Arselona (II): Gravity

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Arselona (I): If I never saw the sunshine

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Mark E. Smith on Ramsey and Shawcross: Gymwork cops stalking the streets-uh

I've been tempted to write something about the Aaron Ramsey/Ryan Shawcross "coming together". Alas, every time I try to publish my thoughts on it, an error message flashes up: PERMISSION DENIED: YOU KNOW IT'S GOING TO END IN TEARS, FREDORRARCI. Which is fair enough.

I can, though, pass on the opinions of others. I was delighted last night to receive a voicemail message from my old whist pal Mark E. Smith From Out Of The Fall, which I relay to you here:

---

Uh ... thing fucking work— Ah, yaright, Fred, 's me, Mark Smith. Ah, just calling about that, uh, dog of yours ... and, uh, 'cos I've written a song about that thing with Shawcross and the Welsh lad and, uh, just thought you might like to hear it, you being a fucking Gooner and 'at, youknowworramean. 's not finished or owt, but (inaudible) dead good, I reckon. I'll sing it for you now, haven't got the band with me, like, but I'll just sing it. My singing's getting really (inaudible) (laughter) (cough).

This is a warning from—

—Fuck, forgot, 's called "Playground Letraset Forgiveness Compact", right...

This is a warning from the Potteries!
Beware the gymwork cops stalking the streets-uh
Boer War scar tissue and Charles M., Charles H. induction-uh, certificate-uh
Remember: when your skull gets smashed with truncheons of propriety:
You are to blame-uh!
In the Big Sam disciple courtroom showroom abattoir
The man with the prawn cocktail Molotov breath says:
You are to blame! You are to blame-uh!
You asked for it, sunshine-uh!
Don't come running to me with your broken-uh
LEG-uh!

...duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh, nuh-nuh, nuh...

HARK AT THEE! HARK AT THEE!
Alimentary rumble of brain shrapnel halfwits
Cling to the scalpel like doctor evil Übermensch rotating the rack-uh
Rotating-uh
The RACK-uh!
He's a good lad, though
His tears fill the reservoirs all across the land
And keep the water bills down-uh
Britannia, prison yard, crap, hobnail, press conference
Hiroo Onoda emerges from the jungle and says:
That's how it's always been-nuh!

...then there's, like, a kind of guitar bit after that, right, and then it's...

Cast signed in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh
Cast signed in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh
Cast signed-uh, in playground-uh, Letraset-uh, forGIVEness compact!
You are to blame! You are to blame-uh!
Cast signed-uh, in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh
Know your place, son, know your place!
You are to blame! It's your fault! You are to blame!
Cast signed in playground-uh
LetrasetforgivenesscomPACT-uh!
That's how it's always been-uh!
Cast signed in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh...

...and that's all I've got so far, so, uh, anyway, hope you're keeping well, and, uh, the dog ... sorry about that, hope he's, you know, alive an 'at, so yeah, I'll (inaudible) ... ta-ra... Read more...

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Like the uncovering of the bodies as the giant sun soars up

So we could do a "best of 2009" type feature here. But that would mean having to exploit two faculties which are in a bad way chez my brain: remembering things, and putting things in order of preference (you should see me at the ballot box (PR-STV ftw!)).

Let's do something a little different. The Liverpool 4-4 Arsenal game in April was strange enough as it was, especially for an Arsenal fan. But to weird it up a squeak, when I wasn't tweeting stream links, I watched the second half with the volume turned down. My soundtrack instead was Barafundle by Gorky's Zygotic Mynci — which is, conveniently, forty-eight minutes long. I was listening to this album again lately, and the memories of confusion, Arshavin, confusion, Arshavin and confusion returned like aftershocks.

So here's a trip 'round my mind as it was on the evening of 21 April 2009. By the wonders of science, I have determined which song was playing as each of the seven second-half goals was scored. I will leave any Dark Side of Oz coincidences up to the reader (a knowledge of Welsh might help). Just realise the cognitive dissonance involved here.




1-1 — Torres — 'The Barafundle Bumbler'




2-1 — Benayoun — 'Patio Song'




2-2 — Arshavin — 'Bola Bola' ("Tummy tummy")




2-3 — Arshavin — 'Cursed, Coined and Crucified'




3-3 — Torres — 'Sometimes the Father Is the Son'




3-4 — Arshavin — 'Hwyl Fawr i Pawb' ("Goodbye to everyone")




4-4 — Benayoun — 'Wordless Song'

*
Now that I've shared almost half the album with you, do buy it if you like what you hear (there's some even better stuff elsewhere on the record) and salve my conscience into the bargain. Happy new year, folks. Read more...

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Arsenal & Liverpool, Ted & Ralph

"Tomato, Liverpool ... aubergine, your ... potato, season's ... turnip dead."



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Awwww...

To wash the sour taste of everything out of our mouths, by which I mean my mouth, what could be better than Cesc Fabregas, Bacary Sagna, Theo Walcott and Andrey "But I wanted the owl costume!" Arshavin dressed head-to-foot as animals for the sake of charidee?

