kenny hodgart

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Think well of us, or else

This article appeared in The Herald

In my experience, if a taxi driver wishes to unburden himself of his woes – or, indeed, of some flatulence – you don’t have much choice but to listen. Occasionally there is an ex-wife to berate; more frequently, it is the cooncil. Sometimes, on happier journeys, there may be a ribald joke or a story about a footballer getting legless that you will later relate to friends.

As a matter of personal taste, I’m not much into taking a note of the driver’s badge number and relaying his opinions on Twitter, though. Partly, this is because I hold steadfast to the view that Twitter is moronic; partly, it is because I don’t work for the Stasi.

However, this is precisely what one business customer in Aberdeen very recently did. The Tweet, which told, apparently, of the driver’s less than eulogistic views on Aberdeen City Council, can no longer be traced online. One can only speculate that it was removed, perhaps with the council’s benedictions, the Tweeter having been duly thanked for his or her exemplary display of good citizenship, or something like that.

The driver? Well, he was hauled up, of course, apparently “questioned” and sent on his way with his tail between his legs. This, see, is what councils are about these days. Not content with trying to outdo one another in the number of people they employ with long, tendentious job titles containing the words “diversity”, “equalities” and “community”, they see it as their duty to spend our money getting us to think well of them.

South Lanarkshire Council last month excelled itself by threatening to bring proceedings for defamation against the membership of a community council in the area because its website linked to an article on another site entitled “South Lanarkshire Council and Scottish Coal Hand in Hand at Community LIE-aison Meeting”.

In England, stories abound of councils using anti-terrorism laws to justify spying on people to see if they let their dogs dump on the pavement or don’t separate their rubbish properly, but this monitoring of the web in search of dissent is every bit as execrable. As a demonstration of contempt for democracy, it is beyond parody.

There is an authoritarian streak in Scottish public life as rigid as the dominie’s strap. Taxi drivers should not, you may ultimately decide, be left to stand up alone for free speech. But, for now, I say to them only this: “Let rip.”


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Review: On Fire With Fergie, by Stuart Donald

This review appeared in The Herald

There are bits of this book that make me want to seek out the author and smack him about the face in the time-honoured tradition of the football casual. It is 1984 and Stuart Donald is “depressed” because his team, my team, Aberdeen, are having to make do with winning the Scottish Premier Division and the Scottish Cup after being knocked out of the European Cup Winners’ Cup at the semi-final stage. Two years later and a 16-year-old Donald is on the verge of giving up on attending matches altogether – this time the Dons have only won the two domestic Cup competitions.

The message I’m getting is that I was born too late, that my life as a fan has been a futile peregrination from nadir to nadir. I was three years old in 1983 when the impossible came to pass and Aberdeen – little Aberdeen, a “provincial” Scottish club – were confirmed as one of Europe’s top sides. I dimly remember them winning the league, for the second year running, in 1985, and that even after Alex Ferguson left to manage Manchester United in 1986 people said you could never write them off. But you can now: the trajectory over the decades has been one of steady decline.

Regrets? No, not really. Donald writes about being a football supporter almost as though it were an illness; even he, I sense, would acknowledge that winning is not the cure. No supporter of Aberdeen will ever tire of reading about the Ferguson years, 1978-86, but there is much more than a raking over of old memories about this very personal memoir.

First, Donald’s narrator, his younger self, is wide-eyed, expectant, irrational; the authentic football fan, in short. But the Aberdeen players he adores are hardly of interest at all, at least not as mortal beings – Willie Miller, lifting the Scottish Cup, “rose over Hampden, arms outstretched and solemn faced, like he was Jesus and Glasgow was Rio de Janeiro” – which means we’re spared the cod psychology of so much sports-writing. Events are filtered instead through our super-fan’s imagination in what turns out to be a coming-of-age tale in which nobody actually comes of age; Donald senior, Gordon, is almost as juvenile in his passion for football as his son. In the chapter on Ferguson’s departure, we’re told: “Little did I know it at the time but Dad was in the first few hours of a strop with Fergie that would run for the rest of his life.”

But Gordon, rather than Fergie, is the real hero of this book and the relationship between father and son, lovingly rendered, is one that will resonate with any male reader lucky enough to have had a dad cut from remotely similar cloth. Fiercely proud, he can be a comic figure at times, but there’s awe, respect and not a little fear mingled in the portrait too. The enduring image is of him refusing to be intimidated by Rangers supporters intent on running riot in Aberdeen, “defending his martyr city by refusing to hide his enormous scarf, like he thought he was a sort of Charles de Gaulle character”.

