Author: bowlingatvincent

Ageism is an NRG.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

I’ve hardly been keeping count but John Lydon appears to have been in eight zillion and twenty-three radio studios this month. Publicising that most modern of phenomenon – the second autobiography. Given the erm difficulties re confronting the perennially inflammatory Gooner, has anybody dared ask him about Second Autobio Syndrome, I wonder? That might stoke the always-spookily-close-to-the-surface fury, eh? Having failed to opt for pod-cast mode during these fests-du-bonhomie, can I ask if the hosts wore shin-pads, as well as the obligatory ear-defenders?

The two Johns – Lydon and @Harumphrys – was surely a good match; have yet to check it. But the singer-songwriter’s (huh? Well… yeh!) also appeared with Simon Mayo and on Beeb Six… and now with Polly Toynbee for The Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/15/johnny-rotten-lydon-russell-brand-revolution-vote?CMP=twt_gu .

This extraordinary volume of coverage speaks to the BIGNESS of the Lydon/Rotten phenomenon as well (of course) the nature of publishing and appetites of The Biz/Media. It’s been a punky mohair  blanket-of-a-thing; were you hiding, cringing, tutting or chortling? I smiled at the deconstruction of our friend Russell Brand, I must admit.

‘Cos when Lydon spouts – and he does, right? – everything’s an opinion. Everything’s loaded with a challenge – even when it’s a plea for common decency. It’s remarkable. I could fully understand how many might think the (let’s be honest?) faintly ludicrously still-mohicanned one a total, total bore. I tend not to. I kinda forgive him, some of it. Just possibly not that barnet.

Look the essence of Rottenness is mischief. To say he plays up to that is both an insult and insultingly obvious. But it’s also inadequate because he’s a complex man and broadly significantly too bright (and too principled? Discuss!) to merely pedal anything. I think there’s an argument, even amidst this dubious schmoozling, that John Lydon has and does and continues to stand for something. Something inevitably compromised yes, but to do with old-fashioned rightness. Whether he does that gracefully or appallingly is debatable but Lydon has always railed against wrongs.

Inevitably we only hear him get interviewed and this is very different from being in his company, having penetrated the protective mesh. For one thing, there’s no relaxing. For anybody. Lydon responds almost uniformly stridently, rarely either confining himself to the question or answering it. He holds court, being occasionally genuinely funny but mostly actually just being prickly – being Johnnie Rotten. What we are left with is chiefly the sense of the absurdity of the game.

Which is why I go back to the music, not the construct. ‘Careering’ or ‘Poptones’ or ‘Rise’ rather than the blowtorch that is his ‘honesty’. I go back there because there was – is? – a real subversive majesty to some of that stuff. The Pil appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, where Lydon/Wobble/Levene simply disembowel seventies traditions for rawk moosic is in itself sufficient to cut Johnnie Johnnie a lifetime of slack. ‘Metal Box’ is in itself one of the greatest ever slabs of anything to be committed (and I mean committed) to vinyl. Lydon was the voice of and for this revolution, in which the Pil Army waded in against banality/capitalism(!)/drudgery and our addiction to sweet melody.

It’s raining across the border
The pride of history
The same as murder
Is this living?
We’ve been careering.

It’s only Johnnie who noticed – who protested – our dumb appeasement to careering like this. He (only) railed against it, with a poet’s vision and a lion’s heart… and that unholy delivery. OK – maybe only him and (more surreally) Mark E Smith. Late seventies early eighties it was perfectly acceptable to love Cure and JD and Bunnymen and Talking Heads and Television but only he – only Pistols and then particularly Pil – challenged the fraud that is Our Working Lives. He exposed the murderous anti-love at its core; he rose against its cruel unjustness, most magnificently in ‘Metal Box’. It’s there in ‘Poptones’, where we – our souls, us the suckers, the minions, the mindlessly seduced – are being murdered in a forest to the soundtrack of vapid music.

Drive to the forest in a Japanese car
The smell of rubber on country tar
Hindsight does me no good
Standing naked in this back of the woods
The cassette played… poptones.

These two songs, both featured in that OGWT (CAREERING IS HERE – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rtwiMFDWa0 ) might be the spiritual and political source for everything brilliant from Occupy to Uncut. Or they might just be the greatest (radical?) noises ever recorded by humans. Either way they simply utterly vindicate Lydon and they changed my life.

On every level they are… whatever the next strata up from ‘seminal’ is. They are fluid and mercurial and bewitching and yet caustic – razor-like. The lyrics are sensational in every way. Levene’s guitar is from another, more atmospheric planet. In the same way that Jackson Pollock produced creepily species-enlarging chunks of expressive art, Pil did too. That famous quote (James Blood Ulmer – ‘they went right past music’) applies. Plus – is it just me? – there is something undeniably beautiful about Lydon’s poise, his control of the (quiet?) whirlwind around him. It’s inviolably, unsurpassably magnificent music.

Not the case though, that this euphoric peak was flukily ascended in some transcendentally inspired recording session. ‘Rise’ is palpably also a truly great noise, as were Pretty Vacant and God Save the Queen from the Pistols days. Sure all that is mired in doubts over fashion/puppetry/simply playing The Complex but them were reet powerful toons too.

If a guitar sound can be said to unpeel the corners of the Establishment postcard then the raw, raking racket emerging from The Pistols stacks was it. A personal favourite for me – partly because of that signature mix of moralistic fire and spittliferous attack was I Did You No Wrong. For all that Rotten, Vicious et al were postcards (or cardboard cut-outs) themselves, unsettlingly magic product was the result of the MacClaren/Lydon/Kings Road adventure.

So for all the hot air, Lydon has produced. He is bona-fide. Whether this entitles him to be a bore is another matter. Whether it’s embarrassing or inspiring to see a worryingly inflated version onstage at Glasto is clearly dependent upon whether you remain either a fan or not. Personally, despite being conversant with the ageism is an nrg debate, I find it (how shall I say?) unnecessary to go see Pil now. I can still love the old bastard.

Few music icons retain their fire in the way that Lydon appears to have  done. But anyway, that back catalogue, those performances, they are enough.

United in their clunkiness.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Those with even the faintest notion of what’s going on in the world of football will know that the ‘relationship’ between Liverpool FC and Manchester United is spicy. In fact it ain’t spicy – or certainly not in any sense aromatically attractive – it stinks; it’s an all hummin’, gut-churnin’ clusterbomb of a thing, particularly off the park. Impossible (probably) to judge whether it’s the foulest rivalry of them all but there is an unseemly kind of hatred there that even mature and otherwise intellectually-viable human specimens seem to get caught up in.

Whilst this phenomena is historically and sociologically interesting I urge that we do get past it, erm… chaps and settle for the standard, or ideally elite-level exchange of witticisms common between opposing fans the globe over. Banter. Good-natured piss-taking or street-step, up-to-the-mike dissin’ of them Manc lot fer thur shockun defence or vice-versa/whatever. Let’s face it currently both sides have plenty of scope for abusing t’other.

Right now I imagine fans from Southampton to Sunderland are taking a certain rare pleasure in the sight of Liverpool FC and Manchester United FC – traditionally the swaggeriest of the swaggerers? – holding hands and walking rather shamefacedly into the Duffer’s Disco. Both are pitifully dad-dancing, or at least only fitfully finding the groove, being united in their clunkiness. Why is that?

