Morality and Obligation

“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” – Albert Camus

This was the weekend that Wayne Bridge refused to shake hands with John Terry. Formerly good friends and team mates, it was a poignant and – to me at least – really quite difficult to watch moment in the build-up to the Chelsea v Manchester City match at Stamford Bridge yesterday. The various reasons for the snub I won’t recap as they are extremely well-documented elsewhere and so ubiquitous at the moment as to be utterly tedious.

This particular moment, though – and that is literally all it was – is one that won’t fade from my memory any time soon. Predictably hyped up in the preceding 24 hours by the written and broadcast press, Bridge’s participation in the Blatter-designed pre-match handshaking ceremony came into question following his decision to withdraw from the England squad earlier in the week. There were rumours that there were more players in the City squad who would refuse Terry’s gesture, jokes that Wayne Bridge might in fact prefer to plant a swift head butt on his former Chelsea and England team mate instead.

Sky’s coverage right up to the line-up was focussed. It thankfully wasn’t, and didn’t need to be, hysterical – there was a tangible intake of breath from all present when the City players, led by Shay Given, started making their way down the row of Chelsea men. “Here it comes,” intoned Martin Tyler, clearly eager to get on with the football but no doubt infected with the same rubbernecking impulse as the other 40,000 people inside Stamford Bridge and the various millions watching on TV. Terry held his hand out. Bridge, locked into the familiar rhythm of repeated token handshaking, moved as if to take the other man’s hand, paused…and moved on. As far as brutal, even comic, timing goes, it was impeccable. John Terry’s face was frozen: he surely knew it was coming, but that brief moment cannot have been much fun in any case.

He looked lost in thought in that fragment of time. The very idea of a footballer lost in his own thoughts is usually the cue for a tedious joke about the assumed intelligence, or lack thereof, of someone who does something as essentially physical as playing football for a living – something I have always found rather distasteful about lazy football punditry. In this case though, the stresses and strains of the past few weeks were etched on his face for all to see. Was he wondering, maybe, whether it had all been worth it? Was he wondering where it had all begun to fall down around him? Either way, it was a rare moment when the audience, both those in attendance and via satellite, gained a gut-wrenching insight into the personal life of a footballer on the field. The collision of front and back pages was made flesh here – and it left a nasty taste.

The usual ‘public right to know’ defence has invoked by the unscrupulous press lawyers throughout the saga. It doesn’t hold up – it is absolutely not my right, nor anyone else’s, to know anything about someone’s private life purely because they have a high-profile job. Despite this – and even if I hadn’t even glanced at a tabloid newspaper or clicked around online for the last month – it would be clear to see that something wasn’t right with the mood in West London. And it was, honestly, shamefully, fascinating.

This was the weekend that Wayne Bridge refused to shake hands with John Terry. It was also the weekend that Chelsea lost at home for the first time this season – and the first time they have even conceded against Manchester City at home for almost a decade. Are the two things related? It seems hard to imagine otherwise. Based on the evidence of this performance, Chelsea’s labours in Milan and their recent defeat to Everton in the league, it gets trickier and trickier to argue that external issues are not affecting matters on the pitch.

Terry was certainly at fault for City’s first goal (as he was on two occasions at Goodison Park) and his temper threatened to boil over into something more serious in a later clash with Carlos Tevez – though to suggest that it is entirely Terry’s problem would be wrong. A lack of concentration and a mood of uncertainty seems suddenly to be running through the entire Chelsea squad. The players’ heads haven’t been in the right place for a few games now – and it remains to be seen whether Carlo Ancelotti will be able to deal with the rift. The big worry, of course, is that this could prove to be a negative turning point in the club’s season, the moment when it all collapses – up there with Arsenal’s William Gallas sitting alone on the pitch at St. Andrews in 2008.

Having ridden the crest of a wave of confidence for the majority of the season and turning in the sort of performances that has seen them achieve, among other feats, comprehensive defeats of Arsenal at home and away in the Premier League and cruising untroubled through the group stages of the Champions League, Chelsea risk everything falling away at a time when Manchester United are growing in self-assurance thanks in no small part to Wayne Rooney’s phenomenal form and Arsenal facing an extremely generous run-in, with influential players returning from injury all the time. If a player as spirited and indomitable as Didier Drogba has been this season can lift the team’s fortunes and carry them on his broad shoulders until May then Chelsea should hang on to their lead. Much more scandal, distraction or plain bad luck and Manchester United are almost certain to get their historic fourth consecutive title.


