The Scottish and Scottish Football

Gerry Hassan has expanded, generously to say the least, on my earlier post about the place of the Scottish national team in the minds of Scots. I’m going to begin my response by considering some of Gerry’s points. But his fasinating post has attracted exactly the kind of in-depth, thoughtful, informed comments that I’ve found more common in discussions of Scottish football by Scots than in equivalent discussions of English football by the English. That isn’t an anti-English comment – both countries suffer by comparison with the Netherlands – but I’m not sure how aware Scotland is of the presence within its borders of various manifestations of quality to do with the national sport and feel this particular manifestation is worth pointing out.

Anti-Englishness

Gerry says of anti-Englishness:

One of the worrying trends is that you can see such a phenomenon across society: in the support for anyone playing the English at football, in the slow rise of a bigoted anti-Englishness, and related to it a kind of romantic, sentimental national feeling (I wouldn’t credit it with the intelligence of a nationalism) which mixes ‘Braveheart’ with ‘Whiskey Galore’.

I’ve not been in Scotland long enough to comment on longer-term trends. But I have had experience of anti-Englishness in Scotland: the experience of not experiencing it. “Hating the English” is one of those things that a small subsection of society get up to, and because (a) they themselves believe it and (b) they think themselves the salt of the earth, they think everyone feels the same way. Everyone who’s really Scottish, of course. Most Scots don’t seem to agree, and regard hatred of the English as (1) insulting to their English friends, girlfriends, wives, relatives (2) racist (3) dim.

It’s weather talk, code, not real. I’ve been warned several times about certain people that they’ll hate me because of my origins (I don’t consider myself English – I’m a Londoner, and other Londoners will catch something of what I mean even if they don’t feel that way themselves). Every time, without exception, the person to whom these dark mutterings referred turned out to be more inclined to open a second or third bottle with me and talk the sun back into the sky. I’ve come to read “I hate the English” as “I love Scotland, and I’m proud of it, for all its faults and shortcomings: I want to be warp and woof of this place of places.” Every time I drive up the A9 into Perthshire and beyond – every time a stranger takes me into conversation on some Glasgow suburban station – every time I smell the breweries on the Edinburgh air – so do I, but then I feel Gloucester Road calling me and pull away from the thought.

Football as an anchor point

Gerry has a three-point strategy intended to place football in a healthier place in Scottish culture:

First, to put football in its proper context in an age which we are constantly told by IT gurus and new economy geeks is constantly filled with choice and diversity, and yet which in many respects has become narrower and more conformist. Is football used by (mostly) men as an anchor point in a culture of chaos and confusion, and why do we not want to talk about that?

I can think of one important way in which the age has become narrower and more conformist, namely the prohibition of recreational drugs in the late 1960s. And one unimportant way: the rise of management-speak (although I think all that’s done is replace earlier forms of the same thing). I’m not sure, either, that we’re being told that the age is filled with choice and diversity: some commentators would like more, and others see diversity as a general good that gives breathing space to immigrants, ethnic minorities and social minorities (and that’s my view too). But Gerry’s core point is the use by men of football as an anchor point and maladaptive displacement activity, and here I have to plead guilty.

I don’t agree that we live in a culture of chaos and confusion – compared with the 1870s, or 1919-23, or 1946-50, or 1979-81, the UK is a laughing paradise. And compared with the period of industrialization and urbanization of the nineteenth century, life has been stable and unchanging to an unprecedented degree since World War Two. Compared to the lives my grandparents lived, my 40-odd years have dodged every imaginable bullet. So what about the use of football as an anchor point?

The bullets I didn’t dodge – parental breakups plural, having my skull fractured in a mugging outside my house, unemployment, business failure etc. – have left me at times, yes, taking comfort in something stable and ongoing and distracting. After my mugging, I determined not to let my attackers or the experience beat me, just as I’d refused them my wallet until I realised my injuries were becoming serious. I kept my same haunts, my same walk home. It was about as frightening as I could endure, but for the first week or so I managed. Then I met the same gang again, and they, recognising me, gave chase. I ran into a nearby shop, and, as I was no longer alone, they left me there. The shopkeeper had a television on behind his counter, and there was a match on. Memory says it was Leeds v Rangers in the European Cup. Memory also says that I watched it with the shopkeeper, and found that bit by bit the sheer ordinariness of it all and the shared company helped me pull myself together enough to get home. I moved away shortly afterwards.

Likewise, during the early credit crunch when the business I’d spent a decade building began its rapid break-up, I don’t think I missed a single Match of the Day, and my 3-DVD set of old MOTD editions – an at-hand reminder of earlier, relatively safer days – saw heavy use. “Look at his face!.. Just look at his face!…” that would be Franny Lee’s, and, next morning, my own, longer, dead-eyed one in the shaving mirror.

I’d regard the use of football as a comfort and distraction from problems as an entirely positive thing. The fact is, it only lasts a short while. In hard times, the information comes at night, as Martin Amis says, and I’ve known it turn up during daylight hours too,to check if you’re busy. That’s why I don’t believe that men are using football talk to dodge realities (I’m reading Gerry’s point as meaning “political realities”) and why I don’t believe men are talking about football instead of what they ought to be talking about. I agree that awareness and consciousness trump their opposites, but I don’t get to define those terms for other people, and in troubled times, you are all too aware, aware of things that are all too close, for any sustained conceptual analysis or bigger picture.

As fans of Simon Kuper know, in unfree political societies, football talk elides into political code and political representation naturally and automatically. The flipside is also true: where free political discussion, campaigning and voting are available, politics and football separate off, unless they are kept together by sectarianism on the one hand or by political self-consciousness (nostalgia for crowds of cloth caps being run together with Liverpudlian socialism, for instance, or the Guardian’s ethical World Cup).

Which leads me to want men to keep the football talk: if the UK really does abandon the free political culture of the later twentieth century – and I think the illiberal urge is at its zenith now, about to go out of fashion and into decline – then they’ll need it. It’ll cover a multitude of tiny, hard-won illicit freedoms, as it did in Nazi Austria and the post-War Communist bloc and as it does today in China.

Know Your History

Gerry’s second point:

Secondly, the Scots need to address some serious issues about their culture and society. Knowing a bit more history: both real and on the football field would be a good start.

Yes, absolutely. Scottish history is avowedly not a story of innocent kite-flyers repeatedly, pointlessly, intruded upon by rosbifs; Scotland is not under occupation nor has it been oppressed. I refer the reader to Alex Massie’s recent exchange with his readers over the issue of the Council Tax – it ends with his nationalist opponent resorting to the surreal claim that St Andrews isn’t really part of Scotland. Whether or not you support independence, it’s hard not to admire the efforts of the bulk of the SNP to create a vision of the country’s future that is open, forward-looking – a vision antagonistic to the paranoia and parochialism of the kind of nationalism that shapes  the Glasgow omnibus version of even recent Scottish history.