Liverpool fans may be secretly the more concerned of the two ailing or failing dance-troupes. Because last year their side was so revelatory… and then came up short when it seemed like ultimate and redemptive glory beckoned. Scousers will be aware of and hurt by the accusations that pressure got to Liverpool when (as United fans gleefully point out) for the first time for aeons they were right in the mix at the back end of the season. It may be stretching it to think that Gerrard’s slip and those alarming capitulations were all down to pressure but something did happen to cruelly unravel a brilliant season. Now the feeling – the fear – will be growing in Liverpool that last year was The One… and it did get away.

Following a genuinely poor start Rodgers suddenly has his work cut out. Sure there have been changes but he would be wise not to make too much of the ‘disruption’ caused by the departure of Suarez and injuries to Sturridge. Liverpool FC are competing now in the big league in terms of transfers and bulking up their squad; so no excuses. Their failure smacks of lack of confidence and drive as well as due to individual issues with personnel. In other words it’s beyond excusing. Ar Brendan has to get topside of the group before (say) Balotelli’s propensity to sulk and undermine eats away further at the previously resurgent fabric of the club.

The Mario gamble I had no problem with. In fact, because I rate him highly, I thought Rodgers might conjure the best from Balotelli. This is still possible of course but that immediate prospect of the love-him/hate-him Italian enigma scorching into cult status having scored a bagful of screamers fades with each slightly dispiriting performance. The Kop needs something to shout about and Rodgers needs to provide.

Thirty miles east and the story runs parallel. Except that last season United were awful not brilliant. And van Gaal has had no lead-in time. But again because of the resources of the club excuses will not be tolerated. Real fans – of which there are, contrary to folklore, plenty – will give the man a little time because plainly there were cavernous holes in the squad but (again) things must simply be sorted.

The Red Devils cash having been splashed extravagantly, MU’s pre-season friendlies were quietly encouraging. Then the paucity of the United defence and the relative frailty of their confidence was utterly exposed in the physical and psychological crash-bang-wallop of real matches. Like Liverpool – only more so – they had no core, no solidity. The extraordinary inability to foresee and then cover the loss of Vidic and Ferdinand – both in decline for eighteen months – proved costly as occasionally sparkling forward play was made irrelevant by inadequate defending.

It may be true that there appears to be a world shortage of central defenders but for Manchester United to continue to line up with two or even three covering players demonstrably short of MU quality is either calamitous or remarkable depending on your allegiance or otherwise to the club. Either way it is an indictment of the shambolic transfer policy at Old Trafford. Incidentally the fact that van Gaal had to summarily abandon his plans to install a back three because the players were simply unable to cope with it speaks volumes on the issue of how truly premier our Premiership stars are, does it not? As with Ingerland FC, the rank inflexibility – the unskilledness? – of Jones/Smalling and co disappointed but surely did not entirely surprise?

The signing of Di Maria has been the chink of light. He looks United alright. Rapid and in the dubious modern phrase – penetrative. Falcao (in the traditional phrase) may need a goal but can clearly play heads-up footie of a high level; the attacking ‘problem’ for van Gaal (as for Hodgson?) seems to be settling on a role for Rooney… and van Persie. Shoe-horning all four of these mega-players into the same line-up may be unwise, may be impossible. Helpful of Rooney to get himself banned then.

There are arguably more problems of team shape for United than over at Anfield. There’s still, in short, a hole where the central defensive axis should be; a hole that spreads forward alarmingly into midfield when teams really get at them. They have players in there but no enforcer, leaving them vulnerable when the opposition squares up and fights.

What the clubs share – fascinatingly – is palpably thin confidence; susceptibility to pressure. This weekend Liverpool have what would appear a straightforward home game to West Brom. United meanwhile face them other scousers – Everton – in their first tough fixture of the season. How will they be if things go against them?

Managers earn their money in moments like these. Rodgers must bully or ingratiate his way in to a group that suddenly looks and feels exposed. Van Gaal has always known he was making a new beginning. Choose your words carefully, gentlemen.

Llareggub – Peter Blake/Dylan Tomas.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Homage is such a weird one; part most personal, part public ablution of some other greater one’s feet. At whatever level it’s clearly revealing of both sides of a (typically) unbalanced relationship but when both idolised and genuflector-alike stand as considerable forces in The Arts, weightier baggage is lumped onto the laundry-cart.

It could be that the necessary cleansing routine for us ordinary folks includes the bawling-out of our deference but a) this is often from within some protected cohort of friends, family or fans and b) nobody’s listening – not really. But for a figure of stature – like Peter Blake say – to come out and darkling thrush his humble joy in the presence of some other, greater genius is well, significant.

This is not meant as some entrée to sychophancy. I can’t stand the idea that artists are better than the rest of us – although (in contradiction) the contribution real artists make is, for me, central to the quality of life itself. I mean specifically that there is likely to be meaning in the fact of the public adoration of one world-renowned artist for another. And Blake’s sincere but gobsmacking, painstaking, deliberate and normal-life-denying love for ‘Under Milk Wood’ is – when you are confronted with the scale of it – phenomenal.

Twenty-eight years and counting. Zillions of man hours that could have been spent on other ‘productive’ things. Used instead to tickle or tease out 170 (and the rest!) mini collages or water-colour scenes or pencilled portraits from some drunken Welshman’s ‘Play for Voices’. What is that all about? Obsession? Love? Vulnerability, even, to some sense of his own inadequacy? I visited Oriel y Parc in St Davids, Pembrokeshire to get a proper look – at Llaregubb.

In the sunken but airy, slightly creamily-lit gallery and…
Ok, so we get told the following; Blake’s been doing this Dylan Thomas thing since about 1985. At college (much earlier) ‘Welsh students’ had stoked his interest but the genesis of this project – or more accurately another Dylan Thomas project – came around the mid-Eighties. When that originally-proposed book of etchings was abandoned (apparently because it was a struggle in every sense) Blake continued with his Under Milk Wood obsession as a form of extra-curricular ‘hobby’.

But why this – Under Milk Wood -and why this intensity?

Knowing too little of Blake’s work to bypass these questions, I needed and was fascinated to break into the link between these two extraordinary and extraordinarily different men. So I cheated and listened to or read more of the background material provided by the gallery.

The painter/artist (in filmed interview) rather flatly describes the ‘separate me’ who is the illustrator – the non-painter, the other bloke – who makes this Milk Wood stuff of an evening, after a day’s work. He is not so much restrained as simply quiet; a quiet, serious but madly zealous fan, then? Quietly-voraciously zealous rather than madly anything, was my impression. In truth – you can’t help but calibrate along with the interview – Peter Blake is pleasingly unpretentious but a smallish, dare I say dullish personality.

Like his handwriting beneath the pictures he is orderly but yes, so undemonstrative he may appear small-hearted. Hard, then, to immediately reconcile this on-screen, quintessentially English keeper of deep secrets with the Welsh torrent himself.

The cod psychologist in anyone works overtime in situations like this. (Erm, or is that just me?) The real live artist discussing the real live art in front of us. O-kaaay. But he doesn’t get asked ‘why Thomas?’ Or ‘why Milk Wood?’ so we must either go to the work for that which confirms or denies or figures, or simply close down the detective instinct. Who needs reconciliation? Who needs explanation?

