Premier League Nonsense

Does Carlos Tevez’ return to the first team mark the end of his days as a football mercenary forever offering himself to the highest bidder each time he seeks pastures new. Ever since he first arrived in England to play for West Ham United Tevez, along with his agent, has been forever in the shop window as he seeks to climb the pay scale table.

By returning to City is Tevez tacitly admitting his days of substantially increasing his salary at a time and place of his choosing are at an end? All the while he stayed away from City the papers were full of stories, no doubt placed by his advisors, boasting about the number of big clubs who were interested in securing the Argentine for their team but when it came to handing over the cash there was a distinct lack of urgency at their ATMs.

As a business model it was never going to be a long term success but then a footballer’s career is not long term either. As long as clubs’ coffers were filled with cash and as long as there were clubs willing to spend the obscene sums required then Tevez could always count on finding a club.

But the number of clubs who can afford his salaries is limited to perhaps no more than half a dozen in Europe. And not all of them are keen on the idea of bringing in a player as disruptive as for a short period of time and this gets truer the older the player gets when his resale value falls alarmingly.

Tevez’ return for the end of the season may good news for his manager Roberto Mancini, especially with Manchester City’s form dipping of late, but Tevez may not be thinking along those lines. He will be aware that the Euros being hosted in Poland and Ukraine will put many players in the shop window and he knows that he needs to keep his name out there or he will be overlooked by clubs looking for more bang from their buck and less baggage.

The Argentine striker is fast running out of friends in Europe and may well find his antics and wage demands have priced himself out of his chosen region. He may find all that remains for him are the mega rich clubs of Qatar, Russia or China.

Which just suit him fine.

# posted by Me @ 4:32 PM 0 Comments

No one ever said being a football manager was easy but given the 24/7 coverage the game receives these days the pressure is only increasing.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary results and success are somehow expected as a right at certain clubs and the idea that a manager is given time to imprint his own style on the club seems quaint and old fashioned.

Chelsea of course spring to mind. Spoilt by the incredible success they enjoyed under Jose Mourinho and the riches of owner Roman Abramovich the days of famine back in the 1970s and 1980s have been forgotten.

Andre Villas Boas is the latest incumbent to feel the impatience of the Chelsea support. After seven months the club aren’t top of the table, aren’t unbeaten and aren’t guaranteed a place in the next round of the European Champions League. To the new breed of fan who never saw relegation or 8,000 crowds at a Stamford Bridge more famous for the thuggish element among their support this is nothing short of absolute failure and AVB must be disposed of as soon as possible.

Seven months. Every decision he takes, every team selection, every substitution he makes is examined under the microscope of social and old media with hasty conclusions reached after circular arguments have echoed round cyber space. The managers of course, including AVB, profess to take no notice of the media and it’s easy to see why not but the Portuguese manager must be wondering why he is getting all this flack after just seven months in the job.

Up in North London Arsene Wenger is on course for a seventh successive season without any trophies and it is only now, after the traditional February collapse, that the discontent is making a few ripples. Frustration has building for a few years now with the Frenchman and his apparent stubbornness and reluctance to spend money but he can, rightly point to Chelsea, and indeed Liverpool, and ask if big spending does guarantee success.

In Indonesia coach Daniel Roekito might well ponder that sentiment. His Persisam side boasts two of the top strikers in the country, Christian Gonzales and Yongki Aribowo yet the goals refused to flow and he was replaced last week having lost three home games.

He may well look wistfully up the road to near neighbours Mitra Kukar where their English coach, Simon McMenemy, was thought to be under ‘evaluation’, the local equivalent of the English vote of confidence, following a defeat away to PSPS Pekanbaru, a place where traditionally visiting teams have struggled.

The club eventually decided to bide their time and team have responded with five wins out of their last seven games climbing to third place in the Indonesia Super League.

Time and patience are the best gifts a football club can give to their manager or coach. Had Manchester United acted rashly during the early days of Sir Alex Ferguson’s career there is a high likelihood he would never have been knighted. Success was slow to arrive at Old Trafford and it was widely believed it was only success in the FA Cup final back in 1990 when a late winner from Mark Robins ended their trophy drought that kept Ferguson from being told to clear his desk. And that came three and a half years after his appointment.

How Andre Villas Boas must be wishing for some of that patience!

(First appeared in Jakarta Globe)

# posted by Me @ 5:46 PM 0 Comments

Cheating is a fact of life. We’re doing it at school when we copy other people’s work or we surreptiously smuggle notes into exams or even pay someone to complete our homework. We do it when we go for job interviews and we inflate our two week stint stocking shelves in a supermarket into a high sounding Stock Assessor & Replenisher Executive. We do it when we drive, forever looking for the slightest advantage to get ahead of the car in front to save us a valuable few seconds and if we don’t use the mirrors when we pull out well, C’est la vie.

