The heaven of mediocrity

Oh the ridiculousness of the opening of campaigns. Four games into the new Premier League season and there are already serious pundits saying things like “well, I can’t really see anyone catching up with Chelsea,” and “Well, West Ham are going to struggle to stay up”. I mean, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone giving England a fighting chance at the European Championships in 2012 following two adequate performances against (let’s face it) inadequate opposition.

I sit in front of my TV and scoff at the absurdity of some of the comments… And just now, yes, 15 seconds ago, a DJ on the radio has said: “And this week we’re at White Hart Lane to see if Tottenham can build on their one-all draw with West Bromwich Albion.”

Build on their draw with West Brom?! Well, that’s got to be a position from which you can put in a challenge for a top-four place.

It started with Andy Gray and Sky Sports, I guess – this insatiable need for every kick of every ball in every game to contain within it significant drama and illustrations of sporting excellence. Good God, world, can’t we relax a bit and think more about the fact that the opening of the season is only meaningful in the context of the closing of the season, 34 games and seven months away.

And then, as April trundles into May, will anyone be saying, ‘well, if Spurs hadn’t got that point at The Hawthorns, they would be in real trouble now’? I seriously doubt it.

But (and here comes the really annoying thing about the start of the season) I still get caught up in it all. I found myself thinking this morning that if West Brom continues to accumulate an average of one point per game (at present we stand at four points from four games) we could well be in real trouble come the end of the season, but not irreparably so…

Fast on the heels of that thought came this: If West Brom beats Birmingham on Saturday, we will probably be ok this season… After five games?! Good God, man – get a life. Get a grip!

The fact is, these days, that the Premier League tends to level out over 38 games with the top six pretty much guaranteed (Man U, Man C, Arsenal, Liverpool, Spurs and Villa – with possibly one of the last three struggling to maintain its position) and the bottom six much the same (West Brom, Blackpool, Wigan, Wolves, West Ham and Newcastle).

True, that second list is less certain and that’s what gives West Brom fans this irrepressible hope – the bottom six (as long as it’s not the bottom three) would mean progression. But this stage of the season means nothing. Look at Burnley last season. Beat a host of top teams in the early part of the season, but then lost their manager and (seemingly) their ability to play. The season before, Hull was almost unstoppable in the early stages, only to scrape a survival by the skin under their fingernails.

But this is where I worry about West Brom (and England, come to that). While these other (often smaller) teams pull off stunning shocks and earn at least the respect of the observing world, West Brom and England stick to form. West Brom bounces up and down between the top two tiers not so much like a yo-yo as a perpetually powered rubber ball in a ventilation shaft and England cruise through qualifying (losing a couple of friendlies to class teams) and are humiliated in the quarter finals of the next tournament (or the last 16 if we have a real saviour at the helm).

You will, of course, have noticed that there are eight teams in the top flight I haven’t mentioned, your Fulhams, Sunderlands and Boltons et al. For these teams there is no fight for championships and cups and there is no scrap to maintain Premier League status.

Some would call it dull mid-table subsistence. I would call it heaven.

The week's weak

They say ‘a week in politics is a long time’. Ha! That’s just what the politicians want you to think when an unpleasant story rumbles on in the press for more than a couple of days. You might like to note that successful political campaigns are referred to again and again, ad nauseum, when it suits them.

If you want a week to be a long time, all you need to do is turn to football – especially at the beginning of the season. A week ago, I was enshrouded in a slough of gloom after West Brom’s embarrassing 6-0 defeat to Chelsea. I kept saying (to various gloating wags) ‘early days yet’, but I was really thinking ‘we’re done for’.

Now, a mere week later, with two comfortable wins under the Baggie belt (against Sunderland in the league and the powerhouse that is Leyton Orient in the League Cup), I’m thinking, ‘hey, maybe we can scrape through’. Unfortunately, the scoffers are remaining annoyingly quiet at the moment.

Of course, it’s not just me leaping to ridiculous conclusions with 36-plus games to go in the season. The pundits are at it with considerable savagery… For a start, Robbie Savage (is he actually still playing for Derby County? He certainly seems to spend most of his time in BBC studios at the moment).

Savage, of course, started the season by assessing Newcastle after the team’s first humbling defeat away to Man United (although not as humbling as West Brom’s). He concluded that the Toon was not strong enough to survive the Premiership and its striker, Andy Carroll was nowehere near the standard necessary to have an impact on the league.

Roll on a week and Newcastle annihilated Aston Villa 6-0 with Carroll slotting away a very cool hat trick.

Blackpool were being praised for their resilience and spirit after their 4-0 hammering of Wigan, only to be another team to eat the bitter taste of a 6-0 defeat a week later.