What matters is the stuff on the walls (alright) but it feels right to offer a doubts-and-all response, a personal response and this began with concern at what felt like a lack of passion; or the lack of a key into that passion. The admittedly short film provided suggested that Blake isn’t the sort to rave colourfully in conversation, even when (surely?) measuring out that which he treasures. Meaning the fear that he may be a (prosaic? Skilled but mechanical?) builder of metaphorical train sets in some spotless attic did occur.

It is not until he offers a snippet of

secret information
on the
disguised portraits… including Terry Wogan as a woman… and Billy Piper

that encouragingly fecund tones begin to bubble out, gently.

I remind myself – or perhaps Blake does? – that this is the geezer who was poptastically famous in the sixties, who dun that seminal album cover, who was all about hallucinogenic brightness… or something.

Instinctively, I go look at the Portraits. They are (ahem) quietly sensational. Beyond alive; they are life-affirming in their twinkling, mischievous, animal presence. It’s a game-changer. Evans the Death, Nogood Boyo and Mr Ogmore-Pritchard and Mr Ogmore are visceral or tragic or ghostly or wicked but what they have in common is a triumphant presence – they are with us, here and now. The doubts have gone.

On to the Dreams, which similarly float free from the shackles-that-might-have-been. They too have their own, brilliant, independent being. The pictures are no longer merely piggybacking ‘captions’ –

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsy-turvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff –

they are works of art, in fact. And if there is a language in these pictures, let it work; read it; it trills and dances – voluptuously – or it nails that sense of a bloke with all his daft and tragic dimensions. There is suddenly a flow, a dialogue, a shared exuberance between poet and illustrator… and onlooker.

In retrospect I made the error of underestimating at first contact the apparent modesty of this show against the flooding brilliance of the inspiration. I walked into Oriel y Parc and feared smallness. Foolish. Lazy and foolish. Wrongheaded too to wonder if it may have been a tactical error by the curator/gallery/artist/his ‘people’(?) to set the thing out with Illustrations of scenes and locations up front; but this I did wonder. Because these pictures are simply less immediately arresting than the Portraits and the Dreams further in to the exhibition.

Only when I had read my way into the pictures (and actually contemplated at some length the triumph that are the Portraits and many of the Dreams) did I successfully gather in the whole experience. Lesson learned.

Blake makes both his reverence for and his sheer enjoyment of Milk Wood gorgeously explicit. In the Portraits he captures a winking Mr Pritchard, a Voice who might secretly be Samuel Beckett. In the Dreams, Mrs Rose Cottage’s eldest Mae smoulders in something close to fire, nakedness and poster-paint whilst Sinbad Sailors sincerely and absurdly

…hugs his damp pillow whose secret name is Gossamer Beynon.

It’s alright for it to be a lot of fun, this art thing.
This exhibition now goes back to the owner but I am informed that a New York show is a distinct possibility. Go mad and unquietly extravagant. Go pay homage.

To hoof not thread.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Part of me wishes – honestly – that Jack Wilshere would just go out and have a few beers and smokes and be him. Then bundle his way past a protesting Woy-in-a-wight-lather (okay, cheap but doncha just kinda resent that flustering pomp thing Hodgson’s got going?) and on to absolutely dismember some half-tasty international opposition. Singlehandedly. In a tournament game. With little flip passes from the outside of his left boot. Threading DNA molecule-like clusters of wall-pass-to-the-power-of no-no-no-he can’t- YEE-EESSSSAA like some cack-handed and slightly boozy Fabregas. But then part of me wishes he would just give in to his fate as a perennial crock; put us out of our misery; break all available limbs in a rash challenge leapfrogging a bollard outside some niteklub in Prague and have done with it. We deserve that, surely – to be put out, right out, of our misery?

This billowing pro and contra emotion around Wilshere is all about… what? When did it start?

In the very beginning something about him stirred us. When he first dinked a tiddlywink of hope into our Ovaltine. When he first semi-loped (can small blokes lope?) and semi-swaggered onto the park in the white of England. We some of us sat bolt upright on the couch for the first time since the Wicker Man. We put away the bedtime drink and reached for a cool beer. In Wilshere it looked like we’d finally found one.

Not only did he have that slightly retro Landun schoolboy(ish) confidence fing abart ‘im – the whiff of catapults in playgrounds or blotting paper splatted expertly into the khazi ceiling, or fizzing past teacher’s ear, he oozed, crucially, excitingly, with what we tend to lamely call ‘culture’. He was so comfortable in possession there seemed little doubt he might actually actually express that higher thing, that football. But perhaps the binary peaks in our relationship with this phantom tightened early around the simple unpatriotic truth; that his was a Spanish Stroll, surely and this was therefore unlike us? It was likely better than us, better than the turgid precedent for tarnished gold but could it prosper in the Three Lions kit?

Plainly with Jack the potential was there to burst exhiliratingly through the fusty limits of what had been us into something better and – please god – more competitive. That caressing of the traditionally renegade sphere, that invented time and space, that fifteen yard passing range, that coolness in the clamour. He spoke of other worlds, of brave new everythings where Ingerland played – competed – with Alonso/Xabi/Schweinsteiger. Momentarily, he really did. At the end-stop of our fifty-year deathlike dearth, it just seemed possible that we might have one but experience having traumatised us, we waited quietly.

We waited and symbolically or otherwise the poor lad got crocked. No – he actually did get crocked – for a living, it seemed. Season after season. In practical terms the granddaddy Gerrard simply dropped a gear and the axis with Lampard persisted – hopelessly – and the national side of Ingerland went on being the national side of Ingerland; woeful; emasculated; subtle as an air-raid; dense as a docker’s sandwich. From before Sven to Fabio to Roy we all traversed together the saddening terrain from one cliché of a failure to the next, with all of it predicated on that raw inability to treasure the ball – to hoof not thread.

With every fibre Wilshere enacted his understanding of – his protestation against – that dumbness. But he was never there, or he never had ‘a run at it’ – injuries gnawing away at both his momentum and our belief. With every absence, with every ‘lay-off’ for the ῠber-Gooner we the resigned flopped out again with another miserable beer and more carcinogenic snacks. Rather than being the pivot at international level, the boy barely featured.  Cruel.

At Arsenal too Wilshere flitted and flattered, his Wenger-approved neatness and penchant for centrality being only sporadically key to their easy, double-clutched movement. Like his club though, there was maybe was/is something one-paced about his game; pleasing mid-gears, so much fluent transition but a lack (alack!) of murderous high-voltage. But I find myself in the past tense…
The possibilities for England still  include saviourhood/irrelevance/absence through injury. As always, availability for selection will define things.
The juicy prospect of a critical role at the rear point of a midfield diamond aired itself recently. Given that Sterling of Liverpool featured at the prow of this formation, a Gor Blimey tingle ran through some of us. We all know (and I imagine even Hodgson knows) that Jackie Boy is happiest asking questions of a central defender thirty/forty yards from goal. However, his brilliance at collecting and feeding and moving and threading with bodies around him equips him beautifully for the (deeper) Let’s Get This Baby Movin’ role too. He is good enough to not just carry the metaphorical water but also the expectation. He is close to England’s finest at (say it again) treasuring the ball and building a threat. So let him have a whole lump of possession and (with Sterling at 10 in front) the other buggers better watch out.

