March 2008 Archives

IT struck me this week thinking about global wrestling for the soul of the Olympic movement that London 2012 could achieve its aims so much easier if it just followed the Chinese model. You don't imagine President Hu Jintao worrying too much about 'inclusion': everything in China is inclusive, everything compulsory. You think you can get out of mass choreography practice with a note from your parents explaining how those rotten fumes in the air have given you a dose of the bronchiolitis? Go and copy out Mao's Little Red Book 50 times.

Inclusion is, after all, the main point of the Olympic Games in London, isn't it? Not athletic achievement or general excellence, but ensuring everyone feels inspired, in a very real sense, to overcome the hurdles and disadvantages that have been placed in their way by an uncaring world. Only now it seems just about everyone is disadvantaged in some way, including those who might seem to any sane person advantaged. Trawl through the London 2012 news stories about local children being given health and safety tutorials and new wind turbines being built and you will come across an initiative called Sporting Giants.

It might sound like something cooked up by the government to help us realise we are all champions, deep down, but in fact it has the even more stupidly literal aim of widening participation in volleyball, handball and rowing - amongst tall people. Apparently more than 50 disadvantaged tall people have already been placed in British training programmes for 2012, all thanks to Sporting Giants and its ringleader Sir Steve Redgrave, who lest we forget - like we're ever likely to get the chance - won five Olympic rowing golds. Now, aside from being mildly surprised that handball is a real sport, and an Olympic one at that - Denmark are good at it is about all you need to know - you will surely be thinking what I am thinking: something like 'what a load of cobblers'. Volleyball was, if I remember rightly, the only one of these sports on offer where I went to school and there was a reason I didn't take it up. That's right: it was played exclusively by very tall people. In fact, come to think of it, tall people played all kinds of sports. Their only trouble was making the right sort of footwear out of canoes.

All of which might have little bearing on the Olympic soul, except to clarify that it's winning that counts rather than taking part just because Sir Steve is wafting his five golds in your face. At any rate, notwithstanding the Chinese government boosting its production of beef and milk to effect a taller citizenry, Beijing seems to have more pressing concerns right now.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

DOUR, small-minded, uncharitable: we might be talking about people from Fife, only we're not. In fact, it is Fifers who were eliciting sympathy last week after the Scottish Third Division champions, East Fife, had the dampeners sprung on their title-winning celebrations last weekend.

Football supporters, of course, know the score when it comes to alcohol: they are second-class citizens who, if they drink at games, will only kick one another's heads in, as opposed to the rugby fraternity, who can tipple as they please and won't say boo to a goose. It's understood.

However, it would seem that the Falkirk constabulary, present no doubt in vast numbers at East Stirlingshire's Firs Park - where the visitors sealed their first championship in 60 years with a 3-0 win - see it as their duty to take the law to draconian new lengths.

It should come as no surprise that the plod were unable to exercise common sense when they realised certain East Fife directors in the main stand were in possession of champagne bottles, which were then "removed". The law being the law, said directors might have counselled themselves, "we should have had the plonk flown in by helicopter at full time right enough". When the game ended and the players made to pour the stuff over one another, as habit dictates, they too were gainsaid, however. According to the club the coppers even forbade swigging in the dressing-room.

East Fife come from a place called Methil so maybe the police reckoned turning a blind eye to something as innocuous as champagne would encourage offences involving harder drink, such as meths. That is, at any rate, the sort of thing the police bother about these days; not actual anti-social behaviour and certainly not proper criminals.

In my experience they're at their worst on Tayside: I still wake up in the night laughing at the time I was told, after a lengthy discussion with a fellow I took to be PC Murdoch, that the half-empty plastic softdrink container I'd been allowed to carry into a game at Tannadice would be "destroyed".

Last week also saw the SNP's Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill declare that the ban on alcohol at football grounds was not about to be lifted "because public safety has to be paramount". When Islamist terrorists attacked Glasgow Airport last year Mr MacAskill wasted no time in telling us - wrongly as it turned out - that none of them were "home-grown", the insulting implication being that if we thought for a moment they were we'd all be out looking for Muslims to batter. If the general public can't be trusted, what chance have football supporters?

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

IT is a quirk of democracy that people aren't often given the chance to vote on whether they actually want it in the first place. People power might be the least bad way of running a country but whether it's any use in making a football club tick is something the people of Kent are due to find out over the coming months.

Opinion among the thousand or so prone to regular attendance at Stonebridge Road in Northfleet, home of Blue Square Premier League outfit Ebbsfleet United - who were until last May known as Gravesend and Northfleet - was inevitably wide-ranging when it emerged in November that the club had found new owners. In an era when England's finest clubs are being sold left, right and centre to (in many cases somewhat disreputable) foreigners, it will ever be thus. Yet aside from the obvious point that Ebbsfleet aren't even in the Football League, this was a takeover with a difference. The club are now owned not by one man but by the 29,000 and counting who have each paid a £35 subscription to the web-based venture MyFootballClub, founded by 36-year-old Fulham fan Will Brooks.

The buyout was finalised last month and structures are now being put in place to allow members to vote on decisions relating to team selection and transfer activity. There is - in a very real sense - a Blairite notion of empowerment to the whole model: the idea that by giving people a sense of ownership results will improve. Meanwhile, long-term supporters of Ebbsfleet - a club the size of, say, Clydebank - who were happy following a local side never likely to trouble even the middle echelons of English football, might have to get used to a bit of progress. Or at any rate to people from all over the UK, in addition to 1500 in the States, 500 in Australia and 400 in Norway, making decisions affecting their club.

