The Fenland Gent

To get to the house where Clough was born I had to walk a little way out of the centre of town. As I got near the house I crossed a railway bridge. To my right beyond some allotments were, what I think, are gas and chemical plants and beyond that was the Transporter Bridge. To my right, under a slate grey sky, were, the very bleak and brooding looking Cleveland Hills.

Hard. Industrial and Northern. Exactly the sort of place I imagined Clough to come from. Except once I crossed the bridge I could no longer see the hills and the chemical plants. The houses in the streets grew a bit more genteel; some were semi detached, most had front gardens

Clough’s birthplace is a nice sized house in a pleasant side street in what seems a nice part of town.

Near Clough’s house there is the very pleasant park named Albert Park. It’s a typical municipal park, the sort that sprang up in hundreds of Victorian towns.

When he was young and played for Boro’ Clough would cut through this park to Ayersome Park. In the park they’ve built a statue of the young Clough, carrying his boots rushing to the match.

Seeing the statue was a bit spine tingly.

Random fact about the town of Middlesbrough. Number 1.

In the early C19th Middlesbrough didn’t really exist. It was just a hamlet of 4 cottages. Then a local Quaker named Joseph Pease saw that the area could be developed as a port for North Eastern coal so he bought the hamlet.

Nowhere in England grew as fast as Middlesbrough did in the C19th. Out of virtually nothing it became a massive industrial town with it’s own identity and a hell of legacy for making stuff.

It’s a kind of creativity that now seems unimaginable.

I’m not naive about the contradictions. The creativity came at a price and the exploitation was almost as destructive as capital and industry’s creativity.

But still it seems a different world.

You can see traces of that Victorian optimism and confidence in a few of the old buildings that still stand amongst the shopping centres and ring roads. Here’s a few photos. They’re from my iPhone so the quality isn’t all that.

These sort of days are my favourite sort of days.

I’m off to Middlesbrough for the day to go to the Riverside to watch Boro’ play Ipswich.

This is just an excuse for me to go to somewhere I’ve never been before and explore a bit. Like a tourist.

Last night I was out with friends and they sort of understood why I might want to go to Middlesbrough to watch the football but they were incredulous as to why I’d want to go to Middlesbrough as a tourist.

Which is a fair point I suppose. But I’ve done a bit of research and I reckon there’s plenty to see. I’ve only 4 hours (insert your own jokes here) but that should be plenty of time to see the few things I want to see.

There is every likelihood that this will be the only time in my life that I visit Middlesbrough – whatever it has to offer it’ll need to hand it over in the next 4 hours.

Disclaimer.

I have this vague notion that the reason why I blog stuff is because someone, somewhere will find something useful in the information I post, a good hotel to stay in or a nice pub to drink in and so on.

Obviously it never turns out like that. It ends up with me banging on about whatever idle thoughts I’m having.

But I quite like doing it though – I like that I can pretend that I’ve turned something as routine as going to a football march into a tiny, tiny little adventure.

All this talk of Holland and how they changed their style of play in the 2010 World Cup got me searching for footage of the 1974 World Cup Dutch team on YouTube

This clip of Brazil Holland is brilliant. The Brazilians are thugs. Fists, elbows and scything tackles are used to try to stop the Dutch & at 3:03 there is a rugby tackle. They may have won in 1970 but through the rest of the decade the Brazilians really were also-rans.

I’m not going to include England in this list because after Rob Green let the ball slip under him and the team fell to pieces I stopped paying that much attention. I don’t think I was alone in this. A few fat blokes in sports wear and a few dopey youths may have wept a few tears into their lager but beyond that I got the impression that most people thought it would have better if we hadn’t been there at all.

So I wasn’t especially disappointed with England but I was disappointed with:

1. The Dutch.

I grew up loving Dutch football. The first match I remember watching was the 1974 World Cup final and if football was a religion then names like Neeskens and Johnny Rep and Cruyff run through my imagination like Old Testament Prophets and if you think that’s a bit melodramatic – well it is but I played Subbuteo loads as a kid but I only ever played 2 teams – Holland and Ajax. I loved them.
Of course, the days of total football have passed but during the following decades there was always something about the way the Dutch played that still had echoes of total football, of flair, of “sexy” football.