It is Gordon, indeed, who gives meaning to Aberdeen’s long struggle and sudden rise as a force to be reckoned with. Where the younger Donald sees no reason why Aberdeen can’t win everything, his dad and others of his generation have learned to be pessimistic about their team’s chances of sustained success in light of the historic might of Celtic and Rangers, who are seen as a blight on the rest of Scottish football and Scottish society. “All that matters is the intensity, the bitterness, the hatred, of their own rivalry,” says Gordon’s friend, Harry.

The perception of injustice in the way the Old Firm clubs always “steal” the best players and the best managers in Scotland has no antidote in their supporters’ conduct. Celtic supporters riot outside Pittodrie after their team is beaten, Rangers fans are observed in “an organised siege on the town and its dignity”, openly urinating on Union Street in broad daylight and frightening pensioners on buses with their sectarian songs. The young Donald quickly comes to dread all things Glaswegian and to understand his elders’ bitterness towards the Old Firm, so that he shares something “demonic” in their joy at beating the Glasgow teams and – when the Aberdeen casuals started putting the visitors forcefully in their place – admits “I was secretly proud of them”.

That was emphatically not the view of the club at the time, but fortunately they did do their bit in other ways to make supporters proud. Donald’s book brings those achievements more sharply into focus. If this review got off on an envious note, I’d also like to register my gratitude, unequivocally, for a magnificent read.


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To the seafront

This article appeared in The Herald

“You are not here,” it says above the door of the boarding house we’ve parked in front of: 38 The Promenade, Whitley Bay.

Nice view. Not the sort of place you expect nihilist sloganeering. No harm in being different, though; it’s a change from Seaview, or Whelk Chambers, or Neptune’s Crib. Maybe it works on postcards: “You are not here … would that you were,” or “You are not here … count yourself lucky,” depending on sender’s mood, level of fussiness and/or tenor of humour.

It’s a puzzling place, Whitley Bay, one of hundreds of puzzling places along Britain’s coastlines. Catch the eye of alien passers-by and there is a look that says: “What will become of us?” Rightly proud we are of the city centres the Victorians built – nearby Newcastle being no exception – but they made the seaside what it is, too, and don’t get a whole lot of credit for it.

England’s north-east has the entire range of British resort types: the genteel sleepiness of Alnmouth, Blyth (which is not very blithe at all) and once-buzzing summer hives such as Culler Coats, South Shields and Whitley Bay, whose grandeur has been fading – as grandeur is given to – for decades.

It is all very well lamenting this, of course, but anyone who claims they actually holiday, properly, at the British seaside is either a liar, a politician or both. All the traditional “miniature gaiety” (Larkin’s words) has gone. Kiss-me-quick hats? Sexist. Donkey rides? Violation of donkey rights. Punch and Judy shows? Trivialise the throwing of babies out of windows, I should think. And don’t imagine you’ll get away with having a drink outdoors.

The response of most people to the recent news that Blackpool is being considered as a Unesco world heritage site was one of amusement. Surely it had merely been earmarked for another new Tesco? But it is all too easy to dismiss a place such as Blackpool as a toilet, and the longer-term prospects of seaside towns seem to me bright, if only because of rock festivals.

Every year now, millions flock to these events, in many instances sleeping overnight in filth-ridden campsites. The music they listen to is often exceptionally dull and usually there is a lot of new age eco nonsense on the brochure. Some day soon, everyone will recognise the futility of such pursuits and run, demented, for the cliffs.


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On the question of dogs

This article appeared in The Herald

In his memoir Fast and Louche, Confessions of a Flagrant Sinner, the writer Jeremy Scott, whose father was an Arctic explorer, begins: “On Easter Sunday Father shot and ate a dog.” The heroic age of Arctic exploration being over – many people now find paying for a gym membership and going once satisfies their thirst for adventure – it is probable that few dogs perish this way these days.

In the west sentimentality for dogs, cats and even inconsequential things like rabbits is one of life’s constant tyrannies, but the Koreans, apparently, have a taste for canine flesh. Indeed, considered from a Korean point of view, the resources put into rearing dogs in other nations must seem like an enormous waste given that the blighters don’t end up on the table.