(Not shown: Walcott's shoulder disintegrating under the weight of the costume.)

H/T: Kickette

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Roma vs. Arsenal: Between cataclysms

The vibes were bad from the start. Firstly, RTE had elected to show the Manchester United-Inter match. This speaks less of the importance of that game than of the fact that were Cesc Fabregas undergoing actual apotheosis, our national broadcaster would still show us the bowling section of Manchester United's bowling 'n' hookers bonding session, live and in full (followed by some grumpy analysis about how badly they would fare in the hookers section). This necessitated the chasing-up of dodgy web streams and...well, we'll get to that.

Then there was the team news: Arsenal would line out with the same XI as in the first leg. This was bad. Bendtner on the left could not work twice.

(I realise that I could have omitted the unnecessary "on the left" and "twice" from the previous sentence. Strunk and White would be displeased.)

(Good.)

Roma scored early, not least because people have started to pay attention to Arsenal's fine defensive record of late, and that sort of thing always leads to trouble. The play flowed like a mountain. The bad vibes got vibier. And then the web streams started acting up.

That's "streams", plural, because every one I tried had some problem: stuttering or bad sound quality or non-existence. And they all had a Sky commentator whose voice registered broadcasterly authority without betraying any emotion, which was utterly depressing given the miserable fare and the dread that lay ahead. He was joined by Alan Smith, the non-non-midfielder, non-ex-Coppell-assistant Alan Smith, whose vocal presence was a constant reminder of glory days — a strange kind of glory, but glory all the same — which jarred with the pervading hum of doom.

Underpinning everything was the juxtaposition of the pomp and bluster of the Champions League with the ultimate futility of this match. Approximately 16 billion people in 837 countries watched Man Utd-Inter, and while it apparently didn't quite turn into celestial warfare, it had a greater chance of doing so than this had. This was more like a crappy tale about a minor deity who a colonising force didn't even bother to incorporate into their own belief system. Neither team could have a role in this tournament greater than being turned into a shrew.

And this gave rise to another juxtaposition: the parallel awareness of this futility and the self-delusion required to give a damn. This was made manifest as most of the rest of the match was unseen by this pair of eyes. The story had to be pieced together from score updates and liveblogs, with a dash of paranoid fantasy for flavour (I bet Bendtner's going to miss any second...). All the while, various streams were in turn dialled up and cursed as they malfunctioned in manifold inventive fashions. And for what? For the chance that, despite the knee-jerk pessimism, that single away goal would arrive and deliver the cheap hit which would soon give way to the dawning reality. I've never been addicted to heroin, but I bet this is a thousand times worse.

There was a pile of CDs beside the computer. I took the top one, a Hank Williams compilation, put it in the machine and selected Shuffle. It played 'I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive'. This didn't help.

The game, it seems, trundled along to a shoot-out, which was accompanied by a belated discovery of a working stream. Eduardo missed the first penalty, which only a bastard, or a Roma fan, could have taken pleasure from. Vucinic missed soon afterwards; I was listening along to a radio commentary that was a few seconds slow, and the kick co-incided with the delayed sound of a loud firework explosion, which struck a comic contrast with the shot. Other than that, the players kept scoring, despite the overall quality of the penalties not being great. (Diaby...you lucky git.) Finally, Max Tonetto blazed, as I believe the technical term is, his shot over. Arsenal celebrated like they didn't know that when people celebrate like that, they end up dead in the next scene.

So, the good news: Arsenal are in the Champions League quarter-finals!

The bad news: Arsenal are in the Champions League quarter-finals.

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Holy shit

I promise I'm not going to post every time Eduardo scores*, but, I repeat...holy shit.

Video link

* Not a valid promise.

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Forgetful Theseus and the shiver of mortality

There's a weekly feature on the Times football blog, The Game, in which their chief football writer states his opinion on a topic and then invites readers to send in their views, after which he takes a sample of said readers' views and tells us that he agrees with those he agrees with and disagrees with those he disagrees with. This week, Oliver Kay asked You, The Reader whether or not Arsenal can progress any further under Arsene Wenger.

The Game is not the place to go for perspective, unless the perspective you want is that of someone with a ten-second memory span and whose skin burns in the wind. Kay declined to tap into the blog's well of silly (the bad kind of silly) and reasoned -- not without criticism -- that to jettison Wenger would be wrong.

Since you have made it to paragraph three and just about avoided utterly falling to pieces with anticipation as to what my own opinion is on the subject (being a blogger, my opinions matter, you know), I'll spare you any further shock and tell you that I pretty much agree with Kay. It'll take more than a season of quasi-mediocrity and a frustrating series of draws to shake my fanboyish devotion to the Wenger way. It can be tempting to wallow in short-termism. But though it's perfectly okay to be frustrated at, say, how Arsenal's season has gone -- at how particularly unsatisfactory recent games have been -- it's preposterous to believe that missing your stop is a harbinger of Death and that we must make a sacrifice to appease the vengeful god of results. To think that the right course of action would be to get rid of Wenger and replace him with...who? takes a leap that is best avoided for fear of insanity. That such leaps seem to have become somewhat more acceptable in recent months speaks less of Wenger's failings and more of the delirium which accompanies rarefied air.

