The list of things that count as a 'brain fade' is pretty long. Forgetting the dates of battles, wars, victories, births, deaths, exams and appointments are just the beginning. It would be understandable if you forget your mother's noodle recipe or the contents of that brown cardboard box on the top shelf in your shed. You might forget your National Insurance number or ever your car number plate. It's easy to forget the name of films or books, even though you might claim they're a favourite. It's easier still to forget the name of that actor you like who only plays bit parts in films but always does with a certain manly swagger. In that case, you're probably forgetting the name Ed Harris or Scott Glenn. Really, the list of things it's okay to forget is extremely long and varied. But nowhere on it does it include the name of your football team.
I mean nobody, not even the recently lobotomised, forgets the name of their football team. It just doesn't happen. Not even as a verbal slip. You don't suddenly say 'Manchester United' if you mean Liverpool, 'Everton' if you support Leeds. It's not simply a trick of a tired brain. You don't have one thing in mind and accidentally say it, like you might say to somebody, ' pass me the knife' when you meant spoon but you just happened to be holding a knife when you reached for the word. Those things are understandable. Forgetting your football team is about as likely as forgetting your own name. Never is my life have I introduced myself 'Eric' or 'Bruce' or 'Norma'. I'm certain about that. 100% of the time I say that my name is David.
I wouldn't image that David Cameron would ever introduce himself as Eric, Bruce or Norma Cameron either, which makes it so hard to believe that today told an audience in Croydon that his favourite team is West Ham. For years he's been telling us that it's Aston Villa and how he is the nephew of a former Villa chairman who took him to his first match when he was 13.
The significance of the story is bigger than the details. What I love about this gaff is that it's an apparently trivial mistake which might have big consequences. It's the kind of story that will click with large portions of the electorate. It's hard to judge a man based on economic predictions or the well practised spiel of a campaign speech. It's much easier to judge what you think about a man who suddenly forgets which team he supports. Had this happened in any pub across the land, the victim of the 'brain fade' would be ribbed about it for months, years, perhaps even the rest of his life.
So, why did it happen?
It happened, I think, because of the character of the man. It is a small point but I think it reveals so much about Cameron and his convictions or, more precisely, lack of convictions. I've never seen him as a true conviction politician. Thatcher was deeply ideological. Blair less so but still in a large part driven by convictions. Brown was deeply rooted in his convictions that came through his Presbyterian upbringing. Cameron, I think, is almost completely lacking in deep political thought. To put it in slightly wet terms: politics seems to be a convenient point on his life journey. It was easy for him to go from Eton to Oxford and then into the world of Conservative politics. Leadership came just as easily. David Davies was tipped as the next leader and then Cameron gave a speech behind closed doors which turned everything around. And with typical Cameron luck, he rose to the leadership at a time when the Labour Party had exhausted the ideas of one generation and a world economic collapse compounded their problems, meaning that a change in government was always likely to happen. I can't think of any party leader who went quite so quickly from obscurity to Number 10 via the ballot box.
His current 'brain fade' makes me think of Libya and the fall of Gaddafi. As revolutions go, it was a fairly easy one for a Prime Minister to cope with. It was easier still to head to Benghazi and take some of the credit and make some vague promises and we know how that turned out. We should only be lucky as he made that speech that he didn't praise the people of Syria or Liberia or even West Ham.
The gaff happened because I doubt if Cameron is invested in following Aston Villa with the passion of a true football fan. 'Aston Villa' is just the convenient tag that he can scrawl in that blank box whenever he has to answer the 'Favourite football team' question on his regular Q&As with the readers of Heat magazine.
Yet one question remains. Why the hell did he pick Aston Villa?
I can't get over the feeling that it's just a shrewd political calculation. If I were a politician who was particularly prone to taking the popular angle and always wanting to be seen on the side of the majority, who would I claim to support?
According to a recent Guardian article, the biggest three teams in the UK are Liverpool (15.21%), Arsenal (15.03%) and Manchester United (14.6%). However, at least two of those teams are great rivals. To support United or Liverpool would stain your character for supporters of the rival team. You might gain respect in the eyes of one 15% but you'd lost it in the eyes of another 15%. Chelsea, Tottenham, and Arsenal all have strong rivalries, as do teams such as Everton, Manchester City, and Leeds.