If the charity the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) is to be believed, 35% of dogs in the UK are now obese, that figure rising to 37% in Scotland. In a mere three years, according to their calculations, it could be 50%. But what should be pointed out whenever a Korean person brings these statistics up is that even if a dog is too fat to pick itself off the floor and go for a walk, it can hardly be blamed for its condition and therefore shooting it seems a bit on the harsh side.

Presumably there is a link between the weight of a dog and the weight of its owner, but the PDSA does not provide this information. What can safely be concluded, however, is that if dogs whose forebears rollicked about all day can no longer lift a leg at a lamp post, the case for obesity having to do with one’s genes starts not to look so convincing.

Another recent study suggests that a great many dogs suffer from depression. This may or may not be because they are self-conscious about their weight; my guess is that they simply find their masters odious.

In America, where dogs are presumably fatter even than Scottish ones, many owners now take their pets to special church services to give them a better chance of making it into heaven.

Christianity does not traditionally apportion animals with souls, but now it seems the modern dog, bloated by sugary snacks, must grapple with such matters as to whether salvation is to be attained by good deeds or faith alone. Little wonder that sometimes the hand that feeds is bitten.


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Schleck must be more ruthless

This article appeared in The Herald

One incident above all in this year’s Tour de France, which finished in Paris on Sunday, provoked obsessive debate among cycling fans: an alleged breach of etiquette by the ultimate winner Alberto Contador that allowed him to gain 39 seconds – the margin of his eventual victory – on his rival Andy Schleck after the latter’s chain came off in the Pyrenees.

The argument that had Contador stopped riding and waited for the Luxembourger he might not have been in the yellow jersey on the Champs-Elysees is at best a facile way of looking at a 3600km race. Schleck may have seemed like the stronger rider throughout the race – by Saturday’s final time trial stage Contador was suffering from a fever – but little has been made of the fact that his rival was not without mechanical troubles of his own during the Tour: on the cobbles of northern France in the first week, he rode 30km with a back brake rubbing against his wheel. No-one waited for him then, and indeed for all those queuing up to condemn the Spaniard, there are plenty former riders who admit observance of the convention has always been the exception rather than the rule.

In any case, it was the Team Saxo Bank rider’s own poor decision to make a big gear change when he did that caused his chain to come off, and a certain lack of astuteness has plagued the 25-year-old’s career to date. After finishing 12th in his first Tour de France, in 2008, however, he has improved year on year: this year’s gap from the now three-time winner Contador was a significant improvement on the 4 minutes 11 seconds by which the latter beat him into second last year.

Race director Christian Prudhomme has wasted no time in identifying the beginnings of a captivating new chapter in the history of big Tour rivalries. For him the pair are the new Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor, Eddy Merckx and Luis Ocana, or Bernald Hinault and Greg LeMond. “They are almost at the same level and that promises new, extraordinary duels”, he said at the weekend, throwing in the names of another pair – Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal – just in case non-aficionados weren’t paying attention.

One name he failed to mention – perhaps because he was later implicated in a doping scandal – was that of Jan Ullrich, one of the youngest Tour winners ever in 1997 but then never able to repeat the feat once Lance Armstrong started his run of seven wins in a row from 1999. But the Anquetil-Poulidor rivalry may be the one Schleck has most to worry about replicating: Anquetil won the Tour five times between 1957 and 1964; Poulidor was the eternal podium bridesmaid, coming second on three occasions and third five times.

Conceivably, Contador and Schleck might continue their rivalry for another decade: the Astana man is the senior competitor at just 27. But will their relationship ever be reversed? And will Schleck have a better chance of winning than he did this year? “This race has been so close not because Andy has been a lot better, but because I’ve been a lot worse,” was how Contador saw it on Sunday, his greatness now beyond doubt after his latest victory placed him in a select group of riders (including only himself, Anquetil, Hinault and Merckx) to have won all three Grand Tours (France, Italy and Spain) at least once, and the Tour de France at least three times.

One reason he has given for being “worse” than last year was the fact that he was on a course of antibiotics the week before the race. But Schleck also had another mitigating factor to contend with: his team-mate and brother, Frank – whose attacks in the Alps and Pyrenees would doubtless have tired Contador – crashed on the cobbles on stage three and had to retire from the race.

The younger Schleck’s own tactical naivete didn’t do him any favours, either. He failed to sense that Contador was tired and so failed to attack until the last kilometre in the first mountain stage, Morzine-Avoriaz, and could have again made time on the stage 17 Tourmalet summit finish if he had only made another charge after he and Contador went clear in front together. “He was too clever for me”, Schleck admitted that day.