Be cautious of my opinion, though, for one should doubt its objectivity. It's really not that long ago, after all, that Arsenal were supping on the dregs of the George Graham era. Sure, there was the domestic cup double and a Cup Winners' Cup; but they merely papered over the cracks. (Like, mid-table finishes?) Before that, the ghost of my great aunt tells me, it was even worse at times. Wenger's arrival was almost like cheating -- a great big deus ex machina, with the emphasis on the deus. As sad as it may be, I still find it hard to be objective about the man who liberated our stricken village and replaced our be-cholera'd drinking water with hot running chocolate.*

*Okay -- showed up at the borough council meeting in our leafy suburb and protested about the somewhat noisy and inconvenient roadworks that had been irritating us for quite some time.


But the genie is out. Now that the taboo against doubting Arsene in polite conversation has been broken, even those of us casually declining to break out the Morse code handbooks must face up to an unavoidable question. There will come a time when Wenger is no longer manager of Arsenal. No -- it's true. One day, shortly after God decides to up and leave and start again somewhere else, Wenger will slip into a retirement defined by entire days spent watching Regionalliga Süd re-runs.

Barring some extraordinary occurrence -- Alisher Usmanov deciding to slaughter him and feed him to Usmanov's own diseased soul, for instance -- this won't happen any time soon. (I don't believe the Wenger-to-Real-Madrid rumours, only in part because I don't believe any rumours relating to Madrid.) But happen it must; and what then? Wenger has had an effect on the club greater, arguably, than even that of Herbert Chapman. (He braces himself for the inevitable thunderbolt.) How does a club proceed when its defining figure is no longer there? Arsenal would, by definition, be set on a new course, because there is no-one they'll find to match Wenger's stubbornness and the brilliance and the stroppiness and the vision and his expert blend of all four.

I'm genuinely at a loss as to how to answer this. Will there be a demand for an impersonator, someone entrusted to carry on the New Tradition? Would that person create a parody or would there be an acceptance that such foolish times are best left in the old season review DVD boxes and that things should be toned down a tad? Will there be some craving for the sensible, the dutiful, the Big Sam...?

Whoa. If I knew I was headed down such disturbing paths, I wouldn't have started this post. Best leave it at that.

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The this post of Arsenal-Roma match reports

Once again, "Tapping into the market for day-old recaps of games you couldn't care less about". This time, Arsenal 1-0 Roma in a mixture of outlandish metaphors (as promised), similes and "X is the Y of Z" constructions. One day, all match reports will look like this.

Emmanuel Eboué making a run is like a person telling a joke with a really great set-up, but then forgetting the punchline.

Denílson is not the Shane Battier of central midfielders, but he may be better than you think.

That last sentence was the mother of all optimistically hedged bets.

Robin van Persie taking possession of the ball eighteen yards out is the first childhood glimpse of a pristine snowfield.

Robin van Persie is the last four tracks of A Hard Day's Night of footballers.

OR

Robin van Persie is the 'Hey Bulldog' of footballers. (Whichever works for you.)

Nicklas Bendtner's first touch is like getting your two questions wrong on your long-dreamt-of appearance on Fifteen-to-One.

Watching Arsenal is like watching a new episode of The Simpsons.

Arsenal-Roma is the political debate between members of two fringe political parties who you and -- if they'd admit it -- they know will have exactly zero effect on anything of import but still retains the potential for some entertainment, partly on its own meagre terms and partly for the realisation that the two sides have not quite grasped the occasion's insignificance, so it at least has the illusion of substance of the first knockout round.

Arsenal are the way you can't quite scratch that itch on the part of your back you can't properly reach.

Arsenal are the Mexico of the Champions League.

Arsenal are The Zombies of football.

Arsenal are the Arsenal of football.

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E equals &c.

Dear all,

Hi! Hope this finds you well. What an eventful day it's been round our way. You know that old tree in our front garden? Well, it only went and toppled over and crashed into our sitting room! Yes, yes: I know you told me it was dead and that the diseased roots would surely rot away. I probably should have got it cut down last summer, but things are always so busy, you know? You never get to do half the things you want to do. You know how it is. Anyway, the window is smashed and the wall and roof have been damaged terribly. And you should see the state of the furniture! Plus, the rain's got into the electrics and shorted the whole house. It's all a right dog's dinner. Still, it gives me a chance to spruce things up. Lick of paint and a new armchair and it'll be right as rain. Probably won't be quite as it was, mind, but one must be grateful for small mercies. It'll turn out right in the end.

