Roy Of The Rovers Stuff

So the World Cup is almost here again. The newspapers and magazines are swelling up with fawning profiles of usual famous names – Ronaldinho, Henry, Gerrard, Ballack et al. But you might as well throw all those away. Judging by recent tournaments, the eventual heroes of this World Cup won’t be the superstars. They’ll be plucky US college boys, scurrying Mexican wing backs, pacy Angolan strikers and a lot of other people no-one has heard of.

Take the first game of the last World Cup. Henry and Zidane played off the park by El Hadjj Diouff – or Who Who Who? as he was then known. That set the tone for a competition where the finest playmaker wasn’t Beckham or Veron but some prematurely balding Turk. Or the European Championships two years ago, dominated by a lot of Greek defenders and a podgy Scouser with tragically fragile feet. What happens to all these stars nowadays? Do they under-perform or are they just not all that good to start with?

They have a standard excuse. They’re tired after a long, arduous season. Each and every one of them. The magazine When Saturday Comes made the point that there are actually less games in a standard season than there used to be. What has increased for the top players is their off-field commitments. The parties, the book signings, the commercial promotions. They’re part of showbiz now, after all, and that can be exhausting. And it does something to their motivation. Celebrities have their image to protect; and the activity which first made them famous can become rather damaging to this image after a while. Actors, once they reach a certain level, never play anybody in a film except themselves. Too demeaning otherwise. And the top footballers look uneasy about putting on silly shorts and kicking a ball around. They’ll carry on doing it as long as they have to but they don’t want to give the impression that they take it seriously.

Plus the fact that the World Cup is less of a giant supermarket than it once was. Clubs are generally too smart now to snap up a player simply on the basis of three to six games crammed into a month. Most of the big deals have already been done. Take Andrei Shevchenko: worth £35 million, yet to kick a ball in a major international tournament. But for the less famous players it is still a time for opportunities. Some of Shevchenko’s Ukrainian team mates will know they could achieve a little of his prominence next month. The likes of Togo and Angola will have noted the impressive deals the Senegalese won for themselves after 2002. These are the people who have a reason to try hard.

Of course, a few football-related motives still remain. The one big name who actually delivered in the last World Cup: Ronaldo. After a mysterious medical ‘episode’ wrecked his final in 1998 and injury most of his career since then. He had something to prove. As did his opponents in the 2002 final, the Germans. Written off by everyone as a bunch of useless journeymen, they pulled themselves through the tournament with an impressively bloody-minded belligerence. So perhaps that’s the way to get the stars to perform this time. A little less adulation beforehand and a lot more sneering.

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things

In case I don't get chance elsewhere, a list of some of the aspects of life that I truly, truly hate.

People Who Think Food Is Important
Not those fussy about what they eat for health reasons, though they can be tiresome too, or on ethical grounds, though we are slightly worst. But the ones who confuse cooking with creativity and art. And who sneer at anyone who, after a day at work, doesn't spend 2 hours in the kitchen working through a recipe like a trained chimp rather than, say, doing something with their brains. Eating isn't culture. It's a necessary bodily function. One does it and moves on. You don't get articles in magazines telling you of places to take the perfect poo or implying the French and Italians are superior to us because they're better at going to sleep than we are.

The Fact That The Wind Always Blows The Rain Into My Face
I mean, it always does. It's not just the speed I walk either. I turn a corner and see the rain shifting direction accordingly. I try to avoid the common trap of believing the whole world just exists for my benefit; or more accurately, exits to mildly annoy me. Then it starts to rain again and all my religious and philosophical creeds are shattered. Plus my face gets wet.

People Who, Upon Learning That Being An Epileptic Means I'm Technically Disabled, Instantly Ask If I Get A Special Parking Ticket
If you get epileptic seizures on a regular basis then you're not allowed to drive. Duh.

Key Changes In Ballads By Boy Bands
Always the same time: 51 seconds before the end of the song. A pause. Then, though you desperately hope it won't happen, the key change. And the singer always has a note of smug triumph in his voice afterwards, as if he's performed a feat of unique brilliance. He hasn't. He's changed key.

Old People Not Bothering With Manners Just Because They're Old
They push in to the head of queues. They talk to you when you clearly don't want to be talked to. Most of all they stop and stare at you, blatantly and without apology, when you walk past them in the street. And they probably complain how rude the young people of today are. Admittedly, if I ever get to be old myself I've no intention of bothering with manners either.

Happy Endings Grafted On To The End Of Sad Or Nasty Songs
Pushing Tin being a case in point. John Cusack's character drives himself into a nervous breakdown. It's the story arc. It's the whole point of the film, you would think. Then, ten minutes before the end, he's suddenly working a reconcilliation with his nemesis and getting back with his estranged wife. You can almost see the head of the studio putting the gun to the director's head, releasing the safety catch and ordering the rewrite.