Man U looked impressive against Newcastle, but mediocre against Fulham (a 2-2 draw). Arsenal looked destined to chug along for third or fourth place (again) against a spritely looking Liverpool, destined to reclaim their ‘top four’ status and Man City were ‘a team of individuals that would never gel in time’ against Tottenham Hotspur, the ‘new contenders’.

Well, a quick look over the past week and we see Arsenal’s 6-0 demolition of Blackpool, while Man City veritably crushed Liverpool and Spurs, a few days later, were 3-0 down to the oddly monikered Young Boys of Switzerland.

Okay, so Spurs fought back to 3-2 and will probably beat the Young Boys (sorry about that, but not really any other way of saying it) tonight (Weds 25th August).

And it is that date that really puts the whole thing into perspective. August! Two games in to the season. It is all as meaningless at the moment as the dryness of the tea leaves before you pour the water on them.

Okay, so fans will always leap to ridiculous conclusions after the first game of the season (we are doomed) only to change direction 90 minutes later (we will be the champions), but the pundits really do need to keep their feet a little bit more on the ground and their mouths a little bit more connected to a brain that is in gear if they are going to blather in front of millions each week.

Predictions are fun and part of the job, of course, but to write a team off or declare its invincibility after a single game? Unwise.

So, West Brom for the League Cup, anyone?

Six of the best

Oh dear…

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…

Actually, I knew before the moment that the Premier League fixtures were announced that my team, West Bromwich Albion, the Mighty Baggies, were in for a rough ride this season. Yes, the opening six games of our fifth season in the top flight in nine years read like a who’s who of top four and top ten teams (Chelsea, Sunderland, Liverpool, Tottenham, Birmingham, Arsenal – with Bolton and Man U following swiftly afterwards), but West brom can hardly have been said to have cruised to promotion last season.

I was worried – even while the World Cup was going on – that we would be fighting so hard to hold on to any decent players we had, that we found ourselves with little time to actually strengthen the squad…

Strengthen? With a 25-player limit?

As it turns out, we held on to everyone except Valero and Koren. The former didn’t want to stay and the latter, for some, as yet unexplained reason, was not wanted. No matter. West Brom did something a little unusual during this close season in that it actually strengthened its team. A few potentially good signings, holding on to Graham Dorrans (non-home-grown, it turns out) and…

That’s when I saw the fixture list for the season.

Now, I must admit, I did find myself wondering something like this during the World Cup and watching England’s abject displays: why can’t we have some luck? Other teams have luck. Other teams win games on bad refereeing decisions. Other teams get Wigan for their opening game of the season. Other teams just ‘click’ and play a game of blinding perfection against vastly superior opposition and win three unexpected points that end up making the difference between relegation and survival. Why doesn’t West Brom?

The team plays good football… all right, that could be down to luck, I suppose. The lovely Tony Mowbray created a team that played ‘The Beautiful Game’ (regardless of the fact that we had no players of any real quality to pull it off) and now, the not so lovely Roberto di Matteo has harnessed that and added a bit of grit and practicality, making us a great team to watch when we are on the ball. It’s attractive in the build up and we can score the occasional goal. But we have to face facts. We are neither as flowing and skilful as the top half dozen teams, nor are we as gritty as the likes of Stoke, Bolton or Blackburn.

So, what have we got? It all looks a bit thin, to be honest. Damn it all, we probably won’t even beat Liverpool this season… In fact, after seeing their first game against Arsenal, I don’t think many will.

You see? A bit of luck. The archetypal yo-yo team times it perfectly to be in the Championship just when Liverpool are at their most shitty for 50 years and miss the opportunity to beat the smug bunch of humourless scallies.

I’d give a win over Wolves to beat Liverpool… Well, a draw, perhaps – let’s not get carried away. But even then – now – with the thoroughly pleasant and decidedly not completely bonkers Roy Hodgson in charge of Mersyside’s scumbags, beating them just wouldn’t be the same.

Not that we’re going to now, of course. They looked like a team of world champion sprinters on the break (except Carragher, of course).

No, the only thing West Brom can hope for over the next few weeks is that the thrashing we took last Saturday from Chelsea (6-0 for those of you living on Mars or in Liverpool).

The phrase ‘six of the best’ has come to be used more frequently of late as a precursor to a list of six really good things. Have we forgotten that it refers to being caned at school?

Well, corporal punishment may not be in our schools any more, but it is certainly alive and well in the Premier League. Let’s hope West Brom can learn the lessons necessary – and quickly – before teacher comes along and gives another half dozen.

