Late Tackle Issue One

LATE TACKLE

NEW!

The football magazine made by fans

No.1 | Sept/Oct 2011 | £2.99

Mick Quinn

The old-school star on modern football

INSIDE Michael Owen: No-one’s hero?

Flawed genius of Robin Friday The brilliance of Brazil 1982 The number’s up for statistics

9 772046 765007

ROBBIE SAVAGE Just what is the point of this big-mouthed show off?

01

Inside this issue

4-5 Mick Quinn 6-7 Robin Friday 8-9 Michael Owen 10-11 John Nicholson 12-13 Andy Hunter 14-17 Merv Payne 18-19 Rory Smith 20-21 Paul Grech 22-23 Colchester 24-25 Sunday League 26-30 Peter Reid 31 Anti-heroes 32-33 Football art 34-37 Life in Wigan 38-39 Stats life 40-42 Brazil 1982 43-45 Non-league 46-47 Robbie Savage 48-49 Scottish football 50-57 Swiss Ramble 58-59 Leeds United 60-61 Classic match 62-63 Walsh’s world

12-13

62-63

8-9 2

Welcome to Late Tackle

S

O what is Late Tackle?

Well perhaps it’s easier to explain what Late Tackle is by explaining what it isn’t.

It isn’t agenda-driven journalism from writers trying to keep their contacts sweet.

It isn’t another vehicle for the meaningless drivel that pours from the mouths of too many players and managers in the modern game.

And it isn’t a magazine which believes the Premier League is the be all and end all. We also don’t believe that football began in 1992.

Late Tackle is written by football fans with a genuine love for the game. And the instructions were simple – if you’re passionate and knowledgable about a subject, write about it. And if we like it, we’ll use it.

The mag features journalists, bloggers, website owners and just plain old fans, who had something to say about football.

We hope you like it. And if you’d like to contribute to the next issue, get in touch with your ideas. latetackle@gmail.com

Get in touch

4-5

Late Tackle magazine, Office 113, Imperial Court, Exchange Street East, Liverpool, L2 3AB. Printed by Mortons of Horncastle Published by Well Red Publishing Limited Editor: Gareth Roberts Ad sales: Call Graham on 0845 638 0704 ISSN: 2046-7656 www.latetacklemagazine.com Twitter @latetackle Next issue is out October 26

3

INTERVIEW

The mighty Quinn Mick Quinn was an old-school footballer. He had a drink, a bet and chased women – a character anyone who’s grown up in a working-class area can recognise. And a type of footballer largely unrecognisable from the men playing the game today. So what does Quinn make of the modern game?

GARETH ROBERTS asked him.

time, no-one seems to put their foot on the ball in the middle of midfield. Do the boys take care of themselves better? Yes, they probably do but there’s more injuries than in my day. They’re playing probably the same amount of games but they are not allowed to enjoy themselves and switch off. It’s just seems like a continual season now.

World Cup or Euro qualifiers, playing internationals before the first kick of the season.

Do you think you would have made it in the modern game?

Yes. A goalscorer would make it in any era. If you guarantee your team 20 goals a season – you’re an out and out goalscorer – you’ll make it.

Is the game as enjoyable to watch now?

HOW do you think football has changed since you were playing?

It’s a lot quicker but I wouldn’t say the quality is any better.

4

When I was playing it was 75 per cent British players, 25 per cent foreign players in the Premier League, now it’s the other way around. But it’s more dramatic, it’s end to end all the

“The pressure is on managers more than when I was in the Premier League – that’s why they play one up front away from home.”

The pressure on managers has changed now. Six hundred grand for every place in the Premier League, you know?

If you’re fourth or fifth bottom and you’ve stayed in the Premier League, in the old days you would give a few of the kids a go, give them some first team experience.

Now chairmen are saying to their manager ‘650 grand a place – play your strongest team because that’s your budget for next year’. So if they pick up three or four wins and move up three or four places, he’s looking at £3million extra to spend.

The pressure is on managers more than when I was in the Premier League.

And I think that’s why a lot of managers play one up front, pack the midfield away from home, don’t want to get beat, go for the nil-nils. It just started when I was finishing really, that system. You either get beat 1-0, or you draw 0-0. Very rarely you

score goals playing one up front away from home.

So it’s a breath of fresh air now when you see a manager play two strikers away from home, or one up and one on the shoulder and wingers.

What do you think of the way football treats fans these days?

Expensive tickets, bizarre kick off times and so on?

Listen, we had to move on from the stadiums we had – we were so far behind. Football is entertainment – you don’t want to be queueing up for two hours for a piss or a pie.

It’s an entertainment industry and stadiums have changed dramatically.

It’s a lot easier now, you get 15 minutes at half time instead of 10, you can go the toilet, get yourself a drink, relax, come back and then watch a game in luxury in some stadiums.

That’s something that has definitely changed for the better but with that comes the expense and for a family to go to a football match it is expensive.

I take my hat off to the clubs outside of the Premier League who run family schemes and kids for a pound or a five and encourage the younger generation who will hopefully become football fans to get involved. But there are certain clubs that take the piss for me.

Do you think it has lost sight of its roots? It’s no longer a working class game is it?

No, no it’s not. Queen’s Park Rangers get in the Premier League, and OK you expect them to put up the prices, but 40 per cent they put up the prices – it’s not fair on the fans.

Do footballers earn too much money now?

Yes. I was on two grand a week for Coventry in the Premier League, their second top paid player in 95-96.

Within 14 months of me leaving and packing in their top paid player was on 25 grand a week, Gary Mac (McAllister).

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe there would ever be a

CAR Clubs, with transfer fee, EER STATS weekly wag goals, appea e: rances, and 1978-79 Der b 1979-82 Wig y (apprentice) 0 in 0; £1 an (free) 19 6 1982-84 Sto in 69; £35 ri si ck 1984-86 Old port (free) 39 in 63; £1 ng to £250 h 90 1986-89 Po am (£52,000) 34 in 80 ; £300 rtsm 1989-92 New outh (£150,000) 54 plus £85k si castle (£680,000) 59 in 121; £950 gn in 112; £1,0 1992-95 Cov ing-on fee 00, £150k sign entry (£250,000) 26 ing-on fee in 67; £2,000 1994 Plymo , plus uth (loan) 1995 Watfo rd (loan) 1995-6 PAO K Salonika plus bonuse (free) 7 in 15 s ; £1,000 a m TOTAL: 231 onth in 512 Englis Approximat h League ap e earnings: pearances Cash left on re £750,000 Cash invest tiring: ed in proper ty and cars on retiring: £0 £0

Do you think English kids get enough opportunities in the game now or are managers too willing to buy foreign players ‘off the peg’ that are ready to play immediately?

player on 100 grand a week, and then for a player to be on 200 grand a week? I just can’t get my head around that. It’s disgraceful. I appreciated what I was on. Now there’s players driving round in Baby Bentleys and Rolls Royces, Range Rovers, Lotus...we all liked a flash car but some of them have got 18 houses, six cars. There’s only a handful of modern-day footballers I can really level with, the rest are like pop stars.

There’s some good lads – Carra, Stevie G, a few others dotted around the Premier League that are grounded.

But there are some that won’t sign a fuckin’ autograph for fear it will go on ebay for a Fiver.

No they don’t. There’s too many foreign players. I don’t mind the top players coming to the Premier League but there’s too many moderate foreign players at clubs. They play them now in the early rounds of the cup or in Europe instead of playing the young British players. That disappoints me.

It seems now if you’re a young British player in a top Premier League team you have to go on loan to another Premier League club and prove you can play in the league before you can go back and get a chance at your own club! Sturridge, Cleverley – it’s madness.

Any regrets about football?

I regret that boom wasn’t two years or so before I played in the Premier League!

But you can’t turn back the clock and I really enjoyed my football right from school level, Huyton Boys, appentice with Derby, young professional with Wigan through to when I finished in Greece. And do you know what? I’d just about

had enough. I had been playing since I could walk. No-one came in for me that summer after Coventry, I went to Greece – for the money – that went pear-shaped and I came back and I was a bit disillusiuoned with the game.

It took me so long to get to the big league – the Premier League – I had one brief taste of it before Coventry with Portsmouth, and then I didn’t want to filter back down the leagues.

And I couldn’t afford to pack in but it was pride that made me pack in. I didn’t milk the game. I’m quite a proud man, probably stupid as well, because I could have played on for another two or three years.

When I got back from Greece I was the fittest and technically the best I’d ever been but didn’t get the chance to showcase that – that was my only disappointment.

“I didn’t milk the game. I’m quite a proud man, probably stupid as well.

I could have played for another two or three years.”

If you could change three things about football what would they be?

Limit foreign players to five in one team. A wage cap of £50,000 a week, which probably make the players still among the top paid around the world, and lower ticket costs.

5

ROBIN FRIDAY

Friday I’m in love

He scored a goal even the referee applauded and inspired The Super Furry Animals’ single, The Man Don’t Give A F**k. PAOLO HEWITT tells us more about Robin Friday.

O

N the Thursday before the game against Northampton Reading manager Charlie Hurley called Robin Friday into his office and told him he was giving him his first team debut.

Friday’s face lit up. ‘Boss,’ he said, ‘That’s great. You won’t regret it. In fact, I won’t drink, go with a woman or get into a fight between now and then.’

Hurley surveyed his player laconically. ‘Robin,’ he replied, ‘you can lie to me once – but not three times in a row.’

Robin Friday was a one off, a unique talent that burnt itself out far too soon.

If George Best was football’s first pop star, then Robin was the game’s first rock star.

He devoured women, drink and drugs of all kinds on a regular basis. He only trained on the Thursday before a game and only if a ball was put in front of him. The rest of the week he spent on the razzle.

Where other players wore the standard club uniform of tie and blazer, Robin travelled to matches in flares and t shirts, his massive hands clutching plastic bags that clinked to the sound of Martini bottles.

He is the only man to be awarded the all time cult hero status by fans of two clubs – Reading and Cardiff City. When you consider that he only played 25 games for the latter club then that achievement is made even more special.

Robin’s talent was special.

Robin scored goals that took the breath away. One, a twist and volley from 35 yards against Tranmere, had referee Clive Thomas actually applauding him on the pitch.

Robin’s response was atypical.

6

Friday in 1972

“We had something here, something special... it was more than just father and son sharing an interest in football”

‘You should come down here more often ref,’ he told the bemused Thomas. ‘I do that every week.’

Reading and Cardiff fans – still - talk about goals scored from impossible angles, goals conjured out of nothing and goals that matched anything delivered by those with more exalted clubs.

That Robin never got to play for those clubs was due to his lifestyle. Scouts would come down to Elm Park, Reading’s ground, and stand in admiration of his breathtaking skills.

But when they asked the fans about their star player, the stories of wild behaviour would be aired and so they would wipe Robin’s name off the list and look elsewhere.

To that end, Reading trainer Maurice Evans once sat Robin down and told him straight. ’Cut out the drink the drugs and the partying and in three years time you could captain England.’

Robin looked at Evans and asked, ‘How old are you?’ ‘44’ Evans revealed. ‘Well I’m half your age but I have already lived twice your life,’ Friday told him.

He was born – along with twin brother Tony – on 27th July, 1952. His family was extremely close knit but by 16 was Robin was incarcerated in a borstal where he joined the football team and began alerting everyone to his amazing skills.

After leaving borstal he played for Reading Juniors before moving on to Hayes in the old Isthmian League.

In 1973, Hayes played Reading in the FA Cup. Within two weeks of that game Charlie Hurley had signed him. It would be the start of a special manager-player relationship, its ingredients the same that fuelled the Venables Gazza partnership.

Over the next three seasons, Robin Friday would establish himself as one of the best players ever to pull on a Reading top. Taking to the pitch without any shin pads on, Robin never conformed to any game plan, nor did his manager try to impose one on him.

Hurley’s instructions were clear – give the ball to Robin as much as possible. And it worked. Robin’s mercurial skills, his reading of the game, his

power and his courage, ensured that Reading’s opponents were stretched to the limits.

Robin’s best season for Reading was the 1975-76 campaign where his goals and unselfish play heavily contributed to the club’s promotion to the then Third Division. By then Robin was adored by the Reading faithful for acts such as kissing a copper after scoring a goal, kissing opponents at corner kicks, embarassing those who had been told to stop him by any means necessary.

Outside of football, Robin ran riot. One night he showed up at a club, slipped off his fur coat and then danced naked on the dance floor.

At his wedding he gave spliff to the elder relatives who danced all afternoon long on the lawn outside. The man was incorrigible. He addressed all the club’s upper-class directors with nicknames which would enrage them. Yet he was also a warm generous man who as everyone testified would lend you his last pound note and never ask for it back.

After Reading’s promotion Robin went on an all-summerlong bender.

When he returned he was an addict who had lost a lot of pace. Charlie Hurley gave him an ultimatum, quit the substance abuse or be sold.

Quitting was beyond Robin’s capabilities. In December 1975 much to the horror of all Reading fans, Robin was sold to Cardiff City for £30,000.

Hurley never explained why the club had committed this sacrilegious act.

He said: “I would rather be known as the wanker that sold Robin than tell the fans the real truth.”

That is how much he loved the man.

On the day of his expected arrival, Cardiff City FC were surprised to be phoned up by the police who told them they had just arrested a man for travelling with no ticket.

‘Only thing is he claims to be your new star striker.’

Robin’s debut pitted him against Fulham and Bobby Moore. Friday’s first act on the pitch was to grab the England

“‘I’m half your age but I’ve already lived twice your life,’ Friday told him.”

legend’s testicles. He then gave him the run around all game.

Despite his personal habits, Friday still possessed enough power and ability to win over the Cardiff faithful.

They were particularly pleased when after scoring one goal he flicked the v-sign to the keeper who had been aggravating him all game.

No wonder at open day sessions he was the player the fans first ran to for autographs.

Although a handful during his 25-match stint, the Cardiff manager Jimmy Andrews was quite taken by Robin’s extreme generosity, especially his regular habit of staying behind after

training to help the apprentices.

It was just one of the reasons why Robin was adored and treasured by so many people.

Robin walked out of football in 1977 and spent the next 12 years on building sites, in pubs, carousing.

He was prescribed a methadone treatment but when one day his brother Tony discovered that Robin had failed to pick up his daily dose, he feared the worst.

At his small flat Robin Friday lay dead on his sofa from an overdose. He was 39.

‘All players are different,’ Charlie Hurley later remarked.

‘There are players who would turn on it for you at home but never do it away.

“There are other players though that would die for you no matter where you were.

Robin was like that.’ nPaolo Hewitt is the co-author of The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw: The Robin Friday Story.

7

MICHAEL OWEN

Who loves Owen?

When Michael Owen scored THAT goal against Argentina in 1998, he had the world at his feet. Now, PETER SIMPSON says, the striker is nobody’s favourite player.

A

s he picked up the ball, glided past several Argentinean defenders and placed it over the keeper and into the net, the world witnessed the emergence of England’s new hero. This was the superstar who would lead the national team to success – and no-one seemed to believe this more than Michael Owen.

Michael Owen was supposed to break Bobby Charlton’s scoring record, end the decades of hurt, and ride into the sunset with David Beckham, Rio Ferdinand, Steven Gerrard and other members of England’s so called ‘Golden Generation’.

But a succession of failures at major tournaments (and the odd embarrassing international friendly) has left the promise shown a distant memory for most – except for the odd journalist and deluded die-hard – and robbed Owen of his goal: becoming an England legend.

In his prime at Liverpool, Owen produced multiple match-winning displays and goals with aplomb on his way to being named the European Player of the Year in 2001.

But despite his goals and performances for Liverpool there was always the lingering perception among Kopites that Owen was saving his best for the national team.

There was admiration for his ability and appreciation of his contribution, but there was no roaring adulation to rival the love affair between the Kop and Robbie Fowler. Owen was aware of this and commented in his 2004 autobiography that he felt a lack of love from the Kop. Perhaps this played a part in his move to Real Madrid.

Owen’s time in Madrid was a

8

“We had something here, something special... it was more than just father and son sharing an interest in football”

period of frustration. He was – at best – a bit-part player, reduced to appearances from the subs’ bench. Again, Owen’s main concern seemed to be was that his place in the England team would be jeopardised should his situation remain the same.

Liverpool attempted to resign Owen but balked at Real’s asking price of £16million for a player exchanged between the clubs for £8m (plus Antonio Nunez) only a year before.

Owen, for his part, wished to return to Liverpool but was unwilling to demand that a transfer be pushed through.

He was left with three options: stay with Real Madrid, make it clear he wanted a transfer to Liverpool, or accept a move to Newcastle (who had met Real’s transfer value).

With time running out and the transfer window rapidly closing, Owen agreed to move to St James’ Park, where the promise of a first-team position would solidify his place in the England team. He received a hero’s welcome.

In four years at Newcastle, Owen made 71 appearances, scored 26 goals, and succumbed to injury after injury after injury. A broken metatarsal kept him out of action from December 2005 to April 2006 but Newcastle fans need not have been disheartened – Owen assured them that he would be fit to turn out for England at that summer’s World Cup He did make it to the World Cup but a knee injury suffered in the first minute of the group match against Sweden put an end to his participation in the tournament and he was forced to sit by as England faltered yet again on the international stage.

Owen continued to struggle with injury and from 2007-2009.

He made the odd appearance

for Newcastle before leaving after their relegation to the Championship and signing for Manchester United on a free transfer; thus destroying any affection Liverpool fans may have still held for him.

Owen seems genuinely perplexed when he is on the receiving end of abuse from Liverpool fans.

A 2006 interview with Matthew Syed of The Times revealed a very focused, cold and disconnected character.

His lack of nerves allowed him to be a calm and deadly finisher, but the perceived lack of emotion and an inability to feel the highs and lows of the game mean that it is difficult for fans to empathise with him.

Recently Owen has said that Newcastle fans may treat him differently if they knew all the facts, but the trouble is many facts are all too clear. Newcastle fans see what Liverpool fans saw: a man driven by a desire to play for England.

His playing time at Manchester United has been sparse and the man who once claimed that he didn’t feel too bothered about his 2001 Worthington Cup winners’ medal, due to the minimal part he played, is now reduced

“He has been frozen out of the England team and now, at 31, it looks as if he never will break Bobby Charlton’s scoring record”

to cheer-leading United from Twitter and rejoicing in his winners’ medals – despite the minimal part he has played.

He has been frozen out of the England team too, by boss Fabio Capello, and now, at 31, it looks as if he will never break Bobby Charlton’s scoring record.

Owen has reacted with bemusement at his situation and shown that the focus and drive remains, but so does the lack of perspective.

His career over the last few years suggests does little to merit a call-up to the England squad but he and his remaining supporters still talk of the Michael Owen of long ago.

A tweet from BBC Chief Sports Writer Phil McNulty suggesting Owen replace the injured Jermain Defoe was not well received.

So Owen has his admirers in the media. But if we look at Owen’s current club and the retirement of Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, we will see two players who will be welcomed back and paraded before crowds of adoring fans. Who will receive Owen?

Before Jamie Carragher’s 2010 testimonial match Liverpool fans had to be asked not to boo Owen; Newcastle fans will remember him taking them for a ride; and his tenure at Old Trafford makes it impossible to perceive him as a first-team regular at Real Madrid.

Where has this drive to succeed for England left Owen’s legacy now?

If he had won something with England he would belong to the country, but the national team failed repeatedly, and that lack of success shone a light on the alienated club supporters that lay in the wake of his attempt to achieve his true goal.

If Owen was not so disassociated from fans and their feelings, perhaps he may have gone down as one of those loveable unlucky losers that the Brits adore.

But, alas it was not his goal to connect with fans; Owen’s goal was to play for England, for himself.

When he retires he’ll have his Ballon d’Or and winners’ medals but it’s doubtful he’ll have the adulation of any supporters.

9

COLUMNIST

JOHN NICHOLSON Bring back the tackle

F

ootball has changed.

Sometimes we don’t realise just how much it has changed. We get used to the incremental alterations to the rules and the changed culture of the game.

But if you look at a match from even just 10 years ago, let alone 25 years ago, it’s remarkable just how different it was in some aspects.

Most obviously, tackling has been practically outlawed along with almost all of the physicality that many of us used to love about football.

Not only that, this new lack of physicality has been, by some rather precious modern football fans, been lauded as a progressive thing.

These are typically the fans who are obsessed with the football that the likes of Arsenal and especially Barcelona play.

They see it as a morally superior form of football; a form of

football that refuses to be tainted by what they see as the brutish, thuggish elements.

What a lot of bollocks. Some of us, the majority of us, loved the physical side of the game up to and including the occasional on-pitch scrap and I for one am not going to be told by some acolyte of a bunch of fanny merchants that this was ever anything other than a good thing.

Rather it was what made football the massively popular global sport it is today.

The likes of Arsenal and Barcelona, as good as they might be, are really only exploiting the changes in football’s rules which have moved the game into a virtual non-contact sport.

Back when Arsenal used to win things, they were a physical side who you couldn’t push around. It’s all very well wetting yourself about the likes of Xavi

“You can get sent off, not for hurting someone, but for looking like you might have intended to hurt someone” 10

and Fabregas but back in the day, they would have had to ply their passing-game trade against defenders who could kick them and kick them hard.

And the more they showed it hurt, the harder they would have kicked them.

On top of that they would have been subject to fullblooded tackles time and again.

There was no protection from the officials and you had to deal with it or wimp out.

Now, at its extremes, this was sometimes a bad thing.

Thinking back 41 years to the 1970 FA Cup Final, Leeds United winger Eddie Gray was put out of the game by Chelsea hard man, Chopper Harris, who went out to deliberately hurt Gray, Leeds creative, flair player.

He raked his studs down Gray’s leg with the force of a small tactical nuclear weapon.

Gray hobbled on but was effectively put out of the game.

Brutalising a sides’ best player was a legitimate tactic back then and went unpunished.

This did mean that we lost a lot of creative players early to injury and that wasn’t a good thing. They did need more protection. However, it has gone so far the other way now that you can get sent off not for hurting someone, but for looking like you might have intended to hurt someone.

You can get a straight red for a tackle that takes the ball first and then the man if it is deemed reckless even if no-one gets hurt by the challenge.

You can’t tackle from behind even if you win the ball cleanly and don’t so much as scratch

your opponent. On top of that you can pick up two yellow cards for farting or for looking in a funny way at an opponent, or looking funny while you fart. Or so it seems. It’s mad.