We see cheating all around us be it bankers paying themselves massive bonuses while losing their company money to politicians fiddling expenses to rich types squirreling their funds offshore to avoid paying the taxes the rest of us have to.

We cheat for a couple of reasons. We cheat because we think we can get away with it and the ends justify the means.

It’s a shame that many of us view cheating inconsistently. When our team gets away with it, we’re fine. When it goes against us we’re up in arms. And when it goes against us but we win anyway we are happy to overlook it.

Take Luis Suarez and his outrageous dive against Arsenal. The guy isn’t exactly flavor of the moth so you’d think he would be going out of his way to avoid controversy but there he is, rolling round in fake agony, shin pad out. The ref fell for it and pointed to the spot and Liverpool got what they wanted.

As iit happened, Liverpool missed the penalty and went on to lose the game in injury time despite dominating for large periods. Justice perhaps was seen to be done.

But in fact justice will never be done until such incidents are punished and the offenders penalized.

We have the dubious goals panel in England whose job it is to decide who should be credited with a goal when it is not clear initially. An onerous job for sure and one for the boys no doubt but hardly the best way of optimizing the technology that now covers the game.

We see and we hear about yellow and red cards being rescinded. But why don’t we hear about players being retroactively punished cheating. For diving, for time wasting, for falling to the ground like they have been shot.

It now looks like goal line technology is on the way though perhaps too late for Mark Hughes and his Queens’ Park Rangers team who were decided a sure fire goal against Bolton Wanderers at the weekend, but surely the technology is there, and there are more than enough pundits, former match officials and commentators out there who would love the chance to rehash games on a Monday dishing out punishments retroactively.

Human error is a part of football and the linesman getting that decision wrong is human error. Fine, use technology to help them in their jobs and it’s a win win for everyone.

Cheating is not human error. It is deliberate, calculatin and embarrassing to see grown men spectacularly throw themselves to the floor to seek an advantage. It is also hypocritical to see a player cheating one week then seeing them complain when the other team does it a few days later.

Why not use technology to stamp out the cheats?

(First appeared in Jakarta Globe)

# posted by Me @ 5:57 AM 0 Comments

I’m English and I love my country. I love the green rolling hills and I love the copses alive with birdsong. I love the white horses carved on the sides of gentle slopes and I love the stately homes built by oppressed workers being paid a pittance. I love the museums filled with artifacts and relics stolen from overseas during our colonial epoch.

I live the white cliffs of Dover and I love the streets of London and the distinctive rattleof the tube trains with that gust of wind as they approach a station. I love the music that has produced bands like the Rolling Stone, the Kinks and the Clash.

I love supping a quiet pint or six at some country pub with a real log fire crackling contentedly in the hearth. I love all the nutters who keep steam trains alive and the nutters who travel the length and breadth of the country following their team.

I love all that. But just because I love all that, jst because I’m English doesn’t mean I must get all excited just because Chelsea overcame a 3-1 deficit in the Champions League to be the only remaining English team.

I don’t like Chelsea. Never have, never will. They were the first team to charge one pound to stand and one pound for a programme. They had players like Ron Harris and Mickey Droy. I don’t like the element in their support who blindly follow Rangers and Linfield on sectarian grounds that many I guess don’t understand.

I don’t like their owner and his approach to football. His fondness for hiring and firing, his weakness for mannequin strikers, his short termism that strikes at the very heart of what I believe football to be.

Back in another lifetime I recall being in a pub. The William Cobbett in Farnham if you must know. It was the night of the UEFA Cup Final and Tottenham Hotspur were playing Anderlecht in the final. I was in the pub with my mates, funnily enough standing next to Aldershot manager Len Walker, and the whole bar was cheering for Tottenham.

Now there was people there who followed Chelsea, Arsenal, Queens Park Rangers, West Ham United, Portsmouth etc etc. even the odd Liverpool fan. I didn’t get it. If their team were playing Spurs they would be willing them to lose. In fact more than a few of them had probably been involved in brawls with Spurs fans over the years. Yet there they were cheering them on. Because they were English!

I’d seen us play them three times that season and we won all three. There was no way on this earth I would want them to win the UEFA Cup ‘just ‘cos they’re English.’ I’d grown up loathing them, loathing the chicken on a basketball they call a club crest, loathing their poncey Shelf, Chas n Dave and all that shite. When it came to the penalty shoot out my mates decided it was best if I went outside!