So, morality and obligation, then. John Terry’s now-public transgressions seem to boil down to that incredibly blokey kind of moral code – the whole ‘you don’t shag your mate’s ex’, thing, essentially. It should be remembered that Terry hasn’t broken any laws, unlike other former England captains and myriad other prominent figures. He does, however, have the burden of professional obligation in a different sense than a scandalised rock star or actor. He has to attempt to put aside recriminations, ignore any abuse he might get from fans during England’s friendly with Egypt on Wednesday and do his job to the best of his ability – for the good of his team mates, bosses and fans of both club and country. The world of football can be as much a harsh spotlight for a person to live in as it is, undoubtedly, an enviable lifestyle, but the point is that, ideally, a player’s private life and professional life should not interfere with each other. Terry’s biggest mistake, perhaps, has been to allow problems outside of work to influence his performance. If morality hasn’t troubled him in the past, his obligations certainly are now.

Consumer

As I have confessed previously on this blog, I am not the sort of football fan who actually goes to a lot of games. I support a Big Four club which, despite being based in the city I live in (albeit at the other side of it), is prohibitively expensive to watch live, even in the case of low-interest Carling Cup ties or dead rubber Champions League group stage matches. It’s a disgrace, of course, but that’s not what I’m writing about today. The fact that the live games I get to watch are few and far between (both in terms of time and geography – this season I’ve taken in a grand total of three matches; two in London, one in Bulgaria) has left me thinking a lot recently about how I, and many millions of fans like me, consume football these days.

As I write, Arsenal are playing away at Porto in the Champions League last 16, first leg. Due to various factors, including a despicably unreliable national cable TV supplier having failed to install their service in my new house after almost seven weeks* of waiting, I am watching it via an old-fashioned external aerial (and for all the good its ‘signal-boosting power supply’ claims to be, I may as well have stuck a coathanger in the back of the telly) through a haze of constantly undulating, mesmerising visual noise. The scoreboard routinely disappears off the top of the screen and the colours that make it through, other than the ubiquitous green of the pitch, are at best approximations of the shades actually on display all those miles away in the Estadio do Dragao. No matter – it’s the football, not the coverage that matters, right?

Last night, by contrast, I watched AC Milan being humbled by Manchester United in glorious Sky HD on a very respectable 37-or-so-inch Samsung screen. It was dazzling – like having a mere sheet of glass between myself and Alex Ferguson’s chewing gum. Every bitter expletive from the grizzled Scot’s mouth was in jaw-dropping, era-defining, slow-motion high definition. The really shocking thing is that Sky HD is no longer the pinnacle of the remote football-watching experience. Last month Sky launched Sky Sports 3D at a select few pubs in the UK for the Arsenal v Man United Premier League encounter – and as one of the many people not invited to any of the events, my lasting impression remains a single TV advert showing a pub full of astounded men wearing dark glasses, bathed in the glow of the Future – like a collection of shady US government officials witnessing the test detonation of a nuclear weapon. Apparently the service will be rolled out across hundreds of other pubs across country come April.

I should also add that in addition to the fuzzy wonderland of ITV’s coverage in Porto, I’m watching Bayern Munich v Fiorentina live on my iPhone via Sky Mobile. This really rather spectacular little app lets me watch Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, Xtra, News and ESPN live – in bafflingly high quality – for only £6 per month. There doesn’t seem to be much of a catch: OK so I can’t have a group of friends over to gather round the little screen to watch Premier League and Champions League games, but I can hide away in the corner of the living room watching live games on headphones while the other half watches Come Dine With Me* – and to me that’s a bit of a revelation and well worth the price of a couple of pints. When I wrote about football and the internet last year at the time of the England V Ukraine World Cup qualifier, I had in mind individual fans being forced to watch blocky YouTube-style feeds on obscure, overpriced websites. It seems I might have been wroing – this particular service even works well via 3G coverage, meaning it can be watched when I’m out of the house (if not, sadly, when on the tube). If online live TV is the way things are headed, Sky Mobile seems to be a genuinely viable option.

Of course, not every game is live on Sky Sports, nor on ESPN, the BBC or ITV. The Premier League’s rules regarding the broadcast of 3pm Saturday kick-offs still apply (though it remains strangely difficult to find out exactly why, particularly in terms of the huge potential commercial value in selling said matches to broadcasters). As a result, the vast majority of football coverage is consumed – by myself and most other fans – in purely non-visual format, whether in the form of online live text updates, TV shows like Sky’s Soccer Saturday and the BBC’s Score or simply by catching up on results and reports in the newspaper the following day. This distance between the event and the fan is an interesting one – especially when it is legally enforced or based on obscure clauses in broadcast rights contracts – as it gives rise to some bizarre behaviour by fans and broadcasters alike.