Not this team though.

There are 4 reasons why this Dutch team got to the final.

1. They are well organised and were shaped to stop the opposition.
2. They have some talented players
3. They’ve been very lucky.
4 They’ve been cheating and getting away with it.

It would be daft to object to the Dutch decision to play a pressing game, with 2 holding midfielders who were there to stop the opposition playing. It may not be what you’d expect from the Dutch but when done well, such as when the Italians do it, it has merit.
It would also be daft to bemoan their immense luck – that’s the way football is and if a team gets a series of lucky decisions or bounces then it’s up to their opposition to do something about it. Brazil and Uruguay didn’t do enough to beat a lucky Dutch team but that’s hardly the fault of the Dutch.

However there is nothing daft at my getting cross at the way the Dutch cheated and how they very nearly got away with it.

And this wasn’t just cheating.

There were different dimensions to the Dutch approach to cheating.

This was Total Cheating.

Firstly – their talented players have amongst their talents their capacity to fall over and roll around on the ground like little children. Robben did it so much against Brazil that a Brazilian player stamped on him – which was quite funny but stupid and self defeating.
Van Persie has it in his game as well.

Secondly. They left the foot in. Almost all of them. Whenever they could. If there was an opponent to kick they did. Sometimes this was done with low cunning, a little stamp or a kick at the ankle. Sometimes it was a blatant chest high kung fu kick. (How the officals missed De Jong do this is beyond me).

Thirdly. There was Van Bommel He cheated his way through the Brazil game with his niggling deliberate fouls, he should have been sent off against Uruguay (in that game he also added some pathetic Rivaldo-esqe play acting to his list of crimes against the game) and he should have been sent off in the final. In fact he should have been sent off about three times in the final.

The Dutch ruined this World Cup. They stomped all over it and kicked their way through it. I’m glad they lost and I hope they go away, get rid of the current managerial staff and come back in 2012 playing football that is a joy to watch and is a joy for them to play.

2. Torres Being Injured.

Spain were really good but I don’t think they were great. Certainly not as great as the team that won the European Cup in 2008. Defensively they were excellent and the way they kept the ball and passed the ball and then did something brilliant with the ball at a key moment was lovely to watch. But sometimes I got a bit bored. Sometimes I found myself getting annoyed that they had just achieved in 20 passes what other teams could have done in 2.

Torres is more direct than his team mates. He can, and does, play the possession stuff but give him the ball anywhere near the box and his first thought is to score and I think Spain missed that. Without Torres this Spain team play some great stuff and are a good team but with Torres they may be one of the very best ever International teams. Unfortunately Torres was crocked for most of the tournament and as a result the Spanish quite often sank into their “faffing about” style of play.
He should never have cut his hair,

3. The way we talk about football in this country.

Some of the punditry in this tournament was just crap. In this country the pundits like to talk about a particular player or team and not the game as a whole. Ex players and current managers fixate on refereeing errors, which are rarely the decisive factor in deciding a game. And there is still the slight residual tone that says Johnny Foreigner is still Johnny Foreigner and huge generalizations are made – so, for example, the idea that South American’s cheat and are dirty just won’t go away even though it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny (- and don’t give me Suarez – any professional player would have done the same). This World Cup also featured a new and weird way to generalize about foreigners which was that African teams all represents each other as if Africa is one big happy rainbow continent. Patronising rot.

The lowest point was Hansen laughing at the idea of another pundit having done some research. It’s garbage. Get it off the telly and who knows maybe we’ll develop a culture of football in this country that goes beyond delighting in Stevie G giving it 110%

This article in the Scotsman makes a few of these points in a much better way.

(Actually it wasn’t all bad and I’d miss some of it if it were gone. Once I would bleat on about John Motson but I missed him in this World Cup)

4. Some Of The “Big” European Teams Being Crap.

Whilst I wasn’t overly disappointed about England going out I was disappointed that England, France and Italy were all hopeless. It’s the World Cup – there are millions of people watching. What on earth were these men doing pissing about like that.

Fools.