It’s the same when it comes to the national team. I never liked Phil Neal! Nothing personal, I jiust thought he looked ridiculous with that bubble perm he sported. He was part of the best team in Europe but I didn’t care.i had decided I didn’t like him and every week I was willing his Liverpool team to lose. So why the hell, come internationals, should I suddenly start cheering them on? It didn’t make sense then and it makes even less sense today. If a French team is packed with Arsenal players and they are playing England should ii support them because of the Arsenal connection or England ‘cos I’m English?

The answer is neither. International football is supposed to transcend club rivalries but I can’t let it do that. My passion is spent over 90 minutes watching Arsenal play, switching from fear and loathing to joy and elation in seconds. I have nothing left to give to a bunch of players I don’t like who play for teams I wanna see lose every week just because they are wearing the three lions on their chest.

It’s the same with Chelsea in the Champions League. The default assumption of many is because they’re English etc etc. it’s a wrong assumption. Fulham, yes. When Fulham reached the Europa Cup Final the other year I was dead chuffed for them. I didn’t become a Fulham fan for 90 minutes and I didn’t care if they won, drew or lost. It was a nice, romantic story and there’s a lot less of them in football today and Chelsea are one reason for that.

Chelsea may go into the draw for the next round but they most certainly do not carry with them the hopes and best wishes of a nation. Well, not mine at least.

# posted by Me @ 5:16 PM 0 Comments

It was an interesting Merseyside Derby last night, not least because of the two managers involved. Both gritty Glaswegians, nothing like a stereotype to get the ball rolling.

Everton’s David Moyes was celebrating his 10 years with Everton. A decade that has seen the club win absolutely nothing.

The mere fact that his anniversary should rate a mention is a symptom of the modern game; the ink has barely dried on Andre Villas Boas’ dismissal from Chelsea where he lasted a mere nine months, a fraction of Moyes’ 120.

That decade though has seen unprecedented change in the English football landscape and one of the victims has been patience. Clubs have hired and fired managers with monotonous regularity, often caving in to fan pressure as we recently saw with Mick McCarthy at Wolves.

In the new Premier League where everything is driven by money the mere fact that Moyes has kept Everton in the top flight is a worthy achievement in itself. The odd flirt with relegation has been tempered with European runs and the odd cup final and it is credit to the Everton faithful that they have not been beating down the chairman’s door demanding Moyes’ ouster as we witnessed at Wolves and the rumblings of at Arsenal.

Instead Moyes has been allowed to get on with the job, working assiduously away from the headlines which may of course have helped. The relatively straitened circumstances at Goodison mean that the days of smashing the transfer fee record to sign strikers, like they did with Bob Latchford back in the 1970s, are a distant dream and Moyes has cuit his cloth accordingly, looking round the smaller teams and the lower leagues for his players. Tim Cahill, Leighton Baines and Phil Jagielka are cases in point.

Success then for Everton is merely staying in the top half of the top flight.

Expectations are somewhat loftier across Stanley Park where Liverpool recently won the Carling Cup. Kenny Dalglish recently came out and said points are not the only signs of success at a football club. Now lest we forget, Dalglish is the manager of the football club, not the Marketing Manager or the Chief Executive Officer. He is fully responsible for what happens on the playing field.

You can imagine the fuss managers would kick up if they perceived directors getting involved on the playing side of things! There would be uproar and we’d see a stern faced manager in training kit telling TV cameras the suits should stay in theboardroom.

And they’d be right of course. God knows where Kenny thought he should start commenting on Liverpool’s business model or indeed, in these days of spin, who he was addressing his comments at, By suggesting that a multi million dollar kit deal was a sign of success, Kenny just managed to belittle the whole playing squad in one nonsense sentence.

As I type this the red half of Merseyside will be out on the town celebrating Stevie G’s hat trick. A new kit supplier? Not a chance. When Gerrard does hag up his boots do you think he’ll tell his grand children about the time Liverpool signed a deal to be supplied shirts by a company no one has heard of? Course he bloody won’t. do you think Liverpool fans went home after losing 2-1 to Arsenal in the last minute and writing blogs saying ‘yes we lost but look which logo we will have on our new shirt next season, everything’s good.’

Mentioning Arsenal segues nicely into the third definition of success. Arsene Wenger has been somewhat dismissive of domestic cup competitions saying that finishing in the top four is as good as winning a cup; it brings Champions League football. Maybe, but seriously, who cares about that when you can do a victory jig at Wembley?

The reality is that clubs need the cash that comes from the Champions League or kit sponsorship. But there is a whole team working behind the scenes to make that happen. And that won’t happen unless the manager brings success on the field. Managers becoming mouthpieces of plcs or the owners shouldn’t just parrot their masters.