I agree with Gerry that there are, if you want them, credible ways of addressing Scottish history that nourish rather than tear down, encourage rather than depress, unite rather than divide: the story of the national football team is one of those. (I think I can speak for both Gerry and myself in deploring, ultimately, the idea that the discipline of history has to be “for” anything, let alone this). I’m old enough, for example, to remember the excitement around the 1978 Scotland team of Dalglish and co. – excitement, that is, in the Home Counties of England, and to remember the sheer force and pleasure of the reflected glory felt in England as Scotland beat the team of the tournament with the goal of the tournament. Humiliated? Who was humiliated? England wasn’t even there: they hadn’t come close to qualifying.

What to do about the Old Firm?

Gerry’s third point:

Finally, it would be great to do something about our football, the sad awfulness that is the Scottish Premier League and the nature of ‘the Old Firm’. Maybe getting them to commit to the Scots domestic game for the next ten years and engage in a root and branch transformation, which would involve Celtic and Rangers seeing their successes as interlinked with the success of Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen and Dundee United.

I waver over the “Old Firm.” As a small boy who didn’t know anything about a row between any Catholics and Protestants, I started supporting Celtic because I liked their name, and was delighted, once I could read properly, to find out that they’d once won the European Cup and were actually quite good. Lucky, happy accidents: I picked up my English team by turning on the FA Cup Final by mistake in 1976 and, being a good little Brit, cheering on the losing team..

Holland has the same “problem”, for instance, of domination by a pair of big clubs, yet still produces stunning footballers. My favourite foreign team of recent years is Ajax 1995. And, given enough determination, other Scottish clubs can compete: Hibs are coming up fast on the Old Firm, and not as a one-off one-season blue streak. Hibs have worked hard to build infrastructure, and have a period ahead of them now when Celtic and Rangers will be hobbled financially. There’ll be at least one league title at Easter Road to show for it.

Root-and-branch transformation might well happen, too: the blogs are shouting for it, the former First Minister is putting a plan together for it, the new Scottish manager wants to be involved in it, there are no illusions in the media about skimping on it, and there are men and women – especially in Ayr and in the unsung Highlands – who aren’t waiting for anyone else and are getting on with it themselves. In Edinburgh, there isn’t just the new Hibs training complex: there’s also Spartans, one of the most inspiring non-league clubs in the UK.

I’m pessimistic, for now, about the national side. As I said in my initial post, I think the job is beyond the reach of anyone at the moment. Football, I think, is where the English go to be stupid: where a literate and intelligent country lets its hair down. Sir Trevor Brooking is a lonely figure down there sometimes. The Scottish value intelligence and its expression as a positive thing  – just read the comments on Gary’s post – and are able and willing to put proper minds to work on the national game. That won’t, however, stop the mass media going all Greater Serbia over the national team, but, then, perhaps those reporters don’t, in the end, know anything about the game.

Sportscene is filmed on a depressing, recession-blue set inside what appears to be an abandoned refrigerated warehouse. The presenters wear the expressions of doomed men. To the right of the screen flicker latest scores from little clubs playing in cold places at the end of single-carriageway trunk roads. Two retired players with earthworm complexions discuss Motherwell and Falkirk. What they have to say is articulate, intelligent and interesting. But in context, it feels like something is coming to an end here.

I do think something is coming to an end. It goes for the whole of Britain that, when the last of the comfortable predictions has died out and all is dark and wet and frightened quiet, good things are beginning. So it is, I think, for Scottish football. It’ll take many years for it to reach the national side, for reasons I’ve discussed before. But the worst is over, before we know it or are aware of it. It feels like 1980 in Scottish football: all unemployment queues, dodgy auction surplus shops in the High Street and no one to vote for. There are people in the jungles of Scotland who fight on unaware that that early ’80s recession has been over for thirty years. The football one’s over too, for all that it doesn’t yet show. When it does, it’ll become clear that the Scots pulled themselves out of it, on their own and on their own resources, and it’ll be a point of pride in the end. But even in my own, sunny version of Scottish football history, it’s been a low and bitter period for all kinds of reasons.

Getting back to the good days is like leaving a capital city by train. You do it through tunnels, and each time you think you’re out and free and can stop swallowing to unpop your ears, you’re back in the dark again. By the time you hit the suburbs, you’ve lapsed into a sullen acceptance of bad artificial light and your fatty, middle-aged reflection in the window and the filthy wire-strewn brick beyond it. Forty minutes later, everything’s been fields and sunshine and rich oaks and dude ranches and good times out there for as long as you can remember.

Where did all the English managers go?

The lack of English managers at the very top level has been well and truly noticed now: last night, Radio 5 devoted ninety minutes to discussing the situation with the likes of Tony Adams, Steve McClaren, Terry Venables and Sam Allardyce. The programme went out live, it’s not clear how much any of the participants had prepared, and the comments rarely went beyond the obvious and the hackneyed. Top clubs won’t give an English coach a chance; clubs don’t give managers long enough; there’s no realistic career path in which to gain experience; chairmen think top players turn into top managers.

Only Richard Bevan, of the League Managers’ Association, came up with anything new. Football management in England, said Bevan, is a profession that needs taking more seriously and whose members need taking more seriously, by those who employ football managers. His job is all about raising the profile and status of managers. This reminded me of the situation in Italy, where a manager is more likely to be considered experienced after a sacking than incompetent – and Italy, let’s not forget, trains its managers properly in an institution created for the purpose.

Privately, I was depressed by the programme. Compared with Scottish or Irish managers, the English ones – Sam Allardyce excepted – came across as inarticulate. And jejune, and ill-at-ease. Even Terry Venables. But then, the programme was live and it was long: plenty of bright, sharp people  crumble at the mic.

What the programme missed was also depressing, but understandable. Here’s my take on the issue.

It’s assumed that there will, all else being equal, always be a through-flow of good English managers. It used to be assumed that there would be a flow of good English players, but not without reason: we’d set things up that way. Almost every school played the game from age 8 upwards; there were junior leagues aplenty, thousands of amateur football clubs, county and regional sides, and an army of volunteers to run it all. Post-war prosperity ate into all that to some degree, but there’s still a structure there that many countries would envy. We had players because we did something to get them. Not as much as Holland, but something.

What have we ever done to get ourselves managers? Even now, I would argue that UEFA ‘A’ and ‘B’ badges do not an infrastructure make. The programme noted, briefly and glumly, that there seem to be as many Scottish and Irish managers as there ever were, but no explanation was offered. I’ll offer one: there’s a cultural difference between Scotland/Ireland and England in their respective attitudes towards the possession of intelligence. England’s a clever, astonishingly literate country – so many people read on buses and tubes compared to Europe and the US – but it prizes the concealment of intelligence in the individual and team sports actively fear it. This doesn’t make for the production of managers, who need to be communicators and influencers (but you can be clever in a Scots or Irish voice without putting backs up). It makes for jobs for the boys, which is what England’s got at the moment.

