Down at the PFA

Imagine the scene. Somewhere in a Surrey 'gated community' (we can discuss the contradictory nature of that phrase some other time). The house is littered with Xboxes, Bentley keys, modelling agency directories (some entries ticked off and marked with ungallant comments), diamond-encrusted watches, cufflinks and belt buckles, hair products and decorative women.

Welcome to the headquarters of the Professional Footballers' Association.

Seated at the table facing a conference phone are several aristocrats of the game: Luis Suarez, John Terry, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez and several other gentlemen of impeccable reputation. They are gathered together to address a disgraceful episode in the game's history.

The telephone is answered. A deep, graceful voice reverberates around the room.

'Good morning. Reginald D Hunter at your service. How may I help you?'
'Hola, Reg. Is Luis here. Luis Suarez. I've got John, Carlos and Wayne here too'
'Hey Luis! What can I do for you guys?
'Well, Reg, we're, well, a little bit upset about your act last night at the PFA dinner.
'Oh yeah? You folks objected to my gags about your taxes and failure to operate the channels in the final third of the game?'
'Not really, Mr Hunter. It's just that all those uses of the 'n-word' really offended me as a modern cosmopolitan role model. I know John here agrees with me 110%'.
'Facking right I do! You should have seen the expression on my Chevy when I heard that stuff. There's no place for filth like that in the modern game, me old China'.
'Yeah, an' all that language la' - bang out of order. Me mam and Colleen might have been watchin' We've gorra reputation to protect la' '.
'An Reg-in-ald. We are muy unhappy about your fee for last night. That much dinero for 45 minutes. We want the money back and the phone number of your agent. Comprende?
'Luis?'
'¿Si, Reg?
'Bite me'.

And with that, the phone goes dead.

The Zipless F…ootball game

I like quite a few sports. Fencing, GAA, soccer, ice hockey, darts, cricket, snooker, kabbadi, rugby league, handball… anything combining speed, skill and violence (though I'll accept that snooker's violence is more on the psychological level rather than the baize).

But I'm becoming utterly fatigued by major sport. It's too relentless. I'm not allowed to forget about soccer for the summer: the off-season months are filled with speculation, transfer rumours, meaningless tournaments and marketing opportunities. Other sports are becoming cheapened in the pursuit of more of your money: Rugby League's teams all acquired stupid names like the Stoke Silverfish or Essex Ebola Viruses. Cricket's been infested with 20/20, which is essentially the crystal meth compared with the real thing's complex smoky Islay malt. Formula 1 is, to me, the essence of non-sport: high-speed advertising with added pollution and no possibility for the fans to get anywhere near participating other than buying similarly advertising-festooned clothing. And don't get me started on the Red Bull Air Race. Not a sport. Just a promotional device in search of an audience.

Most of all, I hate the portability of sport. All the rich sports are now playable anywhere without regard for origins or audience. Take American Football. Like baseball, it's long been confined to continental North America, with outposts in countries American troops have occupied, like Japan. This weekend, Navy are playing Notre Dame in… Dublin. That's right, the capital of Ireland. The home of hurling and football (Gaelic), of Lansdowne Road for the rugby fans and even of a couple of soccer teams. But not, historically, a hotbed of American Football.

Who's going to be in the stands? Americans. 35,000 of them flying in from, well, America to watch some other Americans play American football. Why? It's a promotional gimmick. No doubt the NFL and College organisations think (wrongly) that they might spark interest in the 'sport', but mostly it's a cynical - and very clever - Irish gimmick: get the Yanks over, stuff them full of Guinness and blarney, unearth a few ancestors and hope they invest in the country, or at least come on holiday again. You can locate the cultural level of this event simply by glancing at the billing. It's the Emerald Isle Classic. Three words to make you vomit: the sickening sentiment of 'Emerald Isle' which takes us back to the 19th century, and the arrogant appropriation of the word 'classic'. Surely it's up to the fans to decide afterwards whether or not the game was a 'classic'?

This isn't sport. Sports have origins, histories and obsessive fans who passionately support one side or the other for sometimes very tenuous reasons like geographical accident. How will any stray Irish spectators decide between Navy or Notre Dame? Perhaps Notre Dame's Catholic origins and 'Fighting Irish' nickname will sway them, but it's a bit weak. Despite my personal opinion that American Football shares all the excitement of a prostate exam, I can't help feeling sorry for the sport and its fans. Thousands of Americans are having their support hijacked to generate cash for hoteliers and unscrupulous ticket agents, while their beloved sport is rendered meaningless. It's a sham. It's a commodity: the game's on because those teams took the cash. If the organisers had been able to get a couple of boxers, Premiership soccer teams, Aussie Rules sides or top canoeists, they'd have done so if the money was right.