I suspect that a wily politician would choose a team that's well known but not so successful that it has bred much resentment. Does Aston Villa fit that profile? It has the fifth highest in terms of major honours among English clubs but hasn't won the top division since the 1980-81 season. Is it vanilla enough to be the team that breeds the most apathy in the league? I suspect it might. Choosing Aston Villa means that Cameron is only alienating the supporters of West Brom and Birmingham City in a heavily Labour supporting part of the country. Hostility towards Aston Villa doesn't reach across the country in the same way as you find deep resentments about other major teams. In political terms, it's as neutral a choice as it's possible to find in the top division. The votes he would potentially lose are votes which would probably be Labour in the first place.
Well, that's my theory. I have no way of knowing if it's real or not. I just expect the Tory party's media unit to now go into overdrive to prove that Cameron is a true Aston Villa fan. Expect to see the buttock tattoo before the end of the campaign. In the case of any other politician, I would have written that line thinking it a good joke to end. In Cameron's case, I'm not so sure it's a joke.
Showing posts with label Manchester United. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manchester United. Show all posts
Saturday, 25 April 2015
Tuesday, 13 January 2015
Is Liverpool Football Club Dying?
It's a biting cold day here on Merseyside and I'm trying to get the blood flowing in my fingertips by writing a little bit about football. Yet this isn't entirely about football. This is really about how football is reflecting a broader cultural shift.
My argument begins with John W Henry but I don't suppose it's John W Henry's fault. Nor is it the fault of any owner of a football club given the way the world is going. Yet when John W Henry first appeared before the media that evening to confirm that the sale of Liverpool Football Club had gone through, it did feel like a good man had just ridden in to rescue a much loved institution from the hands of corporate mercenaries. I thought football at Anfield would survive and, more importantly, I thought my love of football would survive.
In many respects, Henry has lived up to my expectations. My disillusionment with football has nothing to do with the way he has gone about operating Liverpool as a viable business. My disillusionment is more structural than that. It has to do with the wider world in which Liverpool operates. It has to do with shifts which are destroying sport, literature, culture, and even blogging.
I began to think about the club and its relationship with the fans after I received a thoroughly depressing email yesterday afternoon from the editor of a well known LFC fanzine to which I've occasionally contributed my 'John W Henry' cartoon strips. I haven't contributed a cartoon in a good few months for reasons which weren't entirely unrelated to the contents of the email. The email reminded me of so many blog posts I've written over the years. It was the voice of a helpless man yelling into the void. It was a plea from a man who wanted somebody to say 'carry on' when every instinct in his body is to quit. I've been there. I know the place so well, I even keep my deckchair by the precipice. Every blog post I write I think might be my last because blogs, like fanzines, are dying a slow miserable death.
When I started to blog, nearly ten years ago now, it was a new era of communications. There were some truly great little blogs springing up. Others, however, were just horrible and produced no original content. These blogs would simply surf all the other blogs and recycled material as if it were their own. I was in contact with one eminent blogger at the time who was producing some amazing content and we'd occasionally exchange emails and complain about one particular character who was continually stealing our work. This character had contacted the pair of us separately, asking if he could use some of our material (for no payment). We'd agreed like I guess so many agreed, thinking the publicity was good. Yet as he cherry-picked our content, the readership of our blogs diminished. Meanwhile, his website flourished. It's now one of the internet's larger fish, with a big staff all employed to nick material from other websites and rewrite it as their own. It's a typical content aggregator. Meanwhile most of the little blogs where great content originated have long since died out.
All of this came into focus when the email arrived. It was an odd email for the editor of a Liverpool FC fanzine to send but more poignant because of that. It was to mark the closure of one of the oldest running Manchester United fanzines. 'Red Issue' apparently ran to 295 issues over 26 years. They have apparently called it a day simply because they've become disillusioned with football. “The game we’ve been clinging onto is gone. Football now is happy-clappy families, half-and-half scarves, tourists and selfie sticks; there’s no point trying to fight that."
