The Significance of the Insignificant

You know, chaps, football is a funny old game and I’ve been wearing the knee length socks for far too long to have me start believing all the hype.

The experts would have you believe that this weekend has been the most crucial of the season so far. United have supposedly made the Premiership title a certainty by beating Liverpool at Anfield. I’m not so sure. Big games rarely produce big results. The key results will come in the next few weeks as United play the smaller teams they are expected to beat. That's when we might see them falter. I can't help but suspect that it’s the mid-table teams that bring title-chasing teams down and it’s victories in games like their lucky victory at Fulham last week that will eventually decide United’s fate.

We should also look for other people’s fates in odd places. If the bells aren’t tolling for the government, then the bell ringer is spitting in his hands and preparing to pull his ropes. The government is hanging on by the thickness of an injunction, but I still don’t believe that something as big as a criminal proceeding will eventually bring them down. My instincts tell me that this government will be defeated from within, by those small shifts of power than go unperceived on the surface but eventually cause huge ructions in destabilising the body. Labour’s defeat will come from one of two places; either at the ballot box when an uncharismatic party leader fails to capture the imagination of the electorate, or from the old guard reasserting the values of old Labour. The Labour Party is full of too much tension to maintain any harmony for too long.

In politics as well as football, big results are usually found in insignificant places. Perhaps I’m wrong and this government will go down in flames within the week but I feel tonight that the really significant things are usually found in the insignificant and that neither of the Premierships can be considered over.