The effect of this overofficious nonsense, this kow-towing to the lily-livered brigade, is that the art form of tackling is being lost. This partly explains why there are so many legbreaking tackles - players don’t need to know how to tackle properly most of the time, so when they’re desperate, they lunge in, both feet off the ground, like Hong Kong bloody Phooey and shatter some poor sod’s leg.

If they had been trained in the art form then they’d know how to do it less recklessly.

Hussling has now replaced tackling. This involves keeping tight to a man and trying to nick the ball from him. All well and good but hardly much of a spectacle for us to watch, incomparable to seeing a defender plough through a striker, taking the ball and the man and emerging unscathed.

Only a goal got a bigger cheer than a full-blooded tackle. We’ve been denied that pleasure now.

Worse still, we’ve been told it is wrong.

All of which might be just be acceptable if it had actually prevented the very injuries that overly-aggressive play such as Harris deployed on Gray used to inflict. But it hasn’t.

If anything, players are injured more. This is the supreme irony.

Look at how many players Arsenal, as just one example, have out injured at any one time. It’s remarkable.

Robin Van Persie has played just 150-odd games in seven years - missing an average of half of every season.

And has it encouraged more skilful players to flourish? Has it bollocks.

We have less tricky wingers, dribblers and skilful mavericks than ever.

Twenty-five years ago England alone could boast the mercurial brilliance of the likes of Waddle, Beardsley, Gascoigne to name just three. We have no-one in that class any more.

They’ve been replaced by sweat

and grind jockeys who can run fast but couldn’t do a trick or dribble with the ball if you attached electrodes to their testicles.

Ashley Young has attracted such high fees because he can, on occasions, go past someone. Its so rare now that when someone does it it adds £10million on to their transfer fee. Time was, most clubs had a tricky winger. It was routine, not exceptional.

So we can see lack of

physicality hasn’t brought more skill to the game at all.

What seems to have happened is that players have stopped being merely fit men and have turned into finely-honed athletes and are much less physically robust as a result.

Yes, the game is a bit faster but so what? Who wants it to be very, very fast? Have we really traded physical, robust football just to see someone run around at top pace like a headless chicken? It seems so.

So to recap, the rule

“All that’s happened is that sides like Arsenal and Barcelona can fanny around forever with the ball”

changes on tackling and on bookable offences only happened to protect players but players are injured in even greater numbers and there are less high-end skilful players than there used to be.

So exactly what is the bloody point of robbing us of the aggression and physicality that we liked in our football?

All that’s happened is that sides like Arsenal and Barcelona can fanny around forever with the ball when in days gone by a

defender would have just kicked a couple of them up in the air to break up play.

This footballing prevarication is categorically not a good thing even though there is a generation of fans who seem to think the endless passing of the ball is the very apotheosis of the game.

No. Football became the biggest sport on the planet because it was a sport which combined the skilful and the physical.

We have had the latter taken out of the game against our will.

I for one want it back.

11

CRISIS AT GOODISON?

Same as it Ever was Crisis time at Everton or the same as it ever was in recent times? The Guardian’s Merseyside football correspondent Andy Hunter on unrest at Goodison Park

I

T was not the most vociferous protest witnessed at a football stadium on Merseyside by any means. Friday, 5 August 2011, Goodison Park, Everton are playing Villarreal in their final friendly of pre-season and a summer of rising discontent at the club’s board is going to erupt. Or that was the word on the forums and from the fan groups anyway. The reality was somewhat different and merely highlighted the quandary Everton find themselves in.

There was no chanting, no marches or pitch invasions, just a few ‘Kenwright Out’ banners that for some reason led to supporters being evicted from the stadium

by Merseyside Police.

The People’s Club – brought to you by Stalin.

Supporters were angered more at the Spaniards’ complete dominance of possession and the inability of David Moyes’ side to construct a meaningful attack in the second half of the 1-0 defeat than the lack of direction and investment under Bill Kenwright and his fellow directors.

But this is not to say apathy reigns at Goodison and the protests will fade away. Until there is progress on investment, until there is more openness from the board and until there is a solution to Everton’s urgent need for a new or redeveloped stadium, dissent will continue to fill the vacuum.

This has been another summer of immense frustration for Moyes and the fear among Evertonians is how much longer their crucial, fine manager will stand for the financial constraints as he approaches the 10th anniversary of his arrival from Preston North End next March. Moyes has not had new money to invest in a squad that most observers would agree only requires minor but 12

Everton chairman Bill Kenwright and boss David Moyes expensive improvement for the past six transfer windows now.

This summer has arguably been the worst of the lot, with Everton’s well-documented lack of funds disqualifying them from the briefest of mentions in the transfer gossip columns.

Breaking point has passed for many. Several supporters groups have formed in recent months to demand answers from the hierarchy or change to it. They recently came together under the umbrella of ‘The Blue Union’ and their stated goals include the following: nThat the group would actively embark on a campaign to lobby local, regional and national media

“Until there is a solution to Everton’s need for a new stadium, dissent will continue to fill the vacuum.”

outlets to report on the true facts surrounding the stagnation of Everton Football Club, the lack of transparency and accountability within “The Peoples Club” (a moniker, tellingly, that the club have ceased to promote). n That all forms of peaceful protest would be considered. n That we would assist the Owner, the Chairman, the Board and the Executive Officers in their endeavours to attract investment and/or a takeover of the Club. n That we would work with all interested parties to resolve the longstanding Stadium issue.

As a journalist who covers Everton on a daily basis, the first point is obviously pertinent here,

with the implication that there day with Fenway Sports Group, made good and boyhood fan to is either disinterest in Everton’s was the number of interested own a leading Premier League plight or a cover-up taking place. businessmen, companies or club, but not even a man as “Everton This might be predictable but consortia that made themselves emotional as Kenwright considers are not an both points would be denied. known to the media during the that an option. attractive There are questions that process, either to test the water or When asked before the 2009 FA Everton have not answered put pressure on the then owners Cup Final if there was a place for proposition to convincingly, such as the role if they refused to sell. Not one has such an owner, he replied: “That new owners of director Robert Earl, the chief done likewise with Everton. has never, ever, ever, ever crossed executive of Planet Hollywood Second: Why would he want to without a new my mind. No room for that. It is International who was introduced remain at the helm? something comforting that I’ve stadium.” to Kenwright by the retail There can be no enjoyment found a manager who will put magnate Sir Philip Green in in running a club that has fallen up with that kind of chairman 2006 and whose most visible behind its former rivals and, as and that he’s found a team who contribution so far has been investors across the Premier will support him and support to bring Sylvester Stallone to a League landscape can testify, me in that way, but never, ever a match. even less profit. moment when I believe my kind There have been many failings This is an industry where, of chairmanship is eventually by this Everton board, most to again use Liverpool as an what this club needs. It is in damagingly – for the long-term example, its owners have had certain ways, but not in others. future of the club and their own to spend £100m on new players I haven’t been able to give him bank balances – the collapse of in 2011 just to have a chance of fortunes.” the Kings Dock stadium project, competing to finish in the top Until that changes, Everton a glorious opportunity to move four. remain wholly reliant on the to an iconic site on Liverpool’s It would be nice to believe expertise and employment of waterfront squandered because there still is a place for a local lad David Moyes.

Everton could not raise its £30m contribution.

To add insult to injury, the A lot has changed board then proceeded with plans since Everton’s last title in 1987 to build a mediocre stadium in Kirkby - “A glorified cow shed built in a small town outside Liverpool,” according to former Liverpool City Council leader Warren Bradley despite constant warnings from Keep Everton in Our City that it would not pass government planning regulations. They were proved right.

The ‘true facts’, however, are that Everton are not an attractive proposition for potential investors without a new stadium, 69% of their £79m turnover in 2010 went on player wages and, at £45m in debt, the banks have stopped lending.

Journalists, including The Guardian’s award-winning sports writer David Conn, have not unearthed much more.

One accusation frequently leveled against Kenwright is that he has priced would-be investors out of a deal for Everton or deterred them with demands to remain on the executive. There are two obvious responses to this.

First: A feature of covering Liverpool throughout David Moores’ attempts to sell his majority shareholding, through the Tom Hicks and George Gillett fiasco to the present 13

FAMILY

Like father like son

A football team doesn’t have to be successful to forge an unbreakable family bond, something Millwall fan MERV PAYNE knows all too well.

F

ather-son relationships are tricky things. Without the benefit of that maternal instinct, extra effort is often required.

These days it’s called ‘bonding’. Modern men can read all the magazine articles and watch all the daytime telly they like to make sure the relationship with their son and heir blossoms. But what do you do when you’re one of the old school – working 12 hours a day back in the ’70s and finding the demands of a young child a hell of a lot more than you bargained for?

I was a little sod in my early years. Dad was from a generation that did as their parents told them and he couldn’t understand why I was such a handful.

As I progressed into teenage years our relationship suffered.

We disagreed and argued over virtually any subject. It was always a great source of upset to my mum. We simply didn’t see eye to eye. Common ground was virtually non-existent.

Conversation was thin on the ground and another argument never far away. This was more than father-son growing pains, there were times when it seemed we resented oneanother’s presence.

But there was one thing we shared. One autumn day in 1979, Dad was getting ready to leave our flat in Balham to make the short trip to watch Millwall. In an attempt to give my mum some relief from trying to amuse me in his absence, he decided (against his better judgement he felt) to take me along. He was certain the idea would prove to be a disaster.

I’d get bored, play up and he’d

14

The Den, 1979

have to come home early. But at least he’d tried.

Saturday, September 1, 1979 at home to Carlisle United. A seat in the main stand, after being lifted over the turnstiles.

The smell of cigarette smoke.

The noise. The roar when we scored. All still with me to this day. A 1-0 win courtesy of a goal from 17-year-old Kevin O’Callaghan. A glossy green programme as a souvenir which never left my grasp all weekend.

The day had been a success and Dad congratulated himself on initiating his only son into the family tradition of supporting The Lions.

We became regulars on the Cold Blow Lane terrace.

He enjoyed regaling me with tales of legends – players and managers: Hewitt, Hurley, Billy Gray, Burridge, Fenton, Julians, Billy Neil, Eamon Dunphy. The ‘59 game unbeaten home

“We had something here, something special... it was more than just father and son sharing an interest in football”

run, the heartache of missing out on promotion in 1972 when my birth was just weeks away. I couldn’t get enough information out of him.

I was full of questions and he loved imparting the knowledge.

He’d shake his head and smile with pride, marvelling at my enthusiasm to follow in his football fan footsteps. It felt good. We had something here, something special. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was more than just father and son sharing an interest in football.

Success was thin on the ground in the first years of our shared support. The Petchey and Anderson eras meant the terraces were a lonely place at times and few games lasted long in the memory. For me, performances on the pitch were incidental. I used to love standing with the other kids at the front of the terrace,

desperate to get autographs.

Even if it was Bobby Shinton, Nicky Chatterton (below right) or Andy Massey.

At the age of eight and nine the complexities of league tables, promotion and relegation were a bit beyond me. I knew we played in the Third Division – and that there were only four so we obviously weren’t up to much because defeat was more common than victory – and that was about it.

I do remember the enthusiasm that greeted the start of the 1982/3 season when Peter Anderson brought in a huge number of players in an attempt to get promoted.

We took our places for the first league game of the season against Cardiff expecting to an all-too-rare glory season to get under way. We lost 4-0 – an introduction to exactly what following Millwall was all about.

I was dumbfounded but Dad just shrugged. “That’s Millwall,” he laughed. He’d seen it 100 times before.

I also remember later that same season his excitement at the appointment of George Graham as manager. The name meant nothing to me but Dad was mightily impressed and certain success would come.

That season gave me my first taste of real drama following The Lions as we battled against relegation and I started to study the league tables and permutations of up and coming fixtures. For the first time I took my place further up the Cold Blow Lane terrace to add my voice to the Lions’ roar next to Dad. The pandemonium that followed a narrow 1-0 over Brentford was my first real taste of what Millwall was REALLY all about. Sharing that with Dad made it extra special.

Away games were followed from home via LBC on his little radio and the win at Chesterfield that kept us up weeks later was greeted with us both dancing around the room in delight, with my mum looking on, wondering what was going on.

Promotion two years later was unforgettable. We had now moved to the halfway line as a result of my pestering that it afforded a better view of both

goals. Dad happily relinquished his lifelong habit of standing behind the goal to keep me happy. My 13th birthday money was spent on a season ticket for the 1985-86 season – all £32!

I was now hungry to attend away games but dad was less keen to give up entire Saturdays travelling after enduring the weekly commute. To his credit he felt it unfair to make my mum a total Millwall widow and insisted that – unless it was for an extra special game – he was strictly home games only.

After much nagging, he agreed to let me go to Fulham away on my own on Easter Saturday, 1986. The first thing on my mind as I reached Victoria station after the 2-1 win was to find a phone box and tell him all about it.

What I neglected to tell him was that, in a fit of fury at what seemed like Fulham’s lastminute equaliser, I stormed out of the ground – only to miss The Lions’ winner deep in injury time. It was a mistake I never made again. I set myself

“The win at Chesterfield that kept us up weeks later was greeted with us both dancing around the room in delight, with my mum looking on, wondering what was going on”

a challenge to get him to away matches and managed to con him into coming to Sheffield United in 1987. I’d only been allowed to go that far because ‘a friend’ was coming too.

This friend ‘let me down at the last moment’ and Dad felt obliged to accompany me. He was full of a cold and spent the freezing three-hour train journey up to Sheffield glaring at me and shaking his head in disgust. There was no heating, no refreshments. This was travelling away Millwall-style.

We won the game with a last minute O’Callaghan goal and he talked about that trip for years afterwards, admitting how thrilled he was to have been roped into it. It felt good.

Dad had taken me – now I was returning the favour.

Try as I might, I couldn’t persuade him to share the long coach journey to Hull to see us clinch promotion to the top flight for the first time at the end of that season.

I begged him to share our team’s greatest moment with me but “he couldn’t leave Mum on a Bank Holiday Monday” – or risk a late night with work the next day.

Again, the first thing on my mind was to share the experience with him from the nearest phone box when we stopped at services on the way back. I arrived home in the early hours and crept in trying not to make a noise, only to be greeted

by Dad in his pyjamas.

He’d waited up, unable to sleep (“like a bloody big kid,” so my mum recalled) and we danced around the house in celebration.

I used to ask him about Millwall getting to the top division. Their near miss of 1972 would be brought up again and how he felt they were doomed never to experience the First Division. I was less pessimistic and looked forward to the days when we’d be watching our team against the Arsenals and Liverpools.

When did he think we’d do it?

I’d ask him after each promising victory. For me it was a matter of time before it was ‘our turn’.

“I won’t see it in my lifetime,” he’d solemnly proclaim.

This used to sadden me. It 15

FAMILY was the first time I’d considered life without my dad. For all our differences, we’d stumbled upon some priceless common ground and, through Millwall, we weren’t simply father and son. We were best mates.

To stand with him at The Den aged 16 and see us in the top flight meant I was able to constantly remind him of that gloomy prediction and how wrong he’d been. By now we were standing at the back of the half-way line terrace, a large contingent of friends had been made and matchdays were not simply for football but for the all round banter terraces provided.

There were times when some of the characters at The Den had us in such uncontrollable laughter that the details of the game fell by the wayside and stories would be recalled for years to come as we shared Sunday lunchtime pints together. Away from the football our relationship often remained strained. Real Jekyll and Hyde stuff.

We could not find common ground on much outside football – and there were times when debates on topics such as whether Gary Waddock (above right) would ever be good enough escalated into heated arguments about issues totally removed from football.

Almost every non-football topic would see us at loggerheads. There were times I felt he’d have a go at me for the sake of it, and looking back I’m sure he felt I went out of my way to wind him up.

Neither was true. Millwall was the glue that held us together.

I have no doubt that without it there would be no room for reconciliation.

Our differences were always forgotten come kick-off – or when the latest Millwall news needed dissecting.

At 19 I left London and Millwall behind. I was starting a family and a new life in Manchester. It was a wrench but for once I had to put something before Millwall.

The day I left home was the first time I ever saw my dad cry. It was unexpected and unnerving. Dad was your typical stiff upper lip, keep it all in sort of bloke. It suddenly dawned on

16

me that all those years I’d spent in teenage angst thinking he couldn’t give a monkeys had been terribly wasted – apart of course from when we’d shared Millwall experiences.

We never had a crossed word from that day in April 1992, never a disagreement or even amicable differing of opinions. I used to find it strange, but obviously the distance made our relationship more valuable and trivial matters that had previously come between us were never raised. It was Millwall, Millwall, Millwall and that was just the way I liked it.

So our Millwall bond was stretched the 200 miles or so between south London and Manchester. He continued to go to every game and we’d share the details by phone. Every Tuesday without fail a package would land on the doormat from Dad. In it would be the latest programme and news articles carefully cut out of the South London Press, just to keep me in touch. Mum would often say what a lonely figure he cut leaving the house for the game on his own and how he often commented that it wasn’t the same anymore. The thought of this brought a lump to my throat. I went to as many games as I could with him, including the last ever game at the old Den. The photo that day of our group is a treasured keepsake.

Another impossible milestone was achieved at the end of the century when we stood together at Wembley. Dad had always insisted that he would only go to the national stadium to see his beloved Lions and if they never reached the twin towers in his lifetime then he was happy to make that sacrifice. If he couldn’t have Millwall at Wembley, Wembley could bugger off.

Inexplicably I managed to somehow lose the camera film from that day (damn predigital era) and I am gutted that I have no photographic record of that never-to-berepeated experience. As the mobile phone and internet age

“Millwall was the glue that held us together. I have no doubt that without it there would be no room for reconciliation”

progressed, football news came instantly and my first response was always to phone Dad and let him know, which almost got me into trouble at Tranmere.

As I excitedly celebrated our great FA Cup quarter final replay win with him over the phone some home fans let me know that my enthusiasm wasn’t appreciated.

Sod ‘em. We were off to Old Trafford – and I promised Dad that whatever it took we would both be there.

One of my fondest memories is of us sat in my local pub enjoying a quick pint while we waited to collect a takeaway. It was the evening of Sunday, April 4, 2004. We had just witnessed Millwall reaching the FA Cup final and couldn’t wipe the smiles off our faces. We just sat there grinning at each other and shaking our heads.

Weeks later we made the journey from my parents’ Kent home to Cardiff for the final.

Amazingly Dad bumped into a pal he hadn’t seen since school as we enjoyed a pre-match drink in the Glamorgan Working Men’s Club. It was a magical day, who cared about the result?

As ‘Abide With Me’ filled the stadium I put my arm around my dad and felt the emotion welling up inside me. My mind filled with memories of FA Cup final days at home with Dad in my childhood when we’d watched the game on TV. As the famous cup final hymn played then, I’d dream of a day when me and Dad would be singing along to it at the stadium before our own team took to the pitch. In 25 years we’d shared just about every experience that any English football fan could hope for. We’d done it all. It was perfect.

So began the customary years of decline. Dad remained loyal.

Renewing his season ticket.

Sending me the programmes and news cuttings. We talked for hours about the club’s dwindling fortunes and how we knew it had to be taken with the good times. There were plenty more years to enjoy and now there was the target of seeing Millwall at new Wembley.

“But only Millwall mind…”

As the 2005/6 season got under way we joked how we’d

be watching them down the road from me at Stockport again soon the way things were deteriorating. His Saturday match reports made for very grim listening.

As the New Year began our phone conversations became interrupted by a persistent cough that he had been left with after a bout of Christmas ‘flu. By the end of February it got so bad that he was barely able to complete a sentence without coughing uncontrollably. He wasn’t a smoker and this had been going on for two months so he went to the docs at the start of March. The doctor decided to send him for an x-ray to double check.

He was admitted to hospital with fluid on his left lung and as my wife and I drove through the night down to Kent to see him I knew deep down what this could mean.

Countless tests were done and Dad was left in no doubt what they were looking for, but he had to wait. The worry was excruciating. I did what I could to reassure him and we shared a trip to The Den. A few pre-match drinks in ‘Arrys Bar and banter with some proper Millwall characters helped to take his mind off things temporarily – but the terrible 1-0 defeat to Leicester didn’t do much to raise spirits.

After two torrid months of tests and hospital visits, Dad was given the worst possible news. He had a rare form of cancer called Mesothelioma, linked to exposure to asbestos when he was a builder in the 60s.

Less than nine months later on Thursday, February 1, 2007 I sat at his bedside with Mum and we watched him pass away.

From the day he was first admitted to hospital for that x-ray on March 7, 2006, the Dad that I knew was gone forever as the fear of what was happening to him consumed his life.

In the intervening period we’d managed to get them moved to a bungalow near us in Manchester where the best cancer treatment was available.

We were there at every hospital visit as he underwent painful, debilitating chemotherapy to try and turn the months into years, but it

SWEET FA: Dennis Wise in the 2004 FA Cup semi

was a fight Dad wasn’t up to.

His enthusiasm for everything deserted him. We tried desperately to lift his spirits but it was hopeless. Just before they moved I persuaded him to go to a game – the first of the season at home to Yeovil.

He sat in his usual place – at the back of Block 35 (he’d always preferred being behind the goal) – and chatted to the friends he had made there over the years. I spoke to him that evening about the game but he just didn’t have the heart.

Conversations now were almost exclusively about his illness.

I persisted with talking about the latest results, signings and news but not surprisingly it didn’t stir his troubled mind.

The first Saturday after he’d passed was a particularly hard time. I cursed Dad’s luck as the result was confirmed and tried to joke to myself about how he could’ve at least hung on until Saturday to see us win a game.

For the first time since that sunny day in September 1979, I had no one to share my Millwall with and it hurt.

I know that every time some news comes through on my mobile from the club about a new signing I will go to phone and share it with Dad – just as I will after every match. The empty feeling I get when I can’t

“I know that every time some news comes through on my mobile about a new signing I will go to phone and share it with Dad. The empty feeling I get when I can’t make that call will never be any easier to bear”

make that call will never be any easier to bear. But what I do have are cherished memories I can play over and over, as clear as if they were on video.

I have to remember how lucky I am. Dad was 68.

We still feel robbed.

Until he took ill he was a fit and healthy man. Belying his years, always active, never smoking, drinking in moderation, watching his weight, never in hospital, never ill it seemed.