Apparently, things are no better in the world of the LFC fanzines. Football is catering to an audience who don't buy independently produced fanzines, which tend to be roughly put together by teams of enthusiasts. If fans want to hear the authentic voice of other football fans, the find it online through forums or blogcasts such as 'The Anfield Wrap'. The written fanzine doesn't appeal. On matchdays, they prefer to buy the glossily packaged pap penned by banal journalists who write in that glib tone that's popular among all magazines these days. It's a voice that's knowingly cheeky, adolescent and lowbrow. It's a perfect embodiment of style over substance and it usually comes with a glossy pullout wallchart.
That, I suppose, is what the game has become. As I doodled last night's cartoon, I realised that as great as Ronaldo is as a footballer, it is hard to separate his substance from his style. Football is no longer about a solid defence or even a hard working midfield. It's the football Brendan Rodgers insists is the future. It's football packaged for the people who only care about the final third of the pitch. It's football of the spectacular strikes, the genius of one man followed by a densely packed ad break. It is Ronaldo in his Ferrari, by the pool, showing off his muscles. Football is Ronaldo's perfect smile and the dreadful metrosexualism which had infected a generation of schoolboys more interested in their looks than actually playing the game.
Yet the problem with this approach to football is the same problem we had as bloggers. If one or two large sites steal the highlights from what the smaller sites produce, those smaller websites will die out. In football, the tendency is for people to support teams that contain nothing but superstars. It's the dominance of Real Madrid or Barcelona. As Liverpool steal the talent from lower clubs, so too is the talent at Liverpool looking to move to Spain.
That the fans have also moved on is no surprise. Less than half a percent of the match day fans apparently buy a fanzine. Perhaps it's just the passing of an age. The long form of the essay is itself dying out. I'm aware that when people post links to my blog, they'll often append 'long but worth the read'. Yet I don't write long essays. This is only 1400 words long. I merely write longer essays that the 300 word click-bait churned out by media pundits who are instructed to strike quickly, provocatively, and depth be damned.
From the club's point of view, a fanzine is a trivial nothing. They have their media machines to feed the public. However, you have to question your loyalty to a club when, apparently, the club doesn't even answer emails from the editor of one of their oldest fanzines. Yet Liverpool Football Club surely isn't a great institution simply because of the trophies it won. Nor is it an institution because of how well they spin the media. The fans who buy the mechanizing are buying into something they believe is authentic. But that authenticity does not originate in all the other people buying cheap plastic tat. The authenticity came from the extended family of diehard supporters who filled (and, sadly, even died on) the terraces decade upon decade. Men like John W Henry and Tom Werner might look at the balance books. They might look at attendances and keep an eye on the league position. That's what they do and have to do. I look at people I know who have supported Liverpool all their lives and are beginning to question that loyalty. I suspect that something is deeply rotten at the roots of football.
Fanzines are dying. Manchester United have just lost one of their oldest and it sounds like Liverpool might be about to lose one too. Yet the sad irony is that football clubs survive because they are supported by the kind of people who make fanzines. The heartwood of the tree is the most important and once that begins to rot, you worry about the stability of the tree. Fanzines are football's heartwood. A fanzine closing today or tomorrow might not mean much in the world of the billions of pounds floating around modern football. However, it indicates a problem at the base of the business. It is a warning about that point in the future when today's casual fans realise that the great club they support is hollow at the centre. When those fans depart to the next fad in world sport, the loyal supporters won't be around to lend their support during the difficult days.
Fanzines die today but it's the clubs that will surely die tomorrow.
My argument begins with John W Henry but I don't suppose it's John W Henry's fault. Nor is it the fault of any owner of a football club given the way the world is going. Yet when John W Henry first appeared before the media that evening to confirm that the sale of Liverpool Football Club had gone through, it did feel like a good man had just ridden in to rescue a much loved institution from the hands of corporate mercenaries. I thought football at Anfield would survive and, more importantly, I thought my love of football would survive.
In many respects, Henry has lived up to my expectations. My disillusionment with football has nothing to do with the way he has gone about operating Liverpool as a viable business. My disillusionment is more structural than that. It has to do with the wider world in which Liverpool operates. It has to do with shifts which are destroying sport, literature, culture, and even blogging.