5. Henry Winter.

Henry Winter is a football writer for the Telegraph and I found myself disagreeing with quite a bit of the stuff he wrote and some of the stuff he tweeted. That’s OK – talking about football is all about opinions and it’s by listening to the opinions of others that you may sometimes learn something.

Henry Winter follows no one on Twitter. I take that to mean that he’s not remotely interested in the opinions of others. This perhaps helps explain why so much of what he writes is tosh.

In my opinion

6. The Ball.

I’ve been watching football for years and I don’t think I’ve seen so many mistakes by players good enough to play for their country. It must be the ball, or at least the ball at altitude. So I reckon FIFA made a mistake by choosing a new ball. It lead to too many scrappy games. I don’t think this was the only mistake FIFA made.

7. The Tournament Being In South Africa.

I reckon this was also a mistake by FIFA. I can see what FIFA were trying to do but it didn’t work. I didn’t get the sense of a nation delighting in hosting the World Cup in the way that the Germans or the Japanese and the Koreans did in past World Cups.
There are obvious reasons why but the empty seats and empty town squares suggest that FIFA overreached. It’s a shame but FIFA’s priority is to organise the best tournament it possibly can and I’m not sure that’s what they were attempting here.

It’s football. Not politics.

8. The Vuvezela.

Horrible bloody noise.
Apparently there was a debate about them.
Between who?
Between clever people and idiots.
That’s who.

9. Twitter

One of the things I like about Twitter is when you follow lots of people doing the same thing, such as being at a festival. I followed quite a few journos who were in S. Africa and a few of them did tweet about things that happened to them as they went about their day to day business which was great – but I couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t a journo. All a bit disappointing really.

10. Twitter Again (And The Opinions Of Millions)

All those opinions. Everyone seemed to have one – players and managers in the post match interview, commentators, pundits, fans, friends, strangers I’ve meet in pubs, cab drivers and all those millions of people on Twitter all banging on about what they thought about what a team or player did during one brief passing match or minute, or moment.

Oh and me as well. I was also at it.

It wore me down a bit

This isn’t a blog entry. It’s an exercise in self loathing.

Read The Ten Things I Liked Most About The World Cup Here

I thought the 2010 World Cup was an odd tournament with the best bits being easily good enough to remind me why I really like football but with the bad bits doing more than enough to remind me why I’ve been struggling to work up any enthusiasm for the game over the last season or so.

Anyway here are my 10 best bits.

1. Germany.

The opening round matches of the group stage were pretty terrible but the Germans brightened things up by thrashing Australia.

Watching this team and the efficient, moody and tedious (and narky) German side of Effenberg, Bierhoff, Kahn and Matthäus seems a distant memory.

I reckon this “new” German way of playing began in the 2002 finals when the Germans annihilated an atrocious Saudi Team 8-0. It is a direct, adventurous and at times thrilling way of playing and it really flourished in the 2006 World Cup in front of a German home crowd. The players and the fans made football feel like a big adventure and that spirit was still there in this World Cup and the way they took Australia and then England and Argentina to pieces were high points of the tournament. They should have won this World Cup. As it was they had to settle for third but the game in which they they won that, against Uruguay, was the best game of the whole tournament.

2. Uruguay.

Forlan was my player of the tournament (and was voted player of the tournament by whoever voted for these things) and Suarez looks like he may have a long career playing at the highest level. Fucile looked a proper talent as well.

There was one cloud over Uruguay’s tournament and that was the Suarez handball against Ghana. This saw him being hated by a whole continent, which is impressive, but I doubt there is a professional player who would not have done the same. The Ghanaians had 120 minutes, a penalty and a penalty shoot out to win the game but they didn’t and that’s the way football works – you need GOALS not EXCUSES.
Suarez got his punishment, and whilst it may be of no comfort for Ghana, that punishment may be one of the reasons Uruguay did not get to the final (- that and a dopey linesman and the fact Van Bommel was allowed to kick whoever he wanted).

Uruguay were not a dirty team (unlike some of their European opposition), a couple of Forlan’s goals were as good as any in the tournament and they helped make the 3/4th playoff the game that it was (which was everything the final wasn’t).

