You know what Tottenham are like? They're like some okay-looking guy who gets his first really pretty girlfriend, and then thinks that because he qualifies for pretty girls now, his own girl ain't pretty enough for him.
Yeah, Ramos seems shit hot, but this is being done for all the wrong reasons, and in the worst possible way.
Well said, James Hamilton:
I never meant it to be a central theme at this site. You can blame the press that it has been. It was their myth after all - that the kind of feelings fans experience watching football are the same feelings that the team needs to have on the pitch in order to win.
James again, lauding Chris Waddle's commentary (after an unpromising start):
Once the match was underway, though, he was superb. Intelligent, thinking, observing. At one point, he mentioned that Spain would pass to a man who had perhaps two yards of space around him - but England were reluctant to pass to anyone with less than five yards. Better, don’t you think, than merely saying that England weren’t passing the ball as well as Spain? Better than saying that they aren’t as comfortable on the ball as Spain?
Because we know those things already. But Waddle’s way of putting it actually makes you think a bit more about what’s going on - it makes you reflect on how much harder it will be for an England player to be in a position where a pass is on; how much harder for England to work the ball; how much more important each England pass becomes, therefore, because there’ll be fewer of them.
Football fans know nothing. Me included. Now that Sisoko is injured, me and everyone else can't believe that Gerrard isn't in the middle. And I haven't been able to turn on 606 this season without hearing some halfwit Liverpool fan bloviating on how Steve G needs to be in teh centre, 'cause that's where he's the best for his team. Is that true? THere's a pretty straightforward way of determining it, and that's by looking at Liverpool's record with SG on teh right and in teh centre. Guess what? Since Rafa's been at Liverpool, when Stevie's started in central midfield, the Reds have won 56% of their games. With him on the right, they've won... 74%. And I'm pretty sure his goals per game average is higher from the right than as a central midfielder.
Instinct suggests it should be Plan A, that the spine of the team is where Liverpool’s best footballer can have maximum impact, that Gerrard’s rare command of all the game’s disciplines — tackling, passing, running, heading, shooting — means he should be deployed in the area where versatility is at a premium. The stats say something different. Benitez, the scientist, will go with evidence over instinct every time. A breakdown of their significant games over the past two seasons shows that Liverpool won a far greater proportion when Gerrard was on the right. His personal contribution, in goal terms at least, does not depend on his position particularly.
[...]
When Benitez first played Gerrard on the right (see panel) Liverpool switched from crisis to a record-breaking run of victories and clean sheets.
(Re the champion's league final in Istanbul, by the way, Stevie spent the first half in a central midfield partnership with Alonso. Only when Didi Harmann replaced Gerrard in this position did the team begin their incredible comeback. Why does no Liverpool fan remember that?)
(Unfortunately, the panel referred to in the quote above isn't available online. Too bad, as it held all the relevant stats.)
That was diabolical - the worst performance I've seen from England since coming over here. Under Sven, they were uninspiring. Under McClaren, they're uninspiring and incompetent. Truly a great leap forward. Just a few points:
1. Steve McClaren might want to change the mantra from "passion and pride" to "pass to someone on your side".
2. The media celebrated John Terry as a captain because he would bring back good old-fashioned "English grit", determination, etc. Leaving aside the fact that Terry seems to have lost some of his positional sense (and he's too slow to be able to recover from his positional errors), how useful are these so-called English virtues? Two days ago, Terry announced that he was going to give the team a big speech before the match. Gosh, John, that really set the boys on fire, didn't it? What did you tell them - fight each other for the ball, get in each other's way, and don't execute even the most basic of passes? Of course, i don't blame him for giving the team a fire in the belly speech - there's surely no harm in this. And here I fault the media as much as anyone. If England had won, they'd have all said that it was becuase of his speech, because of his English grit and fire and spine and determination and etc etc blah blah blah. But the reality is, once you're on the pitch against top opposition, it's more about execution and tactics than hunger. The hunger should be a fucking given, for both sides.
2. IIRC, one of the reasons Terry was celebrated was because he's seen as a straight talking tough guy. It's pretty easy to always talk straight when you're rarely put on the spot, though, and now as captain he is being put on the spot. So how did he fare last night? Was he talking straight when he said that England controlled the first half? I think we all know the answer to that one. Worse yet, when asked how it felt to be knocked off the top of the table, he actually said "we deserve to be up there, we want to be up there." Deserve? Deserve? By dint of what, straight talking John?
Sheesh.
UPDATE: In a generally insipid article, Kevin McCarra offers this useful paragraph:
That cursory involvement by the midfield trio was hard to bear after the manager had blethered beforehand about the importance of "character" and the need for an "English performance". His views have to be quoted, but he came across as superficial, outdated and determined to play to the gallery. In such speeches there is an implication that other nations don't have these qualities to the same extent. They do, as Croatia confirmed. Skill and brains are the elusive attributes.
This "implication that other nations don't have these qualities to the same extent", which the media is more guilty of than anyone (though I don't know if McCarra himself has been) is to me the most irritating aspect of the English football experience. Do the English not realise how chauvanistic they sound when they blather on like this? And how pathetic, when all this "English grit and determination" has added up to diddly squat over the last forty years?