Former Coventry City and Republic of Ireland defender Liam Daish remains as head coach, with MFC backing, while members are due to elect representatives to sit on the board. The manager will be asked for his ideas on selection, tactics, transfer targets and the like, but decisions - so long as they do not jeopardise the club's stability - will ultimately be made by members. Any profits will be reinvested, as opposed to being paid out to shareholders.

Brooks, a former football journalist and advertising copywriter, knows perhaps better than most what it will take to keep MFC members engaged and interested enough to re-subscribe when their year's membership runs out. "There is no guarantee that people will re-subscribe," he admits. "If we keep getting people signing up at the rate they have been, however, then we'll be at 40,000 this time next year. If we retain half of them then there will be the money to take the club forward. It's part of our job on the website to make sure people do stay on. We're confident of being able to boost the club's marketing profile as well as revenues through gate receipts, the sale of merchandise and all the other traditional avenues."

One way of keeping the ball rolling - as at any club - will be improvements on the park. Having advanced as a club in each of the three years of Daish's management before going full-time at the start of this campaign, Ebbsfleet are still in with a shout of making the play-offs for promotion to League Two, English football's fourth division, this season: although they currently sit tenth in the table they have games in hand over most of the sides above them. Yesterday, meanwhile .... against league leaders Aldershot..

Brooks says the club had been losing around £30,000 a month before the takeover, which should give it a cash injection of around £1million from subscriptions. Key among plans for the future, meanwhile, is the building of a new stadium in the nearby Ebbsfleet Valley. Last year's name change, which brought Eurostar on board as the main sponsor, was intended to align the club with that area, where 10,000 new homes are being built in the vicinity of the new Ebbsfleet International Station - a major rail hub linking London to the south-east and France.

Conference league sides tend not to have much in the way of transfer budgets at their disposal but that may be about to change at Ebbsfleet, as Daish senses. "We've never had any money to spend, so anything that comes in will be an improvement," he says.

The democratic urge, to return the theme, is, however, clearly something which motivates Brooks. It is his conviction that football supporters are capable of making the right decisions for their club. "I would never say fans are better than managers at making decisions but I think it can be beneficial to have the fans' views taken into account," he says. Whilst he admits that the level of influence MFC members decide to grant themselves is now out of his hands - and that they may ultimately decide to revert to the more traditional model of allowing the manager free rein - he asserts that voting on team selection will be in place before the end of this season.

Now, we only need look at the example Hearts to realise a lack of managerial control over team affairs can be problematic to say the least. Daish's responses to questions on the matter suggest a degree of unease. "I pick the team and I'll continue to do that until someone tells me differently," he says. "I'm quite happy for supporters to make my job easier by going and looking at players I should be signing but I believe a majority of people on MyFootballClub won't want to pick sides as they won't feel qualified to do so."

Alex Leach writes about sport for the Gravesend Reporter. He believes that while most people who care about the club are glad to see the investment, there is widespread scepticism about the extent to which members will actually have a say. "The principle of people controlling the club via a voting system would seem open to interpretation," he says. "If the experiment is nice and transparent then everyone will be happy. If not, then who knows?" The hardest job on Brooks' hands could well be in convincing members of that transparency. Otherwise they might all just go back to playing Football Manager on their Nintendos.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

THIS column last week praised Arsene Wenger for the dignity of his climbdown after proposing the metaphorical rendition of Birmingham's Matthew Taylor to nearby Coventry after the latter's horrifying tackle on Eduardo. On Tuesday the Arsenal manager was in rapture as his young side put European champions AC Milan to the sword at the San Siro.

The 2-0 result may only have secured a quarter-final place in the Champions League, but it was arguably one of Wenger's finest moments and the surest sign yet that the team he has been rebuilding over the last couple of years is ready to upset the established order in European football. Too young, too fancy by half, the naysayers have chided, but this win will have lit quixotic touch-papers. Wenger's five-man midfield swamped Milan, with Mathieu Flamini and Cesc Fabregas getting forward whenever possible in support of the lone striker Emanuel Adebayor, and it all proved too much for a defence averaging 33 years of age. Even the sole Englishman, substitute Theo Walcott, could not be contained.

Received wisdom has it that Wenger is an arrogant and temperamental individual, to cavil about which is a bit like disparaging British women for dressing unsuitably for the climate. He is, after all, French, which may or may not explain why English football has had so much trouble taking him to its heart. That and the fact he has a master's degree in Economics.

There is something irresistibly marvellous about Wenger's story: how he left the family auto-parts business to pursue a coaching career; how he rose from being an amateur footballer to win the French title as manager of Monaco, parking his knackered Renault alongside the Porsches and Benzes at training; how he ended up at Arsenal in 1996 after having impressed the club's chairman David Dein when they first met at a game at Highbury almost a decade before.

Wenger is the sort of person writers love to write about - lucky the authorised biographer who is afforded not only a fuller appreciation of tarte tatin and how to deal with tawdry little men like Jose Mourinho, but a glimpse into the mind that has been able to spot genius in young, relative unknowns such as George Weah, Patrick Vieira, Nicolas Anelka and Thierry Henry, in many cases turn them into different players around whom he is able to build a winning side, then sell them on to other clubs where they're never quite as good as they were at Arsenal.

They may yet win nothing this season, but for the age of Wenger's side and his relatively tight budget, Arsenal are punching well above their weight. That record might tend to justify a certain arrogance.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald