Wembley Stadium- what a horrible mess.

Wembley Stadium - what a horrible mess.

There are times when you have to say what's on your mind. And this is it. You could hardly believe what you were seeing. It was almost as if somebody had broken into your home, taken your precious ornaments, stolen your cutlery and crockery, pinched your books and DVDs and then just for good measure, defaced your walls with the nearest available aerosol can before spraying defamatory nonsense all over your cupboards and ceilings.

On Saturday afternoon the American football teams of the Philadelphia Eagles had beaten the Jacksonville Jaguars 24-8. Nothing wrong with that perhaps. But then it suddenly occurred to you that last night Spurs, who are still borrowing Wembley Stadium because their new White Hart Lane ground has yet to complete its health and safety checks as well as the structural problems, were playing Premier League champions Manchester City at Wembley. And we all knew what that meant.

A day after the American football showpiece somebody had obviously forgotten to tell the groundsman that the Wembley pitch was in a horrible mess. In fact this was vandalism of the worst kind, a ghastly disfigurement of a pitch that English football was once so immensely proud of. Wembley had been hijacked by the graffiti experts, those revolutionary artists whose sole mission at the moment is to decorate any dull looking wall, turning it into a striking work of art.

But last night really did take the whole concept of abstract art to the lowest levels of vulgarity. For those of us who were brought up with that snooker table top green of the old Wembley in all its handsome pristiness then this was the rudest shock to our system. What on earth possessed both the Spurs and Manchester City players to even think of playing on a surface that reminded you of Billy Smart's circus before the arrival of the clowns and the trapeze acts came bouncing into the main arena?

And yet last night's match continued against that weird and bizarre backdrop of numbered markings on the pitch and the bold crest of the NFL emblazoned all over the pitch. It felt as if the whole existence of Wembley Stadium had been sacrilegiouly tampered with and just left us feeling dumbfounded. At times it must have felt that the players were being asked to endorse some very outlandish advertising campaign.

Now the truth is that we are not opposed to American football because when it comes to anything American we know exactly what they're capable of doing. Their commercial acumen, their sophisticated production values and their attractive presentation of all of those big match sporting events have never been in any question whatsoever.

But the point to be made here is that this was an English football Premier League match and not football of the gridiron variety. There were no helmets to be seen last night, none of those thick padded shirts with equally as thick socks and there were no touchdowns. To the best of my knowledge there were no cheerleaders waving their pom poms or players throwing the ball to the farthest corners of the pitch, frantically running into each other at top speed.

For one night only though English football seemed to share the same stage with an American sport which, although equally as traditional as its counterpart, didn't seem to have the same impact in an English sporting context. It appeared as if a collision of sporting cultures didn't quite fit in with each other. To those of us in Britain, American football looks both complicated and intense, a constantly fast moving sport which never seems to pause for breath. Of course it has its dramas and melodramas, its fiery passions and red blooded tempers. But for long periods it just bordered on the farcical, the ridiculous and the unrecognisable.

On behalf of my American readers it should be pointed out that American football still looks marvellously exhilarating, genuinely exciting and never less than gripping. It is what America does best and will always do best. This is quintessentially American, viscerally American, symptomatic of  what the Americans do at the weekend or any day of the week. It is the sport they instill into their youngsters when they're old enough to appreciate it, the sport where father and son rush over to Central Park and play until midnight or until such time as the park closes.

Last night American football seemed to gatecrash English football without any invitation. All over Wembley was sufficient evidence that two sports were getting in each other's way. We all know about the fertile imagination of Banksy, that brilliant graffiti practitioner who scrawls his surrealistic drawings on any surface and then conveniently drops into obscurity when somebody mentions his name.

To any impartial observer it all looked very strange and incomprehensible. For a moment you thought of the old days and the old players for whom last night would have represented a crime against humanity. What  would those saintly, cigarette card heroes such as Tom Finney, Len Shackleton, Dixie Dean, Stanley Matthews, Stan Mortensen, Bobby Charlton, Len Shackleton and Bobby Moore have thought of it all? You can only imagine that it would have felt like a gross invasion of their privacy. How dare they break into our home and scribble terrible profanities all over our home?

Besides, this was our game of English football and nobody gave you permission to raid, loot and pillage everything we once so held dear. And yet by the end of the evening it must have felt as if this huge charade of a football match would never finish. Of course all of the Spurs and Manchester City looked to be taking it in their stride without any visible effect on them. In the end though you were still left with the abiding impression that the circus had indeed come to town, the fairground had left and for one night only, a unique phenomena had just taken place.

So for those of you who may be reading this in those wonderful states and cities of the USA this is not the ferocious rant against American football that it might seem. But some of us were still bemused and speechless at the spectacle that both Spurs and Manchester City had been part of. Of course American football or indeed baseball has a place in any sporting environment. For long periods of the Spurs and Manchester City game though, it seemed as if the Philadelphia Eagles and Jacksonville Jaguars were still playing each other before realising at once that they, quite clearly, weren't.

So it was that the seemingly unstoppable Manchester City claimed yet another victory against a Spurs side who may yet feature prominently in the race for the top four without quite being able to dredge up the energy to win the Premier League. The truth was though the home of English football must  still have been of the opinion that somebody, albeit briefly, had taken away its identity and mislaid it. But America- you'll always be our friends and closest allies and that's a cast iron certainty.