Arsenal drew against Sunderland. They were at home and everything! This after Villa lost to Chelsea earlier. D'oh! There goes fourth place. You know something? Things seem bad, but it's like my nan used to always say: Every cloud...! Of course, she was senile and would say "Every cloud!" every five minutes, apropos nothing. But that doesn't mean she wasn't right. Look at it this way: Arsenal will be part of the inaugural Europa League next season. They'll go down in history as pioneers, helping to steer European football to new frontiers. That's a warm thought to keep in your heart next September when they're facing a Montenegrin team whose previous best performance in Europe was reaching the Intertoto Cup second round in 2004, isn't it? The excitement of those Champions League nights just gives me the hiccups, anyway.

My wife left me today. She took me aside -- well, she kind of stood in front of me and spoke a bit more loudly and clearly than usual. She said that she'd been having an affair for the past nine years. Some fella from work, I wouldn't know him. She had been deeply unhappy with our marriage for a long time before that, and she couldn't keep living this double life, so she was leaving. Took the kids as well. Says she never wants to see me ever again. That was a turn-up, eh?! I must say, I didn't see that one coming. It's not something you want to see happen, and it's not the most pleasant feeling, I'll grant you that. But I don't know, maybe it was for the best. I mean, if she was that unhappy, what good was there in continuing? She needed to do it. I suppose. And I'll be alright. Maybe the new start will be good for me, too. Having everything you trust and believe in instantaneously blown into smithereens is tough, but who knows what good could come of this? The only way is up! Every cloud...!

Anyway, that's it from me. Hope your day was as exciting as mine. Talk to you soon!

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®ebranding the Premier League

Last week, The Offside were contacted by a body representing the Premier League informing them that unless they removed the team crests from their site, they would "disappear" in the middle of the night, or some such.

Now, some may see this threat as a bad thing. They may point out that clamping down on an operation which is essentially giving them free publicity is more than a tad heavy-handed and risks alienating the very fans on whose custom the league depends. Others would argue that an organisation that charges for the reproduction of their fixture list has things a bit out of perspective.

But, in fairness, perhaps the league has a point. It's time they were given the right to reply. And seen as they are far too honourable to engage in mature, reasoned discussion, I have taken the liberty of presenting their case. As I'm already on a rebranding kick, I have created some new crests which present compelling arguments for why you should Do As You're Told™.

So, bearing in mind that--

* I used the exceedingly crude Microsoft Paint;

* I have the artistic flair of a raw ham;

* I didn't do crests for all Premier League clubs (I'm a genius, not a machine);

* When it came to Manchester United, I couldn't compete with this:


* Yes, smartarse long-time reader: I know that the Chelsea crest is based on an idea previously expressed on these pages (fear not: I have instigated legal proceedings against myself);

* The Blackburn and West Ham badges are pretty much gratuitous Neill- and Big-Sam-bashing, but think of it like this -- you're paying their wages;

--enjoy. Tell my family I love them.

UPDATE: Man City crest amended: key underlining added as aid to proper emphasis.

UPDATE THE SECOND: I forgot to mention that the inspiration for this post was a comment by Run of Play reader cjp, so a big and belated thank you is due.

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Eduardooooooooo!!!!!!!

That is all.

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Falling into fancy fragments

As I intimated in my half-baked Soccerlens piece (though the Party of Five line was pretty sharp, I feel), the Arshavin deal is stupidly exciting to me, even if beyond reason. You can spin all manner of pretty webs out of it, all ready to snare the idiot fly. You could take his first two games at the European Championships and transplant the damn-near-transcendent spectacle to your future hopes for the Arsenal. You could see it as a furthering of Arsenal's New Tradition. You could see it as a bold new departure, buying the finished product instead of the half-assembled one. You could look at it in simple military terms: we got a new toy, motherfuckers.

Honestly, the main reason the transfer makes life effervesce so is because it's a good thing. That is -- for all that Arshavin is but a thought experiment for now -- it stands in contrast to the rest of Arsenal's season. (I know -- dry those tears.) The comedown from the first two-thirds of last season has been brutal and is still being endured, which means that something like this feels like opening the curtains. (Amy Lawrence wrote in the Observer, "Not since Dennis Bergkamp walked into Highbury in 1995 has a transfer been so important to the fabric of Arsenal", and though she was talking about the off-field Arsenal, it may turn out to be true on the pitch as well. Or Arshavin might be the next Alex Hleb. Who the hell knows?)

The whole Premier League season has been a washout. Note that: not just Arsenal's season, but the whole wretched thing, because to me, they are one and the same. My favourite football season is 2001-'02: a properly glorious Arsenal Double, with a Cup Final win against Chelsea and a league-clinching win at Old Trafford (and a Champions League exit too pathetic to spoil things). In 2002-'03, the football was often just as astounding, but the season was defined by the 2-2 against Manchester United at Highbury. Again, not Arsenal's season -- the season; because that is ultimately how I see the Premier League. When you're paranoid about Man Utd and Chelsea, it's hard to derive any pleasure from their brilliance. (Liverpool just make it hard for anyone at all to derive pleasure from watching them.) And, as we all know, the rest of the league may as well have been a different league altogether for much of the last decade, meaning that for the too-hardened partisan, it's shut off from the fevered reality of the Exaggerated Parallelogram, serving as so many attendant lords. Relegation battles become knife fights between recently unemployed stockbrokers: gleefully compelling, but still knife fights.