Laurent Fignon, the two-time Tour winner, gave his own assessment in yesterday’s l’Equipe. “Contador manipulated Schleck by playing with him on a psychological level,” he opined. “He compensated for his bad spells with great mental strength and by bigging up their friendship. Over the course of the Tour, he succeeded in making his rival switch off.”

The message was clear: Schleck must be more ruthless. Champions tend to be capable of learning from their mistakes. It’s up to Schleck to do so now.


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On the causes of socialism

This article appeared in The Herald

The term “right-wing” is hardly used in Scotland other than as an insult these days. It is, therefore, hard to quantify what support there is for rightish sentiment, as poor right-wingers are forced to keep quiet about their political leanings. Left-wingers are, generally, much easier to identify. Often they are devil-may-care types, have great taste in music and great sex lives. They are also deeply moved by images of polar bears, see discrimination in a handful of dust and think competitive school sports days are a bad thing.

In polite society, right-wingers have a way of keeping the conversation on an even keel, often to the extent that their lack of concern for polar bears is all that gives them away. They also tend to be less fashionably attired than their left-wing friends, would rather not be pestered into giving money to causes and are appalled by people crying on television.

I was quite sure these distinctions were fundamentally sound, but some academics have thrown a spanner in the works: a new study has revealed that significant numbers of middle-aged people may be left-wing “by mistake”. Having dabbled with radical left-wing views as students, they still define themselves by those views now, even though the business of holding down a job and raising children has actually led them to be rather more conservative.

The implication is that many people hold centre-rightish views but fail to notice that their outlook has shifted, often because they associate only with others of like mind. Marx, who is thought to have been fairly left-wing, was rather taken with the idea of false consciousness, but I do not think this is what he meant. Later, an Italian fellow, Antonio Gramsci, said that for Marxists to win the political war, they would first have to win the cultural war and, at his suggestion, the left set about infiltrating campuses, the arts and the media, ingraining the idea that to be even remotely right-wing was proof of moral deficiency.

It would be uncharitable not to have a degree of sympathy for the faux left-wing middle classes: in renouncing themselves, they would probably have to forego their good taste in music and their great sex lives. Theirs, though, is the generation that spent all the money, thus requiring their children to be altogether more enterprising and self-reliant, if not actually, openly, right-wing.


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An interview with Neil Hannon

This article appeared in the magazine Metropolitan

It’s usually deemed the height of bad manners for journalists to leave their mobile phones on during interviews, but when my Blackberry starts ringing as I’m sitting down to talk to the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, it’s something of an ice-breaker. He recognises the ring tone straight away as Ann Dudley’s theme from the early-1990s TV serialisation of Jeeves and Wooster featuring Stephen Fry as PG Wodehouses’s ingenious valet. It’s Hannon’s kind of thing – there’s something Wodehousian, indeed, about the wordplay and whimsy in some of his own vignettes about oddballs and eccentrics – and it gives me the opportunity to quote to him from a recent review in the News of the World in which he was described as “the Stephen Fry of pop.”

“That’s uncalled for,” he softly demurs. “Really, he’s one of the few people that, if he died, I’d be really upset. I mean, from the celebrity order. It would be a bloody state funeral, I would have thought.” Hannon says he was delighted when he learned that Fry had “said a nice thing” on Twitter about the Duckworth Lewis Method – an album of songs entirely about cricket, which he made last year with his friend Thomas Walsh from the band Pugwash. He also met Fry once but was lost for words. “We’re talking about a man with a monster intellect,” he says.

Bashful and modest is not entirely what I expected of Hannon. The Divine Comedy released their tenth album, Bang Goes the Knighthood, earlier this summer. But the plural possessive has always been misleading: Hannon, give or take a co-composer here or a backing band there, is the Divine Comedy. And in truth he’s one of our most erudite songwriters, the purveyor of a strain of off-beat, literate pop that’s equal parts Burt Bacharach, Noel Coward, the Electric Light Orchestra and Chopin.

It’s all too clever by half for some tastes, but ever since the 1996 release of Casanova – the album which landed “chamber pop” in the charts and coincided with his adopting the dress sense of a Regency dandy – I’ve been rather in awe of him. There can be few pop artists, after all, who think it a good idea to quote from Horace or EM Forster, or to adapt the words of Dickens (“it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”), as Hannon did on a track called In and Out of Paris and London, to describe the joys of sex.