If I could change any single thing in sport, it would be to make it far less homophobic. To their credit, Man City are making positive steps in that direction.
Writing in the Guardian, Sam Delaney says this is a good thing, but he says so in a curiously half-hearted way. What's up with that?
UPDATE: I think that looking at this range of issues - sport, sexuality, masculinity, acceptance - would make for a very fun thesis. And then I can be very ambitious by getting the FA to employ me to help fight for a more inclusive agenda within football.
Barring injuries, here are my predictions for England's starting 11 at Euro 2008 in Austria/Switzerland:
P Robinson (not great, but England has a dearth of decent goalkeepers)
A Cole, J Terry, R Ferdinand, G Neville (Neville won't last until the world cup, but I suspect he will still be better than Konchesky et al in two years. Cole should be at the height of his powers at age 27. )
J Cole, M Carrick, S Gerrard, A Lennon. Lampard will be 30, and, with the fierceness of the competition at Chelsea, won't be playing regularly there. If he is playing regularly, it'll be at a worse team in the premiership, or overseas, with the latter being particularly bad for his chances. I don't see anyone coming up the left wing to move Cole in towards the middle - Stewart Downing will never really amount to much, I believe. If Carrick goes to Man U he'll get lots of attention, which will benefit him in competition for the (offensive, in his case) holding role - and he should still get much of that positive attention at Spurs, who will be very fun to watch over the next two years. I think this will give him an advantage over Hargreaves, but I'll be interested in seeing how Kevin Nolan does (though he'd clash with Gerrard as Lampard did, I think). Hargreaves will be 27, a lovely age for a holding midfielder; hopefully he'll have added some calmness to his harrying, not to mention a better repetoire of passing and offensive positioning. Gerrard will be 28, and possibly slowing down after a career as one of the most active men in football, though hopefully not as much as Vieira did at the same age. And hopefully Lennon will be able to cross a ball a bit better in two years. Will SWP be a regular player again? It'll certainly be his last chance to shine, as age will whither his speed soon after.
Rooney, D Bent. Will Bent pip Defoe and Owen for the other striker role? That remains to be seen. I think Owen will never really recover. As for Defoe, he'll score wonderful goals, but will he get into the right positions reliably enough to be an integral part of this team? Will Bent, for that matter?
A week later, we're still crapping on about Zidane. Here's my take, posted in the comments at Bitch PhD.
Since this post is about people's reactions to the headbutt, rather than the headbutt itself, I'll stick to the former.
What I'm most intrigued by here is how we perceive Zidane. Becaue he plays with such calmness, dignity and beauty, most footie fans assume that he is a calm and dignified man. In truth, if you were betting money on who would get sent off in this world cup, Zidane would have been one your best choices. He has a long history of losing his cool, was suspended for two matches in 1998 for a deliberate stamp on a Saudi player, and has used the headbutt (though not to the chest, IIRC) several times in his red card-studded career.
I think there's a whole lot of "loving the lovely" going on here. If Zidane had the exact same (very bad) disciplinary record and did not play as beautifully as he did - eg, if he were a hustling little harrier like, eg Gattuso, or a hard man like Roy Keane - then I don't think the world would see this headbutt as the act of a dignified man standing up for a dignity that supersedes the game itself. We'd see him as a great player with a bad temper, and we'd see this as an unofrtunate example of that great temper. But he's a beauty (in play), so we cut him more slack than we would those who are not so beautiful, just as we're more likely to hire the beautiful, or believe their stories in court. We've constructed a pantomime in which the ugly character (Materazzi being considered "football ugly" both for his style and his nationality) was assumed to be nastier than he really was (everyone said it must be racism), while the Beauty is excused his excesses - to the point where generally sensible commentators such as Bitch are acknowledging that it wasn't racist abuse, but saying that since he surely suffered racist abuse throughout his career, we excuse him for transplanting that hurt onto some non-racist abuse and then doing something that almost surely will deny his younger teammates (such as Ribery, who I think is married to an Algerian and has converted to Islam) the chance to do what Zidane has already done: lift the World Cup trophy. Perhaps we could excuse the level of selfishness if it were racist abuse, but it wasn't. Insulting mamas and sisters is rude, but it's just not the same as racism.
Here's a counterfactual, then I promise I'll shut up. If Patrick Vieria (black, of Senegalese descent, and, like Zidane, an occasional discipline problem - but not nearly so beautiful a player) had been the one to get the red card in the final match, and he did it because Materrazi had racially insulted him, a good percentage of us would be supporting Vieira because he ws standing up against one of the scourges of the sport, racism. But if Vieira had headbutted Materrazi because the latter had insulted the former's mother and sister, do you really think there'd be as much support for Vieira as there is for Zidane? I don't, and I think it has far more to do with their relative beauty (in terms of play) than with the merits of the behaviour itself.
Here's a fairly decent article from the Times.
At more than mind games, James has a very thoughtful reflection on England's 2006 World Cup and the state of English football, plus a look ahead to the future.
Oh dear. The Guardian has let Martin Jacques write an article on the world cup. It's as bad as you would imagine.
Football has more upsets than other sports. But then we knew that, didn't we?