3. Argentina’s Mad Experiment.

I reckon that Argentina had the best team going into this World Cup but so as to make it fair for the rest of us the Argentine FA appointed Maradona as manager and he is no more a manager than my Mum is – though I reckon my Mum would have selected Zanetti and Cambiassio what with them both being really, really good players. It was a disaster waiting to happen and happen it did but for a while there it looked like the mad experiment might have worked.

Maradona leads a life that reads as a story and in the chapter entitled “Diego Goes to Africa” the story even has a proper story arc.

Act 1. Argentina do not win the 2006 World Cup despite having brilliant players and a decent manager and playing some brilliant football. The view is that they bottled it. The Argentine people turn to their wayward hero Maradona. He’s no manager but he’s no bottler.

Scene 2. But he really is no manager. His team scrape through the qualifying rounds and, as doubt turns to the realisation that he is the wrong man for the job, the wayward hero makes a mad team selection for the finals. This is a low point in Argentine football.

Scene 3. But wait there. What’s this? In the finals, this team, albeit with no real structure or organisation, are playing out of their skin. They look brilliant. Has the wayward hero delivered? Can Argentina win this?

Scene 4. No.
No they can’t.
Tragedy or farce? Make up your own mind but without structure or organisation of course you cannot win the World Cup. Germany make this point to Argentina in one of the most dramatic games of the 2010 World Cup. The wayward hero has failed. It’s over

Scene 5. Or is it? Maybe the wayward hero goes back to Argentina and gets the girl, or finds redemption in the eyes of a child. Or maybe there really are no happy endings in football.

Turns out quite a lot of people I know hate Maradona. I don’t. In this World Cup Argentina were fun and everything about them was very entertaining.

4. Okazaki’s goal against Denmark to make it 3-1.

Okazaki scored the goal but it was Honda who made the goal with a Cruyff like turn, a faint to shoot and a little dinked pass. There wasn’t enough of this sort of stuff in this World Cup

5.New Zealand.

I don’t care much for underdogs in the World Cup. I want to to see the best teams and the best players play each other in games that I’ll remember for years and I don’t want to see the underdogs screw that up. However New Zeland were a well organised team who utilized what little talent they had available in a way that was effective. Good for them and it would have been nice to have seen them get out of the group stage. They were the only unbeaten team at the World Cup.

7 The view from the BBC Studio window.

Just a nice view.

8. Mick McCarthy as a pundit.

Phrases like: “He spanked that“, “Something as industrial as chasing as ball“, and “He hit that with violence” littered what was effectively a sustained argument against the rules of the game delivered in a broad Yorkshire accent . McCarthy’s punditry was an absolute treat.

9. The Brazil N Korea game.

We went to the pub to watch this and the pub was packed with Brazilian kids. The atmosphere was great.

10. The lack of goal line technology.

I love mistakes, controversial decisions and terrible decisions. It all adds to it. Long may it stay the same.

Read the Ten Things I Didn’t Like About This World Cup here

Chris Kamara misses the sending off at Portsmouth of Vanden Borre. Brilliant

I’m off to watch the Ipswich/Reading match at Portman Rd today and it’s likely to be the last game that I watch this season. Here are my top ten moments of ITFC watching this season. It really is thin pickings.

1. Garvan’s performance against Cardiff.
I reckon that if Keane had built a team around Garvan’s talents then ITFC would have had a better season but he didn’t and I’ve tended up sitting through some pretty dire football. This was one of the rare games I saw where Garvan played the fooball he is capable of playing.
In this clip the initial pass that sets the winger free is by Garvan.

2. Ipswich Coventry.
Cracking game with Coventry getting an equalizer in the 96th minute and Ipswich getting the winner in the 97th. An oddly brilliant game in a dire season. (Garvan was at the heart of this Ipswich victory as well).

3. The Hot Dogs at the Hot Dog/Burger stand at the station end of Portman Rd.
They’re great and they are served in French bread. The burgers are pretty decent too. (Told you it was thin pickings)

4. Sitting with the West Brom Fans.
I’m not an Ipswich fan so for the West Brom match I sat with a West Brom supporting mate. I’m not sure the Baggies fans were on the best form that night but they did see their team get a 93rd minute equalizer (in a match West Brom dominated) and as such I found myself surrounded by loads of grown men going boing boing boing – which was ace.
(It’s not the only time I’ve been in the away end at Portman Rd. I’ve been there twice in my official capacity as a Pompey fan).