That the blend, the detail of this is still palpably unsorted by the England hierarchy tells us plenty, I would argue, about Hodgson’s lack of foresight. Henderson suddenly appears to be a nailed-on starter and this perhaps alleviates some of the fears around Wilshere’s lack of focus defensively-speaking. Much depends on how much width and creativity (or constriction and ‘control’) the wider two of the four diamond players are asked to provide. Sterling has already earned the right – ahead of Rooney, incidentally – to be the free spirit taunting the space immediately in front of the opposition centre-backs. Does this really mean that we have to be (as it were) culturally cautious elsewhere to allow for this luxury?

Hodgson may feel that he has to ‘protect’ our admittedly ordinary back four by opting for durability more than creativity but how ‘bout he told the defence to grow some and the essence of the diktat became about us with the ball? How ‘bout he/we stopped to count the number of defenders in his side and concluded that two of them probably don’t have to mark anybody for eighty percent of the game? And Gary Neville demanded intelligent pressing and brilliant – international level brilliant – defending with or without a shield?

In other words rather than denying expressivity in our own team by selecting surplus minders in our midfield could we not trust those who can really play to play? Huh?

Qualification for the next major tourney should be straightforward enough now following a good win in Sitzerland.  Hodgson has the slack he needs to be positive, to mould a brighter way forward.

The Spanish Era may be over but not in the sense that it remains clear (now and always) that quality of touch/vision/passing are the keys. Not how or if you ‘can tackle’. Not capacity to perspire in the name of the shirt (even.) Quality of touch and the presence and confidence to play and treasure the ball is it.

Wilshere if fit (yawn!) must play central. He could play deepish and own the team strategy. He could. He could blossom and so could the new generation. They could. But the fear remains that he simply won’t get the chance. Because his ankles seem knackered and the culture – our culture, not his – still works against him.

Feel like a tourist?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Don’t know where to start with this one. Partly because I fear trouble lies ahead and partly because it genuinely is difficult to talk about raging furies… and I’ve got one going. Expect me to scuttle past the incorrigible and the politically correct (again) into something recognisably ill-advisedly human. And try to – yaknow – gimme the benefit.

Friends and followers will know I live in Pembrokeshire. We (I mean us as a family, personally) have got bugger all in the way of gargeous property, moolah, land or any of that stuff but what we have around us (my god! Jewel of jewels!) is the coast, The Coast Path, the twinkling sea and the gannets and the smell of mackerel or gorse or honeysuckle or horse-shit or ploughed fields, or the quiet glory that is a mown meadow sprawled out with a single grass-stem in its gob, reading and baking to hay under a smiling, banjo-playing sun. We’ve got all that, always, and particularly in the last week or several we’ve had shed loads, barn loads of it; I’m pretty clear that it’s not just my heart that’s been singing.

Now our tiddly but kinda pleasantly bijou home – four foot deep in kids, animals, wholefood-in-boxes and yeh, animal hairs – is denied a sea view but the total wonder that is the high-rez surround-sound cliff-top is but a hundred and nine point six-two-five yards away. (I labour this because it’s important – key, even – to the unseasonal angst I am about to unleash). Visitors come because they know about, or know something about what Pembrokeshire is.

These visitors, or grockles as we call ‘em, when they fail to reverse into passing places, or sit stupidly and wait whilst a zillion horses clop to all intents and purposes on the spot, preventing us locals from doing actual work in Haverfordwest or Milford, these vis-i-tors do come. (These particular horses, by the way are so experienced and so dumb that you could doughnut your Audi mid-ride and they would barely register your presence, so the alleged courtesy of sitting quietly, engine purring a self-righteous countdown for the life of the planet whilst the (Alexarrnder look! Wubberly geegees!) clomp past is utter townie doe-eyed bollocks). But I do digress…

Visitors stay next door on both sides of us, because on the one hand local people (Guy, computer guy who moves into his garage conversion) cash in and on the other a genuinely delightful family from Brighton/London/all over use their own, second gaff and/or rent it out. In passing I will say that I’m more offended by the amount of money folks charge than the practice of renting out but our hamlet effort is about 40% aliens in the summer and this sometimes feels… undermining. Anyway.

Last week some folks rented Guy’s place and once or twice I said hello to a bloke maybe sixty-odd on my way for that essential snort of briny wotsits with the dog. If pushed, I might place him in ‘The Merch’ on account of his propensity to wear apparently the same white vest for three or four days running whilst having a smoke on the doorstep. Plus he had that slickish back-combed barnet-thing redolent of greasy galley-food and cheery but solitary maritime banter going on. It is arguably entirely irrelevant that this gentleman was/is undoubtedly from Northern Ireland… but it is also undoubtedly true… and so I record the fact.

For some days we had no meaningful contact until one evening Bethan my wife heard The Family Next Door ‘gassing’ in the back garden and described their exchange as being ‘like something out of a cartoon’ but this comment hung, shorn of impact, undervalued, in the air at the time. Then I had a proper conversation with this guy. He nailed me slightly as I passed with the pooch.

You gotta television picture? he asked.

Yeh, we have – and no probs. You have a problem with yours, or what?

Nothing for three days.

Aaah. Hang on (I say) the BT lot were carving up the hedge the other day and bunging up a new pole… they’ll have maybe cut the wire, the donkeys. Happened before.

He neither confirms nor denies that he’s heard this story but I’m somehow immediately certain that Guy has already explained this one to him… and that he’s unimpressed. His manner shifts slightly towards the Miserable Git About to Bore the Universe end of the market. But… I don’t want to hate this man. In fact I want to give him every chance to pull through to Genuine Bloke In a Spot-hood, me being a sucker for well, anyone who patently ain’t posh. I wallow in the possibilities for a moment, giving him every chance – after all, he isn’t posh, he doesn’t reek of privilege, he’s got a working man’s hands and face and manner – no, I don’t want to be hating him, do I? What’s he on about, really?

Me and the wife can just about manage without the telly like but it’s not been easy with the children.

Oh right.

And you got a mobile signal at all?

Nope. Nobody does mate. It’s just a fact of life. You’ll get a mobile signal up there (I point) or up there… but not here. No chance. Just the way it is. Pembrokeshire. Although I reckon there’s something quite nice about not being available when you’re home, to be honest…

Well the telly being off hasn’t been good. Okay for me and the wife but what’s the children (who are grown up, by the way) gonna do? They’ve gone home. Couldn’t stand it anymore… and what happens if there’s a fire and you’ve no mobile… the place is gonna be burnt down before you can do anything…

I’m weirdly stunned; in shock; but immediately the rage is rising. All I can actually get out before easing away is

Well if there’s a fire we’d use a landline, first up… and then we’d probably step outside and call for help or run to the neighbours, as yado…

But I’m already walking away, right? Having swiftly computed the black-and-white of what he’s said, the psychotic, poisonous essence of it… that the children have gone home because there is no telly… walking away, the fury rising yard by yard as I contemplate firstly shocking, summary violence and then calm towards something more proportionate. And then back to justifiable violence once more. Finally I settle and simply wonder what exactly it is that stops me from saying this;

Let me get this right you complete fucking moron. You and your family of unfeeling arse’oles have come to Pembrokeshire where you could walk to a sensational cliff-top in one minute, from where you could walk possibly the finest stretch of coast in Western Europe, or drop down onto a beach that cries out for games or swims or dog-walks or digging or rock-pooling or surfing or paddling out in a sit-on-top or okay just lounging in yer humming fucking vest… and your kids have gone home because there’s no telly? Is this what you’re telling me? With a straight, slightly unremarkable face? With no sense that this marks you out as right up there with the dumbest creatures that have ever walked this earth? You’ve firstly chosen – unless this is some surreal Community Service Award thing(?)- to come to the most beautiful place any sentient being could imagine and then both brain cells have triggered fall-into-a-decline mode because you can’t plonk yer idle underwashed bumholes in front of a gogglebox? In weather that might only be described as absolutely fucking magnificent? When the sun is beaming for you and the gannets are plunging and the sand-eels twirling and the bass practically coming in their pants with excitement… because the whole natural world is screaming ‘Look at me I am a wonder!!’ You, my friend are farting in the living-room and smoking on the doorstep and quite simply unaware… of the presence or value of anything. Well I’m sorry not to sympathise or support your campaign to reduce the rental fee against my friend and neighbour, Guy – that’s where you’re Neanderthal logic is going, right? – but having now reflected upon this and without needing to put this to the committee that is my family and our dog and the pigs in that field… I’ve decided we’re gonna eat you. Bethaaan! Get the knife!

