Rio Ferdinand

Understandings.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Is it just me that thinks that Rio – in his admittedly low-voltage kindofaway – appears to want to give off both something of the guru and the gangsta? (And I ask this in the awareness of the danger of slapping stereotype upon racial slight or slackness here.) He’s got a certain power in that low-geared, almost ambling style of his that diffuses itself into ‘projects’, some of which conflict. Is he, for example (or is anyone else, mind?) really an anti-gun/knife, pro pro-empowerment-thru-education, unfaithful metro-renaissance man with what appear to be occasional flashes of lefty intelligence, who identifies with black urban music and an oppressed worldview… and produces/approves films/music with a worryingly confrontational dynamic? If so how does that all work? And why am I wondering that?

It’s partly, of course, because I’m a white geezer who really doesn’t understand or know the territory – I accept that. But it’s also because we are, right now, by his centrality to the England selection fiasco, pretty much bound to wonder at his integrity – maybe at his level of maturity (even) – given the undeniably childish way this Hodgson/Terry/Fergie/Rio/Qatari/Spinal Rehabgate thing is unravelling. In brief the er… highlights;

1. In a previous life, Hodgson foolishly chooses Terry over Ferdinand

2. Rio sulks but continues to radiate that god’s-gift sweeperaciousness whilst nonchalantly easing round the park…

3. so as to make ultimate re-selection an inevitability.

4. When the call comes, Rio snubs…

5. And Hodgson shrugs…

6. And ‘statements’ come out…

7. And they all sound like cobblers. Embarrassing cobblers.

8. Essentially, Rio has apparently done everything to exact a kind of revenge upon Hodgson, the FA, and the universe. It’s garbage – all of it. Sez yer average fan.

Now might be the time to say that Rio Ferdinand – even allowing for the debilitating injuries (particularly, I imagine the back injuries) – has been close to the best centre-back England has ever produced. If he had remained free from pain and boundlessly agile, I think he may even have been England’s finest player all round. He is one of few who can stop people playing whilst caressing the ball about the place. He can head, tackle, read the game at a level far higher than most; then he brings in that composure, that comfort on the ball and his peers – let’s say like John Terry – look quite quite ordinary by comparison. Fit, he would have been the best centre-half in the world, as Ferguson said he might be on the day he signed for United. For emphasis, I want to repeat that he’s been pretty damn close to the best centre-half in the world whilst playing hurt for years; he’s that good.

But now this. The potential for yahboosuckery has been there for some time. Without being party to the (entirely normal, actually?) clique-making proclivities amongst the Engerland FC elite, it’s been clear that Mardy-Bums lurk. Ferdinand – wow, I realise that this is such a contentious thing to write about him – appears to be an individual (amongst several – black and/or white) – with a chip on his shoulder. Therefore unlikely to accept the vagaries of a new gaffer’s policy on this or that should it clash heavily with his own needs and indeed self-image. I imagine Ferdinand can’t stand any of Hodgson, Cole or Terry and these feelings are likely reciprocated. What is a wee bit tiresome here is the fact of Engerland’s Need.

Egos. Mountainous and cavernous and generally all-round large and hairy interveneth. And it clangs against our – the punter, the fan’s – sense of what is good and right about Playing For Your Country, however dodgily old-fashioned (or not?) that concept may be. A big lump of the universe thinks that playing footie for his/her country really is an Ultimate. Yanking up those formerly Umbro socks, trotting out to wave at an openly weeping cluster of friends near the Royal Box, ritualistically parping mucous out the nozzy as the ref counts down the seconds. Ultimate. So what… what’s happened to those standards, those understandings? Given that Rio is still, currently, our best centre-back?