Last week, following the furthering of the Federer-Nadal myth (the good kind of myth), I noted: "who wins is now only a part of the matter; it almost seems a shame to reduce it to a simple zero-or-one question." The problem with seeing sport by way of the travails of a particular team is that it shifts the balance so far towards the binary that it overshadows everything else. The whole thing becomes about the outcome; process, with all it entails, be damned. Almost everything gets stripped away bar the catharsis of victory or the dejection of defeat. The teams you despise exist solely for the extraction of ill-earned schadenfreude or bitter frustration. It's like getting your kicks from a coin flip.

This blog was fortunate enough to be born in time for last summer's Euros. Though we were too callow to properly make hay with the tournament, it was a beautiful thing to be allowed to behold. The key to this -- besides the majesty of the football itself, which was kind of important, like -- was being able to just sit back and allow the thing to happen without fretting about how a certain team was going to do. I don't even mean Ireland, in this instance. It's easy to be wrapped up in Ireland's progress through a competition and know that it's not going to affect the fabric of reality too much. (Case in point: Ireland 1-0 Italy in Giants Stadium in '94 didn't prevent Italy reaching the final.) More's the point, England's absence freed up the time otherwise set aside for angsting about the possibility of 'Three Lions' being played on a loop on all BBC stations forever, and instead allowed it to be used to just drink in the goodness. It showed that angst up for the silliness it is. Similarly with the Wimbledon final: it was too big and too good for it to be about tying your enjoyment solely to the success of one participant. For me, the Premier League doesn't have that.


It's not that results don't matter. The hours I've lost here, wading through tables from leagues I have no connection with, are innumerable. To quote myself again, shamelessly, "the beauty may be in the struggle but the struggle is for victory, after all." But stressing the payoff dismisses the rest of the sketch which, as any Monty Python fan will tell you, is often the best part. The fetishising of the result is strengthened by each game being isolated and transformed into apparently universe-defining events. Each moment -- each contentious decision and scuffed shot and questionable substitution -- is magnified beyond its rightful significance, beyond its place in the narrative. It is significant, but modestly so. When a well-turned out yet discernibly smarmy gentleman knocks on your door and tells you he's conducting the Last Judgement, something ought to tell you he's lying. Whatever the truth is in sport, I'd wager that I saw more of it at Melbourne Park last week or in Austria and Switzerland last year than I do on any given Premier League weekend.

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Ebooé

What the fuck?

Granted, it's been a while since I was an habitual attendee at football grounds, and I may have had missed the memo and me sat all too comfortably in my ass groove. But the ironic cheering when Emmanuel Eboué's number went up, and the boos that greeted him when he left the field? I mean...like...

What the fuck?

Are we to think that he played badly on purpose? If so, why? Is he a double agent? Did he do it because he wanted to personally offend every Arsenal fan in the ground? Was he about to murder their loved ones, smear himself in their blood and dance on the grave of Herbert Chapman?

By all accounts, this was an anxiety dream made real; the highlights I saw were painful. The man was having probably the worst game of his life, not through a wish to deliberately do damage to the club, but because he was just having a really shit day. Sorry to be all touchy-feely, but he needed an arm around his shoulder, not a hand around his throat. And those fans who booed him need a slap (I mean a metaphorical slap, peace fans). Surely there's something on the radio they can complain about.

Bah. End rant.

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Media outlet in "full of shite" shocker!

Things are bad at Arsenal. You can tell because yesterday's Arseblog contained just two swear-words, one of which was the bog-standard "shit". (The other was "Sp*rs" - asterisk not mine, I should add.)

I'm not going to pretend the outlook is sunny. I may have still not watched the Spurs game (maybe I'll buy the DVD!*) but, like a Daily Mail reader who just has to get angry about something, I did watch the highlights of that...thing that happened in Stoke on Saturday. Like, oh my god...

Arsenal have swung wildly and missed the full toss of an opening schedule that was sent their way. Things are likely to get worse before they get better given that next on the bill are Manchester United, Aston Villa, Man City, Chelsea and Amr Zaki. It's all a bit of a mess at the moment.

So, what to do? Think about sacking the manager, of course!

I know the folk over at The Game section of the Times website probably have to generate hits to satisfy the demands of advertisers and whatnot. But holy mother of divine shite - they're not subtle about it. Here's how it works: posit a ludicrous notion, feasible only as an extreme conclusion to a given situation, in such a manner that it differs from the bulk of material on the 606 forum chiefly in grammar and punctuation. Then wait for the inevitably polarised responses and congratulate yourself on having sparked "debate" which only adds to the thick layer of crud which makes up most of football discourse.