This is clearly how it should have gone. It didn’t, because not only have I read stuff which argues against violence even under appalling temptation, in the main, I believe it. However, despite the need to defer to certain moral guidelines re how we might describe or appreciate other humans, I choose to show no pity in my description of this man and his dumb family, even after a day or three’s reflection.

Yes I know not we’re all reliant or addicted to something and that for many that thing is the telefuckingvision. I find it difficult, though, to claw back from the brink of homicide in this case. To have actually gone home (or in the parents case allowed their offspring to make that choice) is, as we say in Wales, ‘beyond’. They are thus anti-life and their obvious ignorance – traceable to lower life-chances as it may certainly be – offends me so significantly that I react… so. I wanted to cut him up and maybe not eat him but spread him out there for the gulls and the ravens. That feeling remains.

There are bigger questions here, on education and sensitivity and reliance and lack of opportunity as well as issues (of course) around my own levels of tolerance. But in the short term I am left with raw anger at the crushing, crushing stupidity of this ‘ordinary’ family. And sure, sadness that this is where we, the world, the people, the nation, some of us are at – mindless and dead to the most wonderful of things.

Kate Bush – I hear him.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Focus could be the word.

I hear him / before I go to sleep / and focus on the day that’s been.

It’s a delicious opening. An invitation to travel as well as to what – indulge? Or just be thankful?

But who is your ‘him’? Who is that you love so deeply that they are where you go… with or without Kate in that perfectly expressed moment? Probably it’s a lover – no? Whether it’s a lament depends of course on which emotions-from-now you copy and paste upon it.

I think for me that first line – so personal, so all of us? – has always been about my dad, who died at 44. I hear a lament in that tenderness but I hope you don’t, I hope you just luxuriate in its richness. Unquestionably, there’s both that ‘great toon’ thing and some seductively universal draw going on there; undeniably too there’s elite level execution of the intention – of the song.

The Man with the Child in his Eyes is classic Bush in the sense that it pulses and soars beautifully, it’s whole, it transcends pop. It’s intelligent and powerfully received (as meaningful) even if the meaning ain’t always clear. In the opening lines there’s movement – often there is some shift – back into the now. But if I was a real student of Bush maybe I’d be working up a hypothesis around the theme of… yeh, focus.

Look at a slack handful of the videos and the extraordinary (and quite dating?) backlighting or faerie-fuzziness thing. In Man with the Child that dance/tease(?)/express through-the-veil combo is striking. Firstly the dance is erm, sitting down only and yet lithe and wavelike, birdlike, swelling with movement and comfort or the search for comfort. Second the lighting is either about the softness of the song or about Bush’s insecurity about body image, depending on how you read the Kate-as-essentially vulnerable line. Or (most likely) it is some accommodation of the two wildly conflicting notions.

How do we view this? Why is there stuff in the way?

We need to be clear (ha!) that Bush was (yes!) steeped in English middle-class-ness but leaping, arcing, dancing radically free through what she thought of (thinks of) as her art. Her performances and the performances for video and television were extraordinarily brave. That which was seen was not only central, inseparable from the song and expressive in a way that was utterly exposing (but) it was the only way in which this artist could or apparently would work.

Most of us hadn’t seen dance like that or been pre-schooled in any sense for the lit-conversant art-school hand-grenades that this doctor’s daughter was about to fling surreally round the gaff. In short she was unique – obviously so, defiantly so – from the first moment.

Announcing herself with Wuthering Heights was some move. God I’ve love to speak to Dave Gilmour (who allegedly kinda bankrolled her early doors) about the early Kate and how she got there, how she was. Did she reek of prodigy or genius or precious wee thing? How much power did she wield? Were those around her vipers or were they in awe? Who plumped for all those leotards, all that sexuality and what boundaries were discussed? Was it actually all awash with drastically necessary drug-use or was Kate cruising in a kind of searing creative pomp?

I hope it’s not unseemly that I’m fascinated by what on a kindof visceral level fuelled the dance. I’m perfectly willing to believe that she was simply a majestic talent. But later, in that unhinged Babooshka vid, for example, was she simply unaware? I know there’s always some character-acting going on (and three hundred-weight of i-rony) but I worry that there was some self-hatred in there too.

Maybe all these things are more my problem than hers. Maybe the desperation I fear simply isn’t there. Perhaps the fact that Kate was instantly precious was gathered in, presumed and anticipated even by her and that frisson around how far she might go, how out there, became essential to the whole project. Maybe I’m out of order bringing us anywhere near this idea that things point to a level of vulnerability – predictable, girlie vulnerability – that Bush had to fight a way through.

Again let’s be clear; I personally rate and revere Kate Bush for her fearlessness and her ambition. Back then she was profoundly original, gem-like in the banal matrix of duff ‘bands’ and duffer cheesy-pop fluff. She took a huge lungful of something wonderful, loaded up with Klimt-like sensual expressionism and hurled her soul out into the audience. Zillions of us got just enough of it to hold her aloft.

But this becomes too breathy. Let’s grab a hold of something else – politics.

Breathing / breathing my mother in / breathing…

Bush would accept, I reckon, that she is broadly un-political, placing herself in the broader-than-that category we might term Artist. However I imagine there are folks out there who adore her for the revelatory nature of her Woman-as-Artisthood.
Breathing may be a seminal work of feminism as well as another fabulously intriguing product. Go listen.

An end-of-the-world crypto-dirge meets some extravagant, challenging and in truth maybe only partly successful homage to… Mother(s). It’s a line in the sand, yet another exposure and also a triumph of plain weirdness. We may not know whether to wallow in its sexiness, join some protest group, get back to art school or possibly campaign to get every art school in the nation closed down. How are we supposed to view this when the questions are so e-nor-mous and the milieu so colourful and new?

The Gift is surely that it pays to experience this stuff. Of course some of it don’t work – this is the edge. It’s also personal and pure and recklessly giving. So no wonder.

There’s no safe way for me to spill out the feeling that in the 70’s/80’s Kate Bush was a beautiful, beautiful specimen of womanhood who did something liberatingly special. That dancing/those toons/those lyrics. Loaded with something fantastical and real.

Tonight, I wonder where is she now?

She was (I think) an art or dance-school philosopher – and yes there is a wee criticism in there – out there somewhere bold, somewhere only hers. I’ve heard folks lump her in with Bowie as some un-Englishly cracked actor and I can see why… but why compare? Kate Bush was incomparable. I hope her return to the stage does nothing to diminish that.

I can see today that she was, in the midst of the masturbatory blandness of the pre-punk or un-punk music scene, gorgeously unique, bewitching, luminous and credible. How will we view her tomorrow?

For Rod.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 1 Comment

For Rod.
I was asked to say something today and I thought ‘Yeh. What a privilege. However difficult, however worryingly humungus the likelihood that I may just breakdown and weep, pitifully – yeh.  For Rod.’

Then word came I may well be speaking after Bob Marshall-Andrews.
It made me think of Glastonbury… and I’m (say) Ed Sheeran. And I find out I’m headlining – on at midnight – immediately after David Bowie.

I’m suddenly very conscious that I’m Ed Sheeran, the slightly porky, slightly ginger, arguably faux-Irishman with 98 student-friendly numbers all of which are about my own small melancholy. Whilst he’s got ‘Jean Genie’.

Rodney, I’ll do my best.

Before I go any further one wee indulgence if I may? I’m deeply aware that I speak for my family (and maybe your family too?) when I say that Druidstone has been like the Maypole around which we have danced for forty years. I am so thankful for that – we are so thankful for that – I/we, all of us offer our love and continued support to Nick, Angus, Beth and co. especially now… but always. And yes, always, we will dance.

I have some notes to help me out. Scribbled with a bookmakers pen on the beaches or cliff-tops around Dingle, County Kerry. Most of which felt appropriate.

Let’s start with a question, for the Question Master, Jes Walton – my brother:
If I am David Byrne – what are facts?
‘Facts are useless in emergencies.’ Not that this is an emergency – it’s just a recognition.

Personally, I recognise facts as fraud, preferring (like Rod) that which is fascinating or subversive or downright hilarious. I reckon – and I reckon Rod reckoned – often there’s more truth in the style points racked up around something than in what’s actually happened. In other words I/we rate defiance… and wit… and unutterable, irredeemable cobblers.
(Stay with me people.)

So here’s some facts I choose to recognise today. You can grade them and maybe waft them under your nose for the whiff of profundity or alcohol.

Fact one; I learned about longbows from Rod Bell.

Fact two; in about 1638, Rod plus two English tourists took out the entire French nation but for some geezer called Serge le Poisson and ‘is missus – Marie Antoi-fishnet – at either Agincourt or Pont-Abraham Services, from a distance of either 600 yards or six foot two… or both… with their longbows.

Fact three; Strega is a maaaaarvellous but deadly potion.

Fact four; Rod Bell could talk, wonderfully, about architecture, wine, the Aztecs, leg-spin, boat-building and the use of chocolate in South American cuisine.

Interesting aside-fact-thing; Rod could talk but he could not sing. He scuttled around (didn’t he?) humming, on a mission.
Real Proper But Gawd’elpus Massively Flawed By Consumption of Poteen-fact; Rod sang – as did Stuart Thomas – one mad, blessed night in about 1980, when a barbershop singing group, recently peeled from a laughably tiny minibus originating in County Cork, pulled into The Dru.

We luxuriated (I think that’s the word) in the rocket-fuelled rainbow that is the craic for ten hours solid – make that liquid – and it may have been the most fabulous day of my life. Except, naturally for the advent of my children, my wedding day and the mother-in-law’s birthdays.

Rod was at my elbow – then and often. Not conducting, just being absolutely in it; sharing, chipping in, sprinkling anecdotal gems.

Fact several; shortly after this Rod and six blokes with beards invaded Ireland on a land-yacht shouting something about mackerel pate and accidentally winning gold on a beach near Kinsale.

Unfact one; (gently gently…) Rod’s father was a political agent for the Conservative Party. But this is mercifully counter-balanced by the fact that Rod, John the Ghost and Dash were all, at one stage, Sandinistas.
These are the things I have learned and here is my concluding fact. Factoid. Observation. Tribute…

I experienced Slivovic, Black Bush and Tequilla-Pop kindof evenings with Rod Bell. I learned about the origins of man, music and the internal combustion engine. I/we played fiercely magnificent darts on windblown nights in February. Often Rod got in a real groove; one had that great style points. For me, he’s still in that groove because some things – daft, quiet, remarkable things – do go right past life.

Cheers mate.

The best team won.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

The best team won, in the smiliest, sassiest, feelgoodiest cup of them all. Perfect – just what you want.

In the oven-warm afterglow of a final that was better than many (but hardly wedding-cake, aesthetically) our reviewing and re-living can be surely generally positive? We’ve enjoyed generally good, sometimes exceptional Group Stages leading to the delicious South American/European Giants confrontations in the last four. Though those semi’s see-sawed between the extraordinary (Haaysus Kreeeeest! Bra-zeeeeell!!) and the arch-typical staccato tease and counter-thrust, the simple rightness of the German victory over a relatively dull Argentina in last night’s showpiece surely artfully plonks the cherry.

But… before looking again at the meaning of all of this, I’ll hand over to the Morrissey lookalike sitting alongside me on the sofa. Because it’s time for my regular dance with miserablism, moralism and emphatic, quiff-swaying pomp.

This has unquestionably been a vibrant, colourful and sometimes brilliant World Cup but not one that allows me to go with the Best Thing Since Sliced Wotsists – not quite. Too many things cut across that notion – key examples include the measured negativism of Holland and Argentina; the low standard of the host country; the continuing drift towards anarchy on the park.

Let’s start with that last one… and get it out the way.

#Brazil2014 confirmed or reaffirmed the sad truth that ‘top’ players are now spending too much of the 90 minutes seeking advantage rather than playing. The Holy Grail is apparently that moment where you find yourself on the edge of the box – or in it – horny with the possibility that you may by some means draw a foul. The actual goal as an objective has receded into the distance, so that only the drawing of contact counts. That grieves me. For so many players to be rejecting the idea that the most life-affirming surge of adrenalin might best be employed to jink gleefully but cleanly past the defender before lashing the ball wholeheartedly into the roof of the net saddens me. However retro or unrealistic it may sound, I just wish they’d dismiss the very existence of the defenders, dart instinctively towards the red zone and smash the fucking thing. Like they used to.

I know how corny it sounds. Robben and Muller aren’t Malcolm MacDonald, eh? The game’s moved on. But I know I ain’t the only one thinking this drift towards games made ungovernable by the cynicism and the cheating of players is BIG and BAD.

Muller and Robben may be word-class footballers but they are both evidently shit sportsmen. They habitually cheat through shameless exaggeration or pure invention of that most contemporary (and cancerous?) of concepts – contact. Forgive me but cheating is unacceptable. Not regrettable, or inconvenient, or inevitable – unacceptable. You don’t have to be weirdly conservative to believe honesty is important in sport or anywhere else. Honesty is important – it’s a central part of that which makes life – and games – work.

I regret but don’t accept either the need to go on the defensive about that value; I’ve written many times about the need for a powerful step back towards that idealism. I still think a Gentlemanly Conduct law could be redrafted to bundle football back into line on this.