People Saying How Good The Eighties Were
Again a caveat: I've been looking forward to this. I waited patiently for the Fifties and Sixties to become passe (which happened at the end of the Eighties), for the Seventies revival to blow away (around the time of the Millennium). Just so I can say, firmly and categorically: I was there during the Eighties. It was crap.

"Opinionated weathermen telling you it's going to be a miserable day. Miserable for who? I quite like a bit of drizzle, so stick to the facts"
Actually I nicked that from Half Man Half Biscuit. But I lifted the title and idea for this post from them too, so I suppose that's OK.

Half Decent FA Cup Final Shock

First my complaints about the FA Cup final. Penalties are no way to decide a trophy. They aren't even very interesting any more. And if we must have them, let's just skip straight to them after regular time ends. Extra time is almost always just half an hour of exhausted players whacking the ball up and scuttling half-heartedly after it. On that subject: why were Liverpool and West Ham so ridiculously unfit? Even before the 90 minutes were up there were half a dozen players going down with cramp. At times the pitch looked like a Black Death re-enactment. A standard piece of 'action' towards the end was a man staggering forward, getting a cross in and instantly collapsing, clutching his calf. Finally, Leslie Garrett, if you're reading this: the last line of 'Abide With Me' is "Abide with me." It isn't "Aaaa-biyiyide wi-yi-yi-yi-yi-th muuu-ye-ye-ye-ye-ye." If you can't hold a note for more than two seconds, don't become a singer.

Otherwise it was a fantastic game. 3:3 and all the goals were entertaining. Carragher doing an Ali Shuffle to neatly slot the ball into his own net. The otherwise brilliant Reina spilling a weak shot right into Ashton's path. Cisse pulling the score back to 2:1 and bringing the game to life again. Gerrard finishing a training ground move with unnecessary venom. Konchesky totally mis-hitting a cross and then watching the ball inexplicably loop into the top corner. Finally a half-fit Gerrard (cramp, of course) receiving the ball about 30 yards out, being too knackered to do anything other than whack it and somehow score. In general, two sides stubbornly refusing to admit defeat and, for once, translating this into an urge to play good football rather than clatter each other.

The FA Cup deserved a final like this. The much-overrated tournament has been surprisingly wonderful this year. Think of Liverpool's 5:3 win over Luton in an earlier round which featured one of the most hilarious goals ever - Alonso scoring from the half way line after the Luton keeper had rushed up for a corner. A dreadful Coventry side coming back from 2:0 down against Spurs to win 3:2 thanks to a previously and subsequently unknown Dutch striker. Burton Albion holding Manchester Utd, Nuneaton Borough - whoever the hell they are - doing likewise to Middlesborough. And Chelsea losing. Not the greatest game ever but Chelsea losing in any circumstances always brings cheer to the soul.

I can't welcome this totally whole-heartedly. There's going to be an awful lot of rubbish written about this year's FA Cup in coming years by the romantics, the self-appointed defenders of football's soul. They always hold the tournament up as somehow purer than the league or European competitions. While the latter are wholly commerical nowadays, they claim, the FA Cup is still true to the spirit of football. This has little to do with reality. Organised by the grasping Football Association, the Cup embraces sponsorship in almost every form and many of the tickets for the final are given to corporate clients. And for all the talk about the Cup being a great leveller, look at the winners in recent years: Liverpool twice, Arsenal three times, Man Utd once. It's no less the property of the big clubs than the Premiership. I suspect a lot of the 'romance' is because it was originally contested by public school sides, not those grubby northern clubs who went on to form the League and create modern football.

But the game at its best can still silence all the caveats. Watching a mediocre stopper like Danny Gabbidon humiliate Liverpool's millionaire strikers, or Steven Gerrard beligerrantly pull his side forward, I was reminded why I keep getting drawn back to it. We just need a decent Champions League final now and I might even start looking forward to the World Cup.

Shameless Self-Publicity!

If I've been a bit tardy with my posts recently it's for the following reasons: a) I still have half a life left and b) I've been using most of that to set up my own web site. So far it's a dumping ground for any assorted pieces of writing I had hanging around my drawer. It may become more focussed later, may change function entirely or may continue as it is. And while I wish I could promise that the appearance will improve, it will probably just go through various types of dreadfulness. Anyway, the link is on the right and just to hammer the message in:
http://www.whyisthishere.co.uk

Entirely Bad Poetry Part 3

For Mandi Ann, who expressed touching but baffling fondness for another of my poems. This one'll learn her.