Anyway: the good English managers are all dead. It’s not just that no English manager has won the Premier League – or, since Heysel, a European trophy. It’s that, with one exception, all of the English managers who have won League titles or European trophies have died. And the period of glory was brief. The first European Trophy won by an English manager, Tottenham’s European Cup Winner’s Cup with Bill Nicholson in 1963, is separated from Sir Bobby Robson’s European Cup Winner’s Cup with Barcelona by only 34 years. And we’ve had another 15 since then.

There were, in those 34 years, a small number of English coaches who were without doubt amongst the world’s best. Nicholson himself; Don Revie; Brian Clough (and Peter Taylor); Sir Alf Ramsey; Ron Greenwood; Bob Paisley; Sir Bobby Robson. (And I’d like to cull the list further – Clough and Paisley are streets ahead… but that’s an argument for the pub).

This suggests to me that there were the conditions, however briefly, in place to produce those managers. Those conditions have gone, and there’s nothing in their place. What conditions? Well…

• Career dissatisfaction. Every man on our list lived through World War II. Greenwood, Nicholson, Ramsey and Paisley had their playing careers interrupted by it. Clough’s playing days were ended by injury, and he never got over it. Revie and Robson had full playing careers, but Robson “won nothing” in his and hated the fact. Keane, Adams, Southgate, Ince and co. had brilliantly successful, personally fulfilling careers. An earlier generation had finished playing but still had it all to do.
• International and club humiliation at European hands. First it was Hungary in 1953. Ramsey played in that one: Revie changed his entire game because of it. Then it was Real Madrid, Benfica, Inter, Ajax, Bayern… not until Liverpool’s 1977 side was there an “English” team considered unequivocably, emulatably the best on the continent. But by then, the England team were embarrassingly bad. It’s hard to remember now, when England are assumed to be World Cup quarter-finalists and Premiership sides fill 3 out of 4 Champions League semi-final places, but for many years English managers fought as underdogs: there was something to prove and real humiliation to avenge. That feeling went before Heysel.
• Northern Cultural Dominance. All of our list bar Ramsey were born in the north of England – and most of the northerners are from Middlesbrough or Newcastle. Of course, that’s to do with professional football being as much a phenomena of urban industrialization as machine shops, cotton mills and shipyards. Most people who played the game lived in the north. But in the sixties, seventies and early eighties, northerners were far more prominent in all of the most visible walks of national life. Where have they all gone, the Morecombes and Wises, the Barbara Castles, the Parkinsons, the Harold Evanses, the Alan Bleasdales? The working class voice of clichee used to come from Manchester or Liverpool, and the person using it was avuncular, middle-aged and smartly dressed: he was a warm and comforting figure that I knew well as a boy. But the Etonians are coming, and the working class clichee voice is Danny Dyer’s and despised. Cockney used to mean Michael Caine. We got accustomed to a world in which people from any background were starting to come through to national leadership, and then that world went away again.  What Brian Clough stood for – brilliance, hope and rootedness, in one man – went with him, and we don’t know when we’ll see it again. His modern successors lack the polish and glamour that our age demands of leaders. Now, Roy Hodgson,  you have to be posh or foreign, a Cameron or a Mancini. Signor Allardice was right. For the rest of us, there’s the X Factor.
• A blue collar world. It’s old hat but true: football failed to follow the advice of a million working class mothers to go white collar. It’s starting to, now. But our great English managers predate, most of them, the days of universal secondary education. All of them possessed the intellectual strength to go on to 16, 18 and 21, but couldn’t. Today, it’s still unusual for an Englishman going into professional football to bother much with school after 16, but the question is whether potential Paisleys aren’t taking the risk that football represents as a career choice when staying on (and more than half of schoolchildren now express a desire to make university) offers such comparatively certain rewards. Football was never a great bet, and our great English managers won a hidden lottery to reach the places they did. But you have to be in it to win it, and with fewer boys playing football seriously in the first place, it has to be asked if men like our greatest managers aren’t now just choosing washing machines, cars, compact disc players, electrical tin openers and a fucking big television over the risk of football and the slim chance of great, grand adventure.

In short, I’m saying two things: there aren’t the English managers there were, and the big four aren’t entirely wrong to steer clear. But those that are around – Allardyce, Hodgson – aren’t given the chance because the culture’s played them crook. And Hodgson’s 63.. If this is to change, three things need to happen. First, “show us your medals” has got to go. Only one of the big four is managed by a man who was also any kind of player. There’s little real connection between great playing success and managerial brilliance. Second, England needs to set up a managerial college along French lines. Third, Richard Bevan’s efforts to raise the image of the profession must succeed, and the consequence must be that managers are given time and backing. If the structure of the league, which so penalizes failure now, must change to accommodate that, then so be it.

What mustn’t happen is any kind of affirmative action. It’s too late to appoint an Englishman to the England job just because he’s English: after Sven, after Capello, the second-choiceness of the situation would overwhelm anyone but the thickest-skinned. The next Englishman in the job must have the job because he’s the best of a superb bunch. And there’s many years of hard work and change before that comes about. In 1977, the choice was between Robson, Clough and Greenwood: that’s the level we must now demand.

Peter Watts on Private Schools and Association Football

Peter Watts has an article in the new FourFourTwo about private Whitgift School’s efforts to develop young footballers. It’s worth getting hold of a copy to read his piece in full, but there is a useful summary of the main points in Peter’s post at The Big Smoke:

I met six of Whitgift’s schoolboy footballers, ranging in age from 10 to 15, who came from a wide variety of backgrounds, and were all placed at different football academies – two at Chelsea, two at Palace, and one each at Charlton and Spurs. What an opportunity they were receiving, and how happy they were to get it.But Whitgift has gallons of money, and spreads it around in the form of burseries and scholarships. It is based in South Croydon, and therefore cannot pretend that poverty and inequality do not exist.

All the same, I tried to tease out some hint of social friction from the boys, and also the coaches, all of whom had a state education. None of them bit. Later I spoke to David Muir, an eloquent presence on the Crystal Palace academy staff, who pointed out that private schools tended to be far more flexible and open-minded than comprehensives, which is surely as much about a state of mind as it is about money.

What was most refreshing of all was the insistence that all these young footballers should receive a good academic education. Muir said that previously kids were divided into ‘sportsmen’ and ‘academics’ but he always believed that our best footballers always had the potential to be high-achievers academically. I agree. From personal experience, footballers are certainly nowhere near as stupid as they are portrayed, but it often makes people feel better to pretend that they are. Whitgift are proposing a quiet and double-edged revolution here, so all power to them and begger the snobbery, inverse or otherwise.