In Brazil (as in the Prem/La Liga etc etc) with a zillion witnesses we saw the following on countless occasions; an international player either chugging purposefully or bursting athletically towards the danger area with but a single thought in his head – to throw himself shamelessly as soon as a defender’s leg was stretched. I’ve heard it said that there is some skill in ‘drawing’ fouls this way but c’mon, really? What could be cheaper or more crushingly anti-sport? Players are plainly unable to restrain this appalling instinct so it falls on those who govern the game to sort this. (Surely this is do-able, given the 86 cameras on every significant event in world football?) For me, until it is dealt with there will be no relief from the drift away from full-on, life-affirming sport – from pure footie.

The second major disappointment was the unsurprising but still dispiriting funk that was the host team. Brazil have been ordinary for arguably 20 years – certainly they have rarely showed the expectant world the kind of football for which they are famed – but there was no avoiding the near-cataclysmic sense of well… despair that engulfed the host nation and provided an unwelcome mega-story for the tournament. SEVEN – ONE.

Let’s face it Brazil had a head-start in terms of goodwill, the buzz around this World Cup being manifestly sexier and buzzier than yer average quadrennial gathering. I can’t imagine a neutral anywhere not wanting to see some festival football from these hosts or at the very least downright expectant of an upful shindig given the context of beachy, beautiful, footie-daft people. Brazil (the nation – or nations?) was well up for it; the team, however, was simply inadequate.

I confess to some minor toldyouso-ism following an early-tournament twitter prediction that either #Ned or #Ger might stick 5 past the hosts given their diabolical defending. When it came to pass in such dramatic, nay traumatic style I felt angry rather than vindicated – angry for the arrogance of Luiz and Marcello and the rest, who have plainly been dreaming they are no. 10’s for aeons and have finally been found out for simply not bothering to work at their real jobs.

Scolari is of course culpable in this, for imagining a clubby, fatherly relationship would see his poorly selected, frankly inept crew through. Ultimately an obviously consistently negligent group got what they deserved, if somewhat cruelly. Is it strangely gratifying that our press aren’t the one’s screaming Show Ponies?

The generally more predictable inertia around the other semi (and mercifully, just a few of the other ‘knockout’ matches) was simply tournament football in action. Argentina were unlovely but successful against a Dutch side who did a whole lot more but without that finding, expressing or urgently seeking the freedom to unleash. Van Gaal enhanced his reputation (you do wonder if this was as important to him as the progress of his team, especially given the theatrics around That Goalkeeping Change?) but chose not to liberate up his side. Whilst the majority of coaches would do the same in the circumstances that ole idealist in me wants to believe he would have been better advised to have bawled ‘we’re plainly better than these Argies – go get ‘em, boys!’ before instructing Schneider and co to flood forward into the box. Except I suppose, that if they’d gone in there, they’d only be thinking of that one thing… contact.

So let’s remember the other stuff; the freshness and brilliance of James Rodrigues maybe, the sheer quality of the German’s teamwork, the gusto and the brilliant defiance of the Americans. Mini-glories from Iran and Costa Rica, gallantry and ecstasy, as well as local heartbreak or overly growed-up caution. If we can ever separate the obscenity of all that money spent on our indulgences – and perhaps we are simply wrong to do so? – this was a really good World Cup.

Immediate reaction? This is a crisis.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Unwise and unnecessary to be too gentle on the lads, just because of their alleged general impressionable yoofness. Don’t forget these people are massively over-remunerated athletes who live in a competitive environment but cannot seem to accept that challenge. Not when it gets big on them.

I’m not typically a hard-hearted sort but it feels like they’ve scudded beyond the range of our sympathy and even if some of them are decent enough blokes they’ve been so Sunday-League hapless we’re entitled to unsheathe the knives.

Lots of what we have seen from England was barely international standard; there may be cultural reasons for that or structural reasons or sociological but that’s where we’re at. I rate the main protagonists (ha! Like they affected anything!) here; the view being of the tournament rather just tonight’s dismal showing. I think I may have been generous.

Hart 5 – unconvincing. Probably our best but this again reflects very low standards elsewhere.

Johnson 5 – ordinary and rarely exposed entirely – which was something of a pleasant surprise.

Cahill 4 – ordinary and occasionally totally duff. Distribution often woeful.

Jagielka 4 – ordinary and rarely looked comfortable. Is actually quickish and reasonably dynamic if poor on the ball. Not here (except the poor on the ball bit). Nerves or just found out?

Baines 5 – offered a glimpse for about fifteen minutes against Uruguay. Otherwise a pale shadow.

Sterling 6 – nearly fabulous against Italy. The one player who can be reasonably satisfied with what he offered. He lifted us but then was garbage against Uruguay, mysteriously.

Gerrard 5 – a significant disappointment again. Could certainly play on in that Liverpool role – deep-lying, strolling about. Hope he doesn’t.

Henderson 5 – okaaaayish because we don’t expect fireworks… but (doing the easy job, remember) barely made any impact.

Rooney 5 – not a total embarrassment. Just ordinary but missed key chances.

Barkley – huge distance away from fulfilling Golden Boy status. Genuinely hope he gets there but this was not the start he would have wanted. Even given that his brief is a high-risk zone, he was disturbingly wasteful.

Lallana 5 – needed to show us something – that fluency, that movement, that composure. Didn’t, really.

Wilshere 4 – may have been unlucky with injuries but may have been lucky to get a further opportunity; which he manifestly didn’t take. We thought he may be the answer 3 years ago; his cuteness and skills seemed set to bring in some new, cultured, contemporary age. May be now that his chance has gone.

Wellbeck 4 – poor and probably the closest to full-on embarrassing at times.

Sturridge 5 – good against Italy. Disappeared, pretty much, against Uruguay, diabolical against Costa Rica.

Conclusions?

Need a book or at least another blog but clearly the manager was neither motivational nor tactically bright enough. But the players can’t hide behind that. They appeared marginally less petrified than in South Africa, marginally less rooted but still that central soul-crushingly painful fear of the natural gamble ate away. Only Sterling flew, looking and no doubt feeling in his element. And then he – the real Raheem – was gone again, against Uruguay.

So how do we get players – even ordinary players – to (in that famous phrase) express themselves?

Firstly you choose a superb manager; an inspirational sort, ideally. Then that manager chooses a dynamic blend of characters for his squad. Guys who will turn up, more often than not, when those big questions are asked. (If we again have to stick the label Mentally Strong on this then so be it). Then you work with them and sort a team pattern. If players are not up to being flexible or are not pretty damn comfortable in international fixtures – specifically, if they don’t look comfortable on the ball – you get shot of them. That ease over the pig’s bladder in Munich or Rio or Belfast is a NON-NEGOTIABLE. Wherever they play, positionally. Plainly we still lack that.

Sure there are questions about training methods and percentages of foreign players and all that but dumb maths says we should have enough bodies to gather a competitive international side. (If, for example, Uruguay can.)

I’m not going anywhere near those arguments right now. I’m just going to say that against ordinary opposition we looked (can I use the word literally, please, please?) Hopeless. And therefore I revert to the word crisis; in the knowledge that we have some young talent but a whole load of work to do. If Jones and Smalling (for example) are the future then yeh – a whole load of work.

So… what have we learned about England?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Maybe not much. Because we can only speculate about what might have happened should Roy have been moved to (say) bench Rooney and Wellbeck for Uruguay. Or Gerrard/Henderson – or whoever. Because the wry, chortle-inducing truth is we’re into the lurid, ridiculous and (c’mon!) essential business of this or any World Cup now: that sanctuary or graveyard or AA Meeting equivalent for all of us lovers and/or bitter haters and bawlers who just wanna say something about England. Because England are out (already) and that’s what we’re left with.