Blue genes

In David Bond’s excellent blog posting yesterday, he discussed Richard Scudamore’s recent (very limited amount of) acceptance of some blame for England’s appalling performance at the recent World Cup (which England has never won).

He comes up with some interesting figures.

Nearly 60 per cent of the Premier League players are not ‘home grown’. Of the 42 per cent that are ‘home grown’, not all of these are eligible to play for England.

The academy system in the country has some 300 players between the ages of 16 to 18, of which 245 are English.

The 2010/11 season will see Premier League teams having to comply with the new quota system that limits squads to 25 players, of which 17 have to be ‘home grown’. At the extreme (Arsenal, of course) that means there will be precisely two (yes, two – that’s 2 – one more than one, one less than three) English players. The other six ‘home grown’ players have come through the academy, but are not English – and never, presumably, will be. One suspects this will do wonders for Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshire’s foreign language skills. For their footballing skills, I fear the worst. Shame, two good players that probably could do well with another team.

But digging at Arsenal, while inherently warming inside for any football fan (only to be topped by digging at Liverpool, really), is misleading. The fact is that there are about as many teams in the Premier League and Championship that can claim more than 50 per cent British players (let alone English) as there are teeth in the average nine-month-old baby.

Again, this is not necessarily bad in and of itself (although I have pointed out in a previous blog that mediocrity among English players is often obscured by the brilliance of the foreign team mates), but what walked out of the computer screen and slapped me repeatedly across the face was a simple and immediately obvious discrepancy in the figures above…

Let’s have a look at them again…

58 per cent of players in the Premier League are from abroad. 42 per cent are ‘home grown’ (that is, not necessarily English). 245 out of 300 academy players between the ages of 16 and 18 are English – that’s 82 per cent…

There are 20 teams in the Premier League, each (now) with a squad of 25 players. That’s 500 players aged 21 upwards, which means that’s 210 home grown players.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this means more than two out of three academy players are making it into the Premier League. Now that strikes me as a pretty good success rate. Using these figures, this means that we have something like 172 English players in the Premier League.

Seems to me that the problem is not so much the FA, or the manager, or the Premier League, or the clubs, or the foreign players, or even the academies. All of that seems to be in place. The problem is that England is turning out adequate squad players by the hundreds every two or three years. What they are not churning out is international standard players. It’s just that we’re a bit shit, really.

Is there anyway of nurturing raw talent? I’m thinking it will probably require genetic engineering, but with Britain up in arms today about someone having ‘slaughtered and eaten’ the offspring of a genetically modified cow, I doubt we’ll be going down that road any time soon.

The national team faces Hungary next Wednesday. Oh God! Come on Hungary…

The waiting game

I love the World Cup, but it’s a bit like flying business class. It spoils you. I flew business class once… well, twice. There and back again. I was taken on a press VIP trip to Japan and it was simply fantastic… Bloody fantastic. Space, comfort, personal service, a choice of quality meals, drink the whole way and no questions asked. Delightful – pure and simple.

I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles since. Economy class. And each time I do, I can’t help the unpleasant little tingle of resentment when I see those bastards queuing up and filing on first, but turning left at the entrance to the plane.

That’s what the World Cup is – that’s what it does. It is a luxury journey that we have the right to once every four years (which, granted, is a lot more frequent than my flying business class).

You see, last year, come May, I had already geared myself up to yet another year in the Championship for West Bromwich Albion and the fact that nothing else would happen for another three months.

This year, I got myself all keyed up for the World Cup, desperate to read and watch anything and everything pertaining to it for the month before South Africa kicked off against Uruguay, then watched just about every game through to July 11th and the (more deserved than most people seemed to give them credit for) Spanish lifting the trophy.

Since then, I have been at something of a loose end. Yes, I have started a blog… Two blogs in fact. I have got the ball rolling on establishing my own website – at last! I’ve only been chuntering on about it for about ten years. I have written a few songs and recorded a couple and set up my first gig playing my own brand of digitally looped guitar (Auraloramas)… In fact, I don’t think I have done so much in a two to three week period for decades. 2010 is indeed turning out to be an important year for me, as I had suspected it would be…

But it’s all falling a little flat at the moment. There is a hole in my life and there is nothing I can do about it except wait.

You see, I had failed to prepare myself for the one month and one week of no football between July 11th and August 12th. Completely forgot to prepare myself. What a knobber.

So, I found myself this morning, a little hungover, admittedly, scouring the ‘on demand’ section of BT Vision looking for something to feed my embarrassing habit.

I found it in a rather pants programme detailing the best goals of the first three seasons of the Premier League. Goal after meaningless goal went in, filling me in on three seasons I had largely missed due to my being in Bulgaria at the time.

