May 29, 2005
It was 20 years ago today...
Heysel football disaster marked.Amidst all the celebrations after Wednesday, we shouldn't forget.
Unfortunately, it seems almost everyone has.
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April 09, 2005
Heysel: the inevitable result of a brutalised era?
There has been no spectacle in the history of televised sport as compelling and atrocious as the night of 29 May 1985, when 39 Italians were killed on the terraces of the Heysel stadium, Brussels, in the murderous prelude to a European Cup final.
Caremani does not flinch from describing all those present at Heysel as victims in the sense that they were playing roles in a larger tragedy that they did and could not understand at the time. This is the perspective of the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard, who devotes a chapter in his book The Transparency of Evil to Heysel.
His analysis is uncharacteristically straightforward and clear-eyed. He says Heysel was a primitive but devastatingly effective form of 'interactive television'. He points the finger at the Thatcher government's war with the miners (which he describes as 'state terrorism'), which he says was bound to lead directly or indirectly to eruptions of violence at sporting 'pseudo-events'.
Heysel, says Baudrillard, did not happen by chance; it was the inevitable result of the desire of spectators to turn themselves into actors. The nature of the violence itself - crude, tribal and pointless - was a cultural reflex conditioned by circumstance and environment.
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March 11, 2005
Keegan quits yet again...
For the fourth [and, sayeth the punditry, the last] time Kevin Keegan has quit a manager's job.
Given that he was at a club with no money, huge debts and only one star player, who may yet leave this summer anyway, with nothing left to play for and the club unlikely to be relegated, was there any real reason for him to stay?
And in other news, the ethically challenged Bruce Grobbelaar has been fired from a coaching job for the second time this season.
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March 06, 2005
Cardiff City £30 million in debt
You can't help but wonder who on earth was dumb enough to put that much money into a football club, particularly a [no offense CC fans...] small lower division club, with no marquee players, a ramshackle stadium and [to put it mildly] a bit of a hooligan problem.
But things may all get turned around once they start to build a new stadium with associated retail developments, but for some strange reason I won't be a bit surprised if the club ends up having to transfer them to a property company... owned by the club chairman, of course...
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January 20, 2005
Thank god, a new goalkeeper...
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January 12, 2005
Oooh...
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November 14, 2004
Mourinho takes swipe at Arsenal
You have to admit it, the man speaks sense.
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September 28, 2004
Understatement, spot the.
RAFA: WE NEEDED TO PLAY MUCH BETTER
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September 07, 2004
The end of the experiment
Frustrated Ridley cuts ties at Weymouth
This is a shame, as there are few things more interesting than watching a football journalist trying to run a football team. At least Ridley knew a lot about football, a charge you wouldn't make against most of his erstwhile colleagues...
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September 04, 2004
The curse of Alan Green...
There is a school of thought that when Alan Green calls a side a 'pub team' they are guaranteed to do something unpleasant [in footballing terms...].
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August 28, 2004
Random Premiership thoughts
Since when did they start selling advertising for referee's uniforms?? WTF??
Is there some Premiership rule I don't know about that says that teams now have to have a yellow away strip? Liverpool, Charlton, Arsenal, Spurs, Southampton...?
John Terry. You make enough money: get a decent hair cut.
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August 19, 2004
Bye bye Tynecastle
BBC SPORT | Hearts reveal stadium buyer
If they'd been willing to sell a few years ago Hearts might have been able to sell the site to a supermarket: they've prevaricated too long and now that ASDA's redone their Chesser store [which admittedly is aimed towards the suburbs around Craiglochart] and Sainsbury's got a large site just 800 yards down the road, there was no other interest in the site: still, if they had any sense they'd re-develop it themselves...
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August 17, 2004
The point of Match of the Day
Telegraph | Sport | Pie in the Sky as MotD manage to miss the boat[registration required]
With so much live football available to those who can and will pay, what is the point of Match of the Day? Recorded highlights, however well presented, are now of historical interest only.
You do have to love the Daily Telegraph, you really do - where else would you find anything half as facile (and I'm excluding Private Eye as they do it on purpose...)? Many (although admittedly no-one who reads the Telegraph) can't or won't pay to watch live football. As an aside, many of us in this latter group pay (through our license fee...) to watch MotD.
Humour me if you will. Assume that there are ten Premiership games on a weekend (which, for the point of this exercise, will be deemed to include Monday night). Three of them will be absolutely god-awful. Two will show some potential but turn out to be mostly dire. Three will highlight middling/decent/good teams who may or may not decide to put in a decent performance, depending upon the phase of the moon, the number of r's in the month and whether a dead chicken has recently been waved over the centre-circle. (The latter two groups invariably overlap.) There may be one game with a good team playing well, and then there's the Arsenal game.
Now, would you willingly sit through all that, hoping for the good bits?? Of course not. Would you even sit through four or five games, hoping for he good bits? Of course not. Would you watch four or five simultaneously, to make sure you know the instant anything happens? (Of course not, that's what Radio 5 Live is for...)
Which is why you watch MotD, because some poor sod has had to suffer through all this for you, and you get to see whichever watchable bits they can find, plus quite a few more un-watchable bits they sneak in to fill the time slot. The joys. Which is why we watch recorded highlights: most of the time they're the only interesting bits anyway.
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August 13, 2004
This is the end...
Owen going to Madrid
Now this may go down in history as one of the strangest transfer sagas LFC have been involved with. Player happy, definitely staying, his choice of manager hired, negotiations suddenly in trouble, player benched, possible player swaps both decline to move, player leaves for peanuts plus someone nobody in the UK has ever heard of [yes, Senor Nunez, we mean you]. If Morientes had been included then it may have been worth it, I wonder if the clubs've tacked on a rider that Madrid won't bid for Alonso??
We knew this would be a year of changes, but didn't expect quite so many...
Friday the 13th. Not quite the Ides of March, but in truth a close bloody second.
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August 10, 2004
There's only one Danny Murphy...
BBC SPORT | Football | Charlton secure Murphy deal
Oh well... :-(
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August 09, 2004
Premiership sack race
BBC SPORT | Premiership sack race
I think the odds against Santini going are rather generous, to put it mildly...
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