His father a Church of Ireland bishop, Hannon was raised in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, a middle class boy in a largely working class town who dreamt of pop stardom. “I was living through the golden age of British pop music, ’78-’82”, he says. After his first attempt to get the Divine Comedy up and running as an indie band foundered, he locked himself away and wrote Liberation, which, paired with its follow-up, Promenade, established him as an artist whose baroque pretensions won the praise of critics but failed to register much in terms of sales. That all changed with Casanova – all of a sudden he was selling out the Albert Hall, touring with REM and, unwittingly or otherwise, riding a post-Britpop wave. The album’s title, and the single Becoming More Like Alfie (another song about fornication), saw him cast in the role of suave womaniser by the scene’s media cheerleaders, and for a time he seemed happy to play up to a certain foppish persona.

“If you subscribe to the Adam Ant pop handbook, you can’t just do the music,” he confides. “I was down with that. I agree. I think it’s nice to have an overall kind of image; it makes everything more palatable. But I wasn’t very good at it. Basically the height of my image was to wear some nice suits and shades [lately on stage he’s been wearing a bowler hat and carrying a pipe] and kind of pretend I’d read a lot of books. In reality, I was not some kind of crazed dandy.”

More hits followed: wry, three-minute numbers like Generation Sex, a song about tabloid prurience and the death of Princess Diana, and National Express, the use of the word “arse” on which the BBC saw fit to censor on a Top of the Pops performance. By 2001, however, Hannon had tired of being arch and jaunty. He ditched the Savile Row wardrobe, lowered his eyebrow a notch and hired Radiohead’s producer Nigel Godrich to make his most introspective album to date, Regeneration. When it flopped commercially, he declared the Divine Comedy were finished, but has since delivered three more records under the name besides involving himself in collaborations with Ute Lemper and Air and writing songs for Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

In the aftermath of Regeneration, he also moved from London to Dublin, where he still lives. He has a daughter, Willow, with his ex-wife Orla, and is happy in a new relationship with the singer Cathy Davey. Lyrically, he seems to have relaxed a bit, too: Bang Goes the Knighthood is his least “conceptual” album. There’s the odd moment of anxiety or self-examination, but on the whole there is a feeling of contentment running through it, allied to a resounding rejection of the bohemian life.

Has he become a Young Fogey? “Well, I’m not young anymore. I’ll be 40 later this year. But I’m certainly no thrillseeker. In fact, I actively avoid thrills. There’s a song on the album (Down on the Street Below), the basic thrust of which is about getting to a certain age and trying to work out what you’re really after. In the second verse I’m at one of those rarefied parties (‘the clientele straight out of this month’s Vanity Fair’), and it’s about how I sort of realised a few years ago that I’d rather be at home with a cup of tea watching the football. It’s just not me at all.”

Which is not to say that he has somehow beaten a retreat from the world. The response of most songwriters to the economic upheavals of the last couple of years has been silence. Hannon, on the other hand, sat down and wrote The Complete Banker, a chirpy, music-hall composition, the very chirpiness of which belies a rather biting set of lyrics – “I’m a conscience-free, malignant cancer on society”, declares Hannon’s assumed character, a generic City high-flyer laid low by the crash. “That song is in the grand old tradition of satire, working from the inside out and inhabiting a character you’re trying to vilify,” he says. “Political songs per se are not good, I don’t think, but I wrote that one because I felt angry.”

With uncertainty gripping the markets again this summer, Hannon will be performing at the Days Off Festival at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on July 8, followed by an outdoor gig at Somerset House in London nine days later. The former will be his first show in Paris since September 2008, when he played half a set of French cover versions – including Joe le Taxi, je changerai d’avis by Francoise Hardy, and Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam – live recordings of which were released on CD2 of the limited version of Bang.

It is a gesture that might seem a little arbitrary, but in fact Hannon has been infatuated with France for years. “Definitely France, yes, but also with Belgium,” he says. “Jacques Brel always really inspired me and the look of the new album [Hannon is pictured on the cover of Bang sitting in the bath, bowler on his head] was influenced in part by Magritte.

“After the first incarnation of The Divine Comedy fell apart I retreated to my parents’ house for a while. I watched a lot of French art house films on late night television, listened to Serge Gainsbourg and generally soaked up French culture. I think those influences really informed Liberation and Promenade and when I started playing in France the press picked up on that and supported me. No one was paying much attention in the UK at the time, so without France I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep making records.”

Success came later, he insists, as an added bonus. Now, having sampled a degree of pop stardom, it is almost as though the experience taught him to renounce such reckless folly, to “plough my own furrow” as he puts it in a song on the 2006 album Victory for the Comic Muse.

“People who go on X Factor and its ilk have this total belief that if they win their lives will be transformed,” he says. “And it’s just bollocks, because for the vast majority life could effectively be worse than before. It’s sad because they want to be famous, but they haven’t worked out why or what for. They don’t care. For me, fame was just an interesting by-product, and now that the pop star thing has all but disappeared I’m just slightly notorious. I much prefer it that way.”


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A whole lot of Globish

This article appeared in The Herald

George Bernard Shaw was an early advocate of simplifying English spelling. It wasn’t one of his better ideas, but if the entries on, oh, online football message forums, say, are anything to go by, it is one that has been belatedly taken up. English, meanwhile, continues to be mangled in other ways: only this week I saw water coolers bearing the legend “water with integrity”; when using ScotRail’s services, one frequently hears the word “detrain” put over the Tannoy; and the Americans are never done bastardising things.

It is doubtless a comfort to many native English speakers that there is no real call for them to learn other languages. The Labour MP Chris Bryant was wrong to say that French is a “useless” language – certainly, schoolboys can use it to try and chat up nice-looking French girls when they are in France – but it is true that English, or at least a form of it, is the nearest thing we have to a modern universal lingua franca.

The journalist Robert McCrum has just written a book, Globish, about how English, shorn of its complexity, idioms, cultural baggage and about 648,500 words (the OED contains 650,000) has given non-native speakers a common currency in the context of international business, politics and so on.

In a whiggish sort of way, he seems to be rather taken by this, the simplification of English on the net and in the boardrooms of the world being tantamount to hobbling “elites” – in this instance those of us lucky enough to know more than 1,500 words.

The term Globish was, in fact, dreamed up two decades ago by a Frenchman, Jean-Paul Nerrier. Having noticed that non-native English speakers found it easier to do business with one another than with native speakers, he saw there was money to be made from knocking up a list of words and phrases that would serve their needs while simultaneously striking a blow against Anglophone hegemony: if people learned Globish, he reasoned, they wouldn’t need to bother learning English.

I don’t know whether “detrain” would be considered Globish, but look online (80% of websites are said to be in “some kind of English”) or lift the phone to Mastercard and you may well encounter it.

Meanwhile, the French expunge their own language of words such as “weekend” and “toaster”, and the advances of Anglophone suitors continue to be met with shrugs.

 


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Tour de France preview

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

It is a remarkable thing, but people are actually talking about the terrain, the peculiarities of the course and the relative merits of the riders ahead of the 97th Tour de France, which starts in Rotterdam on Saturday.

It’s not that controversy has been wholly absent from the run-up, but no major riders from last year’s race – aside from Franco Pellizotti, King of the Mountains in 2009 – will be missing from the Tour caravan when it converges on the Dutch port.

There is also a vague feeling of ennui after all the doping scandals that have rocked cycling in recent years. The dramas of the coming weeks may well involve ignominy, but light enough has been shone on the secrets of the peloton to guarantee that it will be as clean in 2010 as it is likely to get.

For those who take an interest in the physical geography of the Tour – and the science of the thing can be every bit as dumbfounding as viticulture – a number of things stick out about this year’s race: the first week, which winds first through the Netherlands and Belgium before entering France on July 6, will offer a taste of the Northern Classics, including some of their most treacherous terrain; there is no team time trial this year; and the climbs look harder and are likely to be more decisive relative to last year.

That first incursion on French soil a week on Tuesday finishes in Arenberg, home to the notorious cobblestones of the “Drève des Boules d’Hérin” that form part of the “Hell of the North”, as the Paris-Roubaix spring classic is known. In 2004 the Basque rider, Iban Mayo, put paid to his Tour chances there, and anyone serious about placing high in the general classification must be up front and out of trouble before crossing the “pave”.

In the Pyrenees there are, unusually, two ascents on the Col du Tourmalet, one in the mammoth 196km 16th stage to Pau – which covers the four dreaded passes nicknamed the “Circle of Death” – and then at the finish of stage 17. Other major climbs in the Alps (including four in stage 9 between Morzine and Saint Jean-de-Maurienne) have likewise been included in tribute to epic battles of yore, but still there have been complaints that too few stages actually finish on a major summit. In fact, there were more stages last year in which it was feasible that breakaway climbers could be caught in the final kilometres after a big climb.

All of which is to say, Team Sky fans, that Bradley Wiggins will be up against it as he endeavours to improve on last year’s fourth overall. The 30-year-old Londoner, who has always been fast on the flat, was a revelation in the mountains riding for Garmin-Slipstream in 2009. But he wasn’t that good: mostly it was his ability to make up time on long final descents that ensured he kept within distance of the overall podium. That and his time trialling – but this year, after the prologue, there is only one further time trial, and that in the penultimate stage by which point he could be well back.

Britian’s only pro-cycling outfit are going for broke, however. Having omitted their most prolific sprinter, Greg Henderson, from their nine-man team in favour of the seasoned Canadian domestique Michael Barry, it is clear they are basing their entire approach around supporting Wiggins.

Otherwise, the majority of Anglo-Saxon interest will revolve around one man: Lance Armstrong. Having retired after his seventh Tour win in 2005, then returned with the stated ambition of winning an eighth, he finished third overall last year. This time, riding for RadioShack, he has not enjoyed a trouble-free build-up. Besides enduring crashes and illness, he has had to fend off allegations from his former US Postal team-mate Floyd Llandis that he doped in 2002 and 2003.

Nothing has been proven, but it is not the first time Armstrong has been implicated by conspiracy theorists who discern a cover-up. The American and his former Astana team-mate Alberto Contador, Tour winner in 2007 and 2009, are also impugned in the ongoing war between the International Cycling Union (UCI) and the French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD), who allege the UCI have consistently shown favouritism towards the pair and that Astana were in the habit of keeping doping inspectors waiting for almost an hour for samples after stages. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) have just turned down an AFLD request to carry out their own targeted tests over the next three weeks, on the grounds that they have “access to confidential information from the police and customs” that they cannot share with other organisations.

At any rate, Armstrong has started to put together some form in recent weeks, with podium finishes in the Tours of Luxembourg and Switzerland. He also has a strong team around him, including Andreas Kloden, Levi Leipheimer, Chris Horner, and the winner, this month, of the Dauphin Libere, Janez Brajkovic, but let’s not forget the American is 38.

For his part, he was keen to talk up Contador’s chances last week. The two struggled to keep a lid on their strained relationship at Astana – the Spaniard declaring last year: “He [Armstrong] is a great rider but it is another thing on a personal level, where I have never had great admiration for him and I never will” – but Armstrong was all plaudits for his rival. “Alberto’s a complete rider with very few weaknesses. He climbs better [than anybody else] and he time-trials with the best,” he said.

Contador is odds-on favourite, but there are others worth keeping an eye on, not least Andy Schleck, Saxo Bank’s attack dog, the veteran Australian Cadel Evans (BMC Racing Team), Giro d’Italia winner Ivan Basso – back racing, for Liquigas, after a two-year suspension for blood doping – and Rabobank’s Denis Menchov, from whose Grand Tour checklist only a win in France is missing.

In terms of new contenders, Jurgen Van Den Broeck (Omega Pharma-Lotto), the 27-year-old Belgian who finished 15th overall in his Tour last year, and the 24-year-old Czech, Roman Kreuziger (Liquigas), who improved on 13th in 2008 with ninth in 2009, may well impose themselves.

But while Spain have been knocked off their perch as favourites in the build-up to the World Cup, it will take something seismic in the first week for Contador to suffer the same fate.


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Talking tempo with Andy Roxburgh

This article appeared in The Herald

When Barcelona beat Celtic 3-2 at Parkhead two years ago, Gordon Strachan simply couldn’t believe the visitors had made a total of 700 passes. No amount of previous experience in European campaigns or fraught encounters with their domestic rivals in Old Firm matches had prepared his side for an opponent so utterly in control, not only of possession, but of the rhythm of the game.

Inter Milan may not have not won this year’s Champions League by playing the kind of free-flowing, expressive football Barca specialise in, but in last month’s final against Bayern Munich they showed a similar kind of mastery in their ability to control the game’s rhythm and tempo. Indeed, it was such that their manager, Jose Mourinho, said afterwards that he knew the game was over when his side went 2-0 up, despite the fact that 20 minutes remained.

Forget, for a moment, the quality of players at Barcelona’s and Inter’s disposal. In Scotland it is almost an article of faith that we play fast-paced football, but rarely do we think about how our teams might dictate or vary the tempo of a match. We may wish we could do this or that differently, but the high intensity of our game is something we tend to put store in. Year on year we hear claims that signings from abroad have struggled to adjust or will take time to adjust to the pace of the game here.