Read the rest.

“A Beautiful Country… helped by football”

A great story from Owen Slot of The Times:

..spent two weeks in Sierra Leone. He went there because two mates of his were in the timber business there and advised him that it was a fascinating country. So he took them at their word, arrived unheralded with no fanfare, no media welcome, nothing apart from a large number of footballs and the intention that, whenever he saw a bunch of kids playing football – usually with a rolled-up ball of socks or a taped-up ball of newspaper pages – he would stop, give them a real ball and join them.
He left inspired and certain in the belief that this beautiful country, brought to its knees by a savage civil war, could be helped by football.

And so…

..two years on, he has succeeded in putting in place the first ever structure for youth football in the country. He already has 1600 players, he employs 40 coaches and 40 managers on the payroll and this is just the start.

On top of that:

The next stage is the opening, next year, of the new state-of-the-art football academy outside Freetown, the capital, where the best young footballers will receive an elite football and academic education. The whole project was expected to cost him £650,000, but building projects always over-run the budget – don’t they? – and (name of current Premiership player) has committed to spending a considerable amount more.

I’m pleased to say that we’re talking about this man (no, not that one):

Craig Bellamy: founds state of the art academy outside Freetown

Tom Vernon is the go-to guy when it comes to setting up proper facilities in central and southern Africa, and he

says this of Bellamy: that he is astonishingly professional in his approach, that when he makes his two-week visit every summer, he turns his phone off and dedicates himself entirely to the project “like he is turning up for a business conference” and that when he drives round the country to look at the prospective football talent for the academy, he talks to the players, eats with them and meets their families. And he says that Bellamy is so on top of the project that he insists on meeting every prospective new employee; before the new head coach was appointed, he was flown to England to spend a day in Bellamy’s company.

(..)

Vernon says he often finds that footballers are keen to put their name to an academy believing that this alone will bring funding, yet putting in their own money is a different matter. And when Vernon’s management team convene to consider these players and their proposed enterprises, too often their conclusion is: “No, they’re not like Craig.”

I’ve always had a certain amount of time for Craig Bellamy. On the sports field, I had an ego, a short fuse, a red mist and a strong tendency towards violence. That was twenty years ago and I’m too old for team sports now. I still have a temper on me at times, but I can appreciate how different someone can before and after the whistle goes.

Slot’s article fails to mention one other salient Bellamy fact: he’s married to his childhood sweetheart with whom he has three kids.

Someone said a week or two ago that Bellamy’s superb start to the season was all down to his feeling that he was at last in a team worthy of his talents. That may be so. But really, given all of the above, it scarcely matters: he can still beat Arsenal (and nearly Manchester United to boot) but he’s found a better and wider expression of his talent than his Prozone stats. Good for him.

Deisler, Football and Depression

I’d like to thank Rob Marrs for putting me onto this particular story. I don’t follow European football particularly well, and the Deisler situation had completely passed me by. I doubt very much I can do more with it than rehearse the usual things, but here’s what I make of it nonetheless.

Depression is “my” problem, in that in the company of (my off-the-cuff estimate) one in three of the kind of people who’ll find themselves reading this, I’ve put up with periodic bouts of dysthymic disorder every so often since my late teens. It’s a common mistake for people in my position – those who’ve experienced the problem AND practiced psychotherapy – to consider ourselves as having an unusual insight on it or some similar reflection. For what it’s worth, I’ve read the same autobiographical accounts, textbooks and analyses of the experiences of the famous depressed as you have. And all I can say having done so is that, in terms of communicating the experience of depression to those who haven’t had the pleasure, it isn’t so much that we can’t provide the right sort of metaphor, but that we lack the kind of syntax for the job.

People talk about “pain” in depression for instance (usually after telling you that it’s different from sadness on page 1.01) but then admit that they don’t mean it: the pain in question lacks the narrative, temporal quality of pain from injury or grief. And the desires for self-harm and suicide can come at the same time but drive in quite different directions: the self-harm can feel a bit like, but altogether unlike, a signal to the outside world that one has cottoned on to one’s dragging uselessness. Suicide can be a bit like, but not like – I really apologise for this – not “ending it all”, but “ending specifically this” , this nameless, faceless ongoing way of living.

Reading this account of Deisler’s experiences doesn’t provide me with anything original to say about him either, but for what it’s worth, here is what I think there is to say.

Firstly, we’re talking about Germany, not England: the attitudes towards mental illness here do not necessarily copy across to Europe. Of course, 100 years ago, they had both Kraepelin and Freud, the men who began the essential psychiatry vs psychotherapy argument that rages on in e.g. Richard Bentall‘s books. Football in Germany isn’t exactly set up for what happened to Deisler, but they are much less likely to borrow the metaphor of possession and witchcraft that we saw with Tackling My Demons. (Although Deisler has called his book Back To Life…)

..my home was not a place I could withdraw to for getting support as my parents had other problems to deal with.

That’s Deisler, and I can imagine a host of depression sufferers inside and outside sport nodding in recognition at that. In my own former practice, a majority of depressives had had the kind of experience that Alice Miller (a German-speaking Swiss)  describes in The Drama of Being A Child:

It is one of the turning points in therapy when the patient comes to the emotional insight that all the love she has captured with so much effort and self-denial was not meant for her as she really was, that the admiration for her beauty and achievements was aimed at this beauty and these achievements and not at the child herself. In therapy, the small and lonely child that is hidden behind her achievements wakes up and asks: ‘What would have happened if I had appeared before you sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love have been then? And I was all those things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me you loved, but only what I pretended to be? The well-behaved, reliable, empathic, understanding, and convenient child, who in fact was never a child at all?

Back of the net, there, in my opinion. And I’m also saying that there are elements in Deisler’s experience that are only circumstantially related to football. If the genetic potential is there, if the peer influence is right (and Deisler says “When I was young playing football in the streets, the other kids would mock me for being small”) then the stage is set for the situation at home to wrap things up long before the final whistle.

Are there “pressures” in the game, however, that make it a situation unto itself when it comes to depression and other mood disorders?

The article talks about “a dream of becoming professional footballers with the guarantee of fame, a full bank account and an Aston Martin in the driveway” and comments that “it does not always lead to a happy life”. Does it ever? At any rate, if you have grown up badly mirrored in the Alice Miller sense, or otherwise feeling low in the universal pecking order, invisibly flawed, then money, fame, success and “new friends” – surely this doesn’t need saying – are, far from covering over the wounds, only likely to exacerbate them.

There are balanced people in this crazy game, and consistently they are the ones who reject the Aston Martin side of things: Shearer found himself a retreat in Northumberland and a city that would regard him with affection and respect his privacy. Matt Le Tissier did the same on the south coast. Nicky Barmby went home to Hull, and is still there, loving it.