Rather than the visceral physical and emotional experience of seeing a meaningful match of interest only to the teams and their supporters, this kind of peripatetic mega-even takes on both more and less significance. The purely local, Navy v Notre Dame, may have history and purpose within the sport's structure. Perhaps there's a long-standing rivalry there - but in Ireland, this weekend, that's entirely meaningless. The game is the equivalent of a UFO landing, addressing a couple of trees and leaving in a huff - there's no attempt to add American Football to the Irish sporting landscape in any permanent way: even the 'garrison' sports of soccer and rugby made more effort than this.

The game 'means' nothing culturally, and yet everything economically and politically. It announces that Ireland is open to the world (e.g. it has hotels up to American standards and doesn't ask too many questions about taxation and employment laws), and that American Football is similarly 'global', despite the evidence that it really, really isn't. The event's little different from hosting the International Convention of Sanitary Engineers, underneath the glitter and hype.

What does the match say to American Football fans? It tells them that their participation is merely ancillary. They can come along for the ride, but the game itself is simply a tool in a global PR exercise. And for Irish sports fans? It rejects their own sporting affiliations and histories. It prostitutes itself to them by assuming that fandom is easily transferable between sports and countries and cultures. Forget that fact that GAA is played by battered amateurs who'll be teaching, or roofing or selling insurance back in their home counties on Monday morning, and watch multimillionaire drugged-up freaks smash each other to pieces before variously spending their downtime raping, murdering, endorsing products or organising dogfights.

I don't really have any objection to the game itself - it's got a history and a genuine fanbase. My objection is to the way all of this is ignored in the pursuit of other goals, largely capitalist globalisation. To be of any use, the sport has to be stripped of meaning, made shiny and smooth, tamed for TV and made available to advertisers and sponsors - mostly be removing what makes it unique and replacing these features with other narratives entirely. This applies equally to the 'Ireland' visible to the visiting fans: not a living, breathing, complicated place with a culture of its own, but a plastic stew of ancestors, golf, Celticism, leprechauns and romance (and for businessmen, a Romantic fairyland of low corporate taxes).

This game is the equivalent of Erica Jong's 'zipless fuck', the no-strings, emotion-free encounter which appeared (wrongly) to be the high point of women's liberation. 'Come on in', it says. 'Pick a side, any side, and Bingo! You're a Football Fan'.

Sport - like any cultural activity - shouldn't be this easy. If it is, you're being sold a pup.

Lookalikes Monday: Football Special

He's the grim-faced, inscrutable leader of a dwindling tribe dedicated to a dead-end goal amidst an inhospitable, ruined wasteland.

No no, not the Easter Island statues. 

Steve Kean, hapless Blackburn Rovers manager

or at Ben's suggestion, Mick McCarthy:

Lessons from history

While my students settle down to a task, I'll just point this out (thanks to Em):

Ireland beat the Soviet Union too. Singlehanded. That was the beginning of the end for them. Beating Estonia 5-1 on aggregate was child's play. Well done to England for beating Sweden for the first time in 43 years too. 

We must all tighten our belts

This is the Labour Party's Shadow Chancellor (even more ironically, his name is Ed Balls). Insert your own witticism here:

Top tips for student success

1. Everything is more complicated than it looks at first glance.
2. Everything is more interesting than it looks at first glance.

If you accept these two maxims, you'll thrive, because you'll find that the hard things are also the most rewarding. There are quick wins, but they won't get you far. The stuff you struggle with is likely to be the most important: but if you learn to enjoy working at it, you'll succeed.

I've been trying - an annual event here - to think of new ways to explain poetry, metre, verse and scansion.

This year's analogy is soccer, and the offside rule. Here goes:
Sports have rules and if you play, you have to accept this.
If you stick rigidly to the rules, you'll be OK, but you won't be great.
If you ignore the rules, nobody will play with you.
If you understand the offside rule, you can bend it in creative ways, which might lead to the rules being changed.