As football fans we know the realities of life. We don’t need to be lectured by people who earn sums we can only dream of. One of football’s joys is that we can all dream, whether we support Arsenal, Liverpool or Rochdale. It is our dreams that bring us back week in, week out. Don’t let reality spoil it.

# posted by Me @ 4:24 PM 0 Comments

Chelsea’s impatient supporters and apparently the players in the dressing room have got what they want. Andre Villas Boas was sacked following the Blues 1-0 defeat away to West Bromwich Albion, the latest in a string of results that have left the fans, used to a feast of trophies from the Jose Mourinho years, demanding his ouster and owner, Roman Avramovich, giving them what they want.

The turn of the decade was the most successful era in the club’s history and it has brought with it a new breed of fan who has known nothing but John Terry, Didier Drogba and competing for the title. Lacking the perspective of the fans who have been round a lot longer and have experienced more lows than highs, they made their feelings known and Roman was only to keen to respond.

The appointment of the 33 year old Portuguese seemed at the time nothing more than an attempt by Abramovic to recreate the Mourinho years using Villas Boas as some kind of Frankenstein imbued with the best of the Mourinho gene pool. A young coach who had brought success to Porto, had studied under Sir Bobby Robson at Barcelona as well as Jose, AVB was always going to be seen as a Jose Lite until he could prove himself.’

Unfortunately for him, he was given nine months. Comments made during the final days of his rule showed his dissatisfaction with a number of areas at the club. He claimed that Chelsea could never compete with the likes of Manchester City. He compared Fernando Torres to Andrei Schevchenko and Metjaza Kezman, a pair of high profile strikers who flopped at the Bridge.

Much has been made of the Arsenal support in recent weeks and how fickle they have been in their treatment of their manager, Arsene Wenger. But Arsenal fans, more used to periods of success throughout their history and with perhaps a greater awareness of the club’s history have been remarkably patient with Wenger, crediting him with the good times and the overall change of perception with which the club is viewed while at the same time scratching their heads at some of the players he has signed and some of his stranger quotes,

It took defeat against Birmingham City in the last minute of last year’s Carling Cup Final, poor league form in the wake of that disaster and the summer of discontent, selling Samir Nasri and Cesc Fabregas right at the end of the transfer window leaving little time to find replacements to really prod the Emirates support into questioning Wenger in any numbers those dreadful days in February away to AC Milan and Sunderland increased the volume the board and a large section of the support were still happy to go along with the Frenchman who had been so successful during his first few years at the club.

This season though is the seventh year the club will have gone without a trophy. That there is no open revolt is a credit to the club and the fans understanding of the club. When talk first appeared of placing black bin bags over empty seats at home games then the support united, those who had tired of Wenger and those still behind him, at the obscene nature of the protest.

Plenty of boos and jeers, yes while message boards and blogs were filled with bile and venom aimed at the club and the manager but the idea of such a visible revolt, in full view of the players they were supposed to be cheering to victory, was shouted down in an outpouring of common sense.

Football fans complain. It’s what we do best. Most of us are frustrated players anyway, annoyed that our talents on the playing fields of our comprehensive were not picked up by the roving eye of talent scouts for district and club. But we love our club. When we lose it hurts. Social media may grab the headlines because of its public nature but it’s just a less expletive filled version of the discussions that take place in pubs, bars, cars and trains following any game on any given weekend.

The lows are depressing; especially when coupled with a lackluster performance. Most fans know they can’t win a trophy every season, but we do expect to see the players give 100% every minute of every game and when they don’t then the bile and venom fly. The badge rarely evokes the same feelings in players as it does in fans but for the fan who gives everything going to games the minimum they expect from the players is the same.

As an Arsenal fan, Sunderland away was dreadful. The fact that the team were well out of sorts made things worse. There are times when you have to hold up your hands and say you were beaten by the better team. Had Liverpool, based in their first half performance at the weekend, gone on to beat Arsenal then I don’t think many of the away support would have had much to complain about. They wanted it more first half.

I recall a UEFA Cup tie back in the early 1980s between Arsenal and Spartak Moscow at Highbury. The team from the former Soviet Union gave a master class performance that evening and won 5-2. I am proud to say I and much of the Arsenal support that evening applauded the Moscow team off the field. In the days before extensive coverage of the game on satellite TV we knew we had seen something special. A similar thing when West Ham United played Dinamo Tblisi during the same era. Tblisis won 5-1 at Upton Park but were cheered off the field. Perhaps Chelsea fans would have booed and walked out long before the final whistle

There is a fickle element to being a football fan. There has to be, it’s a results driven industry. You’re up when you win, you’re down when you lose. Chelsea Football Club institutionally and their fans emotionally have lost the ability to accept defeat, any defeat and that is not the way to build a successful club.

# posted by Me @ 4:37 PM 0 Comments