Deisler talks about fainting girls and men admiring his money and pulling power. For someone with any depressive (and while we’re here, isn’t “depression” quite the wrong word for something that internally violent?) tendencies at all, this is the nightmare. When you need to hide, where do you hide? When you need trusted people to bore silly with your talk, which of your absurd hangers-on can you trust not to run to the papers? And look, there’s Deisler: in the papers…

The top of football is not the place to be depressed. And there’s another angle: therapists can be a predatory bunch when it comes to fame. I didn’t find many familiar faces coming into my consulting room, but there were some, and believe me, you feel the tug of money and attention playing on the lapels of your jacket. The sensation is very real, and some give in to it: think how many therapists you’ve heard of simply through their famous, publicized, clients.

If you are the famous client, you can find therapists who will e.g. not ask for a public testimonial, or gush about you to their friends at conference, but you will have to tread carefully at a time when treading carefully is the hardest thing.

And it might not help you anyway. Paul Gascoigne’s two autobiographies made me feel wretched and ashamed of psychotherapy. Firstly, there was the hideous misdiagnosis of what at a distance looked (primarily) very much like a severe anxiety disorder that he was self-medicating with alcohol. Secondly, there was the treatment, well-meaning and all, but leaving one with the picture of poor Paul padding around expensive Colorado retreats looking after everyone else except himself. That warm, caring, generous man being propelled unwitting through all that 12-step stuff which his background gave him so little traction with (is there anything more essentially middle class than therapy, really?)..

If you are prone to difficulties, then football isn’t the best place to be, and fame can make finding worthwhile help all the harder and riskier (if it’s to be found at all: can I put my hand up and say that although I criticize Paul Gascoigne’s treatment, my distant/unreliable diagnosis isn’t exactly awash with optimism about what could be done for him?) .

But is there something special about sportsmen, about footballers, that sets them up for mood disorders? Or about the environment itself?

Real sporting talent is harder to miss than it used to be. In the 1940s and 1950s, improved nutrition and working conditions meant that Middlesbrough, a place with famously little to do if you were a boy who didn’t like football, was awash with playing talent. Brian Clough could remember many a man better than either himself or Len Shackleton who simply preferred factory life to being treated like a chattel by Ayresome Park. That’s all changed now: coaches can no longer rely upon chance discoveries in non-league football of the Ian Wright variety. If you are good enough to be good at sport, it’s more likely that you’ll end up like Phil Neville, with more than one sport knocking at your door when you’re still at a young age.

And if you are that good, the pressure to take the chance given you is immense. Sometimes, it will be welcome: sporting biography is full of men and women who had been able to do nothing right until they e.g. picked up a javelin… and, finding something they could do, they hung on to it as hard as they could.

But football draws into it men and women – more and more of the latter as the game grows – who are extremely gifted at it, and able to work hard enough to develop that talent, but who aren’t actually interested in it and don’t enjoy it. Fans can miss this, because we all wanted it so badly ourselves as kids (and do you find, as you get past 30, that your fantasies contemplate retirement, your fantasies hang up their boots, your fantasies start taking coaching badges?). But it’s perfectly possible to be international standard at football and not care about the game at all.

You can live the dream and find it’s your nightmare job; and then you find that no one wants to listen or sympathise. Footballers can’t complain about anything – all that money! what more could they want? except the things that we all really want and need: an honest day’s work, and then the sleep of the just. But how many footballers fetch up with the sleep of kings?

And yes, football is ultimately a male competitive environment, and no, you can’t display weakness. One of the most revealing conversations I had in this respect was with a young coach at a Premiership club. He’d been struggling, and, whilst struggling, had overheard his “colleagues” discussing with relish how they were going to take advantage of his difficulties, pile pressure on his head and steal his opportunities. One hears similar tales from business, but business people bullshit on the grand scale, and I wonder.

Thus the environment, and I know I’ve added nothing new there. As for the footballers themselves – and the sporting mentality in general – there is something that I’ve seen, that I don’t altogether understand, that might contribute. I can only describe it as a kind of teak-hardness.

I’ve come across this mostly in golfers. By teak-hardness, I mean that from my perspective, the men (all men up until now) that I’ve seen in this appear to have trouble feeling any real emotion at all. They persist in a steady, solemn, serious, strongly judgemental frame, giving little away, not laughing except at another’s humiliation or misfortune, admitting to no grief or upset of their own, and looking ahead only to opportunities to distinguish themselves from the contemptible mass of mankind. Writing it down in one go makes it sound a lot nastier than it actually looks: there’s little unpoliteness – indeed, they will tend towards old-fashioned courtesy and a surface-level protectiveness towards women and the defenceless. They aren’t rude, but neither, you realise after a while, are they paying any particular attention to anyone else, and they have, ultimately, little interest in, and no knowledge of, the feelings of others.

Sitting with people like this – they’ll usually have come complaining of some mysterious, essentially physical complaint that they suspect and fear of being psychsomatic (ever met anyone with glove anaesthesia? rare but fascinating..) – you have the sense of being in front of a thick sea wall, with powerful currents and a world of natural chaos hemmed in behind it. If that wall goes, everything goes – identity, personality, sense of place in the world, sense of being worthy of humankind – total collapse. Worse than depression, or an anxiety disorder: total, enduring, nervous breakdown.

It’s not something I fully understand, and I suspect I’ve described it badly, but it’s a type I’ve only met in full in sportsmen. I’m reminded of that wierd BBC belief that sporting success should inspire the young. Given how many top sportspeople are solipsistic egotists who enjoy putting one over on other people, I do wonder what they are trying to encourage.

Can Manchester United Win Four Titles on the Trot?

Of course, if Manchester United do win a fourth consecutive title next season, they will be the first team do win four, and it will be at the fifth time of asking. That alone makes it unlikely – dominance of the top division has to end some time, and in the past, this is where the end’s come. But this time might be different.

Keeping the Manager

First Huddersfield, then Arsenal, made it to three titles between the wars. In each case, the teams had been assembled by a certain Herbert Chapman. Chapman was the sort of manager whose flywheel would go on spinning for some time after his departure – the thriving remnants of his Huddersfield lost to his up-and-coming Arsenal at Wembley in 1930, walking out side-by-side in his honour under the shadow of the Graf Zepellin. Chapman left before Huddersfield completed their sequence, and had passed away before Arsenal completed theirs.

Without Chapman, four titles proved too much to ask. There are many reasons for supposing that a title was a great deal harder to win before the end of the maximum wage and retain-and-transfer. But harder still without the oversight of the general. Barring accident and ill-health, Manchester United go into title race number four with the same man at the head.

Money and Squad Size: Don’t Try to Rebuild

No team would earn themselves the chance of four again until Liverpool in 1984-5. But they began the season terribly, and although the team recovered to show championship form from the start of the year on, they were up against Howard Kendall’s Everton in its sudden, unexpected pomp and fell well short. Management was again a question – Bob Paisley had overseen the first two titles of their three, Joe Fagan the third – but given Liverpool’s continued dominance of Division One for the rest of the decade, the change of managers is hardly to blame.