But to have been able to enjoy such a friendship with him through such a simple shared pleasure as following a football team is a genuine comfort.

Many don’t get that chance. All too often I hear of those who are taken at a younger age and remind myself that there are many who would happily have swapped places with me.

Over the years, when asked ‘Who do you support?’ my answer was always responded to with and instant ‘Why?’.

People hardly ever question why you are an Arsenal, Man United, Chelsea or Liverpool fan – even if you live nowhere near the ground or never get to see many games.

They rarely wonder why your allegiance is a less-fashionable Middlesbrough, Stoke, Brentford or Barnet. But they have trouble understanding why anyone would follow Millwall.

My reason was always simple, one I’m sure shared by many fans and a great source of pride regardless of lack of success or off-the-field reputation.

I may not be able to call myself a Millwall supporter in the truest sense of the word any more. I can’t get to many games but heaven knows I would be there every week if it were possible, no matter how bad we are performing. Just as Dad did through the bleak 50s when we were battling against the dangers of re-election.

There are so many cliches.

“It’s in my blood”, “Cut me and I bleed blue and white”, “English by birth, Millwall by the grace of God”. But for me, the reason I give for a lifelong love affair with The Lions is very simple whenever anyone feels the need to ask ‘why?’

“Because my Dad does”.

17

ITALIAN FOOTBALL

Crisis, what crisis?

RORY SMITH, of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, on how Italian football is going on the attack

R

AVAGED by corruption, poisoned by cynicism, polluted by violence and brought to a standstill by greed. There was a time in the barely distant past when Italian football was glamour distilled, a game of cat-and-mouse tactics, blanket defences punctured by long-haired, ingenious attackers.

Serie A was noise and colour and glory. Now it is dying. Its condition is chronic. Italian football has long been the sick man of Europe.

Cristian Chivu disagrees.

Vehemently. As he always does.

The Romanian is one of those footballers who speaks his mind with a rare clarity, with coherent thought, and in a number of languages.

“Twice in the last five years, Italian teams have won the Champions League,” he says, stridently. Little wonder: when Inter’s class of 2010 aped AC Milan’s triumph three years earlier, he was a key performer.

“The national team won the World Cup in 2006. Maybe it is not as bad as everyone says.”

Chivu’s logic is impeccable.

For all the talk of crisis in Serie A, perhaps it endures only a barren spell by its own lofty standards.

Perhaps the lingering stench of Calciopoli and its successors, the enduring problem of the power of clubs’ ultras and the rest has not quite managed to rob Italy of its gilded edge.

The stigma remains, though.

Players head for Spain, first and foremost, and the wealth of the Premier League, rather than Serie A, given the choice. The great 18

Gian Piero Gasperini

and the good no longer dream of playing there. That should be no surprise. After all, when you look past the off-pitch problems and the fleeting glories proffered

by European competitions which once existed as Italian fiefdoms, there is the ultimate, unedifying truth: as everyone knows, Italian football is boring.

“It is our objective to change perceptions like that,” says Gian Piero Gasperini, the thoughtful, kindly 53-year-old appointed this summer as Chivu’s new manager at the San Siro after four quietly successful years at Genoa.

“Football goes in cycles. Maybe five years ago, Italian football was one of the strongest around. We have still had great results since then – like Inter winning the Champions League last year – but we are not at our peak. It is up to coaches like me and [AC Milan manager Massimiliano] Allegri to change things around.”

Like Gasperini, Allegri – who won the Serie A title in his first season at AC Milan last season – represents a new breed of Italian manager. He is substantially younger, but the core belief is the same: a desire to rebuild Italian football in a new image.

His teams play an attractive, open style, removed from the catenaccio of the past. The new philosophy is evidently catching.

Juventus, too, have handed control to a young manager, the former player Antonio Conte, a coach who favours an ambitious 4-2-4 formation.

Andrea Pirlo, that elegant symbol of the old Italy, has been recruited to play as a quarterback, with the gracefully combative Chilean Arturo Vidal alongside him. Forwards and wingers will raid forward, and the emphasis will be on attack.

“The manager has his beliefs and it is our job as players to put them into practice,” says the Serbian international winger, Milos Krasic.

Employed as a traditional right winger last season under Luigi Delneri, Krasic has rather different expectations this year.

“Each coach has his own ways of doing things, but I think this year we will be more aggressive on the pitch,” he adds. “I will

Luis Enrique

be more of a winger than a midfielder. That is the great difference with last year and it is ideal for me. I love attacking, with the whole team, as one collective unit.”

That is how Juventus intend to return to the Champions League after two abject seasons; much the same plan has been put in place following Thomas Di Benedetto’s takeover of Roma.

Walter Sabatini, the former Palermo sporting director, has been appointed to provide the new manager at the Stadio Walter Mazzarri

“Italians have shaken off catenaccio’s shackles.”

Olimpico with the players to fit his system. That new manager is Luis Enrique. That system is, broadly, the one that has brought such success at his alma mater, Barcelona. It is one of intense pressing, swift attacking and a constant thirst for possession.

“When Roma got to know me, they got to know me as an offensive coach who likes to attack, who likes good football,” Enrique says.

“The important thing is that the fans come to watch us, that they enjoy themselves. It’s a very attractive way of playing. We will play on the attack. I don’t consider football any other way. We are moving towards a complete change of ideas and identity.”

Enrique is an exception, in the sense that he has been imported to impose a new philosophy which has largely emerged organically in Italian soil always thought to have been salted by the doctrines of Helenio Herrera, the innately defensive mentality that seemed to pervade even the great Milan sides of Arrigo Sacchi and Fabio Capello.

Elsewhere in the peninsula, Italians themselves have shaken off catenaccio’s shackles.

Gasperini employs a 3-4-3 at Inter, though in practice it could just as easily be a 3-2-2-2-1, or a 3-4-2-1. At Udinese – the club where Alberto Zaccheroni honed the system – Francesco Guidolin reached the Champions League with a similar set-up, based on the considerable attacking talents of the now absent Alexis Sanchez and the evergreen Antonio Di Natale.

At Napoli, another of Italy’s Champions League contingent, Walter Mazzarri has earned the sobriquet Walter Maradona for the way his 3-4-2-1 constructed around the golden triumvirate of Marek Hamsik, Ezequiel Lavezzi and Edinson Cavani, has got the best out of a limited side.

They are not quite so attacking as some of their peers, but there are few more innovative systems.

That is the hallmark of the new Italy: excitement in style, but also in structure. They have always thought about football here; now the philosophy is changing.

19

ITALY

Conte makes it to his Promised Land PAUL GRECH takes a look at the new Juventus boss and what he must do to avoid the chop

Antonio Conte is no shrinking violet

W

ILL I manage Juventus? That’s a matter of when, not if. I’ve got no doubt that I’ll make it. It is only a matter of time and it all depends on how much I’ll study; how good I’ll be at improving myself.”

Even back in 2006 Antonio Conte knew where his destiny lay. His ego was backed by the confidence, arrogance even, of someone who had played in a side that marked a generation.

Conte knew that whoever he managed, few would be able to match his record of five Italian league titles and a Champions League. Such successes left little room for lack of confidence.

Five years on and Antonio Conte’s prediction has come true. In the days leading to his appointment – and increasingly in those following it – it was repeatedly mentioned that he is someone who knows Juventus.

He knows what the supporters want, how the players should behave and how a Juventus team should play.

Above all, he also knows that at Juventus winning is an expectation, nothing else.

Whilst this might seem as being obvious for a club of Juventus’ stature, it isn’t so straightforward. Ever since the calciopoli scandal, Juventus have been almost reluctant to adopt such an attitude. It is as if they feel that there are dark 20

implications; that it was the pressure of such a stance that brought about the scandal.

Subconsciously, something has been holding Juventus back from being open in their desire to win and, as a result, from doing enough to actually win.

Conte doesn’t have such problems. “We want to open a new cycle,” he said on his appointment before going on to quixotically answer a question about how long this will take by saying “he who has time will wait for time.”

With which he presumably meant that if you claim to need time to do something, you’ll end up wasting what time you have without ultimately doing anything. These, or so the ever excitable refrains have gone, are the words of someone who knows all about Juventus.

The problem is that Juventus have already been down this path. Those, or something similar to them, were the kind of words that earned praise for Ciro Ferrara in his first days as Juventus manager. But heart, passion and knowledge of the club ultimately wasn’t enough for him. Ferrara left midway through a season where not even his status as club legend was enough to save him.

It could well turn out to be the same for Conte.

There is, however, a significant difference between the two men: experience. Whilst Ferrara got the job fresh out of managers’ school, Conte already has spent the past five years managing. And he has done so with a fair degree of success.

When he took over at Bari midway through the 2007-08 season they were a side staring at relegation from the Serie B. Yet that of keeping them up wasn’t his biggest challenge: first he had to win over the fans after heated protests over his appointment with the base of the rancour being Conte’s past as a former player of their hated neighbours Lecce. But win them over he did, thanks to a series of good results that, incidentally, also comfortably kept them in the same division.

Then, the following season, Conte took Bari up. Actually,

Juventus aren’t a big enough team for attacker Eljero Elia

he didn’t simply take them up but dominated the division with a team that, at best, was expected to make the play-offs.

So surprising, yet so absolute was this success that it is still referred to by Bari fans as the miracle of Sant’Antonio.

Less emphatic was the second promotion achieved this season

by Siena, a club that, suitably, play in a black and white kit that mimics Juventus’. But getting promoted was the target he had been set at the start of the season and a man can hardly be blamed for ‘simply’ achieving the goal placed in front of him.

So now ‘il capitano’ - as he is still referred to by Juventus fans - returns to Turin to fulfill his ambition. Just as it was the ambition of Claudio Ranieri, Ciro Ferrara and Gigi Del Neri.

All three good managers who perhaps were so happy to be where they were that they tried to make do with the players that the club made available to them.

Only that these players weren’t good enough.

If he is to succeed, Conte has to be more determined. Already he’s admitted that he only knows to play with an aggressive 4-2-4 system where the wingers push and work very hard. It is a system that requires specific players; full

“There remains a feeling that Juventus have bought the best players they could rather than the best players out there which used to happen in the past.”

backs who are expected to focus primarily on the defensive side of their game, wide midfielders who are ready to run up and down for ninety minutes, two largely defensive midfielders to fill any gaps, a strong target man.

In truth it is a system similar to the one theorised by his predecessor. And it is also a system for which Juventus failed to provide players who were good enough.

In that respect, Conte has been luckier than his predecessor.

Juventus have spent heavily and players like Reto Ziegler, Stephan Lichtsteiner, Arturo Vidal and Mirko Vucinic all seem to lend themselves well to his system.

Yet there remains the feeling that Juventus have bought the best players they could rather than the best players out there, which is what used to happen in the past.

The most telling comment was that delivered by Eljero Elia after Hamburg had refused Juventus’ offer for him. “The club told me that they won’t let me join Juventus, but that’s not a problem for me. I’ve agreed with the club that we’d open talks if a big club like Arsenal or Chelsea comes knocking,” he said.

“There’s no need to talk if a club of the same level as HSV is interested. Juventus are still one of the best Italian teams around, but they’re not better than Hamburg in my opinion.”

Those comments betrayed Elia’s somewhat exaggerated feeling of self-worth. But there is also a strong degree of truth about them: Juventus are no longer the attractive proposition they once were.

As much as the fans would love to see them challenging Inter and Milan for the title, finishing in a top three spot has to be the short term ambition.

Getting there would give them the status – and the money – to attract the kind of player that they’ve found it so hard to get in recent years.

It won’t be as ambitious a target as someone as used to Juventus dominating as Conte would like, but it would be a significant step in them opening the cycle that he has promised.

21

COLCHESTER UNITED

No signings to speak of but at least the car park’s been tarmaced RICHARD WILLIAMS won’t be welcoming any new players to the Community Stadium as another season marooned in the middle of League One beckons

S

ometimes I envy my friends – fans of the big clubs. Summers spent debating whether Sneijder, Aguero or Sanchez will join them, or a rival.

Lunch breaks spent on YouTube drooling over the next Brazilian wonder kid, they’ve been linked with a £10 million bid for. It all just seems so exciting.

As a fan of League One Colchester United, this close season was welcomed in with the news that chairman Robbie Cowling could no longer afford to pump the same level of his personal fortune into keeping the club afloat, and that not only would there be no money for new signings, but that the wage bill would also have to be cut too.

Meaning that what is already a decidedly average squad (that finished 10th last season, safely adrift of both relegation and the play-offs) might make the longpromised transition to mediocre.

Now you can’t begrudge Cowling for looking after his and his family’s interests in the current climate, and manager John Ward always comes across as a decent, honest guy too.

It was evident to everyone who saw us last season that we need a new striker though – a goalscorer.

But it seems every time I flip 22

Even Teddy’s cameo couldn’t lift the mood for U’s fans

over the local paper, I read that we haven’t been in talks with Karl Duguid – this player, or that player, as the knight in rumoured, to the extent that I’m shining armour beginning to wonder quite how much solitaire Ward is playing each day.

Proven U’s old boys, and free agents, Jamie Cureton, Kevin Lisbie, and Lomano LuaLua were all ignored.

Even last season’s loanee from Reading David Mooney opted to join Orient instead, ‘good riddance, he was shit anyway’ said the bitter message-board optimists.

One afternoon I logged on, to see who we were being linked with next, only to be greeted with the top news story - that tarmacing was under way on the stadium car park. Well that’s a relief.

The only signing of note we have made is U’s ‘legend’ Karl Duguid, who at 33, has rejoined the club after being released by Plymouth.

Karl, is a local lad, who made over 400 appearances for us, in every position going, before moving on to pastures new in 2008.

But all the bluster and enthusiasm in the world can’t disguise the fact he’s not a particularly blessed player. make things more interesting. selling of all our best players, Abysmal in our Championship Others might wonder why I don’t capitulating to relegation the relegation season, he was even following season, and moving to just go and support one of the worse at Plymouth, if their fans “Supporting a a souless new all-seater stadium, big clubs. are to be believed. big team has it’s all just become pretty lucid The answer is, I don’t know. It’s He was apparently ‘just training just never been an option. I’m with us for fitness’ - with crushing just never been over the last three years.

Even a cameo at the club by from Colchester, so I support my inevitability. I don’t mean to be an option.

41-year-old Teddy Sheringham, local team. too hard on him, he’s a lovely guy, had a melancholic feel to it.

My dad took me to my first I’m from but it’s just symptomatic of how On the first day of the season game as a wee nipper, a 5-2 the club has stagnated in recent Colchester so before last, I travelled to Carrow home defeat by Rochdale, which years.

I support my Road to see them take on with hindsight was a terrible “He’s U’s through and Norwich City, more in hope than result, but I was hooked. through,” say the Colchester local team.” expectation. But my cider-addled Curiously, the team went United Supporters Association brain witnessed the U’s run and won away at arch-rivals (presumably, after they got their out 7-1 winners in one of my Wycombe by the same scoreline pant’s dry-cleaned). So am I favourite games ever. A week the following Saturday — not though, but I’ve yet to be given a later though, the team we’d just that I knew away games existed run out. roundly thrashed, poached our at that age!

I hope this piece strikes a cord manager Paul Lambert, and the Of course, there have been with some of you out there, who rest is history! good times, the promotion like me, are gearing up for a This year, we travel to Preston season in 2005/06, followed by season of nothingness. on the opening day, again more a glorious first Championship A few good smash and grab in hope than expectation, but as campaign, where unbelievably away wins, a couple of big scalps my friend says whenever I get too we were knocking on the door at home maybe, a season where cynical, “let’s get behind them for a play-off place to the Premier part of you longs to be involved shall we?”

League for a while.

But since in a relegation battle, just to 23

SUNDAY LEAGUE

Where’s the talking?

What better way to escape clique-ridden top-level football than a spot of Sunday League?

Surely the grass-roots game can’t have been eaten up by hackneyed phrases and overused expressions – can it? Adam Hurrey of angleofpostandbar.blogspot.com investigates…

T

HISis a piece about Sunday league football.

It will not make any reference to hangovers (Yes! Some of them go out the night before and are still drunk when they turn up!), fat players (that’s right! They aren’t professional athletes!) or crap pitches (guess what, the public playing surface isn’t completely flat and abundant with grass!)

English football, from top to bottom, has always been characterised by its intangible, unquantifiable qualities (unless you count bags as suitable units of measurement) of spirit, passion, grit, determination and, less notably, talking.

Talking is easy. Not talking enough is generally agreed in Sunday league to be highly counter-productive. Players are urged before kick-off for “lots of talking”, especially “back there”.

Not talking is an accusation that can only be levelled at a whole team (or at least its rearguard), rather than an individual (unless it is the captain, who must shout indiscriminately for 90 minutes, for that is his job.)

To avoid this indictment, a lexicon of largely useless phrases has emerged, which can be called upon whenever it is necessary to fill a period of relative silence.

Everyone knows them, everyone understands what they are vaguely supposed to mean, and almost nobody questions them. Now, clichéd as they are, many bellowed phrases you hear on a football pitch - “Man on!”, “Out we go!”, etc - are useful instructions.

Nothing wrong with those.

The following set of on-pitch rallying cries, however, must not escape scrutiny: 24

Stripes head on this...

1. “We’ve Gone Quiet” Going quiet, as highlighted earlier, is the sign of a malfunctioning team. No-one is talking, which means we all might as well go home. A period of notable quietness is ended only when the captain draws everyone’s attention to it: “Come on lads, we’ve gone quiet!”. It can, at the shouter’s discretion, be bookended with “...haven’t we?”, to present the illusion of a debate where one is really not on offer.

Apart from functioning to actually end the quietness, this is accepted as an open invitation to call upon phrases 2-8 in this list.

2. “Straight In” A staple instruction that can be used only at a very specific moment - namely, the opponents kicking off the game.

“Run after the ball!”, it demands,

“Chase it when they kick it backwards!”. Only the strikers need to do this, of course, and the moment quickly passes.

Getting “straight in” is not a continuous requirement, but merely an opening gesture of intent, which is guaranteed to be unfulfilled.

It is often accompanied by a mindless, yet somehow entirely appropriate-feeling, clap of the hands.

“No accuracy is required but congratulations are available for heading it really, really hard straight back where it came from.”

3. “Two On The Edge” When a corner is awarded, it is everyone’s job to pick up their man. One player has the added task of spotting a particular discrepancy in this complex marking system, in that there are two unattended opponents lumbering into the penalty area.

In extreme circumstances, there may be “three on the edge”an unthinkable catastrophe which is met with a suitably

incredulous cry of “I’ve got three here!”. The lack of concentration may be down to the defence’s preoccupation with the big man, the tall (i.e. lanky) opposing centre-back/estate agent, who has arrived with a look of great purpose from the back.

Straight in, lads...

4. “All Day” An utterly irritating phrase (specifically designed to be so) used by smug opponents to declare your attacking efforts as weak and unlikely to succeed even if repeated. Often said twice in quick succession – as a speculative effort flies high, wide and [not at all] handsome – to compound the humiliation.

5. “It’s Still 0-0” Football is an overwhelmingly childish pursuit. Much of football supporting is based on schadenfreude and suffering the taunts, in return, when your own team is humbled.

To combat this threat, some employ an overly defensive stance, hoping that an audible absence of pride will pre-empt any possible fall. And so, if a Sunday team races into an early lead, one stern-faced, armbandtoting try-hard will attempt to construct a parallel universe in which the game is, in fact, goalless. The job is not done, he says, a point he may return to when the final score is 7-4 or something similarly amateur.

6. “Box ‘Em In!” A cult classic, in my eyes.

Satisfies two fundamental criteria; 1) a laughable attempt at tactical insight, and 2) exclaimed almost instinctively, EVERY SINGLE TIME. The ball goes out for an opposition throw-in, deep in their final third, and it is universally accepted that they will not have the adequate technical skills (or simply the upper-body strength) to play/hurl their way to safety.

7. “[Shirt Colour] Head on This!”

Possibly the most pointless one of all. For the uninitiated, this cryptic command is for your teammates to meet an imminent opposition hoof with their head before the

other lot can. No accuracy is required but congratulations are available for heading it really, really hard, straight back where it came from. ”WELL UP!” you are told, with your name broadcast in full if the game is particularly tense. More forward-thinking Sunday league players concern themselves with the second ball, which is often simply another header.

Third balls remain an untapped, bewildering resource, possibly due to Chaos Theory.

8. “Away!”

Loosely translated as “Now look here, teammate – I neither want nor trust you to play your way out of trouble.

Please dispose of the ball as quickly and as far away as possible.” Failure to do as directed leaves one open to castigation for “fannying about

Second ball...

with it there”. Professional footballers, it should be noted, do not officially fanny about but simply dally, hesitate or dwell on the ball. Meanwhile, back on recreation grounds up and down the country, players might be allowed to fanny about if they are deemed to have an adequate amount of...

9. “Time!”

The ball drops from the air and a player finds himself in acres of space. Pointing this out to him might seem a good idea.

It’ll calm him down, allow him to get his head up and play a pass, rather than treat the ball like an unpinned grenade.

However, when ten other players scream “Time! Time!” in unison, it tends to have quite the opposite effect. The futility of the situation is laid bare when, after relinquishing possession easily, the player is offered a final, withering, retrospective observation.

“You had time.”

10. “Where Was The Shout?”

The ultimate act of Sunday League buck-passing. A player is unceremoniously dispossessed from behind, to howls of derision from his teammates.

Accompanied by a despairing flap of the arms, the player begs of his colleagues: “Where was the shout?”

There wasn’t one.

Because they’ve gone quiet, haven’t they?

25

MANAGERS

Reid it and weep

It must be great to get to know the manager of your team, right?

MARTYN McFADDEN of Sunderland fanzine A Love Supreme tells a cautionary tale

I

t was 4am and I was trying to get to sleep on the back seat of a people carrier in the middle of the French countryside, but I had steam coming out of my ears (metaphorically that is).

I put Belle and Sebastian on and eventually dozed off only to wake up covered in sweat about four hours later when the sun got hot enough to cook my metal moving motel and raise the temperature inside to beyond sauna levels.

I dusted myself down, wandered into the farmhouse, immersed my head into a sink of cold water to bring me round and went to see what the other lads were up to.

Mark was already at work with his face stuck into the ALS endof-season polls. I was surprised he was even awake because his timekeeping was atrocious, but since he was sleeping in a flimsy tent alongside Heslop, Tom and Peter I guess they’d all been woken by the heat (and noisy geese) too.