Firstly, the idea of staring at an empty scoreboard, waiting for it to fill with numbers and then ascribing meaning to them is fairly absurd on its own. Looking at a list of scoreboards from an entire day’s events, waiting for them to be confirmed and assimilating the information dispassionately also seems to be a strange way of engaging with an ‘entertainment product’ as visual and visceral as football – nevertheless I, and many others, do it every single weekend.

The strangest of all, however, must be Soccer Saturday. One of Sky Sports’ most popular shows (not least because it is broadcast free-to-air on Sky Sports News), Soccer Saturday has, among other things, made a cult hero of presenter Jeff Stelling and inspired a host of Soccer Saturday drinking games. The fact that it consists entirely of Stelling reading out scores from the vidiprinter as they come in (albeit in an entertaining and delightfully pun-riddled fashion); live links from match reporters who, despite being at the ground, seem to be facing the opposite way from the rest of the crowd in order to watch (and become hopelessly confused by) the action on a small monitor; and a collection of ageing former pros watching matches that are being televised elsewhere on screens the viewer can’t see, occasionally yelling “Goal!”, “Chance!” or “GO ON LAD!” (if one of the clubs playing happens to be one they used to play for) and ineptly attempting to describe what they’ve just seen. It sounds bizarre because it is – and I can’t imagine another world in which it could take place. Needless to say, I love it.


There is a huge amount of choice available to the ‘armchair’ football fan in need of their fix – and it seems, like so many things, to be a question of finance as to how close one can get to the action. If you can’t afford to go to the game, you watch Sky Sports and Match of the Day. If you can’t afford Sky Sports, you rig up the coathanger and (occasionally) watch teams playing in a blizzard of your own creation. And if all else fails, you can watch the cogs turning behind Paul Merson’s furrowed brow as he attempts to describe a Wigan near miss or a dubious Bolton penalty. It’s unbelievable, Jeff.

Christmas Week

Christmas week 2009 has been, in my opinion, as effective an advert for the Premier League as you could imagine. We’ve seen plenty of goals, big upsets, high quality football, brilliant fan support, mind games, backroom intrigue and even a high-profile managerial sacking. All of which has meant that we finish the year, with one more game to play, with the annual title race closer and more exciting than it’s been in years. It has also demonstrated, somewhat brutally, exactly what a ruthless place the league has become.

Last weekend, more so than this one, was the sort one could use as an argument to anyone as to why they should watch the Premier League over any other. Manchester United lost their second consecutive league game in a 3-0 defeat to Fulham, having been forced to play midfielders in defence owing to a crippling injury list – the sort of thing that just wouldn’t have happened last season. Portsmouth finally found a result to go with their improving performances as they beat a woeful Liverpool side 2-0 – the side hotly tipped for the title at the start of the season after their stunning 2008-09 run-in in April and May. Arsenal beat Hull 3-0 to keep up their string of impressive results and ensure that they remain worth keeping an eye on despite being largely unfancied and appearing under-strength. Mark Hughes’ Manchester City finally got a 4-3 over Sunderland win when yet another high-scoring draw looked to be on the cards – and their manager was sacked at the final whistle. And, on Sunday, with the stage set for Chelsea to move six points clear at the top, West Ham held them to a creditable draw – ensuring that no one was drawing premature conclusions as to the destination of the Premier League trophy at the halfway stage.

This weekend kicked off with Chelsea being held to yet another draw, this time away to Birmingham City who themselves, impressively, are currently 8th following a run of five consecutive wins. Victories for Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool seem, on paper, to suggest a return to normal service – though with the latter lying in 7th behind Aston Villa, Tottenham and Manchester City, this might finally be the year when we are forced to stop talking about the ‘Big Four’, at least temporarily.

The gap between first and second is now only two points (with both teams playing again this year, and with Chelsea facing the prospect of play Fulham with an untested strike partnership) and between third and eighth is only eight. I’m not suggesting for a moment that we’re in a position yet where any one of these top eight can win the league – but would certainly argue that we’re no closer to knowing who will be entered for the European competitions than we were in August (indeed probably less sure) and that when you look at Serie A (Inter Milan eight points clear, Roma in fourth, 11 points behind) or La Liga (Barcelona two points ahead of Real Madrid, who are in turn seven points clear of third place Sevilla), and without wanting to come across too biased given that it’s the league I happen to watch every week, the English top flight does seem to be where the true unpredictability lies. Nothing is over by this Christmas.

