Premier League Nonsense

Ok, so a town famous for rugby league beat the Arsenal. 2-1. I can't be too upset. They were the better team. Sorry but that's football. In a way I'm gald we lost to them at home. Better them than the Totts.

Way back when I knew a Hull fan. He lived in Berlin for a while when Germany was still divided. But this guy loved his football so much he took too following Hertaha Berlin SC home and away. And away games took him through East Germany along one of the two roads then open to 'western' traffic.

I've been thinking about Rick a bit this season. He's Hull through and through, I know I've been with him to away games. Maybe he was there today, maybe not. I hope he was but then he's old school. Maybe he's not so keen on the way football has gone. But I'm sure, wherever he is, He'll be proud of his teams achievements.

We lost to Hull today but my mate Rick, he deserves it.

This may surprise many but there is alot more to football than spending big money on star players. What makes the English game, sorry what used to make the English game, so special is the whole culture that surrounds it. Running yourself stupid like a twat, the rivalries, the culture that surrounds an individual club.

Many recent takeovers have been by people who, while successful in their primary businesses, have been momentarily blinded by the glitz and glamour of the premier league and are seduced by the perceived status they acquire when buying into it. A successful businessman isn't just the one who knows what he's good at. It's the one who knows where he's weak.

The Glazers at least understand that. United have continued to be successful because they have allowed Fergie to do what he does best. Manage.

Other takeovers haven't prospered so well. West ham's homely east end traditions of jellied eels and bovver boots have been replaced by, well, confusion, and it may now take an Italian to restore their 'Academy of Football' heritage. Never can one club have produced such prodigious talent in recent years only to spurn it. Or make a healthy product.

Defoe, Ferdinand x2, Carrick, Lumparse among others have been allowed to move on and find success while Wham try to find themselves in football's golden era. Gone are the likes of Malcolm Allinson and Ron Greenwood staying around to discuss training methods, Wham's youth today are more interested in their Play Station and i-Pod. The intelligensia of East London nuffing but a fading memory innit.

Let's all laugh at Liverpool! How not to run a football club, the two clowns who walked into Anfield have taken the headlines off the players and shifted it to their own egos. Fine, you don't like your partner, not my problem but how much are your brattish spats distracting from the business at hand which is moulding a successful football team.

Ashley up at Newcastle is finding out wearing a replica shirt and getting pissed with the fans, while great personal PR, may never appear on any upcoming MBA programme. The club is mired in confusion and the Toon is now little more than a synonym for confusion. Who does what and from where? Can you really run a football club 300 miles from the town? If so can I please run Tottenham?

Thaksin ramwonged ino Manchester City promising to have everyone from cleaner to centre forward waiing and eating pad thai. He turned the club into a laughing stock and, oh sorry, no he understood their culture perfectly well. All that was missing was inflatable hookers from Patpong to be bounced around the terraces.

All this makes the Arsenal approach seem quite sensible. They may or may not sell out to this American geezer later on down the road, that remains to be seen, but by appointing him to the board allows him to get an insight into how the club operates. He will learn the little idiosyncracies that make them so special and so if he does effect a complete turnover at least it won't be a shock to all and sundry as it would had he just barged in on day one with a wad of cash.

Having a spot of humle pie for breakfast and very nice it is too. 4-0 at Blackburn has lovely jubbly all over it and after three straight wins the memories of that inept showing at Fulham are slowly fading but...

... we croaked at crucial times last season. Our defence was found wanting or we couldn't score. I'm too old and too wise to believe we have turned a corner yet. On our day we can tonk anyone but we need to beat the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United yet.

But for now, time for another slice.

Back in 1938 Neville Chamberlain returned from Munchen having met some twat with daft facial hair and waved a piece of paper declaring peace in our time.

The country was elated but months later war came anyway.

Fast forward to 2001 and Michael Owen scored a hat trick in Munchen and Sven's men were being garnered with laurels as the nation announced to the world our football was on the cusp of a great new era.

We weren't of course. The hype soon disippated as realilty sank in and slowly we started to consider the possibility that, despite the millions thrown at players, they weren't that good.

Now it happens again. Mocked in Andorra, once again England return from foreign lands with a performance that has the folks back home rejoicing in the street, drinking from their Silver Jubilee Souvenir mugs and proclaiming a bright new era under Fab.

Except it won't happen will it? We've been there before and we know how it ends; with the media building up then knocking down.