I asked him why there was a fox’s head lying on the floor next to the back door and listened to his monologue about why it was wrong to hunt these animals, cut their heads off and mount them on the wall above the place where a vegetarian was trying to count votes on SAFC’s very poor 2001/02 season.

I couldn’t be arsed to argue with him so asked how the poll was going. He explained that the obvious candidates had won the obvious categories and he was onto the question about which ALS merchandise the readers would like to see introduced. Apart from a few funny ones like ALS thongs, a lot

26

of people were requesting antiPeter Reid t-shirts.

We were halfway through the Belgian pre-season tour and were staying just over the border in France, freeloading at a mate’s farmhouse and commuting to the games.

This seemed to suit the eight of us. It suited me because otherwise I’d be paying the hotel bill for the ALS staff. And it suited the lads because they had to design and write the first

“In 2001/02 things had gone west.

We’d turned European aspirations into relegation fears and the natives were getting restless”

issue of the upcoming season while we were away, and if we were in Brussels where all the other lads were we’d get no work done and just be in the pub all the time.

On the down side the house had only three bedrooms and no hot water. Hence the body smells and overspill of folk sleeping in cars and tents. But we were mostly happy in our own little world, drinking cheap beer, having BBQs, playing footy

in the garden and getting some work done.

The night before we’d played in Antwerp and the feeling of dissatisfaction from the previous campaign was still simmering among supporters.

If your memory is poor let me remind you that in 2000/01 Sunderland had been pushing for European qualification for the second year in a row, the stadium was packed week in week out and all was rosy in the garden. But in 2001/02 things had gone west. We’d turned European aspirations into relegation fears and the natives were getting restless.

Normally in pre-season everyone is chilled out and enjoying a holiday mixed with a bit of footy. On this tour the atmosphere was totally different. We’d put a bus on and had booked everyone in the same hotel in the Belgian capital, which had been turned into SAFC HQ. When we met our coach at Antwerp’s ground a group of lads on board had a Sunderland flag with Reid Out written on it and some others who we knew quite well told us that someone printed out a load of A4 Reid Out sheets and stuck them up around the hotel and even inserted them into hotel menus.

Until then I hadn’t realised how strong the anti-Reid feeling was among supporters.

We made our way into the ground and watched the players warm up while sipping at our glasses of beer on the terraces, as is permitted on the continent.

The fans with the anti-Reid banner stuck it up in the Sunderland end and within five minutes Jason McAteer spotted it and, without speaking to any of the other players, ran over and said to the lads standing by it: “Is this yours? Because all of the players want you to take it down.”

Now McAteer was not known for his intelligence, but I never knew he had developed telepathy with his team mates, because that is he only way that ‘all the players’ could have told him that they wanted the banner down.

Thinking about this a little more, I recalled the many players the manager had fallen

out with, most of whom I knew personally, and they all, without “When he first exception, detested the bloke. came to the I thought to myself, not only would those players not want it club I was taken down, but they’d actually over the moon be amused by it.

– he’d done The fans concerned were really well amazed that a senior squad at Man City member had even come over and we were and, not wanting to cause a in the lower scene, granted his wish. echelons of Two minutes later Reid the second appeared from the tunnel tier and totally oblivious of the banner staring down shenanigans, but once the the barrel of Sunderland fans spotted him a drop to the boos rang out from some of them, while others looked third” bemused. This was the first time I can remember Peter Reid being heckled by Sunderland fans and also the first time I can remember our supporters quarrelling among themselves about his tenure. Some argued that he was the best manager that we’d had for years, while others declared that we were heading for relegation. In hindsight both were correct.

The game itself was pretty uneventful and the only incident I can remember from a dull first half was my photographer being ejected from the stadium by a member of the Sunderland press office.

This annoyed me because we needed

by Simon Bird photos for the magazine we were putting together PETER Reid is and the club had taken drenched by an left our home game press fan’s can of drink, leangry aving and photo pass off us a him in no doubt rest couple of years previously Sunderland fans less without reason, leaving the fizz has gone outhink t of us to scrap for images his reign. from away games and This is the th ks the pre-season friendlies. under-fire boss isange tti Now it seemed they for lifting the Wearsi ng ders were trying to stop us from the brink of doing even that. to the old Divisiorenlegation After getting the call to Premiership big Three from the photographer, ys wi th a state-of-the-art bo I went down and spoke new sta diu m during seven years to the press guy from at the helm.

Antwerp, who was But Reid is being really embarrassed. humiliating lesson thgiven a He basically said that at his proud tenure is reac he had no problem hing br eaking point, as fa letting us in and demand a big-money sig ns even went as far as before Premiership kic ning saying he thought A k off.

Love Supreme was a FLASHBACK: The great magazine, but Mir ror, Augus t 2002 Sunderland’s press

DESPERATE REID ON BRINK AFTER DRINK DISGRACE

office had insisted that we leave.

I don’t think he was meant to tell me all that and he even said to come back after he game and have a beer with him so he explain things further.

Anyway, by the time I returned to the terraces with my evicted photographer all hell was breaking loose. I’d obviously missed something.

It didn’t take me long to discover that when the players left the field at half time and walked down the tunnel, which was actually in the middle of our section, someone had emptied the contents of their beer glass on to Reidy’s head. I couldn’t believe it.

There’d been no love lost between me and Peter Reid for some time, but I thought that the beer-throwing incident was out of order. He was only trying to do his job as SAFC boss to the best of his ability and although I personally thought he was an arrogant, foul-mouthed, badlyeducated bully, I wanted him to succeed in his job because he was managing my club. The club I love.

Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just come to the aforementioned opinion of Reidy by watching the team and his TV interviews and deciding I didn’t like him. It was his personal witch hunt against me and ALS, which made it so very hard to do my job, which led me to this conclusion.

When he first came to the club I was over the moon, he’d done really well at Man City in the top flight and we were in the lower echelons of the second tier and staring down the barrel of a drop to the third.

I remember that I was over in Ireland that week when Gordon Armstrong rang me to tell me the news of Reid’s appointment. Five minutes later every media source going was destroying my peace in my Cork hotel room looking for a quote, but that comes with the territory when you’re editing ALS. The following week I went along to the training ground to grab a player for the next issue and Reid came over and asked 27

MANAGERS

what I was doing. I’m pretty sure the first words Peter Reid ever uttered to me were: “What do you want, you c*nt?”

And to be honest that just about summed the man’s vocabulary up. After that I was told off for going round to see Shay Given at his hotel to conduct a pre-arranged interview, for getting some pictures of Mickey Gray and Martin Smith in ALS t-shirts and for laughing at a joke in the press box at a reserve game. The list goes on, it really does.

Once I was filming some local TV news thing with the Boro fanzine guy Rob Nichols. There had been crowd trouble and racism the last few times we’d played The Smogs and the club had asked for the interview to be along the lines of hopefully there’ll be no bother, not that Sunderland’s hardest were going to take any notice of me.

I was dead busy that day, but I said I’d do it. So there we are walking out of our tunnel at the Stadium of Light when Paul Bracewell comes out. “Hi, sorry about this Martyn, but the gaffer wants to know what you’re doing.”

I explained the craic and that the press office knew all about it and he thanked me politely and went to pass the message on.

I think Brace was a bit uncomfortable about the whole running round doing Reid’s errands thing. After all he was the assistant manager, why was he worrying about me the day before a local derby game that we desperately needed to win?

To be fair to Bracewell he was always spot on with me and I felt sorry for him being pushed around by his old Everton teammate. Rob from Boro couldn’t believe it. He was laughing his head off at the thought of the fanzine editor causing such a fuss by doing nothing.

He was saying something like, “If this was at Boro no one would even take any notice, what have you done to them?”

At this point Reidy arrived and I was starting to get a little irritated, so again I explained the TV thing was to do with the trouble last time we played them and an anti-racism initiative, all sorted out through the club. But he goes off on 28

one at me and Rob and the cameraman about how the club was run like a Christmas Club before he arrived and how he’s told that bloody lass in the press office that everything should go through him, then eventually shuts up and goes away.

My next run in with him is at some random reserves game. Tap on shoulder from Brace.

“Martyn mate, sorry, but the gaffer wants to see you again.”

Regular theme developing here you may notice. Apparently there had been something in A Love Supreme (which I hadn’t written) about how the lads had a team bonding night in a hotel after a home game, but that Brace had gone to bed early.

We’d said he was boring, but a model pro.

Reidy started banging on about how certain things should remain within the club and then in front of Brace says: “For f**k’s sake I find it hard enough getting this c*nt motivated for the games, without you lot calling him miserable.”

Bracewell just stood there looking at his shoelaces like a schoolboy.

I may be thick skinned and a little slow on the uptake, but at this point I started to realise Reid didn’t like me. I thought sod it and instead of just taking the bollocking I decided to argue my corner and stick up for Brace, who was my favourite player at the time.

It didn’t go down very well and although I got my point across and he had no retort, he just told me I was a “c*nt” and to get out.

It’s not just the direct contact of verbal aggression from Reid that we encountered though.

One fan who waited at the training ground to get his copy of ALS signed by the manager was told, “I’ll sign your arse, but I’ll not sign that.” While another fan who was shown around the dressing room on match day told us that he witnessed Reidy grabbing a copy of A Love Supreme out of Michael Gray’s hands and throwing it

“When he arrived in the centre circle to collect the money he looked at me and said: ‘What the f**k are you doing here?’”

across the room. Reid then apparently said: “If I catch any of you reading that shit, you’ll be dropped.”

But after saving us from the drop in his first full year in charge, Reidy led us to the title and promotion in his second and even though I wasn’t getting on very well with him (understatement), I thought he was doing a great job as manager.

So when three of the lads from ALS (Tom Lynn, Craig Foster and myself ) were offered the opportunity to join five others (Sean Vasey, Ian Chester, Steve Atkinson, Gary Raine and Paul Davison) and record Cheer Up Peter Reid under the hastily made up name of Simply Red And White, I was only going to say yes.

What followed was a month of madness and drunken nights out performing the song. We got to go on the Big Breakfast when were interviewed by Peter Andre and had to take a penalty into the Fulwell End against John Burridge.

He was the keeper who saved Paul Hardyman’s last-minute pen in the play-off semi against the Mags and then got his head whacked by Hardyman in front of the Fulwell, who was duly sent off.

Our task was to score past the Newcastle keeper, but if we missed we had to run to the touch line and eat a spoonful of Sugar Puffs.

Just to explain here, the said breakfast cereal was being advertised by Kevin Keegan, Newcastle’s then manager, and as a publicity stunt Simply Red And White had called upon all Sunderland supermarkets to ban the breakfast snack.

I was a bit nervous because it was live on TV. But thankfully I neatly slotted home my penalty past the Mag keeper into the Fulwell End net, whilst proudly wearing John Kay’s very own number two shirt, and fulfilled another boyhood ambition in the process.

The following Saturday we were on the pitch again, this time just before kick off so we could present Reidy with a big cardboard cheque from sales

PARTY LIKE IT’S... Reid’s Sunderland side won the Division One title in 1999, clocking up 105 points

of his song which were going to his chosen charity. It was decided by the lads that I’d give him the cheque because I’d missed the previous press day.

When he arrived in the centre circle to collect the money he looked at me and said “What the f**k are you doing here?”

Very grateful, very gracious. I shrugged it off and watched my team win again.

We had a great time pretending to be rock stars for a few more weeks and even got the call from Top of The Pops asking if we’d be available for the following Thursday’s show if the song’s sales continued to go well. As it turned out we never managed TOTPs, but we did get to number one in the NME indy charts. I was happy with that.

With the league won and Dickie Ord’s testimonial season in full swing, we were asked to perform our song at the 2,500-capacity Rainton Meadows Arena. That night Newcastle had thrown away the league by losing against Forest and Keegan had famously spat his dummy out live on Sky with his classic “I would love it” quote.

That event just made the night even more special and the sight of loads of drunken SAFC

supporters dancing on tables, chanting and joining in with every word of the song made it a great gig for us, if a one-song show can be classed a gig.

I must admit to being very drunk that night, but remember that Ordy was well made up that we’d turned up to sing Cheer Up as the finale of his do. In reality we wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I was chatting to some of the players afterwards and we got talking about my son, Joe, who was a baby at the time, as I’d often taken him along to the Charlie Hurley Centre when I did my interviews.

The bar was closed by now and Martin Smith nicked a bottle of red wine from the top table claiming it was the gaffer’s and halfway through that it was somehow decided that I should come along to the training ground the next day and some of the lads would pose for a photo with Joseph so he could look back in years to come and see himself with a Sunderland team of champions before he could even walk or talk.

I made a habit of not asking for personal favours from the players because folk are always pestering them for this, that

“I waited for Reid and waited and waited. In the end he came down. I asked him if it was OK to get the photo and he said: ‘No chance.’ I was beginning to not like this guy”

and the other, but when this was offered I was delighted to accept. I turned up at The Charlie Hurley Centre the next day, Joe in pram, very hungover and happy just to take the photo and go.

But Bally came over and explained that after training the players were going to get a full team shot in front of the Fulwell, kit on, with the Championship trophy and if I liked, after the press had finished taking pics, he’d pop my lad on his knee and I could get a photo of him with the whole team. Amazing.

The only thing I had to do was run it by Reidy.

I drove over to Roker Park and Moira, the manager’s secretary, and the girls in reception made a real fuss over Joe, which is just as well because I was in no fit state to look after him.

I waited for Reid and waited and waited. In the end he came down. I asked him if it was OK to get the photo and he said: “No chance.” I was beginning to not like this guy.

I went home and when Joe nodded off for his afternoon nap I joined him in an attempt to shake off the hangover.

That night I was at The Annual Football Writers’ Dinner at The 29

MANAGERS

Royal County Hotel, in Durham.

When I arrived I discovered Peter Reid was the guest of honour.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t have any run-ins with him and since he was at a football writers’ do then he was on my patch and surely I could do no wrong. Surely?

It was all going pretty well, my previous night’s hangover had gone and I was slowly getting drunk on bottled Bud and the food was good.

Reidy got up to speak at the end of the meal with the beautiful League Championship trophy that had been following him around for the past week by his side. He gave an interesting and colourful account of his career and after he finished the organisers asked him if he’d go around some of the tables and pose for pictures with the trophy and guests.

Since everyone on our table was a Mackem it was pretty obvious he’d be asked to stop when he reached us.

All the lads were really looking forward to the photo opportunity, but I just knew that Reidy would say something or other to wind me up.

So I thought sod it I’ll just go and sit on the toilet until it’s all over. So I’m parked on the bog and one of the lads from our table comes in shouting for me.

I shout back over the toilet door and try and explain that I’m not bothered about the photo and even pretend that I’d been hit by a dose of diarrhoea!

But he says come on they’re all waiting for you. Reidy’s waiting for you, he’s in a hurry.

So out I come and back into the room I go and as soon as he sees me Reid says: “I might have known it would be you, you c*nt.”

I’m pissed and really pissed off with him by now and just tell him to f*ck off and that I don’t want to be on the photo anyway and turn round to walk away.

But he decides that this is a good time to try and start a fight with me and makes a move after me, but the photographer gets in the way.

We then have an embarrassing stand-up row with everyone watching where we repeat the same things over and 30

over. He digs deep into his vocabulary and presents his favourite phrases: “F**k off, you c*nt before I hit you.”

I tell him he’s an old man who wouldn’t stand a chance and maybe his back-lane fighting days are over. It seems to go on for ages, but it probably only lasted 30 seconds.

And that was that.

Any possibility of a half-decent working relationship was over and as Nicky Summerbee, Allan Johnston, Michael Bridges, Chris Makin, Martin Smith and dozens of other players he’s fallen out with would tell you, once Reidy’s made up his mind about you, he doesn’t change it.

You are frozen out. In my case I was already frozen out and didn’t need to be selected for his team.

I just bided my time, got on with my job and waited for him to self destruct like all dictators eventually do.

So, I’m faced with the question. Shall we give the readers what they want and produce an anti-Reid t-shirt?

What have I got to lose? Do I owe the manager any loyalty? Has he ever helped me out in any way at all?

I let it mull around my head for a few hours and then decide that if we do a Reid In and a Reid Out t shirt then we’d be giving the fans a chance to choose, and air their views and that’s what being a fanzine is all about. Perfect.

I discuss this with everyone from ALS and we agree that we should do two white t-shirts with the simple slogans on in red and black block text. One saying ‘Reid In’ and one saying ‘Reid Out’.

Happy with the decision I go into town to buy more food and beer. When I return the

“Eventually the crisis we knew had to come set in and Reid was sacked less than six weeks into the season”

shirts are designed. Instead of just the simple slogans we agreed, he incorporates a monkey’s head into the design (the Mags sang a song about Peter Reid having a monkey’s heed).

The lads think it’s really funny, but I’d prefer the simple slogan design we agreed on. We put it to the vote and I lose.

By the time the magazine is released there is uproar on our shared message board, SMB. The press have picked up on the story and I, as editor, take all the flak. I withdraw the monkey’s head t-shirts after three days and replace them with the simple slogan t-shirts that I originally asked to be designed. But the damage is done.

Fans threatened to boycott the magazine, but ironically the issue with the Reid Out tops in sells out. Eventually it blows over, but people still mention it.

The fans were clearly split over a manager who had been at the club for seven years, so we ran a poll on our website and Reid lost.

Results on the pitch were initially good in the first three games of that season, but eventually the crisis we knew had to come set in and Reid was sacked less than six weeks into the season and replaced

by Howard Wilkinson. A couple of days after Wilko took over, my mobile rang.

“Hi, it’s Howard Wilkinson, just wanted to introduce myself and say if there’s anything you need just give me a call.”

At last I thought, a gaffer I can get on with. This should make my life a little easier.

Shame Wilkinson was a bloody rubbish manager.

Eight times Fanzine of the Year, Love Supreme was founded in 1999 and is available at North East newsagents, the ALS shop (opposite the Stadium of Light) and online at: www.a-love-supreme.com

MODERN FOOTBALL

Not so super Mario?

SUHAIL SEEDAT wonders whether we are too quick to condemn modern day footballers, seeing them as overpaid spoilt brats rather than anti-heroes

F

OOTBALL has been littered with characters of great diversity. The common man, the gentleman, the drunkard, the playboy. Some of those are in fact, rolled into one.

But there has been this emergence of an enigmatic genius, which leaves the British viewer feeling largely angry and joyful at their misfortune.

They are often misunderstood and portrayed as the direct result of the influence money has within football. They are the anti-heroes of football.

The curious case of Mario Balotelli epitomises this exactly.

Painted as an uncontrollable misfit who is unable to function like a cordial gentleman, the player is continually prodded with a stick like a crazed animal in a cage. Naturally of course, the reaction is what was intended.

An angry lashout demonstrating the traits initially thought of: aggressive, cold, narcissistic.

With the advent of money, fame and fortune, football has become part of the entertainment circus. Footballers share agents with popstars and are featured more on the front pages for their sexual antics than they are in the back pages. With that has come the dumbing down of footballers – no longer do they possess a lone voice.

Instead, players have become mass produced robots with a monotone sound after extensive media training. Opinion is no longer championed. Characters are becoming recherché.

As football is used as a tool of escapism and entertainment, surely their natural persona should be valued far more than the manufactured tiresome cliché ridden individual? In the rich narrative of football, each player offers a different dynamic with their personality. Football in itself

Is he the Messiah - or just a very naughty boy? is at threat of becoming a sterile environment where many agents and PR gurus perceive to be of the best interest of their client, solely for commercial purposes.

These unique players infuriate and surprise equally with their madness and their genius. They accompany and balance each other perfectly; the ying and yang of their mind, body and soul. The extraction of their perplexing attitude will result in a lesser man, a lesser personality to be enforced on the field. That, in itself, could be dangerous for the team who purchased him. Had Diego Maradona been sanitised, would we have seen the same player rise to prominence in the manner which he did?

There is a huge problem of psycho-analysing players in the game today. Every person

“As a source of pleasure, football needs characters”

seems to be a body language expert based on what they’ve read. Rather than coming to conclusions based on amateurish research, let the player express himself. Much like an actor on stage, allow the player to interpret the role presented to him by his manager.

Anti-heroes are thought of as being arrogant, brash and suffering from having a ‘Messiah complex’. As a protagonist, many aspects of their character are the antithesis of the James Milner or Scott Parker. As a source of entertainment and pleasure, football needs characters of depth, partial irrationality and sui generis to evolve and continue the attraction and lustre which football has. Without it, football could lose its ability to entertain.

31

ABOUT THE ARTIST...

Name: Dan Leydon From: Sligo, Ireland Supports: Liverpool He says: I have been designing as a job for about two years now.

I only started combining football with my passion for making posters in Febuary and its taken a

lot more of my attention since then. I love hearing new ideas and am always on the look out for an interesting job so people shouldn’t hesitate to drop me a tweet or email.

Ideally I would love to start doing illustrations

for magazines in the future.’’

Twitter: @blastedfrench Website: hotfootynews. blogspot.com Email: theblastedfrench@ gmail.com

WIGAN

Welcome to the six-team town

Martin TarbucK, editor of Wigan Athletic fanzine The Mudhutter, on the frustrations of growing up in a place where some locals go out of their way not to support the local team

I

T is 6pm, Sunday, May 22, 2011 and we’re leaving the Britannia Stadium, Stoke on Trent, in jubilant mood, laughing and joking in celebration and wild disbelief.

We look out of the window and something’s not quite right about it all. As we weave our way through the escort and back towards Stoke’s bananashaped ring road, something feels distinctly amiss. The Stoke fans appear to be clapping us on our way.

There’s not an ounce of aggression on display. This is unheard of. For one reason or another, we’ve always had a particularly unhealthy rivalry on and off the pitch with the Potteries club reverting back to the days when we were both third-tier clubs.

An hour later and we come off the M6 still buzzing and pass those “Welcome to Wigan” signs and back into town and within 30 seconds there it is: two fingers raised proud and erect in our direction and a shake of a fist from a fat bloke stood outside a chippy wearing a red and white striped shirt.

Welcome to Wigan: The Six Team Town.

The same day that Wigan Athletic won at Stoke to secure their place in the Premier League for another year, Wigan Warriors were playing a Rugby League Challenge Cup tie away at Bradford.