Except one thing, maybe. Where there is the excitement of unpredictability, there is also bound to be a measure of the crushingly, tediously inevitable to spoil the party. Rumours of Mark Hughes’ demise as Manchester City manager after 18 months were in all the tabloids from Friday morning and all over the internet on Saturday morning during the build-up to the afternoon’s fixture. It’s been well reported that Hughes looked disconsolate and distant throughout the game, despite the pulsating action on the field and the odd-goal-in-seven win for his team, and that his wave to the fans at the final whistle had a look of the farewell about it. Sure enough, here was a man who had effectively been replaced weeks before, by another young manager – this one from Italy and with a more high-profile name and CV. While it seems now that Mark Hughes was the only person in the country who didn’t know on Saturday that the Sunderland game was to be his last, the fact that he clearly knew something was up is heartbreaking.

The inevitability of the decision is the worst part. When City’s new owners came in at the beginning of last season, it seemed even then to be only a matter of time before Hughes went. Given £200 million to spend, Hughes survived into this season – but it seems now that only sitting top of the league and with a trail of Big Four scalps behind him would have been enough to save him this indignity (though going unbeaten at home all season and getting wins against Arsenal, Chelsea and narrowingly missing out against Man United was not).

Of course, the points that City have dropped this season were never going to be tolerated by ambitious, impatient owners who clearly feel they had given Hughes everything he needed to shape the club into international superstars. Financially, they did. The one thing they didn’t give him was time. Roberto Mancini did not start out with the name and reputation he has. Neither did Ferguson, or Wenger. Hughes was settled into the job, had bought well (mostly) and the players liked him. Mancini will now start from scratch and, in all likelihood, bring in a slew of players in January and next summer. In replacing Hughes, City’s owners have effectively put themselves back a year in development and written off the money they spent on players this year – and if they get the Champions League place they so crave this season it will only paper over the cracks.

I wish Manchester City all the best and hope that Mancini does use the club’s financial clout in the same way that Mourinho did at Chelsea when he arrived in 2004 – to bring in exciting new talent rather than marquee shirt-shifters, to make the Premier League even more competitive than before and to help the English leagues show the rest of Europe the way in modern football. My fear is that if it doesn’t happen quickly, I could be writing all this again very soon.

Naming Rights and Wrongs

Today Newcastle United announced the ‘new name’ to be applied to St. James’ Park in the wake of less-than-popular owner Mike Ashley’s decision to take the club off the market and put the rights to the historic stadium’s name up for sale instead. Apparently more of a placeholder move than a permanent change – especially given that it is named for Ashley’s own chain of budget sports gear shops – for the remainder of the season Newcastle will be playing at The sportsdirect.com @ St. James’ Park Stadium. Hm.

There’s been a predictable amount of noise made about it – scoffs from the majority of football fans who see limitless comedy potential in the prospect of an already-maligned club lumbered with an unfashionable name for their once-untouchable and locally-treasured home; groans and resigned shrugs from the beleaguered ‘Geordie Nation’ who are long past being shocked at anything Ashley has to throw at them in terms of indignity; and of course platitudes from those in the team’s hierarchy who are adamant that this direction can only be a good thing for the club. The same has been said about Tottenham’s proposed new ground (which, based on the concept artwork, I like to call The Naming Rights Stadium).


To be honest, I’m inclined to side with the latter. I mean, the sportsdirect.com @ St. James’s Park Stadium’s not that bad is it? OK, so it’s far too wordy and impossible to fit into a catchy terrace chant and the @ sign in the middle is a cringingly dated lunge at sounding modern (much like the awful Stadium:MK where MK Dons ply their trade) – but the fans and TV pundits will still refer to it as St. James’ Park; it’s unlikely that the BBC in particular will spend much time reciting the URL for Ashley’s retailer in fear of giving ‘undue prominence’.

Newcastle fans can be consoled with the fact that it could be a lot worse. In America’s MLS, where, unlike in England, the commerce came a long time before the football, the fans take their seats at Pizza Hut Park (FC Dallas), The Home Depot Center (LA Galaxy) and – best of all – Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, home of the Colorado Rapids. Even York City’s KitKat Crescent has a certain assonant poetry to it.

The key to selling naming rights for stadiums, it seems, is choosing the right sponsor – and making sure it’s actually a good name. One example is Arsenal’s glittering Emirates stadium; probably the most pleasant place in the country to watch club football and oozing class and expense from every glass and concrete corner – and it has a name that rolls off the tongue; the sponsorship element of it is relatively easy to ignore.

When Arsenal first announced that they would be leaving Highbury for the Gulf airline-sponsored Emirates, there were groups of fans who were incensed, declaring that they would refer to the stadium as Ashburton Grove and never, ever, by its corporate name. Three years down the line and you’d be hard pushed to find an Arsenal fan that had a problem with playing at the Emirates (apart, perhaps, from the fact that they haven’t won anything since moving there!)

