Larry Ryan: Watch out - there's food for thought in sporting failure

You can nearly hear Hugo say it in Roy Keane’s voice. Finalist! FINALIST!

“As magnificent as the watch is, I have never worn it,” writes Hugo. “I would have preferred there to be nothing on it. With an engraving like that, Levy couldn’t have been surprised if we had been 1–0 down after a couple of minutes: so it was written.” 

As it happened, Spurs tested the precision of their new timepieces by staying in the game for around 24 seconds.

Hugo’s book looks promising. Elsewhere he nails the conceit of fly on the wall documentaries, the nonsense that they capture any sort of reality.

“When the film crew placed little microphones on some of the canteen tables, we went and sat at other ones. We had to be careful all the time. The only place where we could speak freely was the training dressing room – we’d got them to agree that it would remain out of bounds.” 

But it will probably be remembered for the watches, which may one day rank alongside Liverpool’s 1996 white suits in the folklore of final failure.

That gaudy Armani clobber did a lot of heavy lifting as a symbol of excess and complacency and unwarranted celebrity. Jamie Carragher unpacked it: “We’d picked up the bad habits Alex Ferguson had successfully rooted out of Old Trafford.

"In the 1980s, it was Liverpool led by a working-class Scot who won the League most years while the brash, arrogant upstarts from Manchester consistently failed to live up to their pre-season promises under Ron Atkinson. Now it was United acting like the old Liverpool while our lads were behaving like those flash United players we used to hate.” 

Symbols are seductive. We love an easy explanation. A shorthand. A meme that defines everything. 

Donald Trump raising a defiant fist after the Pennsylvania shooting won the election. Poor Steve McClaren’s umbrella kept him dry but showered him in perceptions of weakness and self-preservation and mistaken priorities. 

Complacent Arsenal wore ‘50 not out’ t-shirts under their jerseys the day Manchester United returned them to vincibility. The existence of five-in-a-row t-shirts did more to sink Kerry than Seamus Darby. Distracted Kilkenny botched their drive for five because of big crowds at training. 

Playstations were once responsible for every long aimless ball in English and Irish football. Ten Hag was unfortunate to have a living, breathing, needlessly spinning symbol of all his failures, in Antony.

There may be something in watches, though, so visible and at hand. The sports psychologists like writing on wrists for a reason. Roy Keane traced United’s own lapse in standards and priorities following the 1999 treble in watches.

“Rolex watches, garages full of cars, mansions, set up for life - then forgot about the game and lost the hunger that got you the Rolex, the cars and the mansion.” 

Maybe it was just that Keane could recall when his own hunger could be measured in wistful gazes through a jeweler’s window. Alan McLoughlin once lent him €1,200 to buy a Rolex on international duty, when Roy was on a pittance at Forest. When it got nicked from his hotel room, Roy still had installments to pay.

Not long after, Keane accidentally paid 11 grand he still couldn’t afford for another Rolex, out shopping with Lee Sharpe. Naturally, Roy had to take it, to save face. But he probably spent the next few months earning it.

Watches aside, Roy can take credit for coining another of the enduring sporting symbols of the age, elevating prawn sandwiches from dubious snack choice to parable of excess, distraction and corporate indulgence.

Roy’s cheese sandwiches shouldn’t be forgotten either. It’s concerning to see nobody yet cast as Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink in upcoming blockbuster Saipan, because of course the roots of that 2002 dustup over FAI incompetence are in Amsterdam 2000, when Mick McCarthy’s team weren’t served the food Keane expected the night before the qualifier with the Netherlands, producing the immortal line: “Do you think Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink is eating fucking cheese sandwiches?” 

Cheese sandwiches and later isotonic drinks - or the lack thereof - took over as symbols of Irish football dismay from the humble plate of fish and chips.

It was fish and chips that finished Big Jack, after he brought the squad to Harry Ramsden’s the night before a Euro 96 qualifier at home to Austria, where some of them allegedly took on ‘Harry’s Challenge’.

“Being honest, the Harry Ramsden Challenge marked the end,” wrote Paul McGrath. That they were in an imported chipper chain at all marked the transition from innocent exuberance to bloated boom.

“Gary Kelly took the Harry Ramsden’s Challenge and ate a fish about a yard long and a mountain of chips and anything else they challenged him with,” explained Niall Quinn. “He thought there’s be a certificate but he got a free desert instead, which he duly ate.

“Sometimes you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It was all over for Jack.” 

Roy Keane wasn’t available for that fixture, but his verdict was written too.

"Yes, Austria won 3-1. Some of the lads reported that their legs ‘went’ 20 minutes from the end. F**ked. But they’d passed Harry’s Challenge."