Even so, their fans as ever were thinking of their round ball flatmates by singing Stoke songs, a few renditions of ‘Going Down’ 34

The size of the DW Stadium does Wigan no favours

to go with the ‘Bubbles’ they had been singing the previous Friday in homage to our previous opponents West Ham. A quick scan of Facebook brings back several events and pages titled ‘Wigan Athletic Relegation Party’ and a quick click of the profiles of some of the mugshots aligned to this celebration reveals that nearly all are actually residents of the town of Wigan.

So what happened there then?

Why did one town become so divided over its football team?

Sports fans in cities such as Bradford, Leeds and Hull seem capable of uniting behind their teams without animosity, and the same can be said in places like Leicester and Northampton when it comes to rugby union.

Yet Wigan is a town of merely

“Why did one town become so divided over its own football team?”

80,000 people, which may point to the answer in itself – a small town with a small-town mentality perhaps? When both sports clubs in the town play at home there can be anything up to 40,000 people watching sport in the DW Stadium in the same weekend and yet there is still so little crossover between the two it borders on farcical.

And what is more, a large proportion of each team’s support absolutely detest each other. As we arrived back in Wigan that day I looked at the cherry and white fans pottering around – they live in a completely different world to us and our paths rarely cross, and when it does it results in name calling and abuse.

If that was the only problem Wigan Athletic had to contend

with, and it is a big enough problem in it’s own right, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad, but there is also a massive body of people who choose to support other more established teams.

Even though the town of their residence possesses the 16th best football team in the country, it still pales into insignificance compared to their allegiances to The Big (North West) Four of Liverpool, United, City and Everton. This is by no means an issue exclusive to the town but once you scratch at the surface and begin to understand the geography of the area and the history of the football club, you start to realise that it’s a miracle that the town’s football club gets anyone watching them at all.

Here begins the case for the defence anyway. You might think Wigan Athletic get shit crowds, you probably think they don’t deserve to be in the Premier League, you probably see all those empty seats in the ground and think what awful fans we’ve got.

However, to truly understand the situation you need to understand the geography and the history of the town.

WIGAN WARRIORS They are probably the second best supported club in Wigan and may well even be the first if they carry on their current rich vein of form. When Wigan Athletic entered the Football League in the late 70s their crowds were bigger than those of the Warriors for several years and many fans watched both. The rugby club then went on an indestructible run of success in the 80s and 90s which saw them win nine Challenge Cups in a row.

At this point in time, you would expect Wigan Athletic to barely register but there were implicit moves everywhere to discredit the football club and drive them out of town. No more famous than Wigan RL’s then chairman Maurice Lindsay’s interview on Football Focus in 1987 before Latics played Leeds United in the quarter final of the FA Cup: “They’re a smashing little club….but they’ve chosen the back yard of rugby league to do it in.” (YouTube it) The assertion being that Wigan Athletic weren’t welcome in the town and with the rugby club sweeping all before them and the council, media and police all in cahoots, if truth be known they came to within a whisker

of getting rid of that pesky little football club, sending them the same way as every other attempt to establish football in the town.

It’s easy to cry lack of interest if you control the methods of interest being generated.

Fast forward to 2005, and backed by Dave Whelan, Wigan Athletic complete a fairytale story to reach the Premier League. Now I’m not going to deny plenty of Wigan Athletic fans gave it to the rugby lot in spades on the way up but when you’ve had to put up with decades of success across town not to mention the words “it’s a rugby town” continually rammed down your throat, and told that you watch a game for homosexuals, well you eventually give a little back.

For the last five or six years however, Wigan Warriors have barely registered on the radar of most Wigan Athletic fans, it’s only since the Warriors won the 2010 League and Grand Final that their fans have piped up again.

Their attendances have grown whereas the football club’s has dwindled against a backdrop of Wigan RL’s recent success has brought rugby fans out of the woodwork

“For the last five or six years, Wigan Warriors have barely registered on the radar of most Wigan Athletic fans”

continually scrapping against relegation and an increase in internet streams and every pub in Wigan showing home games for free.

“Wiganers only watch a winning team,” is an often heard sentiment in these parts and five home wins a season doesn’t exactly have the more selective locals champing at the bit for more.

The recent success of Wigan Warriors has propelled them back into the spotlight and slick marketing has seen their crowds grow from an average in Super League of just over 10,000 ten years ago to around the 15,000 mark, although for the current season this has risen above the 17,000 mark, similar to the football team. The press in the town makes a big deal of their team being full of local lads, local heroes in fact, although with rugby league only played seriously in a handful of towns and cities across Lancashire and Yorkshire, you have to ask the question as to where else would you expect rugby league players to come from?

Nevertheless, Wigan Warriors have reinvented themselves as “Wigan’s team” and removed the demographic stats from their website which stated that nearly 40 per cent of their season ticket holders don’t come from Wigan.

After averaging 20,500 for Wigan Athletic’s first year in the Premier League and 18,000 for the subsequent five, a dip below 17,000 for Wigan Athletic meant all of a sudden the Warriors want to talk about crowds again, pointing out that when you take out the larger away support at football games, the rugby club probably get a better ‘home’ gate.

Even though 40 per cent of that ‘home’ support is from outside of Wigan.

There’s the rub around this whole debate, it’s all about the ‘pull’ factor. Wigan Warriors are undoubtedly one of the biggest fish in the small pond of rugby league and pull in support from across the north west and even Yorkshire and Cumbria.

Wherever they play rugby league anyone who has an interest in it will want to support and associate themselves with Wigan, in a similar manner to United or Liverpool at football. Wigan Athletic, however, despite being in the Premier League are still a small fish in a big pond, surrounded by 35

WIGAN more successful and established top-flight clubs.

To the east of Wigan you have the Manchester clubs, and to the west the Liverpool clubs and the pull of those clubs is far greater than that of Wigan Athletic, even within the town until such a time comes as Wigan Athletic win 20 League titles.

MANCHESTER UNITED Thousands of Wiganers unashamedly love Man United, and wax lyrical about their team in that daft, broad Wiggin accent calling them ‘Man Yew-nited’ with a ridiculous emphasis on the U and over the years in the Wigan Athletic fanzines we have ridiculed them to high heaven over their glory-hunting ways.

I recently scratched a bit deeper and interviewed a Wigan Red. His view was that he’d started watching football in the early 70s, he’d watched Latics many times as well but when his dad took him to Old Trafford once it blew him away and he was hooked.

Division One football watching one of the biggest clubs in Europe or Northern Premier League watching part-timers scrapping against luminaries such as Buxton or Stafford Rangers? No contest.

It’s hard to argue with that isn’t it?

I asked how many match-going United fans he thought there were in Wigan, knowing full well he’s a postie and the answer of 1,0001,500 came back based on season ticket renewals which come through the post.

Remember that’s just the season ticket holders, not the total United fans in Wigan some of whom – cliché alert – have probably never been to Old Trafford in their lives.

If I said there were 10,000 United fans in Wigan, I probably wouldn’t be exaggerating, a lot of them also being rugby fans as well.

There’s another Wigan lad I’ve bumped into up town once or twice who is in his 20s. He’s a big United fan and a sound lad, goes all over Europe and I can’t help but enjoy his tales of following United away usually via Twitter.

Yet there is a dark, burning repulsion deep inside me every time I read which uncomfortably tells me ‘this isn’t right, he should be one of ours, born and bred in Wigan’. He’s United because his dad was United and just like the previous example he’ll probably bring his kids up to be United too.

Wigan Athletic just doesn’t even 36

register despite being the team of their place of birth.

So what chance have we got of getting that stadium full of Wiganers when so many Wiganers eschew their local side?

LIVERPOOL & EVERTON It’s a slightly similar story with Liverpool and this is by no means a problem isolated to the town of Wigan.

Let’s face it Liverpool ran the dsay show in the Eighties, they Maurice Lin were the preferred choice of every school kid and still garner massive support from every corner of the globe.

Everton also enjoyed halcyon days during the Eighties as well.

There’s three types of Liverpool/ Everton fan in the town. To identify the first, you just need to travel anywhere west of Wigan town centre: Winstanley, Hawkley Hall, Highfield, Orrell are all essentially Scouse overspill estates, so unlike many Wigan-based United fans, there is a bloodline there.

I don’t mind that and understand perfectly why Liverpool or Everton are their team even though it makes the job of pulling in fans for Wigan Athletic that little bit harder. Again.

The second type are generally found in the posher areas of Wigan (yes there are some). They are Wigan-born and drive around in their souped-up Citroen Saxos with their massive ‘five times’ or ‘You’re in my heart’ full screen car stickers plastered across the back.

They aren’t Scousers but support a Scouse team ultimately because they are bigger and better than Wigan Athletic but generally from the comfort of their own home or their local. A girl I used to work with recently had a little baby boy and the first thing her Wiganer partner, an Everton supporter in a ‘watch them on the telly’ sense, did was spend the whip round money on an Everton shirt for the kid while I cursed quietly under my breath. Another generation lost.

Finally, there’s a hybrid of the “I counted above. While sat in a pub in Appley at least a Bridge last season after a Wigan dozen Chelsea home game, three lads came in fans on the who looked the part: clobbered platform, with up, middle aged baldies but accents more essentially Scouse and returning pie and peas from Villa. than jellied Just like the United fan above, they’re Wiganers but have become eels”

so entrenched over decades of watching Liverpool that although they live in Wigan, from a football perspective, they’re Liverpool all the way and never likely to change. I disagree with their choice of club but understand it for reasons already described and respect them to a degree.

MANCHESTER CITY Where do City fit into it?

Probably to a lesser extent if we’re honest. Yet as I sit here typing this the fella across the road is playing football with his kid wearing a City shirt while his lad has a Liverpool shirt on. I do know however that both of them attend the DW on a regular basis, plus he originates from Newton-le-Willows which is outside of Wigan so I’ll let him off.

Wigan Athletic have made inroads with the fans of other clubs due to affordability and this has to be the way forward given the situation.

Many Wiganers do support City though purely due to their status as a big club and anyone who has been to Eastlands will have seen the ‘Wigan Blues’ flag next to the away end. I know us Latics fans were particularly vocal on this matter the last time we beat them!

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to register the ‘swingo-meter’ in the town of Wigan should City manage to turn that money into success this season.

THE REST It doesn’t even end there though. While catching a train to London in May 2010 to travel to Stamford Bridge to watch Wigan Athletic get walloped 8-0, I counted at least a dozen Chelsea fans on the platform, shirt-wearing lads and dads with accents more pie and peas than jellied eels.

Newcastle and Leeds have a large following due to their big club status, as do Arsenal and Spurs. I know a lad who drives down to Tottenham on his own, parks up on his own and watches the game on his own for every home game when there’s a small but perfectly-formed football club available on his doorstep at a fraction of the cost.

To the North and East of Wigan, the areas of Hindley and Aspull are closer to Bolton than Wigan and the Wanderers haven’t helped by building the Reebok closer to Wigan than Bolton in this respect and flooding the Wigan area with their season ticket brochures.

Lest us forget that Bolton have

a long-established top-flight pedigree and the same can be said for other neighbours like Blackburn, Preston and Blackpool who were up there just a couple of generations back while Athletic were playing football persona non grata in the Cheshire League.

So do the maths through all of the above and add up the tens of thousands of football fans in the town who support other teams and bear in mind that there is no more than five per cent crossover between Wigan Warriors and Wigan Athletic fans – with the bulk of the other 95 per cent actively hating one another and you’ll quickly realise it’s a miracle that we have any fans at all.

But we do: around 15,000 of us to be precise. It might not be many but as I always say, you wouldn’t want us all to turn up at your house unless you’ve got a particularly big front room.

One thing’s for sure, the laziest line in history, the statement that Wigan is a rugby town could never be further than the truth when you add the many thousands of football fans of other teams to the now well established Wigan Athletic fan base. A town that plays rugby league? Yes I’ll give you that one…

AND SO TO WIGAN ATHLETIC… So what is the official club view on this? I’ve been fortunate enough to have been in to discuss this matter with the club’s CEO Jonathan Jackson on several occasions. I even pulled together a 30-page report containing literally hundreds of ideas to boost the crowds, like the Wigan Athleticdaft muppet I am.

The club don’t tend to hang themselves up on the empty seats thing, preferring to concentrate on the people who do come to watch us and focusing on the long-term development of younger fans.

There is a well-worn stat which tells us that Wigan Athletic have the biggest proportion of Under-16s of any Premier League club and as a first generation fan myself – and without going all Whitney Houston on you – we can all understand that the children are the future and it takes time to develop a fanbase for a football club who were averaging barely 1,800 just 15 years ago.

Even so, the next generation are up against it though: the CEO and Head of Media have told me tales of their own children getting

bullied and laughed at in the playground by kids who support United and Liverpool, and it’s a sad world when children who actually get to go and watch their local team play a live game of Premier League football get ridiculed by other kids who watch their team sat in the armchair with their dad.

Being particularly blunt – and with a generous helping of king-sized hindsight – the ground does us few favours.

Nearly every week through last season you could read about the passionate Blackpool fans at a packed Bloomfield Road and those thousands of empty seats at the soulless DW down the road.

Both teams generate roughly the same attendance yet the perception is vastly different. Oh for a redeveloped Springfield Park or a stadium holding 1618,000 close up and personal to the pitch. All of a sudden those Wiganers would be clamouring for tickets wanting to be part of a full house rather than hanging on for freebies or cheap deals knowing full well they’ve got 8,000 empty seats to choose from.

We’d have 3,000 away fans max instead of giving them 5,000 and a whole end allowing them to have a right old knees up while the Wigan fans scattered around the three other stands mutter contemptuously.

Where will those extra 8,000 home fans come from? Well, given

“Being blunt, the ground does us very few favours.

Oh for a redeveloped Springfield Park or a stadium holding 16 or 18,000”

all the factors above, it won’t be from Wigan, at least not in the short term.

The club has made strides with recruitment in nearby towns which don’t have a professional football club such as Warrington, St Helens and Chorley.

Affordable Premier League football is the punchline with season tickets from £250.

Now I have to be careful here not to be accused of hypocrisy on a couple of fronts. Firstly, in that I have scoffed at the notion that Wigan is a rugby town, pointing out that they have a strong fanbase outside of Wigan. I can’t ridicule them for doing that while praising my own club for doing the same.

Secondly, doesn’t this approach go against everything I’ve said in the above?

I’ve tried to be objective throughout in a bid to redress reams of pages written in years of Wigan Athletic fanzines slagging off big club glory-hunting fans but I’m sure if you’re reading between the lines you can sense that simmering cauldron of contempt I have for all these people.

Wigan has always had a football team: they might never had conquered Europe or had trips to Wembley every year but they have always been there for the public of Wigan for nearly 80 years.

The moral issue I have is that Warrington, St Helens and Chorley all have football teams too, albeit it further down the pyramid and what gives Wigan Athletic the right to steal fans from those towns?

As it is, I hark back to an away day at Pompey a few years back: it was a few weeks before they reached the FA Cup Final and we were in the Wetherspoons in Fratton and it was a veritable rogues gallery.

It was packed with hundreds of burly blokes from 16 to 60 with every new face entering greeted like a long lost friend, bonded together by their unequivocal love of Portsmouth FC while we stood in the corner looking on in awe with our mouths firmly shut.

If only we could be that one-town team.

Sadly, with football becoming more and more a consumer sport than a spectator one, it feels as far off as it ever was.

Twitter: @mudhutter www.thisnorthernsoul.co.uk 37

STATISTICS

The number’s up Football’s big money, and so are statistics. Matthew Bretherton asks where the obsession came from – and how do we do get rid of it?

O

nce upon a time, before the explosion of media coverage and money which accompanied the gentrification of the game, football was played and watched by working class lads (and lasses). It was a simpler time, when there was a genuine bond between players and supporters. We all came from the same place, if not geographically, then socially and culturally.

For supporters it was pure escapism after a week of hard graft for next to no reward – as long as players showed heart, fight and commitment, then they were OK by us – unless they were genuinely useless that is, but that’s useless as judged by supporters who still watched a team game and saw every player in terms of his contribution to the cause.

It was different for players too.

Very few were celebrities in the modern sense. They didn’t get 24/7 media coverage and they didn’t get paid eye-watering sums of money.

They felt genuinely privileged to have escaped a very different life – a life mapped out for them by rigid social structures. They were lucky and they knew it, and they were backed to the hilt by those in the stands who had dreamed, or still did dream, of walking in their shoes.

Back in those days, footballers were still part of society, bound by its rules and conventions, and they were still human.

How times have changed and, along the way, how footballers have changed - as has the way we view them. These days, we live in a society obsessed with measurement. Everything must be measured to the nth

38

degree, with numbers and statistics allowed to dictate the decisions, policies and even the relationships that define us – both as individuals and as a society.

This obsession with measurement has brought with it an uninvited guest. With a mania for measurement comes a focus on individuality, which is deeply amusing given that most ‘social’ measurement is, by necessity, an exercise in generalisation – best, worst, above average and so on; all these measures rely on an underying generalisation to give them meaning.

At the same time, interest in football has exploded. Eased by the (entirely correct) arrival of all-seater stadia and in lock-step with soaring media exposure, football has become a game that transcends social divides. All that has brought

ALL CHANGE: Fans from the ‘Where has our Arsenal gone?’ group march in May

“Footballers these days are rich beyond their wildest dreams almost before they are old enough to drive, let alone make sensible decisions”

two huge developments that have changed football forever, but it has also changed our relationship with football, and footballers – not necessarily for the better.

First, the explosion of media coverage has flooded the game with obscene amounts of money. Footballers these days, if they are with clubs in the higher echelons of the game, are rich beyond their wildest dreams almost before they are old enough to drive, let alone make sensible life decisions.

The fact all that cash flows directly from the pockets of fans, or indirectly via media subscriptions, has set up an uneasy bargain – we have the dubious ‘right’, via the media, to scrutinise every aspect of their lives. As a result, footballers, like ‘celebrities’, live two lives. One is the fake, public life defined in officially sanctioned ‘news’ and

interviews, public appearances and the now ubiquitous charitable foundation. The other is the almost invisible private life, which we really only see through the keyhole of Twitter, a distorted and partial view (in every sense of the word).

In a sense, footballers these days are not part of the wider society. They have a social category of their own. Set apart from the world occupied by Joe Bloggs, they have attitudes, expectations and opinions that are, in a great many cases, alien to the ‘average’ supporter – and in some cases a sense of entitlement that, whilst odious, is a product of the lives they live.

All that has created a divide between footballers and supporters. Gone is the sense of empathy and togetherness which sprang from common roots, shared hopes and dreams of glory – those sentiments are now empty clichés to be trotted out parrot-fashion in post-game interviews.

In reality, that sense of empathy and togetherness has been replaced by an ‘entertain me’ ethos from the stands and beyond – money being the handiest stick used to beat players perceived as underperforming.

For their part, players now live in a world where their worth is defined by money, rather than the achievements of the team, which has, over time, morphed into something far more distasteful...

As the mass media, particularly Sky Sports, realised there was big money to be made from football, the level of scrutiny and the sheer volume of coverage has exploded.

The public has a seemingly insatiable appetite for football coverage, which left many outlets scrabbling around for something to say – some extra something that would, at once, provide fodder for ever more content, and elevate their own content above that of the competition through the creation of ‘insight’.

It’s no surprise, given the world we live in, that they turned to measurement and statistics – as epitomised by that purveyor of piffle, Opta.

These days, football statistics

are everywhere – websites proudly proclaim themselves as ‘the best football stats site on the net’.

In the meantime, we willfully forget that football has always been, and always will be, a game of opinions.

These days, it is treated as a game of absolutes, driven by individual player stats – never more so than during the closed season. Fans swarm to internet forums and phone-ins, armed with statistics that PROVE their team should buy player X, but avoid player Y, and the arguments, debate and dogma go on and on, round and round.

Why? Because statistics, as we all know, will prove anything you like, they are not absolute.

Far from it, especially when you consider context.

A player’s statistics are not simply a measure of individual performance, they are shaped, even defined, by the team he is operating in, how he is asked to play, his teammates, his training regime, a tactical framework and so on.

But these days, that context is ignored, by the media and fans alike. In fact, reading many assessments of players, one could be forgiven for thinking the discussion is not of a human being at all, but of a car or a gadget.

It’s all features and benefits – goals, assists, dribbling success, cross completion – an endless parade of guff that has defined our view of football and footballers – and which is entirely at odds with the reality of the game.

For better, but mainly for worse, footballers are now commodities. Set apart from

“Give young men piles of money, set them apart from the world, endlessly measure them and treat them like commodities and you’re asking for trouble”

STAT’LL DO: Ceefax used to be all the facts and figures a football fan needed

society and measured from every angle, they are little more than highly-paid, pampered gladiators minus the life and death imperative – there remains little or relevance to supporters outside of the field of play. There is no connection, only constant assessment and reassessment.

Is the game less enjoyable as a result? Well, it’s a ‘better product’ apparently, but is that enough? What about empathy, what about togetherness and what about the shared pride that comes with ‘glory’?

Footballers don’t do themselves any favours, it must be said – but then are their misdemeanours (or more serious incidents in some cases) so different from those you would find among any group of young men?

Maybe, just maybe, putting the hysteria aside, the only difference between footballers and all the other young men of the world, is exposure, plus the anti-social niche we have carved out for them, a comfortable niche, lined with bank-notes though it is.

The bottom line? Give young men piles of money, set them apart from the world, endlessly measure them and treat them like commodities and you’re asking for trouble.

But worse still, take a glorious team game, our national game, and define it by individual performances and attributes and you diminish it.

After all, a football team, a good one anyway, should be greater than the sum of its parts.

That indefinable extra that exists in the spaces between players (and supporters) is something we are becoming blind to, which is a shame because that is what made us fall in love with the game in the first place.

Is there any way back?

Probably not (at least without a catastrophic, financial meltdown).

The stattos will march on, taking their lead ever more from American sports.

There is a genuine risk that they will ultimately kill the romance of the game forever, and that would be a great loss to us all.

39

wrecks. This truly was, in the that disillusioned accountants net it could have conceivably prescient words of Alan Partridge, really shouldn’t get involved in. demolished a tower block, while ‘liquid football.’