Yes, Wenger has made a bit of an arse of things since last season. But he has done more than enough to deserve the chance to make things right again. Just because other teams (cough cough) see throwing the coach overboard as the first resort, just because teams are constantly egged on by the media to operate in such a way, doesn't mean that Arsenal should succumb to it too.

Of course, I realise I'm an idiot for rising to the bait, but hey...

UPDATE (4/11): A more reasoned look at the issue on The Game today by Oliver Kay, even if it doesn't say much that hasn't been said a gazillion times already by fans and non-fans alike.

Photo

*Or not. And I've resolved never to watch a second of footage from the game. I specialise in such denial of reality - I have still not seen Ryan Giggs' goal in the 1999 FA Cup semi-final. That's not a lie.

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All of a sudden I felt brushed by the wings of something dark

What can one say but - whoa. I mean, who saw that one coming? Something had to be done, of course, but seriously, Portsmouth - Sam Allardyce?

At least that's according to goal.com, about whose trustworthiness in this kind of story I know nothing. (Five Live did mention it as well, though.) If true, expect the average quality level per Premier League team to dip shortly. More importantly, it means Arsenal will have one more bogey team. At least Sam will no longer be on the ITV settee playing Sancho Panza to Andy Townsend's Don Quixote as the latter makes a fearless attack on officials who apply the offside rule properly. He's going to have to go back to displaying his ignorance of the rules in post-match press conferences like a normal manager.

Portsmouth's desperate, inexplicable pursuit of Allardyce has had far-reaching consequences: poor old Arry Redknapp has been sensationally forced of Portsmouth. Luckily, a vacancy had opened up more or less simultaneously over at Tottingham, allowing AR to miraculously save yet another team from from relegation.

Actually, this is truly terrible news because it turns Wednesday night's Arsenal-Spurs game into a particularly fraught one for the Gunners. They may suffer from the effects on Tottenham of New Manager Bounce as Spurs' emaciated waifs try and impress their new boss. In this scenario, David Bentley scores a 30-yard screamer in stoppage time to inflict upon Arsenal their first north London derby defeat in the league since before the Napoleonic War, and Arsenal will be left to concentrate on preparing for their agonising defeat in the knockout stages of the Champions League.

Even if Arsenal win, even if they thrash Spurs, it won't be quite as satisfying as it could have been. If only Daniel Levy could have restrained himself for just a few more days, it could have been Arsenal delivering the final blow to the Ramos era. All he's gone and done is spoil the fun.

Worst of all, it has made my Sideshow Bob analogy pretty much redundant. Does Levy not read this blog?

The whole episode does have one happy result though: it has condemned the director of football concept to the bin. It's bad enough having the continentals - your Spaniards, your Frenchies, your Argies - flooding the English game with their diving and whinging and impeccable technical ability. But the attempts to do away with the good ol' English-style manager have been a step too far. If these "modernisers" had their way, we'd all be buying straight bananas by the keelo-whatsit in pavement garlic cafés from snooty waiters wearing berets who only accept those ridiculous Brussels banknotes with pictures of ugly bridges on them which they probably only got the chance to build because Britain rescued them in the War. Ooray for Arry!

Barely believable Flickr image by dgolfrabbit.

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Mind, how you go!*

Before we begin, two points.

Firstly, you should probably know, if you haven't already figured it out, that I tend to see things through red-and-white tinted shades.

Secondly, there is but one thing I know for certain about sports psychology: even though I, like most other sports fans, have fantasised about what it would like to play in, say, a World Cup, were I actually to find myself in that position, I would surely have a nervous breakdown before I'd even managed to get the shinpads out of my kit bag.

So, with that in mind, my considered opinion of the ASTONISHING motivational letter found at Arsenal's hotel at Bolton at the weekend is:


I suspect that some of the excitement it's created is similar to that when a celebrity gets papped while wearing non-fabulous footwear and no make-up. Despite the fact that one could spend one's entire life wading through news and analysis, we really know very little about what goes on behind the set-piece interviews and a-source-close-to-person-X's. It's quite interesting to get a glimpse at the otherwise hidden process. The reason there are entire boxsets dedicated to outtakes is that there are people out there who will buy them (guilty as charged).

Beyond that, and the excuse it gives to the makers of absorbent house-training floor-coverings to print something hilarious for Fidinho to use as a target**, it's hard to see what the big deal is. At worst, it's a list of platitudes you or I could probably whip up in half-an-hour's mind-tempesting. At best, it's yet another sign of Arsene's genius. In truth, it looks like nothing more or less than a useful way to reinforce some basic principles essential in a good team. Apparently, Arsenal don't employ a full-time psychologist, instead bringing one in from time to time when deemed necessary. It's reasonable to assume that it would be useful in a week involving a 2,000-mile round trip bookended by a couple of visits to some neanderthal shitkickers. It all seems like fairly elementary stuff of the type no doubt practised up and down the league.