Take the sonnet: 14 lines about love in three quatrains plus a final rhyming couplet which contains the kiss-off, in iambic pentameter. You could do that in your sleep. Count the syllables, makes sure the last syllable rhymes with the right previous one, off you go. There's even a 'How To Write A Sonnet For Dummies'. Just like sport: I could read about goals, pitch size, offside and throw-ins on Wikipedia, then head down to the park to give it a go. I'd be rubbish. My version of soccer would be as awful as the poetry attempted by the Dummies' Guide reader. Silky skills, ambition and audacious moves aren't mentioned.

Poetry, like football, becomes beautiful when the rules are bent and outrageous variations are attempted. You can spot the dull stuff: it sticks to the rules and says nothing new. I won't insult anyone by posting their sonnet, but you can tell that it ran out of steam in a big way by reading Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 130'. He's bored. He's fed up with the equivalent of birthday-card poem sentiments and the same tired old clichés. It's too familiar to adequately express love - it's become an exercise rather than an evocation of passion - it's boring boring Arsenal all over again:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Likewise Edna St. Vincent Millay, who takes issue with the sonnet's assumption that men are active and women are the passive recipients of love and poetry,

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
and its denial of our fickle natures:

and with the sonnet's high-flown romantic notions.

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

It's a sonnet, but it's more than the basic rules: it's a new twist which grows from the rules but does something better with them. It's Rory Delap's long throw.

Free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last

I don't know if you care about or have been following the shenanigans at FIFA (sharp businessmen + sport + £billions = corruption!!!!!), but it's fascinating. I'm involved with my sport's governing body as it tries to modernise from amateurish snobby incompetence to professional outfit, so I can see some of the pressure points.

What's wonderful about FIFA is the pantomime villain quality of these people: they've turned their organisation (like the IOC, run for decades by actual card-carrying Fascists) into a cash cow protected from corruption enquiries, tax authorities and justice (gotta love the Swiss), and they still acting like they're the victims.


Hence Sepp Blatter's plaintive cry in his re-election speech today (unopposed, his opponents having been less subtle than him with the suitcases of cash):

""Football belongs to everyone and we are in charge. I have found my voice again. If you agree with me, say it!"

It brings to mind images of poor Mr. Blatter bound and gagged in the cellar of his Zurich eyrie, eyes rolling as his opponents drag trolleys of gold bullion towards waiting trucks before making a fast getaway. You wouldn't think he's been there since 1975, and President since 1998…

What a rotten bunch. And talking of rotten football records:

He shoots, he scores

My good friend Gary has been clearing out his loft and sent me all the early 1970s football magazines with big features on mighty Stoke City. Happy days - we won something in 1972, a mere three years before I was born…

Smith helped us to the 1972 win, and was in the Guinness Book of Records for the most injuries (including 5 broken legs). He never did play for England, but did manage a lot of teams.

Didi was right: the Dutch beat them 2-0 in a violent semi-final.

The great John Ritchie. Stoke's top scorer for many years in a row. His 171 goals have never been rivalled.

In March 1974, after a row with Southampton's Peter Osgood who criticised Ritchie's heading ability, the striker completed his hat-trick against the Saints by dribbling around keeper Eric Martin, stopping the ball on the line and kneeling to head it over!

Finding poetry in unlikely places

There's a branch of poetry known as 'found' poetry (like found art), in which texts crop up in unexpected places and are recognised as poetry rather than written with poetic intent. One such example is The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld: some bright spark realised that the way America's Darth Vader spoke - gnomic, highly metaphorical, rhythmically structured - is poetic, and published his speeches divided into verse, and also set some of them to music. That link includes some clips of the songs.

I found some poetry yesterday, while searching BBC's Ceefax for a fix of hot Stoke City news. I think it works:

To me, it reads like Ezra Pound or H. D. had developed an interest in football. 

Grandma's birthday joy

I think my gran enjoyed the bits of her 98th birthday she was conscious for. OK, she didn't know me or my mother (who cares for her 24 hours per day), but she seemed happy.

I'm sure she's really looking forward to her present from me: a Manchester United football training day. She was trying out her bicycle kicks only last night - success rate hovering around the 70% mark, I reckon. She'd certainly give Owen Hargreaves competition for his coveted 2nd reserve team spot, and she's only slightly older than Giggs.

Talking of football - not a bad weekend for the Potters. Man U weren't too convincing in their 1-0 victory over non-league Crawley!

