance about looking a total, preening ninny.
This year, though, it was very much back to basics, night attire-wise, certainly among the evening’s big winners, Wayne Rooney and James Milner. In this, the evening may well have been bearing the gloomy imprint of the recession. Remember that this is a night for players across all four of the English professional leagues. Some of those players are on only £4,000 a week, or even less.
Rooney, of course, won Player of the Year and he was able to reassure the room, during his acceptance speech, that he hopes to recover from injury and play a role in the most important part of it. Actually, make that “acceptance interview” rather than “acceptance speech”, the PFA having long since eliminated any potential out-of-comfort-zone awkwardness by getting Stelling to tee up a few questions on the podium.
Fair enough, I suppose, although if you don’t want to see Rooney burst like an overfilled gutter and cry out, in the manner of Sally Field, “You like me, you really like me”, I politely suggest you’re not really interested in football awards ceremonies.
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