Football used to be a simple game. Headlines would be about players and their antics on the pitch though once in a while we would be treated to kiss and tell shockers that player so and so, who missed a sitter the previous Saturday that would have earned his side three points, had actually scored the previous evening and in fact the gangling centre forward we saw week in week out who couldn’t control a beach ball was nothing more than a sensuous lover who knew how to take Shaz from the club to unknown peaks of pleasure.

No one knew a thing about who ran the club. Fans would turn up rain or shine, take their favourite spot on the terraces, moan like hell during an abysmal game played on an abysmal pitch then take the train home vowing never to return again as knuckle dragging hooligans beat the living daylights out of each other.

With the media glare elsewhere, usually the late Princess Diana or Boy George, people were involved in football because they wanted to be. There was certainly no ‘status’ to be gained by owning a club and the stereotypical football fan so beloved by England’s low brow media was a shaven headed thug with boots designed for kicking.

The people who ran the clubs were usually local people. Butchers, bankers, farmers, they were a hybrid bunch who probably couldn’t find Russia or Abu Dhabi on a map let alone contemplate some deep pocketed foreigner being interested in the English game.

Things have changed. And how! Seriously, I never thought I would have explained how the credit crunch in the US would affect a football club’s activity in the transfer market. I now need a PhD in advanced mathematics to understand ticket pricing policy at most clubs.

Headlines, once dominated by players, are now hogged by a menagerie of weird and wonderful characters that have no links with English football beyond perhaps having once bought a replica shirt for their children.

We have Russian oligarchs, Emirate sheikhs, Icelandic cookie kings, Geordie barrow boys, Irish horse racers, Americans who don’t talk to each other now falling over themselves for a piece of our game. And while they throw money into the bottomless pits football clubs have become they also bring with them odd ideas about how football should be run.

Some clubs need to be run as a business, some are just the plaything of some fabulously wealthy individual excited to have a brand new toy.

Football in England is no longer a sport. It is even no longer a business. It is now nothing more than an extension of playground taunts. Taunts that were once limited to chants like Brady is better than Hoddle now boast about how much the owner is worth and how much was spent pre season.

Football in England is slowly strangling itself in the grasp of foreign owners who seek personal gratification at any cost. The national team has long since died, at a youth level the last rites are not far off but all is well while the suits in the FA who run the game drool over the sums being invested at the very top. Sums that are soon being redirected into the pockets of agents and clubs overseas on players of mediocre ability.

The stadiums maybe full, fans maybe snapping up the replica shirts and the lust for the English game round the world shows no sign of being sated. But all is not well on the good ship English football and the fall when it comes will be very painful. Not for the owners, the players and the agents who can afford to ride out such hiccups and will move to pastures new.

Football clubs will be left high and dry committed to expensive players on expensive contracts and committed to unworkable business models. Who then will replace the billionaires in the boardroom and the corporates in the executive boxes?

With West Ham and Newcastle falling over each other to find a new manager, and being linked with the same old names, it is perhaps a surprise to see that no one has yet thrown Graeme Souness' name into the hat.

His name gets menioned everytime a managerial vacancy comes up and indeed my cousin Jan in Hartlepool tells me that when her local off license was looking for a new boss he applied.

Funnily enough last night I was talking to a football agent who is active in Indonesia. Coaches there have it tough, one guy was slapped by the club manager while one team wentthrough two coaches in six months without paying them a bean.

We were talking about the difficulties faced by coaches in the country and casually I mentioned that Souness was out of work and could be ...

Poor guy, spat his food all over the bar and needed plenty of water and kind words to expunge the mere thought.

I gave up on the England national team a long time back. I can't remember the last time I bothered waking up early to watch them. They're crap and have been for years.

However I decided to have a look see at the Andorra game and ...well, nothing has changed. Apart from the shirt which looks awful but still has punters paying 40 notes for it.

But when you have 'seasoned' pros who can't pass the frigging ball, can't control the damned thing. And those crosses? When you have two 'wide' players but never go to the by line, just give up lads. 100 grand a week and you produce pants like this week in, week out.

I don't doubt that after the game some of the players, upset that people can actually have the temerity to come out and boo them, will say they are scared to perform for England. Then don't. Retire. See if I care. After the dross they turn out year after year they are lucky anybody wants to go see them at all.

The likes of Terry, Lampard and co. They ain't the solution, they're the problem. I don't have a solution much beyond turning over and watching Japan play Bahrain. Well, I do have a solution. Withdraw from international competition for 10 years. Put Arsene Wenger in charge of an national academy where kids start learning the game from the age of 12.