Besides, if you really are surprised by it, you must not have heard of the Blue Book. Sorry, I mean THE BLUE BOOK.


THE BLUE BOOK, the Dublin Gaelic football team's bible for the season just finished, saw the idea of psychological preparation and raised it some crazy. There were the usual quotes from the likes of Confucius, Isaac Newton, Bruce Lee, Winston Churchill, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gandhi and - but of course! - Vince Lombardi, as well as some fearsomely precise playing instructions (being a senior inter-county footballer seems as much fun as playing for Louis van Gaal).

What was most striking, however, is that THE BLUE BOOK made Dublin look like - how to put this? - paranoid, psychotic Freemasons. It sees the all-in brawl with Tyrone in 2006 as when "we crossed the line together as a Dublin squad hasn't done in years". According to the Irish Independent's Vincent Hogan, "it lists being 'more cynical' among the positives". It recommends a closing-off from the outside world: as Confucius advises them, "Silence is a true friend who never betrays" (and why not? Sure isn't it so that "some of the people making these judgements are the ones that had us as shite from the start"?). Most importantly, all squad members were required to sign up to a seven-point creed (counter-signed by a witness), thus affirming that, amongst other things:

• "I promise to adhere to all areas of THE BLUE BOOK RULES OF ENGAGEMENT"
  


• "I will not show or admit the existence of THE BLUE BOOK to any other person except another Blue Book holder"
  
  
• "I will not divulge the meaning of our BS logo to anybody" (they make it too easy for us...)
  
  
• "Finally, I appreciate that for the duration of this campaign it will be thirty-one versus one. I am quite happy with these odds" (ie. thirty-one counties against the brave boys from, ahem, "the greatest city in the world" (sic)).
  

The punchline to all this? Someone in the camp leaked the BOOK to the media after Dublin's exit from the Championship.

Speaking of which, every page of THE BLUE BOOK has the heading 'Dublin, All-Ireland Champions 2008'. It would be cruel to point out the twelve-point skelping they got from Tyrone in the All-Ireland quarter-finals.

Some have questioned the fuss over the BOOK, claiming that other counties have successfully used psychologists in the recent past, and that had Dublin won it all, this would have been hailed as a masterstroke. Four points on this:

1) They didn't win the All-Ireland. That's an important detail;

2) Even if they had won, THE BLUE BOOK would still be as creepy and hilarious as it is in this Dublin-are-not-All-Ireland-Champions reality;

3) Much of the interest stems from the same feeling of getting a peek at the engine underneath the bonnet as with the Arsenal document, which is heightened by the would-be clandestine nature of the BOOK;

4) It is the solemn duty of every culchie in the land to raise a glass of Schadenfreudebräu at any instance of Dublin misfortune. I'm sure the Dubs wouldn't mind - after all, does not the good BOOK say "Our motto is - we are not in a popularity contest"?

Cheers!

Flickr photos by Яick Harris and uzvards.

*Title appropriated from Roger McGough's Poem for National LSD Week.

**I refuse to put a link to the Daily Mail here - partly as a point of principle, and partly because if I did, then you might click on it, and then you would have the Daily Mail in your History file, and I think better of you than that.

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Clash in the playground: how football fuelled London Calling

In the spring of 1979, The Clash were in a funk. Despite coming off a tour of America's east and west coasts during which they were treated as visiting heroes, they were, as lead singer Joe Strummer later recalled, "at [their] lowest ebb". They had acrimoniously split with Bernie Rhodes, their domineering manager, and subsequently parted company with the temporary replacement. In addition, their fractious relationship with their bosses at CBS continued, as the label dithered over whether to back the band's third album.

Deprived of their usual rehearsal space, which had been leased from British Rail by Rhodes, the group had to find a new base. They settled on Vanilla Studios, a spartan facility in an upstairs room of a garage in Pimlico in central London. It was here that the new sense of brotherhood fostered during their American adventure, unencumbered by the "hectoring" of Rhodes, bore fruit. Thoughts and ideas were freely exchanged. The band worked diligently, eschewing the attractions of the White Swan pub down the road, and a collection of diverse, multi-dimensional songs soon emerged.

It wasn't just music, passion and work ethic that drove the process along. Across the road from Vanilla was a playground, on which the band and assorted friends and associates would every day have a game of football. The band attributed the nurturing of this atmosphere within which their creativity could flourish to this daily ritual. "We'd play football 'til we dropped and then start playing music," said Strummer. "It was a good limbering-up thing." "What they got out of that was unity, a sense of togetherness," said Kosmo Vinyl, trusted member of The Clash's entourage. Lead guitarist Mick Jones concurred: "I just think we really found ourselves at that time and it was a lot to do with the football. No, I'm serious! Because it made us play together as one". Pat Gilbert notes the echo of Bob Marley and the Wailers in this routine, adding that taking out their aggression in this manner must have had a hand in the lack of vitriol in the new songs, relative to their previous work.