It is unlikely that homegrown players are really any fitter than their team-mates from elsewhere, however. And it is with some confidence that we can state that the majority of Scottish players would find it doubly difficult to adjust to the more controlled version of the game played in Spain, say. One might even conclude that the frantic pace at which Scots have traditionally learned to play football – make a tackle, win the ball, get it away – mitigates against the nurturing of a greater technical skill level.

Andy Roxburgh, the former Scotland manager, and since 1994 UEFA Technical Director, does not believe that assessment to be entirely fair. “Coaches have to play football the best they can with what they’ve got, and in the conditions they’re given,” he says. “There are aspects which work against Scottish players, whether it’s the surfaces we play on, or the weather, or the facilities to train on. And there’s also the competitive element of a small league, which puts its own pressure on teams.”

He does believe, however, that the Scottish understanding of tempo is somewhat incomplete. “Scottish football is hectic – it’s all about power-running,” he says. “If you watch a Scottish league match, you see the ball getting played forward quickly and people racing in to pressure the ball, but that’s only part of the game. It’s not a simple equation. There are also a whole other raft of considerations – explosive power, speed of thought, the ability to pass the ball at speed. Teams like Barcelona and Arsenal are not only busy about the pitch, their passing speed is phenomenal.”

Roxburgh’s job is one that puts him in regular contact with the continent’s top coaches and managers. In anyone else, the roll-call of figures – Arsene Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson, Marcello Lippi, Juande Ramos – whose views he can quote from personal conversations might seem like name-dropping, but it’s clear that he is simply immersed in thinking about the beautiful game.

“You can talk about a game being hectic, everyone clattering in with tackles and so on, and it’s quite hard to live with that if you’re not used to it,” he adds. “But foreign players may be more used to a change-of-rhythm type of game, which is something our players find it very difficult to play against. They have you chasing all over the place.

“If you watch the top sides in Europe, transition speed is a key thing. When you’ve lost the ball, you quickly reform and immediately press the ball, but also when you’ve just won the ball back, it’s about the ability to go from defence into attack, to immediately run with the ball or find the right pass. That transition speed is not necessarily something we’re good at in Scotland – possession might change very quickly, but there’s not the same transition into a very controlled fast break. So it’s not just running, but also the speed of the ball and the speed at which you react to winning the ball – a quickness of perception, and then the ability to interpret that. I spoke to Zinedine Zidane recently about this, and he said the first place players are now fast is in their head, the ability to see situations quickly, and then to have the technical ability to implement the answer very quickly.”

It is often argued that English football has seen a “coming together” of styles in recent years, that under the influence of continental managers the traditional British way of playing – a basic 4-4-2 with wingers haring it down the flanks – has become diluted. Does this mean that the English game is less hectic or physical than it used to be? “Well, Fabio Capello has been successful with the national team in varying things; it’s not just quick-quick. And in English football generally, teams have become better at controlling the tempo. But the ball speed is phenomenal if you look at the top sides, and they’re also very good at exploiting space on the counter-attack.”

Roxburgh adds that this is something Scottish teams have never been particularly good at – “We were always at our best in Scotland playing off a tackle. A Scottish player gets a ball in a lot of space in he’s never quite sure what to do with it” – but he is not, by and large, a pessimist. Scotland can still breed and nurture gifted players, he says. Our football culture can still adapt and evolve.

“You can’t change it at the top level overnight; it has to be over a period of time. I think we do still have players with technical ability in Scotland, and we’ve always had them. I used to say when I was managing Scotland that guys like Gary McAllister and Paul McStay and Pat Nevin could easily play in the Italian league, just from a purely technical point of view. But since the Bosman ruling we’ve tended to look for that technical quality elsewhere, instead of on our own doorstep. I think now there is a swing back, but it takes time.”

Over the next four weeks, managers will pit competing football philosophies and their own tactical wits against one another on international football’s most prestigious stage; but the sides who reach the latter stages of the World Cup are likely to have certain things in common – among them the ability circulate the ball well, control the tempo of a game and attack quickly from “the depths”.

The current Scotland manager, Craig Levein, has many people’s confidence that he will make a decent fist of things with the squad available to him when qualification for the next major tournament, Euro 2012, begins later this summer. But if Scottish football does not, collectively, ask important questions about what it would rather its players were able to do and how it would like them to play, then the odds on us competing at the highest level will only lengthen.