He shoots, he scores

My friends, I can't express how much fun it was to watch Stoke City play Wolverhampton Wanderers in the FA Cup yesterday. Emma and I wandered along, had a beer beforehand, and took our seats next to a man who deserves a big medal for not managing to say anything positive about his team for the entire 89 minutes (he left before full time).

Good things about the Wolves ground: excellent cheese and potato pie. And the toilets. I knew things had moved on from the days when fans would just pee onto the terrace until a pleasing yellow waterfall effect was achieved, but I was stunned by the space, cleanliness and all-round sparkle of the men's loos.

The same could not be said of the first half of the match. Stoke were totally dominant in the set-pieces, while Wolves seemed better in the open play, though they did massively prefer to pass the ball back rather than try to score goals. That said, they did have the majority of the (few) chances in the first half. I politely applauded each competent Wolves move and tried not to openly eat oatcakes and throw pots.

The second half was loads better - both managers had obviously given their players the hairdryer treatment. The quality wasn't entirely apparent, but the effort was. Wolves had several threatening runs, but no finishing quality. Then late on, Stoke's Robert Huth (he's roughly 4 times my height) rose to meet a corner and headed in a great goal, which I was forced to acknowledge with a rueful shake of the head rather than a 'proper mental', which the Stoke fans opposite me did indulge in.

They were in good form - 4000 of them and only 7000 Wolves fans. 'Delilah' rang out many times, whereas the Wolves fans only managed 'We're the boys from the Black Country' once, preferring to sing 'Boring' at Rory Delap's wondrous long throws and 'You Fat Bastard' at Stoke's goalie, Thomas Sorensen. I thought that was a bit cheeky: fans from officially Britain's fattest region singing that to a lean professional athlete. Funny though.

The last few minutes were - in Alex Ferguson's words - 'squeaky-bum time': frenetic attacks from Wolves, one needing a fantastic save from Sorensen. I thought I was going to have  a heart attack when Wolves were awarded a penalty - nobody saves those - but Sorensen did, and the Wolves fans started to stream out of the ground.

Not a classic match, but a decent one, and a brilliant afternoon out. Here's a professional's report.

Another dull weekend…

I have a huge amount of work to do this weekend: writing lectures and planning seminars. However, I'm finding time to do a few pleasant things:

Rally for Jobs and Education in Manchester: meet outside the Museum on Oxford Road, 10.30 a.m. It'll be boringly tame, but it's important to remind the government that we've neither forgiven nor forgotten. Come along! There's a big one planned for London as well which might be a little more interesting.

Then it's off to see Richard Thompson play a gig in Warwick: he's the backbone of Britain's folk movement. I've seen him a few times and always enjoyed it. Here's June Tabor singing 'Out of Winter' and then Thompson's 'Waltzing's for Dreamers', one of my favourite songs.



Finally, Sunday lunchtime sees Emma and I off to watch Wolves v. Stoke in a cup match. Unfortunately, we could only get tickets in the Wolves end, so I'm going to have to keep my mouth shut as Tuncay smashes his eighth goal past a static Wolves goalie. Alternatively, they could win. I just don't know.

Talking football

Anyone else bored by Match of the Day? Four multimillionaire golfers with - as Stan Collymore put it - 'a passing interest in football' competing to be the most bland, and always leaving the Stoke City match until the very end.

Here's that naughty man Cassette Boy with the antidote.

All's Well That Ends Well?

What a surprise. The British media have been utterly hysterical about spud-faced nipper Wayne Rooney's supposed departure from the Manchester United team. Indeed, my Man U-supporting chum Emma came out with an appalling stream of invective aimed at out-of-form whore-buying Rooney yesterday.

Now it turns out that Rooney's petulance and the manager's heart-broken press conference were all just performances designed to extract the maximum cash from the heavily-indebted corporation that masquerades as a football club.

Wayne Rooney has made a shock u-turn and agreed a new five-year contract at Manchester United just days after announcing his intention to leave.

Congratulations to both sides: they realised that the British media are so desperate for material to fill the acres/hours of space that they could be played like a finely-tuned organ. As an example of how to negotiate in public, both sides played a blinder, though I'd give the nod to Rooney as the winner on points for demonstrating his importance to the team and making Alex Ferguson look like a broken old man. Never before has a player managed to beat him in the mind games: Ferguson usually tosses them aside without a backward glance.

I look forward to Emma's claim of amnesia…

ha ha ha ha ha

OK, Ireland only managed a draw with Slovakia, but England not managing even a goal against Montenegro? That's pretty miserable.