And centre forward Serginho Eder, with a flourish that seemed “Any concept A nominal 4-2-3-1 set-up would was the only Brazilian in history to suggest this was a team intent of defence typically convert to something to be able to control a ball further on cementing its legacy, teed seemed an that loosely resembled a 2-1-5-2 than most players could kick up a rolling ball and unleashed approach, but in reality even this it. Stepping in at late notice to a swerving, dipping volley that afterthought fails to do justice to the positional replace the injured (and more left Russian keeper Dasaev, as if it was flexibility of Tele Santana’s team. obviously talented) Careca, considered by many the world’s Orchestrated by the irrepressible Serginho was in the mould of best, rooted to the spot like a an unsightly genius of Zico, ably abetted by a classic English number 9. Big, rusty oil-rig. blemish on the chain-smoking, expansively strong, good in the air and as In the next match, against a bearded, toweringly elegant subtle as a housebrick to the back Scotland team that could boast the overall Socrates, Brazil’s attacking of the head. the likes of Souness, Dalglish, aesthetic.” philosophy was crystal clear.

It was, in some ways, akin to Wark, Strachan and Hansen, Brazil In basic terms it was the adorning Michelangelo’s David gave a masterclass of relaxed, ultimate manifestation of several with a pair of plastic comedy inventive attacking football. age-old clichés: “Let the ball do breasts and a jester’s hat.

After again falling behind to the work.” “No matter how many Their path through the World an early Narey effort, they simply the opposition score, we’ll score Cup was littered with moments stepped up to a gear that was more.” “Attack is the best form of to treasure. I implore those who beyond anything most teams defence.” remain unconvinced to undertake could envisage. Zico curled a Whereas the current Barcelona the requisite YouTube search. free kick into the top corner that team specialise in intricate short Start with the two late goals could not have been more precise passing patterns, content to bide in the opening match against had its trajectory been plotted their time to prise out an opening, Russia, after the hapless Peres had

by NASA, a triumph of technique Brazil opted for 30 yard one-twos, casually ushered a speculative and unerring accuracy. overwhelming opponents by the long-range effort into his own But even this was upstaged by sheer variety of their play and goal, as if he felt his teammates a sublime angled chip from Eder the range of options that they needed a bit more of a challenge. that left hapless Scottish keeper fashioned at will. One-touch, twoThe response was unequivocal.

Alan Rough wondering whether touch, pass and move and move First Socrates exploded a shot repeated World Cup humiliation some more, flicks and tricks. of such force into the roof of the was some kind of karmic They could exploit the width offered by perpetually overlapping full-backs, Junior and Leandro, the direct (in every sense) precursors of Roberto Carlos and Cafu. They could drive through the middle, with Zico dropping deep undetected to take possession before crafting passes of such precision it was as if they has been designed using nanotechnology.

In truth, they could do whatever they pleased. There was no obvious game-plan, no agenda, no secret formula. There was a ball and a million different ways to get it into the net.

All of which is not to say that this was a team without weakness. Perhaps inevitably, any concept of defence seemed an afterthought, as if it was an unsightly blemish on the overall aesthetic. Whether this reflected naivety or arrogance, ultimately it was to be their undoing.

They fielded a goalkeeper who Zico and the bore all the physical hallmarks of giant striker a disillusioned accountant and Serginho performed like a man who felt that goalkeeping was something 41

GREAT TEAMS retribution for once sporting the worst footballer’s perm since Bob Latchford.

Zico again took centre stage against Argentina, poking home from close range after an Eder free kick, which changed direction more than a latter day Radiohead album, crashed against the crossbar.

He followed this up with an exquisite, defence garrotting pass to the rampaging Junior, which didn’t so much ask to be converted as vehemently insisted.

There seemed no limit to what this team could accomplish.

We were entering uncharted territory here and, for a generation of English teenagers raised on a decade of international failure, it felt like the romance and the wonder of World Cup football was finally, thrillingly, revealed. We were all Brazilians now.

At which point it all came crashing down.

Brazil went into the final second-stage group match against Italy needing only a draw to progress to the semi-final.

There was nothing to suggest that it would be anything other than a routine exercise.

Italy were in many ways the antithesis of Brazil – cautious, disciplined, occasionally brutal – and appeared over-reliant on a 40-year-old goalkeeper (Zoff ), a defender prone to acts of dubious legality (Gentile) and a misfiring striker recently returned from a two year match-fixing ban (Rossi). The outcome, surely, was a formality.

Well, not quite. This was the day Brazil’s defensive failings were finally, fatally exposed.

In a match still remembered as one of the finest in World Cup history, they fell behind on three occasions to an Italian team suddenly perfecting the art of the counter-attack.

The previously anonymous Rossi struck a hat-trick, in a devastating display of predatory finishing; in response Brazil threw caution to the wind, unable or unwilling to abandon their freeflowing philosophy.

It was an enthralling, compulsive spectacle, which, in hindsight, was as much a fight 42

for the soul of the game as it was a struggle for a place in the last four.

With 20 minutes to go, a sumptuous Falcao strike brought the scores level at 2-2, which was enough to send Brazil through.

A time surely for restraint, for prioritising the bigger picture at the expense of immediate glory?

For most teams, yes. But the Brazil of 1982 were anything but most teams. And they weren’t about to forego their principles if it meant settling for a draw.

So they kept on attacking. And, inevitably, it cost them the World Cup. An unmarked Rossi grabbed his third goal; Zoff denied logic in keeping out a last minute Oscar header; and Brazil, shockingly, were beaten. In the words of Zico, it was “the day football died.”

The result left a scar on Brazil’s footballing psyche. It wasn’t just a team that had been defeated in the Spanish sun, it was an ethos.

Their failure may be seen as the point at which pragmatic, results-driven, safety-first football became the default, with flair and

“To this day, few teams have successfully replicated the Brazilian template, the elusive jogo bonito.”

expression increasingly sacrificed at the expense of discipline and tactical rigidity. To this day few teams have successfully replicated the Brazilian template, the elusive ‘jogo bonito,’ although certain elements may be detected in the Liverpool of 1988, Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan and the currently dominant Barcelona.

As for Brazil, they have captured the World Cup twice since the trauma of 1982, each time with teams that were largely lacking the fantasy of Zico and his colleagues. Were these victories any less sweet for being achieved through the harnessing of individual ability within an organised, practical outlook? I doubt it.

But don’t expect me to think of them the way I think of the team that shone so brightly back in 1982. When Zico and Socrates and Eder and Junior showed that football could be magic. And when teenage kicks were played out in yellow and blue. They’re my memories and they’ll always be with me.

Junior and his impressive Afro

NON-LEAGUE

Cutting it fine

Pics: Johnston Press

Groundsman, fundraiser, driver, cleaner...there’s more to life to managing a grassroots football team than meets the eye, as AIDAN TOWNSEND finds out

S

teve Toyne has plenty of reasons to feel a sense of relaxation as he exits the junction towards Phoenix Park, the home of Dinnington Town FC – a club in the middle of a former mining area in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

The lights reflect from the passing signposts as the vehicle travels quickly along the uncongested A57, wipers jarring in unison as the rain plummets against the windscreen.

But the difficult outward journey does not bother Toyne one jot. A local football stalwart,

the Dinnington boss knows the road most travelled, his evolution to first-team manager seemingly clearly mapped out from his school days.

“From leaving school there’s been hardly a moment I’ve not been involved in football,” says the highly amiable Yorkshireman, whose career in football now spans four decades.

A well-travelled pro, he plied his trade for Chesterfield, Matlock Town, Selby Town, Mexborough and Denaby before finding his feet in his first management job at Stowers FC

“You need to be able to juggle five balls at a time and be good with the players as well as knowing football”

of the Sheffield District League.

Successful as a tracksuit manager, Toyne helped produce 10 of the squad that helped Sheffield Boys claim victory in the England Schools Trophy (Sheffield Wednesday produced two, United four.)

After six years in the job he moved on to take charge of Hallam Under 18s for two years – winning 37 of 40 matches.

Toyne then took the reins of the Hallam senior side before moving on to Dinnington Town, a well-run family club based on the Sheffield border, nearly a decade ago. He has

43

since guided Town to various successes.

In 2006 they were promoted as champions of the Central Midlands League Supreme Division, and a further promotion followed two years later when they won the Northern Counties East League Division One, earning promotion to the NCEL Premier.

He knows his way around the local grassroots scene and pulls no punches in describing the numerous road blocks that can impede the route to a career in football.

But Toyne is also at pains to stress the positive aspects that make the long hours worthwhile. Prospective managers take note.

“As well as coaching and the footballing side, I have to do all the administration, help develop the club commercially, and I generate income as much as I can,” he says.

“My other jobs include driving the team coach at times, washing the kit after every game, helping to mark the pitch with the tractor, taking training.

It is a full time job.”

But the game, he affirms, has many avenues to explore, and provides opportunities to maintain an interest in the game and become successful, even if a career as a player fails to materialise.

Offering advice to those who would need a SatNav console to correctly map a path into football, he says: “If you are not up to the mark as a player there are other things – you can try the management side, coaching, being a physio, secretarial work.”

Toyne compounds this assessment with a word of warning: “I’d say it is not for the faint-hearted, you need a strong constitution, and need to become an absolute professional and diplomat.

“You need to be able to juggle five balls at a time, and be good with the players, as well as knowing football.”

And Toyne is quick to acknowledge the assistance provided by the other members of the backroom team that help run a club such as Town.

Coaches Ronny Akers and John Lewis, physio John 44

Newton, PR man Wallace Chambers and Dinnington FC County Senior (Youth) coach Mark Ramsden are, he says, ‘absolutely vital to running a successful club.’

Prior to his current role, which he has held for five years, Ramsden coached the Sheffield Rangers Junior side before managing the Under 18 side at Stocksbridge Park Steels.

Before coaching he was a semi-pro player at various nonleague sides.

In a similar vein to Toyne, he talks with passion about the club’s hard work and local football in general, but reaffirms the belief that a role in coaching and dealing with the plethora of duties therein is far from an easy ride.

“You cannot look at a career in football with rose-coloured glasses – it’s hard collar work,” said the straight-talking 55-yearold. “At a club like Dinnington, for example, there are a lot of strings to the bow.

“You need to become financially aware, and the admin side grows every year. There are a lot of other issues to deal with, as well as getting a team on the park on a Saturday or Sunday.

“Anyone who does it, I take my hat off to them and applaud, because it is hard collar.”

His words may prove sobering to those thinking of getting involved in bossing a side, but he adds that managing and pure coaching are two individual disciplines that require different capabilities.

“When you progess to club level, you usually need to separate into one of the two distinct kinds of people; those who are interested in coaching, and those interested in

“Often people need to choose what their passion is in life – coaching or managing.

They are distinct paths”

GREEN GRASS OF HOME: Toyne gets to work on the Dinnington pitch

management,” he argues.

“At Dinnington, we have a couple of excellent coaches with their UEFA B licenses, but they have no inclination to get into management.

“They have no interest whatsoever in that, but when they take a training session they are in their element.

“The coaches set out training and put sessions together, but the manager – as Steve will tell you – is also involved in picking the team, selecting recruits, man-management and letting disappointed players down if they’re not in the side, as well as the financial and commercial side. of things.

“So I think that often people need to choose what their passion is in life – coaching or managing. They are distinct paths that people tread.”

While outlining the requirements, Ramsden went on to speak of the positive aspects that help empower him to work the long hours.

The pay-offs, he says, are worthwhile: “On the other side of the coin there are a lot of positives.”

“You see the football club develop, watch your players improve and also see the local community around the club develop as well, because that’s your fan-base.

“One of the biggest pleasures at a club is to see people come out and support it – that makes all the hard work worthwhile, and makes the many long hours worth the effort, particularly if it is an excellent family-type club like we have here.”

“Dinnington as a club is rooted in the community.

People care passionately and you feel the passion along with them. You also get to know the ones who come out and support you, you enjoy seeing them at matches and often become good friends.

“When this happens it means the club is in a good position to get people involved.”

Toyne also talks positively of the symbiotic relationship between a grassroots club and the local community, and the positive role it plays in young footballers’ lives.

“Junior football often gets bad publicity, but I think it

NON-LEAGUE keeps them off the street, motivates them and gives them a sense of purpose,” he says.

“We have now got the help from the local community. We worked hard and persuaded them that we are here to help their children.”

He adds: “You can talk about these social networking sites – Facebook and whatever – but football is all social. You have gatherings and make friendships, and you enjoy meeting each other, despite the competitiveness.

“It’s also good for parents as it gives them a sense of purpose too, and they get to meet other parents. So clubs are also doing a job for them, and not just the youngsters.” Ramsden is in full agreement. “It is a change to a normal life, there is good comradeship and you can enjoy being part of a team.

“You get to know everyone within the local football sphere, a bit like a local family.

When you bounce along for a few years you always know someone who knows

someone else.” Commenting on Ramsden’s County youth side, Toyne continues: “And now we have an up-and-coming team who are mature and who form the basis for Dinnington Town, going forward. We have an influx of young players who are loyal to their home-town club.”

Toyne is unsure that the next generation of youngsters – often more used to computer consoles than goalkeeper gloves – will have the same committed attitudes of those that have gone before.

“I worry a little bit about younger people getting involved,” he says.

“There are plenty of distractions for them. I look beyond our current age players that Mark is coaching, and wonder about them. Will they be committed?

“It’s hard work and I have an understanding why some young people say ‘I’ll give that a miss.’

“That’s a shame because if they do they are missing out on something that could one

day mean a lot to them.” He adds: “Local grassroots is going from strength to strength, and long may it continue. We hope to leave something here at Dinnington.

“We have been sowing seeds and will see it grow, and we want it to continue to prosper.”

And with that, they are gone on a good evening for the team following the successful 4-2 win over Armthorpe Welfare.

FAMILY SPIRIT: Toyne with some of the Dinnington fans

“I worry a little bit about younger people getting involved.

There are plenty of distractions for them”

Well Red WELL RED The magazine THE INDEPENDENT LIVERPOOL FC

SUPPORTERS’ MAGAZINE By the fans, for the fans

INSIDE: FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY AND LIVERPOOL’S SPENDING

Issue 9: August/September 2011 £2.70

BIG FUSS AND THE HWasEourN£16mDmanEwoRrthSit? ON 09

for Liverpool fans . . . by Liverpool fans In all good newsagents now – only £2.70

SAVE MONEY ON OUR NEW FOOTIE MAG: P33

family Adam's SCOTinWHATthe IT TAKES FOR LIVERPOOL WHY CHARLIE HAS

45

OPINION

RANTS Gareth Roberts

Savaging Robbie

W

HAT’S the point in Robbie Savage?

What’s he famous for? What’s he ever done remotely worthwhile? He curled one off in a ref’s toilet once. Great.

From where I was standing, he was an average footballer whose modus operandi was to run around a lot, shout at referees and wind up fans.

Now, inexplicably, he’s carved out an all-consuming media career. A column in The Mirror, regular spots on Five Live and ESPN. He’s even been on Match of the Day. Just one question: Why? He never displayed any deep understanding of the game as a player – he was too busy brashly waving his cash around, kitting himself out in gaudy designer clobber and inviting film crews to document his “love” of sports cars or capture

46

his insipid “pad” on camera (The Mirror recently revealed this beauty about his house: ‘On the walls of the main lounge are two giant canvas photos of Robbie, 35, and Sarah’s faces.’

Niiice...).

Savage likes to suggest he is like Marmite – you either love or him hate him. But come on, who LOVES Robbie Savage apart from himself and maybe his mum?

As a player he liked to beat his chest, and bleat about being a fans’ favourite, but Savage was just your typical modern-day footballer. As soon as there was a better offer he was off faster than one of his Lamborghini’s from his (fake) gravel drive.

Remember that bollocks about leaving Birmingham for Blackburn to be closer to his family in Wrexham? Nice one, you arse. Birmingham to Wrexham = 70 miles. Blackburn

“The fella wouldn’t know class and dignity if the words were perched on the end of his concordesized nose poking him in the eyes”

to Wrexham = 75 miles. Aside from his horrendous haircut, his annoying voice and his twat of an attitude, Savage likes to tell the world how great he is. How much money he has. How many games he played. How beautiful his missus is. How white his whitened teeth are. How soft his (shite) hair is.

The fella wouldn’t know the words class and dignity if the words were perched on the end of his Concorde-sized nose poking him in the eyes.

On Twitter, he describes himself as “Sony Award Winner”.

This may be true. But it’s a fact that should make every aspiring broadcaster shudder to the core. Any media organisation offering this buffoon airtime is essentially saying to aspiring journalists ‘Forget the training, the knowledge, the dedication and the preparation - we’re not interested. We want a wally of a wind-up merchant.’

Well you’ve got one of them alright. I never thought Stan Collymore could be topped on that score. But they’ve only gone and done it.

For as long as I’ve had ears, I’ve listened to Radio Five.

Sports Report, and that classic jingle that’s a throwback to days of old – it’s an English institution.

So why is Savage anywhere near it? He shouldn’t be on the air, never mind on the same station, and on the same night, as something so deeply ingrained into football culture.

Wooden as a rocking horse, offering no insight, and about as funny as a punch in the face,

“Parry tried to explain seeding as Savage proceeded to insult the callers and claim they were from another planet”

Savage manned the 606 phoneins on Saturday evenings last season.

It was the aural equivalent of slashing your wrists.

Anybody who criticised his mostly ill-informed opinions was shouted down, insulted, or hit with the age-old dumb pro’s argument: “Yeah, but you’ve never played the game.”

Nice one, Robbie. Well I’ve never worked in a restaurant but I still know if a meal tastes nice or not. And I can rustle up a mean piece of cheese on toast.

Savage has gone from displaying all the traits that grind about modern footballers to epitomising all that is wrong with modern football media coverage. Fine work.

The nails-down-theblackboard moment came when someone at the BBC

decided to pair this goon with Mike “Porkie” Parry, previously of the moron-fest that is the TalkSport phone in.

Again, why? Why not break the trend for pitching coverage at base level and include some real analysis and debate about the game instead of all this shouty bollocks?

I’d much rather listen to someone like Gabriel Marcotti, a knowledgeable man who meticulously studies the world game and has contacts in the sport around the globe than Savage any day of the week.

Saying that, the Parry-Savage pairing did serve up some corkers. Particularly when Parry – who clearly takes the controversial line to stir debate – suggested the FA Cup should be seeded. Poor old thick-astwo-short-planks Robbie clearly

didn’t understand the concept.

“How will the smaller clubs get their big pay days at places like Old Trafford if it’s seeded”, he guffawed.

Er? Parry tried and failed to explain seeding as Savage proceeded to insult callers and claim they were from another planet.

Compared to that clown, they probably are. And I’d rather cut off my own foreskin than live on Planet Savage.

Savage’s TV “presenting” is even worse. But there’s a carcrash element to it. You have to look to appreciate how bad it is.

As Martin Kelner noted in The Guardian: “There is more to TV presenting than having nice hair – I tried it years ago (presenting, not having nice hair) and was woeful – and pitching Robbie straight in before the dubbin has dried on his boots is an insult to those who have worked at the craft.”

Indeed. Savage, of course, always likes to have the final word. Fair’s fair, he can have it. These (verbatim) tweets from his Twitter account leave nothing else needed to be said. ¼¼ It was so hard in that heat today cutting the grass I had 3 Pinot noirs watching the gardner cut it !! lol 8:40 PM Jun 10th via Echofon ¼¼ And the footballing world has finally gone mad 20 million for Henderson not his fault clubs have agreed fee but ridiculous price 6 mil yes ! 8:33 AM Jun 8th via Echofon ¼¼ So 20 million gets a young English talent who is an athlete yes ,scores goals not really , decent passer , decent tackler , ok in air , ??? 8:41 AM Jun 8th via Echofon ¼¼ Yes the 2.5 mil one !!!! LolRT @tank0: @RobbieSavage8 u still in that house with the big glass front 7:04 PM May 31st via Echofon ¼¼ @MarkBrighty his name is mArk bright and he is a phoney I’m Robbie savage and I got the Sony !!!

Schaattttinnnggg !! 11:49 AM May 30th via Echofon ¼¼ @SoccerAM great show !! 11:51 AM May 28th via Echofon 47

SCOTTISH FOOTBALL

Power of Scotland

To many Scottish football has become a joke – a two-horse race to be sneered at; a parochial competition long past its sell-by date. But not to KENNY MILLAR...

M

y name is Kenny Millar and I am a Scottish football fan.

Read back that sounds like the sort of confession you’d make at an AA meeting – the release of a crippling burden from worldweary shoulders.

But I’m not looking for sympathy.

Far from it.

Our national game isn’t perfect – at times even ‘bang average’ seems a distant aspiration - but it’s ours all the same.

Through the tartan-tinged trials and tribulations, I’ve never once questioned what others would see as a completely inexplicable devotion to a version of the game so far removed from the likes of Barcelona that it might as well be a different sport.

And I don’t envy the glitz and glamour of ‘The Best League In The World’ or proposed gimmicks like ‘Game 39’.

Because while we may be mired in mediocrity, there’s a beautiful honesty and tradition within the Scottish game that ensures it is, per head of population, the best supported in Europe.

Allow me to explain why…

THE ONLY WAY IS SFA Last year they dished out a BAFTA to The Only Way Is Essex – a televisual travesty that made Z-list stars out of bland bimbos and spawned copycat cousins like Made In Chelsea and Geordie Shore.

But if the easily amused wanted real car-crash entertainment, they need only have looked north of Hadrian’s Wall. That pre-planned ‘docu48

drama’ drivel had nothing on the season of strife we endured up here.

If it wasn’t the referees going on strike it was a campaign of hatred (bombs and all) against Celtic manager Neil Lennon.

Lennon, too, had a dugout dust-up with then-Rangers’ assistant (now manager) Ally McCoist - sparked by one-manwhirlwind El Hadji-Diouf – while the veteran Craig ‘Bomber’ Brown also got in on the act in a scrap with his old chairman John Boyle.

Minnows Brechin were threatened with a UEFA fine for their historic pitch-side hedge, skint Stirling Albion tried to cash in by re-naming themselves ‘Stirling Meerkats’ and Dunfermline mascot ‘Sammy The Tammy’ came under fire for pointing a cardboard army tank at rivals Raith Rovers. Now THAT’S compulsive viewing.

TACTICAL TITANS One area the Scottish scene can take pride in is the

FROSTY: McCoist and Lennon

“There’s a beautiful honesty and tradition within the Scottish game that ensures it is, per head, of the population the best supported in Europe”

commitment to cultivating touchline talent.

A cursory node to the EPL sees seven managers from the greater Glasgow area more than hold their own.