It seems odd, especially nowadays, for fans to complain about naming rights being sold for their teams’ stadiums anyway. For a long time now football clubs have been adorned with advertising: corporate logos and companies names are key parts of the iconography of football – indeed, in the case of shirt sponsorship, they are literally part of the fabric of modern football. Is it really violating the sanctity of a football club to step up from having every single player wear a logo on his chest, every member of backroom staff wear a branded jacket and hundreds of metres of advertising hoardings all around the pitch to playing in a branded stadium?

In a previous blog post, Modern Football is Brilliant, I argued that football today, particularly in the Premier League, is as exciting and infinitely watchable as it is because of the increased money and ‘commercialisation’, rather than in spite of it. For me, this also applies to shirt sponsorship’s effect on the look and, yes, feel of the game today.

Looking back through photographs from the last 20 years or so of football history, the most notable differences are usually in what the players are wearing (and occasionally the haircuts). The history of the Premier League, for example, can be divided into eras based on shirt sponsorship: for example there was the Sharp-era Manchester United of the 1990s, in which they won their historic treble in 1999, which gave way to the Vodafone-era United of the 2000s. So many fans I’ve spoken to will fondly remember their favourite shirts, whether it’s JVC Arsenal, Sega Arsenal or O2 Arsenal; Autoglass Chelsea, Fly Emirates Chelsea (and how incongruous that sounds even a couple of years later, such is the airline’s association with their North London rivals); and how odd will Liverpool shirts look without Carlsberg emblazoned across the front from next season? And will it herald a significant new era for them?

Perhaps this is just me being sentimental as usual – but what is true is that corporate involvement with football is certainly not always some terrible, cynical, money-spinning venture. Often, especially in the lower leagues, local businesses sponsor football clubs who are as much a part of the community as the clubs themselves and form a genuinely symbiotic relationship. Without the sponsorship of local businesses, it is likely many League One and Two clubs would struggle to survive. Is it any wonder that more and more of them sell off their naming rights too? There are always criticisms that teams have sold out or betrayed their long histories by making this sort of move – but when the choice is either changing the name of the stadium or even the club (as many teams all over Europe have – see Wales’ TNS between 1997 and 2006 and FC Red Bull Salzburg, once SV Austria Salzburg) – or ceasing to exist, surely it’s better that a historic club survives in some form?

Football is kept alive by advertising and sponsorship – and is all the stronger for it. It is the reason that England can still sustain 92 league clubs, many of whom are well over 100 years old, despite falling attendances and an overwhelming focus on the top few in the media. So while it’s sometimes funny (I remember as a child when we used to laugh at local team Rochdale because they were sponsored by Carcraft, the local Skoda dealership – could any other sponsor exude less glamour?) sponsorship is a major part of the lifeblood of the sport – and makes for some of the most enduring images of recent football history.

The Champions League

The Champions League is, I think, my favourite football competition. There’s something distinctly nocturnal about it – and not just because it’s played in the evening. Forgive the A Level poetry, but for me it has all the buzz and unknowable tension of a night out in a strange city. It’s dark, your face reflecting the glow of hazy neon lights, and you’re not sure what to make of those around you; they maybe talk or act or move differently than you’re used to, but you know they’re all there for the same reason as you are – and they’re all excited.

No other competition comes close for the sheer thrill of Champions League football. There’s the ridiculously overblown but nonetheless iconic theme music – a bastardisation of Zadok the Priest with overtones of some imagined European community spirit, sung along to in pubs and bars across the continent at the beginning of every game and, eventually I’m sure, by the players themselves in lieu of a cohesive national anthem – and the image of the football covered in UEFA’s glamorous stars unfurled across the centre circles of fascinating stadia in exotic cities you’ve barely heard of.

Then there’s the football, of course. The inimitable spectacle of two-legged contests against foreign or domestic opposition with the horror or glory of away goals or penalties potentially deciding matters is a uniquely CL experience. Anyone who watched the second leg of Liverpool v Chelsea in last season’s quarter finals will be lucky to see a more exciting, closely fought or genuinely action-packed game of football ever again. A 4-4 game is one thing – a 4-4 result at the highest level when it matters so much is truly breathtaking.