Northern Ireland drawing with the Faeroes seems fair enough - though it implies that Italy will manage the same result too - Wales got their usual drubbing, and Scotland should be fairly pleased to narrowly lose to the World Cup holders. At least the match wasn't called off, like Serbia-Italy…

What a weird footballing night it was.

Shall we move on from football?

Seriously, perhaps it's time to collectively decide to support an different game.

Most of the top players are repellent creatures, jumping from prostitute to prostitute in between greedy deals with dubious agents. Occasionally they break off from negotiations to record tasteless and grasping advertisements. Every so often they might play a game of football if their media appearances allow.

The club owners, when they aren't porn barons, are evil corporate entities with no interest in the game or the communities which founded and nurtured the clubs for generations.

Ticket prices are becoming ridiculous, and watching on pay-TV is prohibitively expensive too. Being a supporter is now little more than acting as a piggy bank, one with no right to express an opinion and no respect from clubs, players or the media.

Managers are becoming monsters, yet are afforded slavish respect by people posing as journalists on more and more pages of the newspapers. TV commentating is reserved for the partisan, the boring and the smug.

Most of the clubs are effectively, or nearly, bankrupt. They're operating on the same economic model as all the investment banks which have recently destroyed our economies. Some of them (Liverpool, Manchester and others) are in debt because they owe their owners the money said owners borrowed to buy said club. Eh?

FIFA is corrupt from top to bottom: both the individuals running the game and the organisation itself (World Cup profit $1.7bn, tax free: money spent on developing football in Africa: $70m: new FIFA offices: $200m).

So - to which sport shall we turn? I'm quite keen on fencing, but if it's violent, fast outside sport you want, how about (Gaelic) football, Hurling (both massive in Ireland and still amateur), or Aussie Rules?







In sum, the game's rotten to the core, especially at the top level.

Knee-jerk politics

Forget the pointless briefing and sniping which passes for political rivalry in the UK. We need Bolivian-style political retribution.

More specifically, the Bolivian President, Evo Morales, was playing a football match against a team of political rivals. When one lunged in with a late tackle and gashed his leg, Evo retaliated with a knee to the groin.

Morales, 50, a former Aymara llama herder and coca farmer, is not known for indulging critics, let alone people who foul him. He walked up to Cartagena, indicated his wound, then kneed him in the groin. The player collapsed, prompting audible whistles from spectators.The match swiftly deteriorated into a bad-tempered, foul-filled contest which arguably mirrored the Andean country's combative politics. By the end, the match drawn at 4-4, two players from each side had been sent off, including Cartagena and one of the president's bodyguards.

Makes me nostalgic for the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott Knock-out (which I thought was well deserved). Evo would thrive in the Stoke City or Arsenal teams.

Still bitter about this

Thanks to Em for passing this on. At least the French didn't waste their undeserved place at the World Cup, eh?

PR Stunt of the day (I hope)

The Premier League (that's the top division of English soccer, overseas readers) has proposed opening a string of sport-themed 'free' schools (i.e. unsupervised by elected officials).

I assume that this is just a greedy, stupid and selfish organisation trying to make itself look more caring while currying favour with their friends in the Tory/Lib Dem government.

At least, I hope so. Perhaps they were inspired by the (moronic) introduction of league tables into education, and think that encouraging masses of kids to think that the answer to their problems is becoming a professional footballer is somehow useful. I'm also sickened by the branding and balkanisation of the new education system - schools are becoming indoctrination centres for anything from creationism to corporate products: little chance of independent thinkers emerging from these places.

What happens when a team is relegated? Will expelled kids get shown a red card by the headteacher (or 'referee', as we'll have to call him)? Will the top set kids drive Baby Bentleys and refuse to share the team bath with new kids? School photographs are going to be a nightmare, with every pupil's agent demanding 'image rights'. Still, excuses for not doing your homework will improve after studying the diving and cheating encouraged in the Premiership.

This is just a cynical exercise in branding and PR.

Fresh hope for Man U

Anderson's on fire. Not only did he manage to hit something, but he scored too. As long as 'a farm wall' and 'an young Brazilian woman' count - his record for the Red Devils is none too impressive.

Silly boy - spends the night in a club, crams two passengers into his 2-seat car and manages to plough it into a wall in a serious crash.

You don't get this kind of behaviour at Stoke City. Mostly because if you left your car outside a club all night, it wouldn't have any wheels by the time you drunkenly tried to get it home.