Everton’s wonderful football aside, ’84-85 was a nadir season. Anyone who was there and interested will remember a long, hot spring and summer of rioting. On the 13th of March, Millwall fans tore 700 seats from a stand at Kenilworth Road. On the 11th of May, fire killed 56 people in Archibald Leitch’s main stand at Bradford City. Then, on the 29th, came Heysel.

1984-85 was not a season deserving of a great record, but Liverpool’s early season collapse needs explanation. Since the end of the maximum wage twenty years earlier, squad sizes in the First Division had halved. This, combined with the end of the talent gold-rush that had led to nine different title-winning clubs in 1960-72, presented Liverpool with a problem in 1984-5 that might, under lesser hands,  have sent them the way of post-Busby Manchester United. With Rush injured for the first part of the season, the talented but markedly inferior Paul Walsh stepped in. And there was no more Graeme Souness – Phil Neal took over as skipper whilst John Wark from Ipswich tried to fill an impossible hole. Jim Beglin had to do the same for Alan Kennedy.

These were fine players, and all became famous servants of Liverpool Football Club, but to come in all at once in that louse of a season and pull together in time for a title was asking too much.

Hubris

When Manchester United won their third title in 2001, I was passing through a service station in the Midlands. It was raining, it had been an uninspired season, and here on the television were Beckham and co. jumping up and down for all the world as if it mattered. It was still only April.

Arsenal had finished second, but ten points behind: all year, it had seemed as though the title had gone out of fashion with only United not noticing, and, how gauche of them, winning it and parading the winning.

Then the talk started. Ferguson was retiring at the end of the next season: Beckham suggested that it might be nice for the team to commemorate that, not with a carriage clock, but with going through the season unbeaten. And we’ll win him the Champions League in his home town of Glasgow.

Much of that was probably down to the press: Beckham is not prone to hyperbolic statement, and the papers would have joined those particular dots with no help from the players in any case. Furthermore, the acquisitions in the close season of Van Nistelrooy – seen as hideously risky – and Sebastian Veron – seen as cementing United’s midfield as the best in the world – outstripped anything Arsenal or Liverpool could assemble.

But the press weren’t behind the sale of Jaap Stam, nor his replacement with Laurent Blanc. Nor will anything of comparable stupidity take place this time.

What Will Stop United?

Injuries. Significant injuries have seen off Arsenal and Liverpool’s challenges, if not Chelsea’s, in the last two years. Neither Eduardo nor Torres played full seasons – and if Torres had, it’s likely that I wouldn’t be writing this now. United had to endure a torrid time in defence owing to injuries to – well, just about everyone – but the dead men were revived in time. Another two weeks of that would have lost them the title.

Distraction. History teaches two lessons here: don’t focus on one or two trophies at the expense of the others: you’ll win none of them. But don’t try to win all four/five. Contradictory, I know, but you can also feel the truth of it. The reality is that you won’t know you’ve been distracted until too late.

Scandal. In summer of 1977, Manchester United decided not to return, after all, to Busby-esque winning ways by sacking Tommy Docherty and dooming his marvellous young side to the tinkerings of lesser men. And all because the Doc fell in love… It would take more than that this time, but with the amount of money sloshing around inside Old Trafford, it would come as no surprise were some of it to find its way into trouble.

Other teams. Somehow, one feels, it won’t be Liverpool or Chelsea. Liverpool because, Gerrard aside, there may be a psychological penalty to pay for coming so close this time around. And they were never quite as good as they thought anyway. Chelsea are changing managers AGAIN – and not, to their cost, back to Mourinho, Ferguson’s only real rival.

Which leaves Arsenal. They’ve been my tip for the title in the last two seasons, which means that you’ve rather wasted your time in reading this, haven’t you? But Ashavin playing behind Eduardo excites me, and if Wenger is willing to reimpose himself on the club’s increasingly, foolishly eccentric board, then this team – Champions League semi-finalists, let’s not forget – may be due another day in the sun.

Is Michael Owen a Has-Been?

Disappointing to relate, but Wolfram Alpha can’t tell you. Yet. 

But if Cambridge’s finest is stumped, that does at least indicate that the question is open for debate. I think the answer’s no, and here are the reasons why.

1. Owen, we are told, is out of date. It is no longer enough to be just the “fox in the box.” His all-round game is not up to the demands of modern football. 

This sounds, on the face of it, a believable scenario. But it has two weaknesses. First of all, it is being said by British football journalists, most of whom have no more tactical awareness than the rest of us. Secondly, it doesn’t bear up to scrutiny.

Exactly which forward player’s “all round game” is superior to Owen’s? Rooney, certainly, although that’s an altogether unfair comparison. Does Peter Crouch have a better all-round game? Or Darren Bent? Does Fernando Torres? 

The comparison with Fernando Torres is the moot one, because Owen is by anyone’s measure still the second best English forward player, when he is fit. Once we get past Owen and Rooney, the talent gap opens prodigiously, and it has been widening more each year since Shearer and Fowler left the scene.

But is Owen still of a standard to compete with the likes of Torres? You have to be more than just an effective Englishman to justify a place at a top four club these days, or to be considered one of the best overall.

If you have ten minutes you wish to spend well, watch this collection of Torres strikes and see if you aren’t reminded of somebody:

It isn’t difficult, is it – but if you need convincing, here are seven minutes of Owen that should do the trick:

In essence, if Owen is finished because his game is old-hat, then so is the man commonly assumed to be Europe’s hottest striker.

The question is, can Owen still actually produce his game? Is he able to perform as he did in 1998, or 2002, or 2004, or 2007 when he so nearly rescued Steve McClaren single-handed in that last wild scoring streak for England?

2. Owen, we are told, has “lost that yard of pace” and “he’s not getting away from Prem defenders like he used to.”

That’s another English journalists’ meme, of course. What does losing a yard of pace mean, exactly? It would be interesting to see the actual numbers: how fast was Owen from a standing start in 1998, and how fast is he now? Speed, we now know, comes from possession of a certain kind of fast-twitch muscle fibre. To what extent can knee and ankle injuries interfere with these?

I don’t know. Do you? (If anyone has specialist knowledge, I’d be very glad to hear their views on the matter).

But I’m willing to bet that, given a full pre-season’s training, Owen will prove slower than Torres and Ronaldo, but not slower than Adebayor, Anelka, Drogba, Berbatov, Tevez or Kuyt.