It’s tempting to claim Andre Villas-Boas as one of our own, as he too came from the SFA’s world-renowned coaching conveyor belt (like Jose Mourinho before him).

With chairmen generally more patient, fledgling Fergie wannabes are given more time to develop.

Transfer budgets are generally non-existent, so instead more emphasis is placed on subtle tactical warfare.

Combine that with traditional working-class resilience and it’s easy to see why Scots bosses are all the rage.

BABY BRAVEHEARTS If you’re good enough you’re old enough. The cash crisis dictates that Scots starlets are afforded early opportunities to stake their claim, whilst punters

can identify with teams packed with home-grown talent.

Inevitably the best of the bunch are seduced south by the Premier League Promised Land.

By the time 18-yearold James McCarthy quit Hamilton for Wigan he’d amassed over 100 senior appearances.

Keep a keen eye on Blackburn new-boy David Goodwillie – a snip at £2.8million from Dundee United.

SCOTLAND THE BRAVE Our most celebrated export remains the Tartan Army.

Who else would take 40,000 to London for a friendly with Brazil?

Beloved all over the world, there’s more to the dedicated diehards than the obligatory kilt and ‘see-you-Jimmy’ wigs, with travelling foot-soldiers having raised thousands for local children’s charities in each country they visit through ‘The Sunshine Appeal’.

Still capable of creating a daunting din at Hampden, Spain’s midfield maestro Xabi Alonso was moved to Tweet his admiration for the ‘really emotional’ rendition of Flower of Scotland prior to the world champions’ narrow 3-2 Euro 2012 qualifier win in Glasgow.

out former club Dundee.

Hit by administration and struggling to field a team, McCann made up the numbers as a trialist and promptly bagged the winner Roy of the Rovers style in his first game back against Raith Rovers. Now THAT is what football’s all about.

MAD VLAD Mad Vlad If McCann earned headlines on the pitch, Hearts owner Vladimir Romanov earns them like no other off it.

The Russian rascal puts media-shy countryman Roman Abramovich to shame, regularly shooting from the hip with an arsenal of entertaining soundbites.

Like this observation on alleged corruption within the refereeing fraternity back in 2007...

“To discuss whether referees take money or not is like discussing a woman who gives herself with no love.

“Isn’t it better to concentrate on the standard of their work instead of looking for reasons for their poor performance?

“We are a nation of world-class whingers. A chip on both shoulders helps balance us out.”

A woman cheats herself and nature if she gives herself without love.”

No, I don’t know what he meant either.

WORLD-CLASS WHINGE World-class whingers Let it be known that we are a nation of world-class whingers.

A chip on both shoulders helps balance us out.

Now more than ever supporters have a voice, across a range of platforms.

They’re using it to rail against escalating ticket prices, the unhealthy influence of TV companies over kick-off times and debate how best to restructure the senior set-up.

That raw passion still burns deep within and it must be cherished. While it often manifests itself as unbridled anger, that’s a far less dangerous emotion than disillusionment.

It proves people still care.

They haven’t given up.

That’s why Scottish football has a future.

ENTERTAINMENT: Sammy the Tammy, top left, Romanov, above, and fans, right, below

BIG TWO? BOO-HOO Big Two? Boo hoo.

Readily knocked for the Old Firm’s stranglehold on the title, is Scottish football any different to any other major European country – Germany apart – in that regard?

Celtic and Rangers are big fish in a small pond, but it’s fiercely competitive outwith the Glasgow giants.

The days of Aberdeen and Dundee United competing at home and abroad may be long gone, but there’s no shortage of fairytale stories.

Take Sky Sports pundit Neil McCann ditching his microphone last term to help 49

FOOTBALL BUSINESS

The ultimate traders

KIERON O’CONNOR of swissramble.blogspot.com takes a detailed look at the amazing success delivered by FC Porto with finances that many Championship teams can top

W

HEN football fans witnessed Barcelona’s dazzling 5-0 demolition of rivals Real Madrid, they would have been forgiven for assuming that this was an unprecedented performance, but they would have only had to look back three weeks for a similar exhibition in Portugal, when Porto crushed Benfica 5-0 at the Dragão.

The country’s most successful team of recent times thrashing its celebrated capital city opponents? Check. Inspired by a South American phenomenon?

Check. Guided by a progressive young coach? Check.

After finishing a disappointing third in the Portuguese League last season, Porto replaced their coach Jesualdo Ferreira with André Villas Boas, a protégé of José Mourinho. Although his first coaching role at a leading club, the 33-year-old, now at Chelsea, stamped his authority on the team, which played some beautiful, free-flowing football last season.

So much so that Porto went through the season unbeaten, winning the Primeira Liga by an astonishing 21 points. They also added the Europa League, beating fellow countrymen Braga 1-0 in the final in Dublin.

Their inspiration was a young Brazilian striker named Givanildo Vieira de Souza, better known to the football community as Hulk, largely due to his powerful physique.

His presence was missed by Porto the season before last, after he was suspended for his part in a post-match brawl following an illtempered match against Benfica, when he was found guilty of attacking match stewards in the tunnel. His goals might have made all the difference to Porto in the championship run-in and 50

This is a hugely important activity for Porto’s business model, which can clearly be seen in 2006, which was the last time the club made a loss, almost entirely due to the club’s decision to retain players that year in order improve their chances of winning.

Similarly, the 2010 profit of €0.1m was €5m lower than the previous year, which is more or less the reduction in profit on player sales. would almost certainly have avoided the ignominy of failing to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in living memory.

This represented a slap in the face for a club that has become accustomed to filling its trophy cabinet in the past few years.

Before 2009/10, Porto had been victorious in the Portuguese championship four consecutive times, which meant that they had collected six Primeira Liga titles in seven seasons. Their history in the last decade also features two European successes under the guidance of the Special One, when they beat Celtic 3-2 to secure the UEFA Cup in 2003 and triumphed 3-0 against Monaco to win the Champions League the following year.

Unfortunately, during this

The noughties have been a highly enjoyable era for Porto

period the club was also tainted with the whiff of scandal for its involvement in the so-called “Golden Whistle” investigation, when it was claimed that referees were offered bribes before two of their matches during the title winning campaign in 2004.

They were docked six points and fined €150,000, though some thought they had got off rather lightly. Importantly, they were still allowed to compete in the Champions League, even though they were initially banned, as on appeal authorities ruled the time limit for dealing with the matchfixing allegations had passed.

All in all though, the “noughties” have been a highly enjoyable era for Porto. Their success on the field of play has been matched by their

performance off the pitch, as the club has reported profits in each of the last four years, which is very good going in these difficult economic times. Although the club tends to make sizeable operating losses, it more than compensates by making equally large profits on player sales.

The other key driver in Porto’s finances is revenue from the Champions League. Indeed, the €10m reduction in 2010 revenue was largely due to the team’s earlier exit from the competition.

However, Porto are very skilled at balancing their books, so they compensated for most of the decline in revenue by cutting their costs by €7m, mainly in the wage bill, though they were also helped by €3m lower interest payments, due to the reduction in interest rates.

Porto’s cash flow from operations (EBITDA) is fairly healthy, averaging €33m over the last four years, once non-cash items like player amortisation and depreciation are added back, but this is again very reliant on the profit made from player sales. If this were excluded, then EBITDA would be slightly negative.

Although president Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa has been criticised by some supporters for the club’s policy of selling their best players year after year, a cursory glance at the financials is enough to understand why this approach is necessary.

The relatively low revenue, combined with wages high enough to remain competitive, mean that Porto need to make money in the transfer market to survive.

They have been remarkably consistent in the profits they have managed to generate from this activity in recent years: 2008 €35m, 2009 €40m and 2010 €35m.

They are well on course to repeat the trick in 2011 following sales of Bruno Alves to Zenit St. Petersburg for €22m and Raul Meireles to Liverpool for €13m.

They are absolute masters at selling two or three players every season for big bucks, interestingly often as bulk purchases, e.g. three players to Dynamo Moscow and two to Chelsea, though the latter sales were obviously partly down to Mourinho raiding his former

The numbers are simply incredible for a club of Porto’s size. Since that Champions League win in 2004, the club has raked in almost €350m revenue from player sales, though its net surplus is “only” €190m, as it also spent €160m on buying players in the same period. Looking at this another way, Porto have spent a lot on buying players, but have made even more on selling them. In fact, in the last 12 years, only twice have Porto had a (small) net spend in the transfer market and that was way back in 2002 and 2004.

The club has demonstrated the enviable knack of buying players relatively cheaply, benefiting from their prowess for a couple of seasons, then selling them for a very good price to richer European teams. As the annual report explains, “We clearly bet on the training of talents and the early detection of the best players.” That’s a fine objective, but it would be to no avail if they could find no buyers, but even in a subdued transfer market, Pinto da Costa boasted, “our assets were again the most requested on the international scene.”

51

FOOTBALL BUSINESS club. The list of players transferred for over €5 million since 2004 is an extensive one.

Much of this is down to Porto’s world-class scouting network, which is especially formidable in South America. They need to search far and wide for promising prospects, as they cannot afford to pay top dollar for foreign players, though they address this financial weakness in an innovative way by sharing the player’s rights with an agency, which means that they do not have to fund a transfer in one fell swoop.

For example, in April 2005, Porto bought 50% of the sporting rights of Lisandro Lopez (from Racing Club) and Lucho Gonzalez (from River Plate) with the remaining 50% only acquired in season 2007/08.

Clearly, this type of deal is a double-edged sword, as it means that any future profits are shared proportionally with the agency, but it does reduce Porto’s initial outlay and de-risks their activities in the transfer market.

Even though Porto cannot afford to pay very high wages, they still have much to offer South American players.

Not only is Porto itself a very successful club, their regular participation in the Champions League provides a perfect platform for emerging talents to display their wares. Moreover, players can easily obtain work permits and embark on the path towards a EU passport, which makes them a more attractive prospect to clubs in countries with more restrictive regulations.

Finally, Brazilian players do not have to struggle with any language issues.

On the flip side, Porto are forced to reinvent themselves every season with no player being considered irreplaceable.

In this way, when Carvalho left for England, he was replaced

by Pepe, whose exit was compensated by the emergence of Bruno Alves.

Even with this massive turnover of players, the club has managed to maintain its successful record, consistently winning the Portuguese league, though the departure of three key players 52

to France in summer 2009 was a bridge too far.

In the same way that Porto often buy a percentage of a player’s rights, they sometimes also sell part of a player in order to raise cash. There was an example of such a trade last November when the club sold a percentage of three recent arrivals for a total of €8m (37.5% of Joao Moutinho, 35% of James Rodriguez and 25% of Walter).

They also often structure their transfers in a way that they can share in a player’s future development, e.g. Aly Cissoko’s deal with Lyon included a 20% sell-on clause, while the agreement with Lyon for Lisandro Lopez could be worth an additional €4 million depending on sporting achievements.

While hesitating to use the phrase “wheeler dealers”, Porto are definitely very nimble on their feet in the transfer market, leaving many more illustrious (and staid) peers in the shade.

Ironically, given the vast sums Porto received from Lyon in

The Deloitte money league shows how hard it is for a team outside the Big Five countries

2009, the French club is often considered to operate a similar business model, sharing many of the characteristics of their approach to the transfer market.

Up until the last two years, that was certainly the case, before Lyon embarked on a spending spree of their own, though their president has promised that they will revert to type in the future.

Furthermore, in relative terms, Porto are even more reliant on money made from player sales, due to the fact that Lyon enjoy a far higher turnover.

This is the essence of Porto’s problem, for the club is a big fish in a small pond. The Portuguese market is a small one with many clubs struggling financially, so the only realistic way for Porto to keep up with Europe’s elite from the wealthier nations is to sell the players that they develop. In that way, they can just about find enough money to fund a wage bill that will allow them to be competitive.

The Deloitte money league highlights the enormous financial

We can see the magnitude of the problem by examining the Deloittes Money League for 2008/09. There’s not a Portuguese name in sight among the top twenty listed, which is no surprise given that Benfica is the only Portuguese club to make an appearance on this august list, back in 2006 (in 20th position). Porto’s revenue of €68 million in 2008/09 leaves them miles behind wealthier clubs. To place that into context, Real Madrid’s revenue of over €400 million is almost six times as much. Even a club like Newcastle United, which was relegated at the end of that season, generated 50% more money.

challenges confronting clubs from outside the Big Five countries (England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France).

By a strange coincidence, Porto’s revenue is almost exactly the same as that of Ajax, who face the same sort of issues. In terms of Premier League clubs, the nearest revenue equivalent is Stoke City, who have made a lot of progress recently, but, with the greatest respect, their record is nothing compared to Porto’s. From that perspective, there is no doubt that Porto have been punching well above their weight in Europe, regularly reaching the last 16 of the Champions League.

At this point, I should clarify that this analysis is based on Porto’s consolidated accounts, which include the following companies: PortoComercial (sponsorship, licensing and merchandise, 93.5% owned), PortoEstadio (stadium, 100%), PortoMultimedia (70%) and PortoSeguro (insurance, 90%). That said, the results are still very largely based on the operations of the football club.

It is imperative that Porto continue along this path, as the revenue growth in other areas has been very limited. Gate receipts are actually down 17% in the last five years, while television, the impetus behind revenue growth in many countries, has only risen €5 million in the same period.

The star performer has been commercial income, which has doubled to €24 million. Although total revenue growth of 24% has outpaced cost growth of 19%, the absolute growth is smaller, meaning that the operating loss has slightly grown over this time.

Whichever way you look at it, the club needs to buy and sell.

The total value of the Portuguese Liga TV rights is only around €50 million a season, which compares very unfavourably to others: England €1.2 billion, Italy €900 million, France €700 million, Spain €500 million, Germany €400 million.

That might be expected, but the Portuguese contract with Olivedesportos (matches shown on SportTV) is also behind Turkey €250 million, Holland €100 million and Greece €54 million. This is not a collective deal, so the lion’s share of the TV revenue (about €24 million) goes to the traditional big

The importance of player trading to Porto’s business can be seen very well in the above graph. If profit on player sales is considered as “revenue”, its contribution has been notable in the past few years, averaging around 60% of normal turnover. Put another way, the club makes three times as much from the transfer market as gate receipts. This would be very worrying if Porto had not shown that they are capable of maintaining this “revenue stream” year after year, with the exception of 2006, when, of course, the club made a big loss.

As we have seen, broadcasting is not as important for Porto as other leading clubs with the 2010 revenue amounting to only €20 million, comprising €8 million from the domestic deal and €12 million distributions from UEFA for the Champions League.

Even with the boost of European revenue, which represents over half of their total TV revenue, this is fairly pitiful compared to the major leagues. If we compare Porto’s revenue with the clubs that earn most from broadcasting income in those other leagues, we can see that they earn between four and eight times this amount.

53

FOOTBALL BUSINESS three clubs in Portugal: Porto, Benfica and Sporting Lisbon.

From that perspective, Porto’s €8.4 million is not too bad (up from €7 million in 2008), but to put this into context, Arsenal also finished third in their league and received around €62 million, which is nearly eight times as much – and the Premier League TV money will further increase.

In fact, Arsenal on their own received more than all of the 16 clubs in the Portuguese Liga combined.

Porto use a slightly strange accounting policy when it comes to reporting Champions League revenue, whereby as soon as they have qualified for the competition, they immediately book the guaranteed element for the following season.

So the 2009/10 revenue for participating in the group stage (worth €7.1 million) was already reported in 2008/09, hence the reduction in the 2009/10 accounts, even though Porto actually received more from UEFA that year: €18.7 million in 2010, up from €14.5 million in 2009.

What is certain is that qualification for the Champions League has been fairly lucrative to Porto, €92 million in the last seven years, though they have again been short-changed because of their misfortune in playing in a small country, more specifically a country with a small TV audience.

Although Champions League participation fees and performance prizes are the same for every club, the share of the television money from the market pool is dependent on the size/ value of a country’s TV market, so the amount allocated to teams in other countries is more than that given to Portugal.

For example, last season Porto reached the last 16 and received €5.4 million from the market pool, which was much less than the €18.1 million distributed to Chelsea for reaching the same stage.

Actually, Porto’s share of the 2009/10 pool was higher than they are accustomed to receiving, as the allocation also depends on the number of representatives from a country that qualify for the group stage, and there was 54

only one from Portugal that year, compared to two or even three in previous seasons.

Porto’s bottom line will therefore be adversely impacted in 2011, as they have only qualified for the Europa League, which distributes much less money than the Champions League with the guaranteed fees worth only €1 million.

Even though Porto battled their way through countless matches to win the trophy, they still only got €6.4 million, though that’s better than nothing.

Hence, the determination that the club’s absence from the Champions League would last no more than a year. Only first place in the Liga ZON Sagres guarantees qualification, but the runners-up can also get there if they make it through the qualifying matches. Luckily for Porto – and their bank manager – they regained their title and have a berth in the Champions League for this season.

And there’s more: as the 2009 annual report stated: “In addition to the direct financial results awarded by UEFA, the presence of FC Porto in the great showcase of European football, where players strongly shine, is essential to their

Champions League is the perfect shop window for Porto’s player selling policy

valorization as economic assets of the society.”

Not the greatest translation in the English version of Porto’s accounts, albeit scoring high marks for lyricism, but, in short, this means that the Champions League is also the perfect shop window for Porto’s player selling policy.

Where Porto have done quite well is in increasing their commercial revenue, especially sponsorship and advertising, which has reached €14 million.

They have an interesting shirt sponsorship deal with Portugal Telecom, which features one company tmn (mobile network) on the home shirt and another meo (IPTV) on the away shirt in the same way that Arsenal used to have Sega and Dreamcast on different kits. This is a longterm six-year deal worth €21.45 million and runs until June 2011.

Similarly, the kit deal with Nike brings in less than €3m a season (four-year deal worth €11.1m, potentially rising to €14.8m depending on team’s success, for the period 200812). Although Porto have been very active in merchandising initiatives, including revoking an agreement with TBZ following

That’s why the Champions League money has been so important to Porto’s finances over the last few years. This is most evident in 2004, the year when they won the tournament and received €25 million, which was almost 40% of their turnover that year, but even this year when the revenue was down to €12 million, that was still worth 20% of their income - and that excludes gate receipts and sponsorship increments.

poor performance and setting up several club stores (cobranded with Nike), revenue from this source only comes to just over €2 million a year. A similar amount is generated by corporate hospitality, which is contracted out to a company called EuroAntas.

Gate receipts are also nothing to write home about at just €11 million, which is the lowest that they have been in the last six years. The €2 million decline is partially attributed to the earlier Champions League exit with the previous season’s glamour quarter-final against Manchester United bringing in €0.9 million alone, but is also symptomatic of the general economic malaise affecting Portugal, which resulted in the average league attendance falling 14% from 38,800 to 33,500. The poor results probably also played a part, as the average so far in the current successful season has climbed back up to 37,800, which is just behind Benfica, who have the highest crowds in Portugal at the moment.

The club is housed at the Estádio do Dragão (Stadium of the Dragon), which replaced their old stadium, Estádio das Antas, in 2003. It seats over 50,000 and its name is derived from the dragon on Porto’s crest, which is also the nickname of Porto fans.

The new stadium was built for the European Championships held in Portugal in 2004 and cost €98 million, of which €18 million was contributed by the taxpayer.

To further support the funding, naming rights have been sold for each stand, mainly to divisions of the principal sponsor Portugal Telecom, but also to other companies like Coca-Cola.

The stadium is actually owned

by EuroAntas, which granted Porto a 30-year lease in 2003 to use the facilities for an annual payment of around €1 million. It is also used for other events like the “Race of Champions” featuring the top drivers in motor sport. In addition, the complex features a multi-sport arena nearby for Porto’s basketball and handball teams. Moving on to costs, even though expenses are higher than revenue, it is clear that Porto strive to reflect any movement in the revenue in the costs line,

Shirt sponsorship is still on the low side by international standards, equivalent to only €3.6 million a season, while Bayern Munich, Manchester United and Real Madrid all have deals worth over €20 million. It might seem absurd to make comparisons against clubs of this stature, but Porto will have to beat these teams if they want to lift the Champions League trophy again.

As we have seen, this does not produce much in cold hard cash with the gate receipts being worse than every club in the Deloitte Money League. There may be some match day income hidden away in commercial revenue, but the harsh reality is that the club’s revenue here lags a considerable distance behind its foreign competition. Manchester United’s match day revenue of €128 million is about ten times higher than Porto’s. It’s difficult to compete with such financial might, especially as this difference accrues every single season.

55

FOOTBALL BUSINESS so when revenue surged 24% in 2009, costs grew by a similar amount 25%.

On the other hand, when the 2010 revenue fell 15%, cash costs (excluding player amortisation) were also cut by 14%. This is a tough balancing act, as the wages have to be held at a minimum level in order to attract the right quality of player.

As the annual report explained in its quaint English, “the company bets on the investment of the team with players of high quality … to ensure the best sporting results, which necessarily requires adequate compensation to their status.”

Nevertheless, Porto’s wage bill of €39m is very low by international standards, a long way below big spenders like Barcelona €263m, Inter €205m, Real Madrid €187m and Bayern Munich €165m.

An interesting equivalent would be Celtic, but even their wage bill of €43m is higher. Of more interest to Porto fans might be the wages of Arsenal, the team that eliminated them from the Champions League last season, which are €130m – three times as much.

Wages actually reduced 17% in 2010 from €48m to €39m, partly due to worse sporting performances, which resulted in lower bonus payments.

Porto have stated that 25% of staff costs are related to the performance of the team, so in a good sporting year, these costs will increase ceteris paribus.

The split of this year’s staff costs is: players €23m, technical and administrative staff €10m, directors €2m(on the high side), insurance €1m, other costs €3m.

Given these pressures, the club is justifiably proud of keeping its wages to turnover ratio below UEFA’s recommended upper limit of 70%. This ratio actually fell to 68% last year, which is very impressive if you consider the constraints imposed by the low revenue.

The trend in player amortisation, namely the annual cost of writing down the cost of buying new players, is more concerning, as this has been steadily rising over the last two 56

years. In the four years between 2005 and 2008, it had held steady at around €20m, but it has now shot up to €27m.

Of course, this can quickly be reduced with the sale of a couple of players that were bought for high fees, so I would expect this trend to reverse in the near future. In any case, it’s still much lower than those sides that have spent really big in the transfer market, such as Man City €83m, Barcelona €71m, Real Madrid €64m and Chelsea €57m.