The Confessional

We sit, he and I
And sit
Like lovers struggling to speak their hearts.
Head of Finance and his vassal (me).
The talk starts of promotion prospects
Relegation fears, crossbars hit
New strikers bought, misfiring men ditched
Until we remember where we are
And why.
Performance appraising reviewing assessing
Or: adding up the sums.
Six months in six mumbled words:
Works hard, hits targets, bit careless
Then questions from the home psychiatry kit.
Do you enjoy your work?
(Yes, lucky there's so much of it)
What particular problems are there?
(Head of Finance can't manage staff)
What do you like the most?
(You let us manage ourselves)
Where do you see yourself in a year?
(If I could plan I wouldn't be here, doing this)
I only speak the expected triteness, of course
And perhaps he is concealing similar
Caustic indictments of me.
Just give us a confession booth
And maybe we'll spend the hour stripping souls bare.
But really, no silent truths compress the air.
Mediocre work done in a mediocre fashion
Will never inspire great rhetorical passion.
So we sit, he and I.
And sit.

X Rated

And continuing the subject of lardiness... There are certain things which I would prefer not to even contemplate. One of these emphatically is what John Prescott does with the parts of his body which are below his stomach and above his knees. I concede that the story of his two year affair with his secretary is, just about, in the public interest. I see how it contributes to the general picture of a government in moral and political decline. But please, in the name of God, no more details. I haven't been this revolted, or this amused, since the John Major-Edwina Currie story broke.

Fatheads

Apologies for turning this into a regional newspaper for a moment, but here goes. One of the lengthier rows rumbling about York has concerned the Barbican Centre. Originally this was a perfectly decent public baths. Then they put a god-awful 'leisure centre' around it, mainly a place for archaic rock bands to strut their creaking limbs. The process was like a pearl being created in reverse - the precious stone emerging first then the shit building up around it. The whole mess understandably went bust a few years ago. Now they've decided to revive the leisure centre but leave the baths closed. There are still two public baths left in York. But as one was poorly built in the 1960's and the other has been around since the 1900's, they may have to be closed at least temporarily to stop bits of their ceilings occasionally dropping into the pools.

There's one consequence to York having no public baths left. Children are going to get fatter. Swimming is wonderful for children because, unlike most forms of excercise, it's actually fun for them. You get to fart around and pretend to drown your friends. If you ever run out of ideas most pools have notices of prohibited actions - ducking, bombing etc. - to work through. And you lose calories at the same time.

There's a lot of fuss about fat kids at the moment. They're fatter than ever, apparently, and getting even fatter every second. The usual dire warnings about diabetes and heart disease are issued. And the usual culprits are found - junk food and computer games. Basically, the solutions are to stop children eating and doing things they enjoy. It's about controlling them even more. But children, unlike most adults, will actually do healthy - if not necessarily safe - things out of choice as long as they're enjoyable. They just need access to the opportunities, and those are vanishing more and more.

Football is another example. Not the creepy organised leagues where parents bawl their frustrations at their offspring but spontaneous, unsupervised games, a cross between sport, gang fight and shouting contest. Most school yards and fields in the country are, each morning, still taken over by our allegedly Gameboy-devoted generation kicking tennis balls at each other's heads. After school, though, they're a bit stuck. I used to play on the street a fair bit. It probably wasn't safe then and certainly isn't now, with even the quietest lane taken over by rat-runners. I used to break into waste ground too and it's hard to see any waste ground left any more. Playing fields are the only option left. And with councils and schools merrily selling them all off to balance their budgets and feed the housing boom, that's not really much of an option either. Near York's 1900's baths there's a scout hut. There used to be a playing field behind it. Now there's yet another housing estate. Called, in what must be a deliberate wind-up, 'Greenfields.' 'Greenfields' where there used to be a green field. Ha bloody ha.

Children rarely walk to school any more. Their parents, either paranoid about paedophiles or having enrolled them to a school on the other side of town because it has fractionally better grades, all drive them. They can't swim. They can't play football. And now the moral panic has decreed they can't engage in their only other pleasures - dicking about on the Nintendo, stuffing chips in their face and growing monumentally obese. It isn't much of a life.

There Is No Title

I was going to start this by apologising for not posting any entries for a week or so. Then I realised the comment would be addressed to my regular readers. And, of course, there aren't any. The only people who ever glance at this journal are those idly hitting the 'Next Blog' button, and they will only be scanning it to decide that theirs is much superior. Which, judging by my own research, it will be. The girl writing from Prince Edward Island, Canada, lost a lot of points by using a yellow font on a pink background, while this has a much classier template. But then she could offer in-depth reports on the state of the discos on Prince Edward Island, Canada. All I can manage is snide comments about stories I've read in The Guardian.