We may love to have known how an out-and-out 4-3-3 might have gone. Or how a yet more decisive lurch into free-form, youthful expressionism could be – dispensing with the presumed anchor that was the Liverpool skipper and casting off instead around flashers and dribblers and marauders like Barkley and Sterling, with Wilshere and A.N. Other manning the hospital ship. We may.

At the more caustic end of the spectrum we may be muttering darkly about the criminal, soul-draining absence of Cole, Terry and Carroll, whose presence might have a) stemmed the right-sided success of Italy in particular and b) dug the ribs of artsy pretention wherever it threatened to indulge – for or against.
There are a zillion great arguments for why England have failed again, many of them accepting of and possibly even grateful for the mild resurgence (or emergence) of some occasionally brightish attacking football. But what do we need to take note of? Is there cultural stuff as well as specific technogubbins around individuals or areas of the park? What can we learn – even if we can’t agree on it – what have we learned?

A few thoughts, vaguely geographically put.
• It might seem weird to start here in the context of arguably bigger issues elsewhere but… our goalies. Hart – himself another fumble away from outright membership of Dodgy Keepers Inc – is almost certainly the best of a mediocre bunch. That briskly faux confidence worries me and more importantly surely undermines any defenders quaking out front. He made minor errors again early in last night’s game, including patting away two corners like a reluctant twelve-year-old schoolboy press-ganged between the satchels. I freely admit he is not our biggest problem but he is a crack in the foundation.
The bigger question, of course is where are our ‘keepers? Answer – not in the Premier League.
• Full-backs. Twelve months ago Baines was a genuinely fine modern full-back. Bossing games with his energy and craft; ‘bombing on’ with almost undeniable vim. This season’s form has gently dipped and in this tournament we’ve seen just a wee hint of his best. (I’m thinking last night, either side of the Rooney goal – something worth noting, perhaps?) Then, without entirely blossoming, Baines was finally rolling; available, incisive, as opposed to nervy and literally withdrawn.
The chronic failure to defend ‘his’ flank during the Italy game was a strategic as well as an individual flaw. Ar Leighton might certainly have done more but Rooney let him down and so did Hodgson, for failing to direct remedial action or changes.
I confess to being mildly interested in the argument (however) that A Cole Esquire might have barked more successfully for support when Pirlo and co were unpicking England down his side of the park. Tight call as to whether Cole should have remained in the squad – with Baines then a candidate for either an advanced wing-back slot (possibly even in front of Cole against Italy?) – or the full-back position proper. Lastly on this it seems only sensible now to play Luke Shaw in the final game, does it not?
• Johnson. Has been something and nothing – which may not be as bad as forecast. In defence not exactly routed but crucially last night sloppy and slow to close down Cavani pre that peach of a chip for Suarez’s first, headed goal. In attack, where he can look positively Brazilian when the flow is with him, he was broadly unable to find the necessary pass or the surge to take himself clear. Johnson was medium pallid rather than petrified and diabolical –as he had been in South Africa.
• The two holding players disappointed. Henderson was in there to buzz about and cover but also to hit committed passes forward – to thread things. He did little of this, being if not an irrelevance, a minor minor player. Gerrard we needed – bigtime. We needed him to find both that easy control from deeper positions but also the whiff of, the threat of Roy of the Rovers that changes things. The cruel errors aside, he has significantly underperformed again, being simply too marginal when he – being one of few who could inspire in this way – had to grab a hold and shake his side to action.
Stevie G has been wonderful but not, in my view, for England; he’s been solid or so busy playing within himself that he forgot to really play. Ludicrous to criticise, perhaps but he will know (and he has said) his England career is a six out of ten not the eight he should easily have achieved. And now that career I think is over.
• The three who played behind Sturridge agin Uruguay will all feel England’s pain acutely. Wellbeck because he was relentlessly awful – presumably simply nervous beyond the ability to co-ordinate – Sterling because he fluffed too many passes and never broke the shackles and Rooney because he should have added to his single goal. Sterling, having been hearteningly in his pomp against Italy, has shown enough to get more opportunities; the other two… I’m not so sure.
Rooney was visible, without being eye-catching. In a first half that was largely (let’s be honest) barely of international standard we wondered if he was heading for a dispiritingly early seat back on the bench. Later he did improve as England had a goodish spell and he scored that goal/removed that monkey. But without being the calamity that his previous tilts at major championships have been (after his international infancy, as it were) this has been another low-key affair; Wazza has shown the world little. The brutalist view might be that this is the moment to move on from not just Gerrard and Lampard – the obvious oldies – but from Rooney too.
Wellbeck did reasonably well against Italy but we know he is no striker. He can sprint beyond folks but rarely does it. Mostly, he looks reasonably comfortable at elite level and yet… it doesn’t quite happen. When Townsend is back competing for a place and if the vogue turns towards Lallana and Barkley, he may be struggling.
• Sturridge was a tad isolated and a tad wasteful against Uruguay but he is our best genuine striker, no question. Much sharper and more dynamic than Lambert and yes, clearly ahead of Rooney. Like Rooney last night there were times when he failed to provide that crucial option for the midfield – he was too static, too markable – but he is a threat, always.
So much for the Director’s Notes. Where does this leave England?

If that sense of a significant cultural shift towards pacier, brighter football moves you – Italy game? Sterling? – you will no doubt draw away from the harsher view. Unless you think Hodgson’s hand was forced only by media pressure towards a gambol with the kids? In which case vent thy spleen fully once the final fling is flung, when rounder conclusions may be drawn on Roy’s inadequacies. (My guess is Hodgson caved in to the pro-Sterling/pro Liverpool style barrage rather than genuinely experienced some conversion to energetic and open play. He remains a decent enough but irretrievably conservative type unsuited and unable to energise the individuals and thereby pursue a dynamic game). But that’s just me; a former twinkling genius in the Duncan McKenzie mode – the sort of bloke, in fact, who never got picked by conservative gaffers.

Look if you played centre-back or full-back at whatever level, them thar Suarez-related cock-ups will define your fury. If you hate Liverpool, you’ll be pleased the whole thing blew up so sharpish. Whatever way we approach this, England are out after two games, which is apparently historically bad (as opposed to the hysterically bad under Capello last time out). And yet…

Seems to me there is no longer (simply) a monumental skills deficit and therefore no (single) imperative to embrace finesse. Improve skill, sure, but finding the blend of characters and the tactical framework to do the job has been as key as anything in Brazil. Part of this is about developing guys who are tough enough to stay clear-headed when the squeeze is on. Are enough of the doughty stoppers and the precious youngsters gifted enough and committed enough and up to it in knockout football – in World Cup games? Weigh up the football of it and the human. This is the work of the top manager and it’s demanding work.

We knew before England went out there that this side was ordinary and the defence weak at this level. We couldn’t be sure how the rarer talents might go. Put simply it was mixed – heinous errors, unsurprisingly punished, with an occasional burst of English footie. Two central disappointments for me personally? 1. The teams that beat us (so far) aren’t special, by any means. 2. My concerns about the gaffer largely confirmed.

England remain a side that tends to lack fortitude – yes! Mental strength! – as well as technical/tactical intelligence. They need a truly great and ideally visionary manager. Expect little to change under Hodgson and no major improvements until somehow… the pool of talent deepens.