Juventus match proved football is barking

Des Lynam may be widely considered to be in decline, but he was spot on last night. Des thought he could hear a dog barking during ITV's first-half coverage of the Juventus-Arsenal clash and he was absolutely right.

In the second half, the dog was virtually the only voice to be heard.

The crowd in the massive stadium - all Italian stadia are a massive rebuke to Wembley's silent twin towers - was 7,470, not including canines. This figure was fortunately augmented by a sizeable band of Israeli fans, en route to watch Hapoel Tel Aviv play AC Milan, and a bunch of British skiers, possibly hoping to pick up a discarded medal somewhere in the Alps.

Otherwise, the total could quite easily have been accounted for by the more enthusiastic mums and dads of the Juventus reserves on view. In other words, this was not a hot ticket.

There have been rumblings over the financial future of football. Television companies have belatedly realised that their greed and the need of fans to watch games that are of degraded significance is not compatible. Here, it was possible to watch the big money draining out of the game.

Admittedly, this match was a special case. The complex mathematics which govern the Champions League had put the game beyond the realms of mere football before the opening whistle. Everything depended on a match taking place 600 miles away.

This was football played according to the rules of 'Alice Through the Looking Glass': the winners are not necessarily the winners, and neither are the losers condemned to losing.

Only the spectators had been guaranteed an unsatisfactory outcome and they had voted with their bottoms way before the start.