5. The Bobby Robson Commemoration.

6. Listening to a documentary about Monty Python’s Records.

I could probably do a separate “top 5 radio moments in the car on the way back to Cambridge”. These would come mostly from the local BBC station and would list the joy I feel when I hear the journalists discussing Saxmundham’s or Bungay’s results. The oddest was hearing one of my old teachers, a chap called Simon Warr, doing a local league post match interview. But the best radio moment had nothing to do with football and was after a Tuesday night match. It was a Radio 2 programme all about the Monty Python’s LPs. These are the one part of Python’s output I don’t really know. Luckily they’re all on Spotify and if I hadn’t gone to the match then I wouldn’t have “discovered” (or rather had pointed out to me) how good these records are.

(Listening to Rush quite loudly on the way home would also make this list if I was happy admitting in public to being a Rush fan)

7. Newcastle’s performance against ITFC

I have an idea of what I think is the best way for a team to play football and that way is closer to Holland circa 1974 and Arsenal circa 2004 than it is to Germany in the nineties or Chelsea over the last 4 or 5 years. But in this match Newcastle showed that playing a direct style of football based on strength and speed alone can be great to watch. Ipswich looked like little children in comparison.

8. Adnams

I can’t remember what it’s called but the Adnams’ beer they sell in the bar is lovely

9. Goalkeepers

I can’t be bothered to look up their names but the fact that ITFC have had 4 (or is it 5?) pretty good goalkeepers this season is odd. It certainly does not suggest stability – but the one thing ITFC have been good at is not conceding goals. Sort of slightly strange to witness.

10. Twitter.

Seems to me that some Ipswich fans and the local sports press have really taken to Twitter. I don’t particularly follow what happens at the club but, because I follow @Carl_Marston @twtduk @davegoods and @ITFC_live I’m pretty much on top of things. Pompey’s Twitter coverage is ok but not quite as good as this.

And that’s it. A rubbish season with only a few moments of real joy. Still it did just about distract me from the tedious, idiotic and terrible goings on at Pompey.

The sunset over Carrow Road is really rather beautiful this evening.

This part was blogged live from Carrow Road.

The game started well but the quality of Kenwyne Jones and Andy Reid is way too much for Norwich. It’s now 2-0 to Sunderland. First time I’ve seen Reid live and he is a talented player; the goal he scored was the best I’ve seen at a match for a while.

The scoreline has killed what was a good atmosphere but the large contingent of Sunderland fans are happy. (Monday night, League Cup game, so good for them).

As I’m writing this Reid has scored again. So 3-0. The fans around me are getting agitated and they are right to, if Norwich don’t start closing down on Reid this could be 6 or 7.

And there you have it. My first live blog from a football match.

And this bit was blogged post match.

It ended 4-1 to Sunderland and should have been more, (they hit the bar twice).

Good game for me, being neutral. Reid was fantastic, a real joy to watch especially as he did most of his best work in the first half right in front of where I was sitting. Carrow Rd is a nice stadium, the people who worked in the rather fancy ticket office were pleasant and treated me like a paying customer, which is not always the way football works. The fans were fun and the last 10 minutes were pretty entertaining.

The game ended with Norwich down to 9 men, and with an outfield player having to be in goal. The game was long dead by then – but the farcical ending seemed to bring the stadium to life and oles and cheers were ringing out as the match fizzled out into comedy. Good stuff really and I’m glad I went.

Quite like this series of short films on the history of football managers by Barney Ronay that the Guardian are running. The first is here from YouTube and is about Herbert Chapman and Arsene Wenger (and the links were filmed in London’s Transport Museum where I once worked).

You’ll need to go to the Guardian site for the rest of the videos I think.

The videos are to promote Barney Ronay’s book The Manager: The Absurd Ascent of the Most Important Man in Football

The linked title is for Amazon. The book is published at the end of the month.