Where they became most aggressive was when executives from CBS would come to Vanilla to check up on the band. Invariably dragged into the game, they would suffer at the feet of The Clash. "Brutal, brutal football matches. I mean, war!," said Vinyl. "Boy, they stuck it to them guys!" The band set upon their employers with glee. "They were kicked in the shins, they were pushed over...that was quite fun!," said Paul Simonon, the Clash's bass player. It seems they saved some of their fury for the rehearsal room, however. "I don't think anyone was hospitalised," said Jones.

It's tempting to see whether there is any correlation between the individual football style of each member of the band and their respective musical styles. Simonon remembers himself as "not[...]the most skilful footballer...I tended to chop everybody, so whenever I had the ball, everybody would run away". Strummer was another whose lack of technique was masked by a surfeit of energy: "Joe was the workhorse who'd be struggling to try to get there". Roadie Johnny Green recalled: "Joe would be well-meaning and try hard but wasn't very good". Simonon thought of Jones as "really swift and nimble," whereas Green said "Jonesy was really flash, but we all laughed at his style, because he wasn't as good as he thought he was". It appears drummer Topper Headon was the best of the lot: "pretty nifty," according to Simonon; "skilled and nimble," said Green.

---------------------------------------

A clutch of new material in hand, The Clash decamped to Wessex Studios in Highbury, north London to record the new album. They selected Guy Stevens to produce. Stevens had been a stalwart of the London R&B scene, turning the Rolling Stones onto much of the music which would make up their earliest work, as well as naming Procul Harum and Mott The Hoople. The words most commonly used to describe Stevens are 'maverick', 'manic' and 'alcoholic'. He was summoned to helm the LP by Joe Strummer, who trawled the pubs of central London in search of him, and finally found him dishevelled in a watering hole off Oxford Street: "I found a row of blokes sitting slumped over the bar staring in their beer...I spotted him because of his woolly hat. I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, he looked round and it was like son-find-father in one of those corny films".


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During the making of what would become London Calling, Stevens had a daily ritual of his own. He had found out that there was Clash fan among the employees at Arsenal. Having bribed said employee with tickets and t-shirts, he would have his taxi-driver stop off at the ground every morning, whereupon he would enter the stadium and walk out onto the pitch. He would then kneel down in the centre circle and pray, teary-eyed, to Liam Brady.

The Clash thrived on Stevens' near-lunatic method, which contrasted markedly with the meticulous approach of Sandy Pearlman, the producer of their second album Give 'Em Enough Rope. "He used to believe his job was to get the maximum amount of emotion on a record," said Bill Price, the engineer on London Calling. He achieved this by means of what Price described as "direct psychic injection," which involved leaping around the room while the band played, often stopping to bellow into the face of one of the musicians; trying to smash a plastic chair on the floor; whirling a ladder above his head during a take (Vinyl: "it keeps you on your toes...you've got to pay attention to what you're playing and what's coming...it kind of worked for them"); pouring a bottle of wine over the keyboard of a brand new Bösendorfer piano to "improve the sound"; and playing a recording of the commentary from the famous 1979 FA Cup Final at ear-piercing volume over the studio speakers while holding aloft a scarf bearing the words 'There's only one Liam Brady'.

The Clash released London Calling in December 1979 in the UK and in January 1980 in the US. It received the accolade of 'Album of the '80s' from Rolling Stone. At the risk of editorialising (hey, it is my blog), it's as near as dammit to the perfect rock and roll album.

Guy Stevens died on August 29 1981 after overdosing on a drug intended to combat his alcoholism. Three weeks later, The Clash recorded 'Midnight to Stevens,' an elegy to their friend:



(He may have had a shitty death, but at least he went out to a Mick Jones guitar line.)

The anniversary of Stevens' death falls tomorrow three weeks. It would perhaps be inappropriate to raise a glass to him, but I'll at least be rattling my prescription medication, having a kickabout and returning to stick London Calling on the gramophone before turning to face north London.



The information in this post has been culled from: Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of The Clash by Pat Gilbert; The Complete Clash by Keith Topping; the article How I Met The Clash by Kris Needs; and the documentary The Last Testament: The Making of London Calling by Don Letts, from the 25th anniversary edition of London Calling.

Photo of the playground in Pimlico from Don J Whistance's Clash site.

With thanks to Vandal-prone for, obliquely, inspiring this post.

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That new book smell

I was happy - confused, but happy - when Arsenal spent god knows how much on Franny Jeffers.

I almost literally danced around the living room when the teletext headline told me that we'd signed José Antonio Reyes (I say 'almost' because...well, if you saw me dancing you'd know).

And now it's finally here: the package from Amazon that I ordered some months ago, that was somehow always 6 to 8 days from arrival. It may offer a profound insight into the human condition; it may be a thrill-a-paragraph page turner; I may junk it fifty pages in, slightly embarrassed about buying it in the first place. But let's not worry about all that for now - just open it up and breathe it in.

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