I began to think about the club and its relationship with the fans after I received a thoroughly depressing email yesterday afternoon from the editor of a well known LFC fanzine to which I've occasionally contributed my 'John W Henry' cartoon strips. I haven't contributed a cartoon in a good few months for reasons which weren't entirely unrelated to the contents of the email. The email reminded me of so many blog posts I've written over the years. It was the voice of a helpless man yelling into the void. It was a plea from a man who wanted somebody to say 'carry on' when every instinct in his body is to quit. I've been there. I know the place so well, I even keep my deckchair by the precipice. Every blog post I write I think might be my last because blogs, like fanzines, are dying a slow miserable death.
When I started to blog, nearly ten years ago now, it was a new era of communications. There were some truly great little blogs springing up. Others, however, were just horrible and produced no original content. These blogs would simply surf all the other blogs and recycled material as if it were their own. I was in contact with one eminent blogger at the time who was producing some amazing content and we'd occasionally exchange emails and complain about one particular character who was continually stealing our work. This character had contacted the pair of us separately, asking if he could use some of our material (for no payment). We'd agreed like I guess so many agreed, thinking the publicity was good. Yet as he cherry-picked our content, the readership of our blogs diminished. Meanwhile, his website flourished. It's now one of the internet's larger fish, with a big staff all employed to nick material from other websites and rewrite it as their own. It's a typical content aggregator. Meanwhile most of the little blogs where great content originated have long since died out.
All of this came into focus when the email arrived. It was an odd email for the editor of a Liverpool FC fanzine to send but more poignant because of that. It was to mark the closure of one of the oldest running Manchester United fanzines. 'Red Issue' apparently ran to 295 issues over 26 years. They have apparently called it a day simply because they've become disillusioned with football. “The game we’ve been clinging onto is gone. Football now is happy-clappy families, half-and-half scarves, tourists and selfie sticks; there’s no point trying to fight that."
Apparently, things are no better in the world of the LFC fanzines. Football is catering to an audience who don't buy independently produced fanzines, which tend to be roughly put together by teams of enthusiasts. If fans want to hear the authentic voice of other football fans, the find it online through forums or blogcasts such as 'The Anfield Wrap'. The written fanzine doesn't appeal. On matchdays, they prefer to buy the glossily packaged pap penned by banal journalists who write in that glib tone that's popular among all magazines these days. It's a voice that's knowingly cheeky, adolescent and lowbrow. It's a perfect embodiment of style over substance and it usually comes with a glossy pullout wallchart.
That, I suppose, is what the game has become. As I doodled last night's cartoon, I realised that as great as Ronaldo is as a footballer, it is hard to separate his substance from his style. Football is no longer about a solid defence or even a hard working midfield. It's the football Brendan Rodgers insists is the future. It's football packaged for the people who only care about the final third of the pitch. It's football of the spectacular strikes, the genius of one man followed by a densely packed ad break. It is Ronaldo in his Ferrari, by the pool, showing off his muscles. Football is Ronaldo's perfect smile and the dreadful metrosexualism which had infected a generation of schoolboys more interested in their looks than actually playing the game.
Yet the problem with this approach to football is the same problem we had as bloggers. If one or two large sites steal the highlights from what the smaller sites produce, those smaller websites will die out. In football, the tendency is for people to support teams that contain nothing but superstars. It's the dominance of Real Madrid or Barcelona. As Liverpool steal the talent from lower clubs, so too is the talent at Liverpool looking to move to Spain.
That the fans have also moved on is no surprise. Less than half a percent of the match day fans apparently buy a fanzine. Perhaps it's just the passing of an age. The long form of the essay is itself dying out. I'm aware that when people post links to my blog, they'll often append 'long but worth the read'. Yet I don't write long essays. This is only 1400 words long. I merely write longer essays that the 300 word click-bait churned out by media pundits who are instructed to strike quickly, provocatively, and depth be damned.