The atmosphere in any pub, but particularly a partisan-yet-jovial one, is nothing like it is for a league game or an FA Cup tie – the nail-biting tension and (occasional) subsequent party atmosphere is heightened by the evening setting and the presence of random evening revellers. The banter is more lucid, more paranoid – and more wide-ranging. European club history is truly fascinating; and in every boozer there’s a fan of every club. Everyone’s seen at least one inexplicable Anderlecht fan sat biting his nails in the corner of a beer-sodden chain pub at 9.45 on a Tuesday night or a horde of drunken Fenerbahce fans staggering towards an unsuspecting suburban curry house.

Then there’s the free geography lesson: I suspect that some of the most geographically knowledgeable people you know are football fans. Were I not an avid student of recent Champions League and UEFA Cup campaigns, I couldn’t possibly tell you the name of three towns in Ukraine, or the biggest cities by population in Serbia. I love the amazingly exotic and obscure names and unfeasibly tiny clubs the European competitions throw up – every time a team like FK Ventspils, Unirea Urziceni, Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk or Rubin Kazan appears on a fixture list for an English club there is a definite buzz, at least for me.

As a result, in three weeks time I’ll be in at the Bulgarian Army Stadium in Sofia watching CSKA Sofia take on OFC Sliven 2000 in the Bulgarian A Professional Football Group league. How could that not be exciting?! Were I not a football fan and, crucially, a bit of a nerd for former-Soviet football, I would probably not have suggested the trip to what I’m sure will be a beautiful and historic city (but don’t tell the girlfriend, eh?).

However, as much as I love the Champions League, I can’t help but feel that this season’s competition is going to take a little while to get going.

The action kicked off last night, as I watched Chelsea labour to a soggy and scrappy win over Porto, and as I type Liverpool are taking on Hungary’s Debreceni as part of a frankly underwhelming first round of games (at the moment I feel fairly happy to be avoiding Standard Liege v Arsenal – it’ll probably turn out to be a classic now) – at least for the English sides. The Premier League’s recent domination of the competition (and resulting high UEFA ranking) seems to have inadvertently thrown up some rather dull group stage opponents, and one would imagine that none of the big four, nor Rangers, should have much trouble getting to the last 16 stage.

Sure, Manchester United have a gruelling away trip to Moscow and Chelsea may find Atletico Madrid something of a stumbling block – and one should never discount Arsenal losing their bottle in Europe – but the really exciting groups are those with no UK interest.

Tonight Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan take on Barcelona in a game which is sadly hidden behind the red button on Sky Sports, hence limiting its UK audience dramatically – especially disappointing when it’s a great chance for pub football pundits to actually see the non-Premier League-based players they spend so much time pontificating upon. And last night’s 5-2 away win for Real Madrid over FC Zurich or Wolfsburg’s flying start against CSKA Moscow were almost certainly more of an interesting contest than the two 1-0 wins by English sides who barely got out of first gear.

It’d be nice to see more of the big European sides on television this year. As much as it’s been enjoyable to see English sides doing so well in the Champions League over the last few seasons, I’m getting a bit tired watching teams like Chelsea battling to reach a potential final against Man Utd by beating Arsenal and Liverpool, or whatever. Hopefully they’ll all be there in the last eight again – but not all in the last four, please.

I’m going to end this post by pasting in the trilingual lyrics to the Champions League anthem that I can hear from the TV in my living room, because I’ve only just read them properly (thanks, Wikipedia). They really are mind-boggling. Next time, you can sing along with me (and, presumably, Michel Platini).


Ce sont les meilleures equipes (Those are the best teams)
Sie sind die allerbesten Mannschaften (Those are the best teams)
The main event!

Chorus:

Die Meister (The champions)
Die Besten (The best)
Les Grandes Équipes (The biggest teams)
The Champions!!!!

A Week of Punishment

It’s been, to say the least, a big week for punishments being handed out by the football authorities. It’s very tempting to take up a contrary position to executive decisions and rant about how the faceless and seemingly disconnected powers-that-be hand down apparently arbitrary penalties based on whatever disciplinary issue happens to be in focus at the time, but surely the people running the game have some idea what they’re doing, don’t they?

I suppose what I mean by ‘in focus’ is whatever issue happens to be in the headlines – FIFA, UEFA, the FA et al are not, clearly, immune to the ideological whims of the football press and seem often to act only when an incident hits the back pages and is scrutinised by the television networks. The more of a fuss made by pundits, managers, referees and, to a much smaller degree, the fans, on an issue, the more swiftly (and harshly) the authorities seem to act.

The first of this past week’s big disciplinary stories is a prime example of this, I think. It’s clear to most who saw the incident in the Arsenal v Celtic Champions League qualifier two weeks ago that Arsenal forward Eduardo dived to win a penalty as keeper Artur Boruc came to collect the ball at his feet – what is unclear is the thought process, and indeed the political process, that went on at UEFA surrounding their response. The overwhelming reaction was one of knee-jerk example-making and chaos.