According to the annual report, “the company managed to relieve the financial pressure by issuing a new bond.”

This bears 6% interest per annum and is repayable in December 2012. What was reassuring is that the bond issue was 4.5 times over-subscribed, reflecting the market’s support for the club. This is not the first time that Porto have tapped the debt market, as they issued a similar three-year bond in 2006, which was repaid on schedule in December 2009.

Of more concern is the security provided to guarantee the loans with the accounts listing all sorts

Porto’s wage bill at €39m is very low – even Celtic’s is higher at €43m

of collateral, including Champions league revenue, stadium naming rights, sponsorship contracts and transfer receivables. The club is obviously aware of this issue and stresses that it can service the debt by referring to the net debt/ EBITDA ratio. In Porto’s case, this works out as 2.7 (84/31), which is not great, but I’ve seen worse.

The ratio effectively indicates how many years’ earnings would be required to pay off all the debt and is considered alarming if it rises above 3-4.

The other aspect of debt that is important to clubs like Porto with their frenetic activity in the transfer market is how much they owe to other football clubs, which stands at €25m. This is in line with previous years: 2008 €23m, 2009 €26m.

However, other clubs owe Porto more than twice as much with an incredible €56m of receivables.

This appears to be a vital part of Porto’s transfer dealings, as the sum is unchanged from last year, while 2008 was also high at €46m.

The largest debtors are Lyon €12m, Marseille €10m and Inter €6m. Porto supporters might be surprised to know that the club is

Porto also specifically mention in their annual report the Webster Law having an inflationary impact on salaries. This regulation allows a player to unilaterally terminate his contract after three years (or 2 years if he is over 28) to move to a foreign club, only compensating the club with a sum equivalent to the remaining salary for the time left on his contract. Clearly, that could spell disaster for Porto’s business model and its reliance on money from player sales, hence the decision to raise salaries in 2009.

still owed money two years after the sale of Quaresma to Inter.

This is one reason why Porto’s balance sheet shows €23m of net assets with assets of €183m being higher than liabilities of €160m.

The surplus is partly due to the value of player registrations held on the books, which increased last year from €58m to €69m. Of course, this accounting value is significantly below the players’ market value, which has been estimated at €132 million by Transfermarket. In particular, players developed by Porto’s academy will have zero value in the accounts, but are obviously worth something.

However, there are risks facing Porto’s strategy, as the transfer market has been deteriorating recently, with all clubs affected by the recession, and values of players have plummeted, e.g.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s price was slashed to €24 million just 12 months after Barcelona paid €70 million, while Diego moved to Wolfsburg for €16 million a year after Juventus bought him for €25 million.

The statistics show that Europe’s top five leagues spent almost 40% less on transfer fees in the summer of 2010 than the previous year.

On top of the adverse market environment, the advent of the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations could also have a detrimental effect.

These will force clubs to breakeven if they wish to compete in European competitions, so expenses have to be covered by revenue.

As a major expense element is the player amortisation arising from transfers, it seems logical that clubs will endeavour to reduce their transfer spend, which might well harm selling clubs like Porto.

Having said that, Porto have managed to beat the odds so far with the transfer of Bruno Alves last summer among the top ten worldwide.

Maybe it just means that only those clubs with superb scouting networks and an excellent track record for developing players will thrive in the new world – and Porto certainly fit the bill there. It is clear that they still have many players who would be in demand

Like most other Portuguese clubs, Porto have a lot of debt. Given the imbalance between expenses and revenue, this is hardly surprising, but it is exacerbated in their case by the cost of building the new stadium. That said, the debt is still on an upward trend, though it has remained at €84 million for the last two years. This comprises €76 million of bank loans plus a €17 million bond less €8 million of cash. with Manchester City being only one team linked with a €30 million move for Hulk.

Even so, it makes it even more important for Porto to produce players from their “Dragon Force” academy, as the club may have less money in the future to spend on bringing players in.

This is why they have invested substantial funds into improving the Vitalis Park facility, which now features 11 grass pitches and seven synthetic pitches. There is a risk that players would then be transferred to richer clubs at a younger age, but the financial arguments are pretty compelling.

The fact is that the Portuguese League does not generate enough money on its own for its clubs to compete in the upper echelons of the Champions League.

Many clubs are struggling financially, over burdened with debt, leading to seven clubs from the top flight recently seeking assistance from the LPFP

With Villas Boas now at Chelsea, these are interesting times for Porto

(Portuguese Football Federation).

Although this theoretically represents financial aid to improve sports facilities, it looks more like grants are being given out to enable the survival of these clubs.

This is the situation in which Porto operates, so their focus on making money from selling players is perfectly understandable.

They have become the ultimate football traders, buying low and selling high with great success, which should be applauded, especially as their results on the pitch have rarely suffered.

It’s a delicate balance, however, as seen by their failure to qualify for the Champions League last season. But they got right back on track in winning the Portuguese title and Europa League in style last term.

With boss Villas-Boas having left for Chelsea, it will be interesting to see what happens at the Dragon’s Den this season.

57

FOOTBALL MADNESS

Martin knows the score JAMES WILLOUGHBY on an FA Cup giant-killing at Old Trafford that meant a lot to Leeds United fans – some more than others

A

NY win against your rivals is a cause for celebration. When it comes away from home and at a ground you haven’t won at in 29 years, it becomes even more special.

That victory was achieved when Jermaine Beckford’s firsthalf strike gave then-League One Leeds United a memorable 1-0 away victory against Manchester United in the third round of the FA Cup in January 2010.

The likes of Wayne Rooney, Dimitar Berbatov, Antonio Valencia, Ryan Giggs and Michael Owen could not stop Leeds winning at Old Trafford for the first time since Welshman Brian Flynn scored the winner in a 1-0 victory back in 1981.

But despite the nature of the victory, no Leeds United fan went as far as the man previously known as Martin Bland, who uniquely celebrated the upset by changing his name.

The 52-year-old became ‘We Beat the Scum One Nil’ via deedpoll as a ‘last celebration’ of the victory, although he never even celebrated the win in the first place as he stayed quiet in the home end after buying a ticket off a tout for £65.

“When I went to the game, I watched the game in the Stretford End because I didn’t get a ticket through Leeds United. So I had to buy one off a tout,” One Nil said.

“When Beckford scored, I was immediately behind the line of the ball. Sitting in the Stretford End watching it disappear under Tomas Kuszczak and coming into the goal, it seemed to take about 10 minutes. It was like the world was in slow-motion.”

“When we scored, I couldn’t jump up and celebrate it. I had to sit on my hands all the way through the game and back to 58

Beckford and Becchio after THAT goal

the car before I could let off any steam. I always just thought ‘I’ve not celebrated this game properly yet’.

“You could see all the Leeds fans up the other end going barmy and I was sitting on my hands, so that’s really what led to it all.”

After speaking to One Nil, his absolute passion for Leeds is obvious.

That’s what makes the fact he was able to stay quiet so impressive, although seeing his fellow supporters receive a slap or three may have helped!

“There were a few Leeds in there. When the goal went in, two jumped up and both of them got

“The 52-yearold became ‘We Beat the Scum One Nil’ via deed-poll.”

completely battered,” he said.

“Where I was sitting, there were a row of about six real knuckleheads that were sitting behind me and mouthing off all game. So I knew if I said anything, I might not see full-time!

“All the Man U fans… they weren’t really bothered that they were losing in the third round of the FA Cup and they weren’t really bothered that it was a third division team. What they were really bothered about was that it was us.

“You got the sense that it still mattered to them and I took a lot of pleasure out of that. That was enough to get me through!”

The name change was

triggered by the general election, with One Nil initially hoping to run as the sole representative of a party called ‘We Beat The Scum One Nil’ in the Leeds Central constituency, however it did not go to plan.

“The election was announced and it seemed like an ideal opportunity.

“I decided to stand in the election as a last celebration of the game and first of all I thought I’d register a party as that name when the election got announced.

“But when I looked into it you needed about two or three months to register a political party and there wasn’t that amount of time before the election.

“If I was going to do the election thing, I wanted the name to appear on the ballot paper otherwise it was a bit pointless really. So the only other way of doing it was to change my name and stand as an independent but make sure my name read ‘We Beat the Scum One Nil’ so that’s what I did.”

The process was not an arduous one, with One Nil paying £33 and spending five minutes on the name change, with only his mum unhappy.

“I was sitting on the couch watching the telly with my missus. I told her what I was thinking, popped upstairs, sat on the PC, typed in deed-poll and five minutes later I was back on the couch. I’ve told her ‘I’ve just changed my name’.

“The only negative response I got was from my mum, she didn’t like it, but as I said to her ‘well you’ve changed your name loads of times!’”

One Nil sent humourous letters to Leeds United chairman Ken Bates and Beckford informing them of his new name and his ambitious plans to run in the election, which led to the former striking up a relationship with the semi-retired plumber from Huddersfield.

“I’d sent the one to Bates and I was actually sitting writing the letter to Beckford and the phone rang.

“I picked it up and this voice said ‘Do you know who I am?’

I recognised the voice straight away and it was Ken Bates. He had rung me back.

“He rang me a few times after that, asking if I was going to do it and whether or not as a club they could get on the back of it and have a bit of fun with it.

“Once I agreed to it, his phrase was ‘I’ll put the full weight of the Leeds United publicity machine behind you and see where it takes it’”.

All of a sudden One Nil was thrust into the media spotlight, answering phone calls from daily newspapers, local media and even interest from Spain as his amazing story continued to gain publicity.

One Nil started to deal with Bates regularly and was invited as a guest of the chairman to a home match against MK Dons in April 2010, which Leeds won 4-1.

Bates impressed the father-oftwo with his generosity as he was treated to a special experience.

“Me and my missus went along to Elland Road as his guests for the match, expecting that there’d be probably about 20-30 people that were there in a big room and One Nil with Leeds legend Allan Clarke

“He hasn’t changed his name back and has no intention to.”

we’d be stuffed in a corner, out of the way.”

“When we got there we were the only ones he had invited.

They gave us the entire day. We had a slap-up meal before the game, they took me down onto the pitch to do an interview before the game and they really rolled out the carpet. It was an experience.”

“There’s a side that people don’t see to him (Bates). He didn’t have to do any of that and he did it and I’m forever grateful that he did because I saw a side of Leeds United that as a fan, you never expect to see.”

With the help of Leeds United, One Nil could have seriously campaigned in the aid of winning votes.

But in the end it was nothing more than a laugh and he is still shocked he managed 155 votes in the election.

“I was expecting 20, I was hoping for 20! I didn’t do any publicity. It was only supposed to be a laugh, it was never serious…I didn’t do any campaigning or anything daft like that.

“You are not allowed to touch the votes but I’d been and had a look and I thought there was about 20-25 in there, so I was dead chuffed at that. It wasn’t until they announced the result that I found out I got 155, and I have no idea where that last 130 came from.”

“There are 155 idiots out there who people need to be really careful of!”

Also on election day, One Nil received abusive texts and Twitter messages from Manchester United fans who had seen his name on the ballot paper in Leeds. And that was enough for the Leeds United season ticket holder, who had got what he intended from the whole thing and that was a right laugh.

He hasn’t changed his name back and doesn’t intend too soon.

And why would he, as every time he goes to get the post in the morning, it’s a reminder of one of the greatest days of his life…

James Willoughby is a sports journalist with Sportal Australia in Melbourne. Follow him on Twitter @jwilloughby26 59

CLASSIC MATCHES

Footballing nirvana GER MCCARTHY remembers an incredible night at Anfield when the team that had swept all before them in English football for 20 years hit their peak

Y

OUNGER readers of this article may not be aware of the fact that in the 1980s one club ruled English domestic football.

Liverpool.

The Anfield club were the undisputed kings of English and European football for well over a decade thanks to the steadying hand of brilliant man-managers Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Kenny Dalglish.

The Reds incorporated a beautiful one-touch pass and move game that mesmerised defences up and down the country for the best part of 10 years.

Liverpool were already an institution in world football before their successes in the 80s and were also the smartest club in the transfer market, regularly adding to a squad bulging with international talent.

The fabled Anfield boot-room where managers plotted the downfall of opponents became as legendary as the simple fivea-side training routines and the club’s off-field drinking habits.

Former centre-back and Republic of Ireland international Mark Lawrenson mentioned the drinking culture that was prevalent in the English game in a recent article with the Guardian website but pointed out that Liverpool’s training sessions were often tailored to counteract the booze intake.

It was the ability of the Anfield hierarchy to work in harmony with their manager and seamlessly move from one coach to another that kept them at the top for well over a decade.

In many fans’ and pundits’ eyes, Liverpool reached their peak during the 1987-88 season.

Oddly, the previous campaign had ended trophyless with cityrivals Everton claiming the league 60

Not a great night for Forest keeper Steve Sutton

crown and Coventry winning the FA Cup. Kenny Dalglish set to work in the summer of 1987 and having earlier added John Aldridge from Oxford to replace legendary striker Ian Rush (transferred to Juventus) the Scotsman purchased John Barnes from Watford, Peter Beardsley from Newcastle and Ray Houghton from Oxford.

These new signings added to a settled squad that already included internationals: Alan Hansen, Gary Gillespie, Steve Nicol, Nigel Spackman and Steve McMahon.

The result was devastating as Liverpool tore through the English First Division with

“They won the league by nine points from Manchester United.”

the unstoppable attacking triumvirate of Aldridge, Beardsley and Barnes carving up defences.

The Anfield club deservedly won the English First Division title that season by nine points from nearest rivals Manchester United.

In all they scored a whopping 87 goals and were unbeaten at home thanks to 15 wins and five draws.

The tragedy of the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985 meant that all English clubs were banned from European competition until 1990-91.

There is little doubt that the Liverpool team of the late 1980s would have proven a formidable side in Europe and claimed

the continent’s most coveted footballing trophy had they been allowed to enter. On April 13, 1988, Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest visited Anfield for a league fixture knowing the home side were still favourites to win the title despite losing 2-1 (one of only two losses all season) at the City ground only 11 days earlier.

In between the two league encounters with Clough’s side, Liverpool had also won an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough and gained revenge for that previous defeat with a 2-1 win over Forest.

The game was played at a frantic pace from the opening minute with Liverpool dictating the tempo with crisp passing in the centre of the park from Houghton, McMahon, Spackman and Barnes.

The home side completely dominated possession and a Forest side including internationals such as Stuart Pearce, Des Walker, Neil Webb and Nigel Clough simply had no answer to the incessant attacking.

Fans thronged behind the Kop heaved with every flowing attack as Houghton’s probing passes on one wing matched the mazy dribbling of Barnes on the opposite side of the pitch.

Chances came and went as Peter Beardsley’s influence began to grow but Liverpool had nothing to show for their efforts until the 18th minute.

Alan Hansen broke up a Forest attack and strode out of defence before releasing Houghton with a simple pass.

The Republic of Ireland international raced towards the penalty area, played a quick one-two with Barnes and slotted the ball past Steve Sutton. It was a simple, beautiful effort encapsulating all the best traits of Liverpool FC. Forest were unable to stem the tide. Liverpool hit the woodwork twice and Sutton pulled off a string of magnificent saves before Aldridge doubled the host’s advantage shortly before the interval.

Beardsley was quickest to react to another failed Forest attack and the former Newcastle United player released Aldridge with a 30-yard defence-splitting

pass. Aldridge still had plenty to do but waited until Sutton committed himself and chipped an instinctive shot over the outrushing goalkeeper. “Another superb Liverpool goal, it looked simple but was of quite a stupendous quality,” as described

by BBC commentator John Motson.

Following the half-time break, most teams would have been content to defend their 2-0 advantage and counter-attack when the opportunity arose.

Instead, the Anfield club moved up a gear and netted three additional goals in front of the Kop to complete a marvellous 90-minute performance.

True, Forest lost the services of centre-back Des Walker during the interval but even if the England international had been on the park, it is unlikely he would have been able to prevent any of the goals.

A first-time finish from Gary Gillespie following a quickly worked corner-kick made it 3-0 before Barnes weaved his way past two defenders and pulled the ball back for Beardsley to

“Forest were unable to stop the Liverpool tide.”

fire home a fourth. “A glorious goal again from Liverpool,” mused Motson. An amazing Anfield night was complete once Beardsley and Spackman combined to send Aldridge through for his second and Liverpool’s fifth.

Dalglish’s side would go on to claim the league championship following a 0-0 draw with Norwich a week later but failed to claim an expected double when the Crazy Gang of Wimbledon caused a huge upset by defeating the Reds 1-0 in the 1988 FA Cup final.

To put the Nottingham Forest result into context, Liverpool had just crushed one of only two teams (Everton being the other) to defeat them in the league that entire 1987-88 season and 5-0 was not a flattering score.

It could and should have been more but irrespective of the number of goals scored it was the sheer dominance and movement of Liverpool on that balmy April evening that lives longest in the memory.

Follow Ger on Twitter: @offcentrecircle

Liverpool in the title-winning years

61

COLUMNIST

WALSH’S WORLD Kristian Walsh on football around the globe

Going down fighting

J

une 26, 2011: one of the darkest days in Argentinean football history both literally and metaphorically.

In a small barrios of south-east Buenos Aires stood hundreds in darkness; surrounding those hundreds were over another hundred people, their faces partially illuminated from the candles they carried – some had their heads bowed, while others stood in silence.

Placed at the front of the group

was a figure dressed as a ghost, their costume constructed with determination and linen. Resting upon the chest of the ghost, the flag of Club Atletico River Plate, Argentina’s most successful club.

A young man approaches the front to say his goodbyes. His face contorts, trying to contain his emotion.

It proves too overwhelming.

He lets out a smile, and then a cackle, before metamorphosing into an all-singing, all-dancing River Plate fans didn’t take their relegation too well

“With a minute remaining, objects rained upon the pitch towards the players.”

62

Boca Juniors supporter. The other hundreds join in.

These were not supporters of River Plate mourning their side’s first relegation to the Argentinian second division for the first time in their 110-year history; the barrios was La Boca, the mourners were celebrators, the congregation was that of La Bombonera.

Across the city, in the picturesque, northern suburb of Nunez, some River Plate fans were coming to terms with relegation in a different manner.

Their problems, it seemed, were answered at the bottom of the bottle – a bottle launched towards some of the 2,200 police deployed

by Argentinean authorities. This was the calm after the storm.

Those rioting didn’t even wait for confirmation from the full-time whistle at the Estadio Monumental.

With a minute remaining, objects rained upon the pitch towards the players, each throw representing a vitriolic grievance held towards an individual player.

A coin came across for that backpass; a rock flew over for those easy chances missed. But most of all, missiles hurled at those who had sullied the proud name and tradition of River Plate; the players who turned Los Millonarios into paupers.

Labruna, Mas, Ferreyra, Di Stefano, Perfumo, Kempes, Diaz, Morete, Francescoli, Borelli, Pumpido, Batistuta, Almeyda, Caniggia, Ayala, Ortega, Gallardo, Burgos, Crespo, Balbo, Angel, Cambiasso, Cruz, Escudero, Salas, Demichelis, Aimar, D’Alessandro, Mascherano, Saviola, Buonanotte, Higauin and Falcao. 33 incredible players for 33 league

Mario Kempes

championships. Some stayed for a short time, others for a lifetime, but none of them were complicit in the relegation of River Plate.

Mariano Pavone, on the other hand, was. A selection of seats that rained upon the pitch were reserved for Pavone, who saw his penalty saved by the Belgrano goalkeeper at 1-1. River had to win by two clear goals.

But it would be unfair to solely blame Pavone, or any of the current squad, for River’s demise.

In Argentina, relegation is calculated from the average points total over three seasons – ironically, a system devised by the AFA to maintain the status of Argentina’s top five clubs, of which River Plate was one of.

This was a relegation three

“Relegation is the worst thing that could have happened to River Plate – not just for pride but for purse.”

years in the making. In truth, it began much further back than that.

Financial meltdown came to Argentina at the turn of the century and soon impacted upon the league. In 2009, the start of the football season was postponed due to mounting debts of Argentina’s bigger clubs.

The debt of River Plate, Boca Juniors, Independiente, Racing and San Lorenzo is £105million.

While the number seems small compared to the figures of Manchester United and recently Liverpool – still piecing together the shards left from Hicks and Gillett’s reign – Premier League clubs gain revenue in other ways.

For Argentinean clubs, transfer revenue is now king. In the past

Gabriel Batistuta

“The riots may now have ceased in Buenos Aires but the aftershock of River’s relegation will ripple through the city.”

decade, River have profited on Cambiasso, Demichelis, Mascherano, Higuain and Alex Sanchez – all of whom played less than two seasons there.

While Saviola, Lucho Gonzalez, Buonanotte and Falcao stayed longer, they were still moved on at the first possible opportunity.

But the club can’t hide behind an economic downturn – Boca Juniors and others have coped with similar constraints. River Plate just managed to mismanage more than any other club.

If you’re well-versed in Argentinean football, you may have noticed one player conspicuous by his absence in that list of 33 players.

Daniel Pasarella was not only a hero to River Plate supporters, but to an entire nation. Pasarella captained Argentina to World Cup success in 1978, beating the Netherlands in the final at the Estadio Monumental. He’s a hero no more. When he took over as club president, Pasarella was quick to pass responsibility for the instability of the club to predecessor Jose Maria Aguilar; the fans, unyielding in their bloodthirst, want the heads of both Pasarella and Aguilar.

Relegation is the worst thing that could have happened to River Plate – not just for pride, but for purse. Money for television rights has been slashed now they reside in the second division and the firesale has already begun – star teenager Erik Lamella has moved to Roma. To say more stars will follow would be inaccurate; the fact there’s so few sellable assets shows how far they’ve fallen.

The riots may now have ceased on the streets of Buenos Aires but the aftershock of River’s relegation will ripple through the city – and the football team – for months and possibly years.

An immediate return to the top level of Argentinean football is vital for the club; if not, they risk becoming a footnote in history, perennial underachievers who only have former glories; the South American Dynamo Dresden or Stade Reims.

Even worse, the candlelit vigils heralding the death of River Plate held in La Boca may be replicated across Buenos Aires and Argentina; this time, they won’t be ironic. Once the wick burns to the end and darkness settles, the light will never return.

63

CLASS ACT

Issue Two of Late Tackle – in all good newsagents on October 26