From the club's point of view, a fanzine is a trivial nothing. They have their media machines to feed the public. However, you have to question your loyalty to a club when, apparently, the club doesn't even answer emails from the editor of one of their oldest fanzines. Yet Liverpool Football Club surely isn't a great institution simply because of the trophies it won. Nor is it an institution because of how well they spin the media. The fans who buy the mechanizing are buying into something they believe is authentic. But that authenticity does not originate in all the other people buying cheap plastic tat. The authenticity came from the extended family of diehard supporters who filled (and, sadly, even died on) the terraces decade upon decade. Men like John W Henry and Tom Werner might look at the balance books. They might look at attendances and keep an eye on the league position. That's what they do and have to do. I look at people I know who have supported Liverpool all their lives and are beginning to question that loyalty. I suspect that something is deeply rotten at the roots of football.
Fanzines are dying. Manchester United have just lost one of their oldest and it sounds like Liverpool might be about to lose one too. Yet the sad irony is that football clubs survive because they are supported by the kind of people who make fanzines. The heartwood of the tree is the most important and once that begins to rot, you worry about the stability of the tree. Fanzines are football's heartwood. A fanzine closing today or tomorrow might not mean much in the world of the billions of pounds floating around modern football. However, it indicates a problem at the base of the business. It is a warning about that point in the future when today's casual fans realise that the great club they support is hollow at the centre. When those fans depart to the next fad in world sport, the loyal supporters won't be around to lend their support during the difficult days.
Fanzines die today but it's the clubs that will surely die tomorrow.
Sunday, 14 December 2014
Are You There, John W. Henry?
I wonder if Americans understand football as much as they seem to understand the fine words of a manager who has proved himself one of the slickest prevaricators in the league. Every bad performance is case of 'bad luck' and every crazy managerial decision has a back story to match anything written by another High Princess of Unbelievable Fairytale Bullsoup, Dame Barbara Cartland.
There has to be some reason why Brendan Rodgers is still holding onto his job. Perhaps John W. Henry's attention is elsewhere. Maybe Rodgers has Henry's box set of 'Breaking Bad' and Henry just can't sack him until Rodgers returns it. Up to this year, football usually made sense. Everything about Liverpool at the moment makes absolutely no sense. Won't somebody please educate me and explain the deep underlying structure in this disorganised chaos?
I'm not too sure how much longer this can go on. For Liverpool to lose 3-0 to Manchester United would always be a low point of the season. However, to lose 3-0 to this United team demonstrates the depth of the crisis at Liverpool. I genuinely don't believe it's the players who should take the blame for what's happened. Individually there are some solid players. They work hard but too often seem to lack a system beyond an ineffective tap-it-tap-it-lose-it-to-a-proper-challenge. Even the summer buys don't look as bad as the media portray them, though what Emre Can has to do to get a game must involve dark arts because scoring one goal against Chelsea seemed to mark the end of Brendan's patience with the poor lad. Even the much scorned Mario Balotelli was Liverpool's best player (again) when he came on. He can be petulant, do crazy things and believe in his own hype, but you can also see why managers have persisted with him in the past. He genuinely looks a world class player. If he could just get rid of the petulant little tugs, his game would almost without criticism given he's playing in a system that doesn't suit his game.
What seemed to make a difference were the tactics. One team underplayed but the team selection and tactics made sense. The other team worked hard and made chances but they were continually undermined by odd decisions coming from the sideline. Taking off Moreno, one of Liverpool's best players, to put Lazar Marković in a position where he couldn't attack the back four with the penetration of last week's cameo... Did that seem like a rational thing to do? Perhaps somebody with a better understanding of football can educate me as to why we'd start the game without a proper striker. Why would you refuse to sub Joe Allen whose game is simply not what it was when he looked undroppable for a period a year or so ago? Even more baffling was replacing Adam Lallana, who despite carrying an injury, was head, shoulders and cracked ribs above every other Liverpool player in that first half.
However, Rodgers makes decisions which, even to my limited football knowledge, make about much sense as firing Rafa Benitez during the Hicks / Gillett period, when he was the one man trying to defend the club from those unscrupulous b******s and paid a price for telling the fans too much about what was going on inside the club.