Referee Mejuto Gonzalez gave the penalty, which was the wrong call – but his reading of the game nonetheless – when the dive, had he or any of his assistants spotted it, would have warranted a yellow card for simulation. Eduardo’s punishment, handed out extraordinarily quickly, it seems, was to be a two-game ban – essentially that for a straight red-card offence. UEFA have, then, opened a few predictable cans of worms.

The first is the issue of consistency. Are they now going to hand out retrospective two-match bans for every issue of diving they come across? Is simulation now a straight red if the referee sees it? Does this apply to feigning injury or just diving? Will it still be applied if it happens outside the penalty area? This is chaos – rewriting the rules in one swift, ill-defined move as a result of a bit of hysterical press hoo-ha. More troubling is the fact that they seem to be taking power out of the referee’s hands – if UEFA (and presumably FIFA, on the international stage) is to retrospectively analyse every match for disciplinary infringements, why have a referee at all?

Which brings me to the second can of worms – which, admittedly, has already been open and squiggling for quite some time: video technology. Laughably, it seems that UEFA in particular are doing anything they can to avoid introducing technology in the Champions League, while it remains a bit of a no-brainer to fans, managers and players alike – hence the introduction of a “fifth official” for Europa League matches whose job it is to watch the penalty area. Why, then, if we are to strip the referee of his executive decision-making ability, have another fallible human watching when there are already several cameras covering every inch of the pitch? Is it really just money? I know plenty of people who’d have more time for watching live football if they knew they were going to get a fair outcome – and probably wouldn’t mind waiting the two or three seconds it would take a video referee to make judgements in contentious situations.

I’m in no way saying that making moves to stamp out diving is a bad thing. It was disappointing to see Eduardo go down like that, mostly because he’s always seemed to be an honest player – but this only emphasises that the problem is genuinely part of the game nowadays, and unless proper, sensible rules can be put in place from the top of the game to the bottom (which I’m not sure it can), it should be accepted that it’s always going to be around.

See how easy it is to rant?

This one might be harder to avoid. After the Eduardo noise had just started to die down came FIFA’s announcement that Chelsea were to be banned from signing new players for two transfer windows – meaning no new faces at Stamford Bridge until January 2011. Even as I read this back now it seems unbelievable, and it feels more and more likely that the Court of Arbitration for Sport appeal will see it reduced to just the one window, but still – where do FIFA get these punishments from?

The first thought I had was, for various reasons, the effect this would have on Chelsea. Enforcing a serious setback on a club’s development for almost two seasons felt similar to Juventus’ punishment for match-fixing in 2006, when they were relegated to Serie B for a season (OK, so I was possibly overreacting) but it still confuses me as to the scale on which certain crimes fall for the governing bodies of football.

It was a Chelsea statement that described the two-window ban as “arbitrary”, and it’s hard to see it as anything else. Diving = a yellow card or a two-match ban if the referee doesn’t see it. Systemic corruption, referee-bribing, match-fixing = relegation and points deducted. “Inducing” a teenager to break his contract – a two-window transfer ban. Is this really written down anywhere? And if so, why are we looking at isolated incidents, plucked out almost at random? As BBC blogger Phil McNulty put it, if FIFA think this only happens at Chelsea then they are naïve in the extreme.

Again, I’m not suggesting that the practice of stealing youth players from small and vulnerable clubs should be allowed (I would probably support a ban on the transfer of players under 18, in fact), but that only consistency will make any sense of this particular cruel punishment in the long run – it would be nice to be able to imagine the authorities in charge of one of the biggest global industries not looking like a bunch of reactionary headless chickens.

The final disciplinary issue that’s got me going, that’s only just come to light tonight, involves the domestic game, and the 9-month ban handed to Sheffield United goalkeeper Paddy Kenny for failing a drugs test. For once, this at first seemed fair. Kenny did test positive and performance-enhancing drugs should be dealt with harshly, of course – but in this case it seems that Kenny took the banned substance, ephedrine, accidentally, in an over-the-counter cough remedy. What seems crazy to me is that the FA disciplinary committee have accepted that it was an accident, but handed the player the nine-month ban anyway. This will, it seems, “send out a message” to footballers to watch what they’re taking. No leniency shown, no first warning. Just a whole season on the sidelines for a simple mistake.

Hopefully great performances from England and Scotland on Wednesday night can lift the mood, for me at least. At the moment there’s a bit of a rough taste in my mouth.