My wife caught me at it. “Isn’t this a bit like porn?” she asked (a little too shrewdly for my liking). “Just goal after goal and you get a bit desensitised to it."

Well, yes, it was (although I didn’t admit that to her). I felt a little guilty being caught watching it, too.

Did I learn anything? As a matter of fact, yes I did. I learnt that Alan Shearer was as excellent as I remember him being (before he joined Newcastle and became just ‘good’). I learnt that Matt le Tissier was a damned site better than I remembered him. And I learnt (or rather had confirmed) that Ryan Giggs was a blindingly good player in the first three seasons… And, thinking about it, still is now… The bloke’s a living legend. Every season since 1992. A goal in every season. How many titles? A dozen? How many cups? Five? How many European Cups? Two (I know that one). All with one club.

I suppose 2010/11 could be his last season. I hope it’s a good one. I hope he scores a few goals. I hope his record stands for decades to come…

And I wish, as with Le Tissier and Giggs, that players could develop and shine with one club that they love – but I know that’s never going to come true. We’ve come too far.

Still four weeks to go until the season starts… How do we cope? I’m now waiting for the second episode of the best goals of the Premier League to be uploaded… Although next time I’ll wait until my wife goes to bed.

I think my bank manager's a fascist

This is a tenuous wee bloggette. Tenuous because it only very loosely relates to football and/or music, but because of this, I figure this offering can go on both blogs…

It was, we thought (my wife and I), a simple task. When we first got married, she made her bank account joint for her and me. I’m not sure why we didn’t do the same with mine, but there you go – the question never really arose, but my ongoing ineptitude with all things financial meant that, this week, we thought we would give Lorraine access to my account, too. She’s really good with that sort of stuff.

So, a meeting was made to meet a ‘personal banker’ for a few days later and we were required to bring in voluminous quantities of paper and documents that proved beyond doubt that she really was my wife and not some woman who has been grooming me in order to run off with my amassed wealth (ha!).

All well and good. As were the initial pleasantries of the meeting. (“you don’t bank with us, do you?” he asked Lorraine. “No,” I said. “She has found another way.” I was secretly pleased with that.)

It got to a few minutes in, when he announced that he would have to say some stuff in accordance with the law and ‘will try not to sound too much like a parrot’. He then proceeded to ramble off a couple of paragraphs of financial blah from memory. To his credit, it was not like a parrot. It was more like a horse race commentary. “I hope that wasn’t too much like a parrot,” he mumbled, once over the hurdle.

“It was very good,” Lorraine lied. “Are you an actor?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“You can always spot them,” said Lorraine. “Luvvies, gays, they can always recognise each other.”

“Well, I’m more of a singer, really, I do some stuff with my church and I hold classes with some youngsters.”

Oh dear, I thought. In one sentence he has managed to mention that he is a) an actor, b) a singer, c) a Christian and d) some sort of teacher. We then got a brief outline of the fact that he has recently changed churches and the fact that he is singing with a band, doing numbers such as Mack the Knife, Hey Joe and Minnie the Moocher… At this point I glazed over.

Oh, God, I hope I don’t do this. Do I flaunt myself insensitively like some sort of private parade in front of people, letting them know how bloody marvellous I am? Please, someone, tell me I don’t or I might have to dig a hole in the Chilterns and live there on vegetable husks for the rest of my days.

Somehow, a bit later, we got on to football and the World Cup. Now, we were on more even ground here. Everyone is a football manager – me included – and I consider football a safe haven for the terminal bullshitter – hence my blog.

But there was something odd about him. Statements such as “Don’t tell me Lumpard (I call him that) and Rooney weren’t thinking about their houses, cars and holidays when they were on the pitch.” I know some serious sports journos have said this – and they might be right, although I seriously doubt it. I think the problem is a lot more deep seated than that. But the mispronunciation of Lampard’s name – and the flag to make sure we were aware of it, rang oddly with me.

‘I don’t think I like you,’ I thought.

Somewhat out of the blue, he began talking about Raoul Mote (?) – you know, that fuckwitt that shot people, evaded capture for a few days then, thankfully, shot himself (where he should have started, really). Apparently, there is a Facebook page where people are holding this thug up as being some sort of hero. Definitely odd, but not something I would think about above, say, thinking about the need to buy some more Marmite, because my current jar is almost empty.

Anyway, Mr Manager, started getting a bit heated about what sort of people would consider a murderer and attempted murderer to be a hero.