Is this what football has become? A sport where good men are made to suffer for one bad season whilst coping with devious owners yet a preening peacocks with great new teeth can never seem to do wrong? When is somebody finally going to call the Emperor on his new clothes? Please, John W. Henry. Sack Rodgers. If you need a new boxset of 'Breaking Bad', I'll buy one for you myself in the New Year sales.
There has to be some reason why Brendan Rodgers is still holding onto his job. Perhaps John W. Henry's attention is elsewhere. Maybe Rodgers has Henry's box set of 'Breaking Bad' and Henry just can't sack him until Rodgers returns it. Up to this year, football usually made sense. Everything about Liverpool at the moment makes absolutely no sense. Won't somebody please educate me and explain the deep underlying structure in this disorganised chaos?
I'm not too sure how much longer this can go on. For Liverpool to lose 3-0 to Manchester United would always be a low point of the season. However, to lose 3-0 to this United team demonstrates the depth of the crisis at Liverpool. I genuinely don't believe it's the players who should take the blame for what's happened. Individually there are some solid players. They work hard but too often seem to lack a system beyond an ineffective tap-it-tap-it-lose-it-to-a-proper-challenge. Even the summer buys don't look as bad as the media portray them, though what Emre Can has to do to get a game must involve dark arts because scoring one goal against Chelsea seemed to mark the end of Brendan's patience with the poor lad. Even the much scorned Mario Balotelli was Liverpool's best player (again) when he came on. He can be petulant, do crazy things and believe in his own hype, but you can also see why managers have persisted with him in the past. He genuinely looks a world class player. If he could just get rid of the petulant little tugs, his game would almost without criticism given he's playing in a system that doesn't suit his game.
What seemed to make a difference were the tactics. One team underplayed but the team selection and tactics made sense. The other team worked hard and made chances but they were continually undermined by odd decisions coming from the sideline. Taking off Moreno, one of Liverpool's best players, to put Lazar Marković in a position where he couldn't attack the back four with the penetration of last week's cameo... Did that seem like a rational thing to do? Perhaps somebody with a better understanding of football can educate me as to why we'd start the game without a proper striker. Why would you refuse to sub Joe Allen whose game is simply not what it was when he looked undroppable for a period a year or so ago? Even more baffling was replacing Adam Lallana, who despite carrying an injury, was head, shoulders and cracked ribs above every other Liverpool player in that first half.
However, Rodgers makes decisions which, even to my limited football knowledge, make about much sense as firing Rafa Benitez during the Hicks / Gillett period, when he was the one man trying to defend the club from those unscrupulous b******s and paid a price for telling the fans too much about what was going on inside the club.
Is this what football has become? A sport where good men are made to suffer for one bad season whilst coping with devious owners yet a preening peacocks with great new teeth can never seem to do wrong? When is somebody finally going to call the Emperor on his new clothes? Please, John W. Henry. Sack Rodgers. If you need a new boxset of 'Breaking Bad', I'll buy one for you myself in the New Year sales.
Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Things Here and Elsewhere
If you click here, you can read another 'View from Civic Hall' I wrote for The Pangolin and I drew this for 'Red All Over The Land'.
Saturday, 17 August 2013
The John W. Henry Cartoon
In honour of Liverpool's first win of the season, here's the first of my John W. Henry comic strips I've drawn for the LFC fanzine, Red All Over The Land.
Friday, 2 August 2013
Tuesday, 5 June 2012
Fergie in 'Squeaky Bum Time'
Okay, so I'm still new to this stuff. Learning to draw is a lot easier than learning to animate. It might seem that I abandoned this blog for a week but that’s the time it took me to get this working. It's my fourth attempt at an animation and probably involved far too much time and energy given the end result but it's definitely a process of trial and error. I’m also spending so much time learning to get things moving on the screen, that the script is probably a little basic. So apologies if you expected high satire. There are a few parts of this I’d like to do again (the movements of the body are a little rough) but I want to move on to try something new and with a little more wit.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
The Baddams Family
Another entry in the Guardian's Gallery competition but essentially my finding more excuses to practise drawing these panel strips. Click the pic to make it bigger.
[singlepic id=135 w=600 h=450 float=center]
[singlepic id=135 w=600 h=450 float=center]
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