Deadline Day

The transfer window closed – sorry, SLAMMED SHUT – yesterday afternoon to the usual hysterical Sky Sports News/BBC Online fanfare. It’s something I and probably everyone who reads this look forward to at the end of August and January as it offers an opportunity for some genuinely exciting breaking football news. This time last year was the prime example with the incredible one-day takeover of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the audacious snatching of £32m Robinho from under the noses of a bewildered Chelsea – the taste of their own medicine predictably bitter.

The day’s narrative can unfold thrillingly, with Sky reporters at every ground studying the occupants of every car that arrives, online forums buzzing with often hilarious sightings (“My mate works in the doctor’s surgery Hull City use for their medicals and he just saw Sergio Aguero reading Heat in the waiting room”, “My restaurant just took a booking for a Mr. P. Kenyon and a Mr. F. Fabregas – coincidence?!”) and, presumably, footballers, sometimes, actually having meetings in Little Chefs and Airport Hiltons.

There is the other side of the coin, however. There is inevitably hype and a lot of noise made about what might happen on Deadline Day (Sky have had a countdown on screen for the last 6 weeks, as far as I can tell), but on the day itself we tend to forget that there have already been loads of deals completed, and that these have been so because they take a long time and aren’t decisions that are taken lightly by either side. What were we really expecting to happen? Cristiano Ronaldo already transferred to Real Madrid for £700 billion, Man City have already distorted the market with their huge (but actually rather sensible, for me) spending – plus all the European leagues’ windows shut the previous day on account of them not having had a bank holiday.

Could any deadline day deal really have surpassed the hugeness of Ronaldo’s, or the City saga of 2008? I doubt it, unless perhaps Harry Redknapp decided to take his current spending strategy to its ultimate conclusion and re-sign every player he’s ever previously managed including Rio Ferdinand, Shaka Hislop and Linvoy Primus.

As it was, the deadline day activity was a bit of a damp squib. Having followed the ‘action’ on the BBC website from 9am til 5.30, it seemed that their reporters at least were resigned to the fact that nothing particularly massive would happen – there were rumblings at Portsmouth and Everton, as most expected – and yet still, presumably under orders, hung on to the grim hope that a real ‘marquee signing’ would take place. So was I, of course.

Is this all that the window exists for? It’s hard to be sure that it’s of much further use. I read Gordon Strachan’s column in FourFourTwo this week and he suggests that while the window unsettles footballers and stresses out managers – albeit exciting the fans – it does in fact mean that when the window is shut players tend to focus on the job at hand (knowing they can’t go anywhere) and teams with a bit of money are less able to gain an unfair advantage by replacing injured players whenever they like.

Personally, I suppose I like knowing that the squads are as they will be for at least half the season now, making it far easier to analyse how teams will perform in the coming season, but I still find the idea of people just ‘not being allowed’ to change jobs whenever they like very strange and even slightly troubling – it couldn’t happen in any other industry, could it? (Of course, this could be said for a lot about the world of football).

This period, now that the window is shut until January and we’ve seen a few games played and teams start to take shape, is the only sensible time to start making any sort of tentative predictions. So I might make a couple.

As I’ve mentioned before, for me the most significant transfers of the summer have been, of course, Ronaldo and Xabi Alonso to Real Madrid – not because of the possible impact of the six-year-old’s Panini sticker fantasy team Madrid are assembling (again), but because of the effect on the teams they’ve left behind.

I predicted in an earlier blog that United would struggle without Ronaldo – for goals at least – but what seems to be happening, happily for them, is that Rooney is looking to be the man to step up his game from last season and prove to be the truly match-winning player we know he is capable of being. I also think that Owen will score lots more goals for them – finally getting the service in front of goal he’s been praying for for years.

Liverpool, on the other hand, have blown it in my opinion. This Aquilani chap is going to have an awful lot of pressure on him when he returns from injury – as the hole blown in the midfield at Anfield by Alonso’s departure looks pretty nasty. Sure, they won against Bolton at the weekend but they could very, very easily have lost – a rather harsh red card swinging things in their favour. Unless Aquilani really does turn out to be something special, and slot in with Gerrard and Torres nicely, you’d have to be mad to back them for the title this season – right now at least.

As far as the other ‘Big Four’ clubs go, Chelsea are looking great at the moment, the only caveat to their 100% start being that they haven’t really been tested. Hull, Sunderland, Fulham, Burnley – these are all clubs you’d expect the Blues to take three points from. The fact that they have, comfortably, makes them my favourites at the moment, however. I feel similarly about Arsenal – but as always their relative youth, fragility and susceptibility to injury makes them hard to back over a whole season. Time, and stamina, will tell on all fronts.