3. In any event, most of Owen’s goals have come from attributes other than speed. His speed, as I’ve said, is a meme. His positioning, timing and balance are all better than all but one of his English rivals, and his finishing, when fit and in match practice, still better than almost anyone’s. The evidence for this actually comes from his time at Newcastle: at Toon, he has scored 26 league goals in 58 starts (plus 12 substitute appearances). For a man playing with in a team in spectacular decline throughout this period, with no settled partner to rely on and the only certainty being appalling service, this is an extraordinary return. It does make me wonder what he might have done at, say, Arsenal over the same period. How would Rooney, or Berbatov, or indeed Torres, fared?

Little wonder, really, that Owen looks out of sorts at Newcastle. It’s the only rational response to a shocking situation. Even Shay Given gave up on it: it’s been that bad. 

4. But will he ever be fit for an entire season ever again? His doctors seem to think so: the medical advice he has received in the wake of his recent year out is in total contrast to the non-medical opinions he is receiving from the press. The press think that he was played too much too young, and is now the footballing equivalent of a 90s supercar with moonshot mileage. 

Owen’s been out a lot this year – he’s played in only 31 games as opposed to Torres’ 36. But Torres plays at a club with modern facilities. Newcastle have one of the worst injury records over the last five years in the Premiership, and the quality of their training ground – the pitches in particular – is notorious. Keegan regarded their updating and improvement as a high priority – but then discovered what Mike Ashley’s priorities were, and left.

Were Owen to join Everton in the close season, a club able to keep its limited squad ticking in far better shape and with far less money than Toon, then he’ll have the chance to make the most of his doctors’ opinion and we’ll finally really know what he has to offer.

There is another Owen v Torres stat that is worth remembering in this context: Torres has made 300 career appearances as of this morning, and he’s 25. Owen is 29, and has made only 412.

To conclude: if Owen can get to a club that will offer him stability, proper football and good facilities, then he has a very good chance of putting in a proper season. It is more likely than not that in such circumstances, he’ll still be able to perform at the highest level – and certainly well enough to eclipse all but Rooney in the England stakes.

The question of Owen in club football is clear enough, then. But the international issue is another thing entirely.

Owen can and probably will do an excellent job for a club next season. Wherever he goes can only be an improvement. Will Wigan want to pair him with Heskey again? But what is Capello’s thinking?

Capello is reported to have told Owen that he is in his thinking, but needs, in essence, to “do a Beckham” to get back into the squad. Get a string of quality games under his belt, display the level of commitment to the cause that Capello demands, and he’ll be called up. It’s the press who say that Owen is out of the England running, not the England manager.

Whether Owen can be an automatic pick for Capello is another question – and in this instance, the press are probably right: Capello’s formations thus far do not suit Owen’s game. Nor have Owen’s recent seasons justified setting England up to suit him as they might have done before 2006.

If Capello is confronted by injuries to Gerrard and Rooney, but has a fit Owen and a fit foil (a Heskey or a Crouch) to offer him, that might change. I say might change. And if it does, the run-up to the World Cup will be all Owen needs to overtake Lineker and Charlton. 

But Wayne is 23 and has 21 international goals. The real Owen question is not whether he’s finished. It’s whether he’ll get to the international record before Rooney.

All the Sinners Saints: Chelsea Robbed in Europe

606 was group therapy last night. Chelsea fan after Chelsea fan heard their own voices slurring under an unsuspected weight that, the future gone from them, they could suddenly feel.  There was a lot of anger spoken of unfelt. Tiredness and resignation masqueraded as rage. Lovejoy called for vengeance, but his “I want United to beat them into pulp” was said like it was read from a list and told you he no longer had the energy to care.

It was hard not to sympathise. But I would have to admit to the following: turning the radio off after the Chelsea goal; turning in early; turning the radio on again at about ten o’clock, hearing the news, and abruptly getting up again; running to turn the television on; dancing around the room. Not, I would agree, the actions of a patriot or of a passionate Londoner.

And Chelsea were robbed. There’s no doubt that the tie was theirs on balance. But consider what it would have meant had the football gods (and let’s hope it was just the football gods and not bribery or UEFA as well) not intervened in the dying moments of the game.

We’d have had last year’s final all over again. With all that entailed. Just imagine:

Three weeks of self-serving, self-pitying mockney bullshit from England’s captain John Terry. Tedious speculation about penalties. Replays from Moscow on Sky Sports every day. The hideous ramping-up of the pressure on Guus Hiddinck to stay. Poor Frank Lampard’s mother getting wheeled out for inspiration. Mourinho hassled about his legacy. And all that Triumph of the Will stuff about the manifest destiny of the blues. 

Instead, we get United v Barcelona, a game that might just interest some neutrals and be good to watch. Messi and Ronaldo in Rome. What a way to start the summer.

To be as fair as possible to Chelsea, they have rescued their season from what might have been much, much worse. But an FA Cup Final and third place in the league is about right. It’s still achievement, but there was a moment in April when they might have gone on a run to the treble, and that would have been unjust. Remember Liverpool, who look like winning nothing now.

 It’s interesting how a club carries its essential identity into different times. Chelsea were a cup side and many people’s second team of choice for many years. They were known on the one hand for fan violence and on the other for attractive football and a certain kind of London glamour. The ghost of all that has run on into the Abramovich era. The top’s not yet their home but Liverpool still carry so much momentum from their past, hard-won momentum, that they can feel quite comfortable in the late stages of the Champions League. Result: no league titles for Liverpool, but two Champions League finals in four years. 

I wonder now if Chelsea don’t have some of that colourful mediocrity left in their bones, still to be grown out of. I wonder if that didn’t have something to do with the last twelve months and what now looks like their Leeds 1975 season.

When Mourinho left, I predicted a slow, but definite, decline. There’s still time for a great manager to stop it, to begin rebuilding from a position of strength. But not much time. Some of us who have been watching all this from the beginning think that Chelsea have a portrait in the attic, and that portrait is one of Jody Morris, and if they don’t get the next appointment right, some of us can see that picture brought out and paraded down the Kings Road in front of everyone before 2010 is too old.

Shearer At The Toon

As I’m writing this, the news of Alan Shearer’s appointment to the Newcastle job is on every website bar Newcastle United’s own, so it might all still be an April Fool. And if so, a better one than the Graun’s depressingly poor Twitter put-on.

When Keegan returned to Newcastle, I was one of the doomsayers, and unfortunately the doomsayers proved right. But this time, the doomsayers sally forth without my support. I think Shearer has chosen the right job at the right time. Here’s why.

It’s hard, these days, if it was ever easy, for a manager to be in true charge of a club. Brian Clough had to waste enormous amounts of his time at Derby on politics, on outmanouvering his chairman. It had been the same story at Hartlepools. The very size of modern clubs makes any idea of total control absurd. But a manager must at least be in a position where he moulds the thinking of the people who work with him. Keegan couldn’t – because Ashley wasn’t desperate enough to take his own appointees’ hands off the reins. At Aston Villa, Martin O’Neill could, because Villa were ready to do anything to get him and then ready to let him get on with the job.