Oh sorry, I forgot. We don't have a national academy. We have dads on the touchline living out their Greavise fantasy by yelling 'welly it son.'

The English love football. We just don't understand it.

Kevin Keegan for some reason still excites fans who love his boyish enthusiasm but will that be enough to see the former England captain and manager ever work again? It seems that the beer swilling Mike Ashley appointed King Kev in a vanity bid to win over the fans rather than for sound footballing reasons. I mean let's face it. A guy who by his own admission hadn't seen a game for three years?

Keegan is a serial walker outer having done it before at Newcastle, Fulham, England and Manchester City. In fact the only title he can claim is, oddly for a manager in such a risky business, is that he has never been sacked. Truly remarkable. Of course he hasn't won anything either and that is surely how a manager should be guaged.

Newcastle United are a mess but then that is their role. They along with Manchester City and Tootenham are the Marx Brothers of the Premier League. Their role is to bring light relief to the masses bored with teh tedium of Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea dominating all before them. Fans of other clubs, northern shit pot sides like Blackburn, Bolton and Accrington Stanley need to be able to look at St James Park, Eastlands and White Hart Lane and go phew. Thank fuck I don't follow that shower of shit. They make you feel less bad about your side's consistent underachieving.

Football is about what happens on the pitch. Newcastle are a hoot as a soap opera and will remain so for a long time to come. A populist beer swilling chairman makes for a great Mike Baldwin but I'm sure glad he ain't infecting my club.

When I was growing up and getting to know football names like Ray Wilkins, Liam Brady, Glenn Hoddle were gods in our pantheon. Especially the mecurial Brady. These players who controlled games. They imposed their authority and the pitch was their canvas, spreading passes near and far.

They were the playmaker and rather like The Diddymen and Brotherhood of Man aging old gits like myself wonder whatever happened to them. Are they victims of global warming, did Thatcher deregulate the midfield or were they eased out by workhorses in the same way as craftsmen were replaced by production lines and automation.

I blame Robbo for many things and not just the death of the playmaker. He may not have started the bubble perm craze that afflicted many footballers back then, don't ask, but he certainly encouraged it. And on the field he was a new type of midfielder.

He was an engine. A box to box player who ran lots and scored goals. The late Brian Moore creamed himself over the Captain Marvelous while the rest of us, locked out of the dressing room banter and backstage of the Big Match wondered what all the fuss was about. Brady - Robson, Robson? For many it was a no brainer but the media, gaining in prominence told us Robbo was the milkman's silver top and we obediently followed suit.

In Robson's wake came the likes of Michael Thomas, Roy Keane and more latterly Frank Lampard who defies any post war definition of a midfield player. The workhorses were taking over.

We have produced a couple of playmakers recently. David Beckham and David Bentley. But instead of sticking them in the middle and allowing them to conduct the whole field we ashamedly stick 'em wide right and have them launch balls in 'for the big man.' It's like buying an Aston Martin for a 10 minute commute.

I was flicking through the BBC website this morning and was amazed to see this quote from some Everton fan.

That he should text the Beeb in the first place about such a nonsense tells us alot about him no doubt. The word sad springs to mind. But his actual message suggests that while the circus may have long left Goodison Park a few clowns have been left behind and perhaps those tears that Smokey sang about decades ago are real.

2315: "That's me on the phone in the morning trying to get a refund on my Everton season ticket. Moyes will leave soon. Worst transfer day ever."Totally depressed Evertonian via text on 81111

Football and principles go together like Bar Mitzphas and bacon butties. It was surely no surprise to see that Tottenham have been given the best part of 31 million reasons not to complain about United's approach for Berbatov.

And yesterday Robinho, once linked with the Arsenal, was quoted as saying his head was already with Chelsea only to sign for Manchester City. Football really is degenrating into a farce and it is Chelsea that is taking us there under Kenyon and his master.

Real Madrid would be in their rights to complain to UEFA after the Stamford Bridge club went and started advertising shirst with the Brazilian's name on them. Trouble is, glass houses and all that, they were hardly whiter than white in their seduction of Ronaldo.

In a way I'm glad Arsenal rose above the undignified though judging by some of the comments I have read on message boards I am the only one.

It ain't about how much you spend fellas. It's about how you spend it. After horrors like Jeffers, Reyes, Hleb and others I'm perfectly happy for Wenger to keep his wallet shut. Berbatov would have been nice but like they would sell him to us!