Or in this case, nothing. If I'd been a bit more organised I could have done a piece on Easter weekend. There would have been a hi-larious stint on the two dominant themes of Easter - chocolate and crucifixions - and how they might be combined. A little bit about staying the weekend with my grandad, who is not going quite as strong at 87 as we'd like him to be but still getting around quite well without a stick. And something on the dreadfulness of Luton, the town where he lives, and how he used to travel the world seeing beautiful sights and always had Luton waiting for him at the end of it all. But Easter is, as they say, so last week now. And I've nothing else to offer. So this has to be another blog entry about writing, or failing to write, a blog entry.

OK, I promise: In a day or so's time I'll try to get round to slagging off the Queen like any normal Englishman.

Arrivederci Silvio

It's times like this that I knew Latin. Silvio Berlusconi, who turned virtually all Italian media into his private messengers, who wound webs of scandal around himself so thick that they've even trapped Tessa Jowell, who undermined Italy's crusading anti-Mafia magistrates because they went after his friends, who allied himself with neo-fascists to keep himself in power, who basically built a fiefdom in the style of a Renaissance prince with patronage even thrown in (Paulo Maldini v Raphael , the Sistine Chapel roof v the 1994 European Cup winners - it's a close call)... Yes, that Silvio Berlusconi is out on his arse. By the slenderest of margins. And he's claiming dirty tricks have been perpetrated. It's like the 2000 US elections but with the good guys winning. It's also incredibly funny.

So I wish I knew Latin because there has to be some pithy phrase which sums up. All I can think of is et tu Brutus which means something else, though may be a sentence heard amongst the Italian right in the bitter coming weeks. I'll just have to content myself with saying 'he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.' And laughing a great deal.

The Dying Swan

I know, I should have written about the dead swan earlier. By now it's probably been buried with full military honours and the unfortunate Scots close to where it crashed to earth let out of quarantine. But my own medical problems (epilepsy and idleness) have hindered me. Better late than never then: Bird Flu Is In Britain (da da daaaah!)

Perhaps I should be frightened. The next time a duck even looks at me I should rush out and buy the masks and pills and respirators being sold by the usual snake oil merchants. Several things have stopped me, however. One is that like Prof Nof, who I sneered at last week, the medical panic reports have a heavy reliance on 'might' and 'if'. At the moment avian flu can be contracted by avians themselves and those in direct contact with their innards. Ah but if, we are told constantly. If the germ mutates it might be spread by any contact with birds, it might fly from human to human, it might make the Spanish Flu look like hayfever!!! 'If' is an elastic word, however. If the germ carries on mutating further it might grow a little hat and booties and look really cute under a microscope. If the Queen grows gonads, to adapt the old phrase, she'll become a King.

Another thing stopping my absolute terror is a refrain running through my head: 'Sars, Sars, Sars.' Because three years ago we were told we'd be lucky to even make it this far. And we were lucky to even get to the Sars scare, really, given that we should have been slain by the anthrax revival a few years before that. Bird flu ought to just be another horseman of the apocalypse, dimly registered as we dodge between the tidal waves and the terrorist dirty bombs. Sars, admittedly, was contained rather than fizzling out. The alertness which various governments showed was impressive; prevention is always better than cure. But the number of lives saved by press hysteria is the same as the number lost to Sars thus far in Britain. None.

Another mortality count: How many people, between the discovery of avian flu and its arrival in Britain, have died from maleria, HIV/AIDS, pneumonia and TB? How many more until the first life in Britain is taken by the flu, if any are? Those diseases don't get the hysterical headlines, though, and not simply because they've been killing for centuries. You can be almost certain of avoiding them by being relatively wealthy inside a relatively country. Not AIDS originally, and it caused an almighty panic when it first emerged. But since drugs were found to keep sufferers alive it's dropped off the headlines; and activists and aid organisations have to constantly remind us that it is actually eating up a whole continent. Many diseases are lifestyle ones in a way. People catch them by living in terrible conditions or doing terrible jobs, they die from them through a lack of food and medical treatment. They can be negated by wealth. Some new super-germ, though, which skips across class and national boundaries, which can get you whoever you are... that's always been one of the great terrors of the rich. It's us relatively rich who the journalists write for, after all. The ones with the income to respond to the adverts which keep the papers going. And fear, even more than sex, shifts copy.

I might be wrong about the bird flu menace. Maybe it will indeed sweep the world. One day one of the few survivors could read my scepticism and laugh sardonically. That at least will prove the society that we know really has been overthrown: someone reading this damn blog.