Newcastle will be looking at Aston Villa now in the clear knowledge that that could have been them, standing tall in a proud, worthy, but exhausted fifth. That they aren’t is because it took this season to bring home the consequences of all that mismanagement and Toon-striped shirtless bullshit, of everything that they’ve done since…. and when you type it, you can scarcely believe it – since they replaced Sir Bobby Robson with Graeme Souness…

And this is the moment that Shearer has been waiting for. Had he arrived earlier, as Keegan’s deputy, he’d have been no more than a figurehead on a figurehead. Now he’ll be allowed to do what he wants, for good or ill. He’ll have freedom to act. Newcastle have finally cried uncle, declared themselves powerless against relegation and realised that their life has become unmanageable. (I think I’m about to say that they’re ready for Al-Anon, but I’ll back away from that before it’s too late).

Newcastle need Shearer now far more than he needs them, and Mike Ashley’s been neutered. If only Sam Allardyce had had such luck. Whether Alan will turn out to be a good manager in the long term is moot. He has his A and B badges, so that’s out of the way. He has legendary political pull. Intelligent men who know their business have put him in positions of leadership. So far, so Bryan Robson.

But insofar as this season goes, he doesn’t have to be good at improving players, finding new ones, making clever selections and cleverer substitutions, or imposing his philosophy. All he has to do is change the air in the dressing room.

And when it comes to that, he has a fit Michael Owen on board. Owen, who came to Newcastle at Shearer’s urging, who is now working for him, who has been desperately unlucky with injuries and is looking to rebuild, who, like Shay Given, is almost certainly fed up with the ship of fools he’s found himself on. Shearer believes in Owen, and it’s about time someone did.

How clever it sounds to say that the day of the out-and-out striker is over. I know tactics, me, and Owen is a dinosaur. He’s a goalhanger, needs to contribute more to the team, take part in the build-up. To people of my age, this is all too reminiscent of the 1970s conversations about work-rate, which began with such knowing confidence amongst some very good managers and ended at the Stadio Olimpico in November 1976.

Calling Owen a goalhanging dinosaur is like calling Petr Cech one. (I don’t believe that Capello sees Owen in this light, by the way – I just think he wants Owen back on real form, showing Beckham levels of interest and drive. He might just get exactly that now. And praise goes to the strikers Capello has picked for not letting England down).

And as for Owen’s injuries, do at some point review Newcastle’s record in this respect over the last ten seasons. Something is clearly wrong there. Rumours abound about the fundamental unsuitability of the training pitches although there’s no reason to accuse their medical staff of any shortcomings. For whatever reason, Newcastle have been strung up by injuries, year after year. Arsenal and Liverpool have been unlucky this term, but their overall record is infinitely better.

There’s a useful squad behind Owen, one which Keegan got playing again. It doesn’t have much time left to rescue itself, but with WBA and Borough essentially gone, there’s only one relegation place left, and chances to escape it.

As for next year.. if Ashley thinks this one has been difficult, he’s seen nothing yet. I expect Shearer to remain in post, and for the real power within the club to drain from the chairman at speed, along with large sums of his money. It’s said that the British are the only nation capable of experiencing schadenfreude towards themselves. If so, expect Ashley to spend 2009-10 not in a Toon shirt, but in the Union Flag.

Football and Television in Edinburgh

“Football and Television in Edinburgh” : I didn’t say “Scotland” as it might be different elsewhere.

I was prompted to this by my struggles yesterday afternoon to watch ITV’s live coverage of the FA Cup Fourth Round tie between Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, a suburban London side. Scottish ITV weren’t showing it.

Anecdotally, I pick up that Scottish ITV don’t take the ITV FA Cup live feed. Not doing so opens up a prime slot of some size into which can go programming that’s either from Scotland or relevant to Scotland.

Everyone can see the point of that, if that really is the policy. But what were they showing yesterday instead? This…

Scotland has some good young players coming through at the moment, and the future looks brighter than it has done for some time. So SITV’s decision had the immediate result of preventing young Scots from watching Scottish players (well, Scottish international and oftimes captain Darren Fletcher) and a Scottish manager performing at the highest level. (Alan Hutton was never going to play – foot injury – but none of the other live Cup action was shown either, so I’m guessing that the decision makers didn’t know or care).

In Edinburgh pubs, people watch whatever’s on. On one occasion, we were the only people in a bar who didn’t have a Scottish accent. Scotland’s game had just finished, and the choice facing the assembly was to stick around for the punditry, or retune to watch England’s match. The TV was retuned, and England’s game went ahead – with only a moment’s jocular jeering from one individual, who was immediately frowned into silence.

There’s as much interest in the Premiership as in England – I’ve lost count now of the number of lifelong Edinburgh people I’ve run into or overheard who support Arsenal, or Liverpool, or, unsurprisingly, Newcastle. I don’t know if it’s the religious question that puts such people off from local teams, and in Edinburgh, I’d rather doubt it: I’ve had conversations with Hibs and Hearts fans alike and the subject has never arisen. (I met one man who streams text commentary of Hibs games worldwide, which is the excellent flipside of what I’m discussing here).

The Premiership is on in pubs, and advertised on blackboards outside. And, the Saturday evening Spanish game is also shown.

I’d feared, when I realised that I really would be moving up here, that I’d have three years without Match of the Day. Not at all: there it is, on BBC Scotland, large as life at the usual time. It’s Sportscene that gets shunted. MOTD2 will be blocked back by an hour on occasion, which is irritating but understandable.

Of course, and as I am constantly told, this is a rugby town. Walk around and it’s overwhelmingly rugby pitches that you’ll see. You can even witness pick-up games of rugby taking place, which was something that, hitherto, I’d thought confined to the back pages of the Boden catalogue.

And, at least in the middle, it’s a wealthy, literate town with bookshelves visible in the windows, just the sort of place whose sporting life happens mostly on television.

There are soccer pitches. There have to be: Hibs train in my local public park. (A comparative luxury: Aberdeen still train on the beach).

But the soccer pitch that’s highest in my mind tells a different story. It’s beside the old railway line-cum-cycle path, near Granton. Imagine an open space next to some grubby 1950s low-rise flats. On it, picture one rusty metal goal, still standing, in heavily-littered waist-high grass. A little way off, there’s the remains of someone’s unofficial bonfire, and around it, beer cans, half-bottles, cigarette butts.

It doesn’t take a village: a lawn mower would be sufficient here.

(Edinburgh Academicals update: I reported the demolition of the pavilion a couple of months ago. I now discover that there are plans for a large-scale redevelopment, better facilities, and the incorporation of the Raeburn Hotel, which remains boarded up on the site as of now. Presumably the current economic climate is holding all of this up, but the designs I’ve seen are handsome enough).