“Mass hysteria,” said Lorraine. “It’s the same with Princess Diana, politics… And don’t get me started on religion…”

Oh dear, I thought. My dear lovely wife has either forgotten the religious references a few minutes ago, or is spoiling for a fight.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” said Mr Manager. “I mean, I’ve only been a Christian for a couple of years – although I’ve been in and out of church all my life – but everyone thinks of Christianity as a peaceful religion.” (Do they?) “Whereas Muslims talk about their religion being a peaceful one and we all know it isn’t.” (Do we?) “I wouldn’t mind, but I haven’t heard a single Muslim say they utterly condemn the actions of these terrorists.”

Here, both Lorraine and I interjected. “Oh come one! You need to listen to a bit more Radio Four.”

“Well, they certainly aren’t saying it loudly enough,” he rejoined. (Splutter, splutter.) “The thing is,” he continued, “Is that everyone thinks of Christians as peaceful, but when you think just a hundred years ago, it was all ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. Christians aren’t so peaceful when you think about it. I mean, look at history. Islam and Christianity are just as bad as each other. We both have violent histories. I mean, I became a Christian because of the London bombings on 7/7. I know some people might say that is not the right reason, but it’s had a good effect on me… Can you sign here and here, please?”

As we left the room, he asked us not to say anything about our conversation… “It could lose me my job!” he said.

Is there another way? I sincerely think there is…

The carnival is over

The show that stops the world is over. Gone. Finished. Another four years have to go by before we can get ourselves all worked up again about the best teams in the world (and England) vying for the ultimate sporting trophy.

How did South Africa compare with previous World Cup tournaments? Well, I’d love to hear your opinions, but for me, it was, in the end, much of a muchness.

The team most people said before a ball was kicked (in qualifying!) won… Actually, I almost predicted this, too. I say almost, because in my predictions (I have all the sheets here laid out in front of me now) I always came up with (except in the one where my guiding principle was what I would want to happen – England won that one… Cue loud, baying, hollow laugh) Brazil or Holland against Spain, but I don’t think I ever actually wrote down who I thought would win.

No, I only predicted Spain would win for certain after I examined who I thought would win the final after the semi-final results. My heart said Netherlands, so I knew Spain would win. (My thoughts are the kiss of death to any football team – sorry West Brom… Sorry England.)

A little more trumpet blowing if I may… I predicted the final (pretty much), I predicted that Uruguay would do well (after both my wife and I pulled them out of two separate sweeps), I predicted England would be crap. Okay, not exactly Nostradamus, but not bad by my standards.

All right, enough of my masturbatory spoutings – how did South Africa 2010 actually compare with previous World Cups.

Well, the final was almost a disappointment, but then again, they usually are. The group stages were generally dull, but then again, they usually are. As ever, the really exciting games came out of quarter finals and semi-finals… As they usually do. The group stage this year had a couple of big wins, a couple of exciting matches and a couple of big teams dropping out (France was a good one, because they had done it just eight years previously. Italy, too, was a shock, but fully deserved. My how we laughed and gloated in England… for about three days).

But it’s the final that is always the real disappointment and has been for years now… Decades. I’ve been sitting here, trying to remember the last time there was a really good final – not just a good one, but a really good one. This is what I have come up with…

2006: Dull
2002: Forgetable
1998: good, but overshadowed by the Ronaldo panic attack. How good a game is it if that’s almost all you can remember?
1994: The dullest, most wretched World Cup final ever in history. Brazil should really, in all conscience, give that one back and pretend it never happened. The best thing about the 1994 World Cup Final? Some scraggy Italian with a vomit-inspiring pony tail missing a penalty. Utterly crap. No excuse – strike it from the records.
1990: Good
1986: Good (but it was that cheating wanker’s greatest moment, so I can’t possibly allow it to stand)
1982: I remember nothing about it at all – not even which teams were in it. I refuse to google it – a World Cup final should stick in the memory. (1994 does simply because it was one of the worst games of football I have ever seen.)
1978: Very good… Hey! Very good! (But not REALLY good)
1974: Very good (I refer the honourable readers to 1978)
1970: Outstanding…
Wow! Outstanding! How about that? It’s been 40 years since we had something other than ‘very good’ in the World Cup final.

Damn! Going back through my previous blogs, that means we need to revive the Jules Rimet trophy… No, that’s a can of worms I’m not willing to consider.

(PS – I have since looked up the 1982 final. Italy 3, Germany 2. I have trouble believing that that could have been anything other than a class game of football... But I still can't remember it. The name 'Rossi' keeps flashing across my consciousness... Some stirrings are felt in my loins... I think I must have been a bit out of my head in June/July 1982... There is hope for the World – but, as ever, dispiritingly, it involves Germany.)