There is an assumption that few modern players appreciate the import of these classically traditional/tribal feelings in the way that Stanley Matthews or even Stanley Bowles did. That yes or no from the England Boss meant a huge amount. Dads did blub; mums did flutter with a pride that wasn’t all nationalistic mania; it contained or described even a kind of love. It may well still be out there, in fact; it’s just that we feel overwhelmingly that such is the absurd and cosseted and raw self-important nature of the average Premiership beast that these things typically just don’t matter like they did. (Whether this in itself is a phenomenon to regret or to celebrate, by the way, is another fascinating, quasi-political matter – but one for another time.) Certainly the modern elite pro’ doesn’t need to care about much; he is either rich or obscenely rich; there are no worries about security or profile; when every need is so luxuriously taken care of a certain smugness surely sets in. (Generally.)

Footballers are not known for their sensitivity or intelligence; though the game has changed, the prevalence of gambolling youff or over-coiffured senior – now with ‘people’ – has persisted. Rio is not one of the Grade A posers, being quietly cool rather than fawningly fashion-conscious. He’s grown out of a fair amount, moving further towards that genuinely exclusive club where players who are held as true exemplars draw the phrase ” Aww, he’s a player he is”, (or similar) from supporters home and away. He’s class and that’s been obvious for ten or twelve years. But this England thing ain’t classy.

Certain papers will have a field day with the trip to the Middle East to spice up coverage of the England game. Considering the allegedly stringent requirements of Ferdinand’s Injury Management Schedule, Rio could hardly have been taking the piss more effectively had he first run to Qatar, then scored the winner for Montenegro on the way back. That’s a YAH-BOO-SUCKS of a fairly exaggerated quality. It’s hard not to equate this with a turning his back on England, as some unfortunately very public tit-for-tat effort unworthy of too much of our attention. But gor blimey look how much attention it’s gonna get…

How we wish to calibrate this on the rebellionometer will naturally depend on where we sit on the issue of nationalistic fervour-as-community spirit(-ometer.) Whilst not understanding (and certainly not knowing in grim detail) half the nuances of half the Fergiesque mind-games that have been played out in the last few days, I do understand the following concept, arisen like a bedraggled moggy where there should be three lions; disappointment.

 

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The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct; part 3.

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So now we have the Para’s – is it okay to call them the Para’s? And more genuinely stirring and even remarkable sporting stuff to satiate that proper-joy-meets-nationalist-frisson-thing. A summer of smiling madly and wondering if that’s okay? C’mon… that reading and thinking stuff is … okay… but… give it a rest! BOUNCE – bounce and clap!! TOGETHER!

For life is simple and sport is good and gold is only gold. And these Olympics – these sports – can surely be enjoyed disproportionately in the moment but returned to the real life context promptly. Contemplate later if you will the alarming inconsistencies twixt ‘glory’ and gory chauvinism/materialism midst the nose-bagging or could it be appeasement of our most bovine requirements – for fast-food highlights watchable from our Pringle-caked sofas? If you will. Afterwards. Or not – I’m a fan, me.

So either relax or have fraught moments of post-modernist angst before keeping it simple. And celebrating – continuing to celebrate – on the Brit-funded, Brit-led and spun carousel. Every day there will be a fabulous and a winning smile as our athletes respond magnificently to the world-beating support in the world-class venues. Every day somebody will talk inspiringly modestly and generously of their achievement being rooted in their team, in us. And this sits somewhere rather proudly between heart-warming and outright wonderful. If you just believe.

The thread of my Conduct posts – which I promise I am returning to – has been woven crudely around this un 21st Century wholesomeness; the nature of TeamsGB being so contingent upon, so lifted by some recognition of (dare I use the word communal?) good stuff we might call spirit. It’s something surprisingly pure, this thing – their connection with, even their reliance upon a real and conceptual us. Time after time we have seen athletes rise to the challenge, even when the pressures seem absurdly charged agin them; they’ve performed; they’ve thrived. And this is one of the key things that separates them from (for example) England footballers.

There could be a specific charge here, that Team England FC have perennially wilted when their Olympic equivalents came around. I am more interested in broader charges against the game of football – or allegedly top level football – and its indulged protagonists.

My first two posts on this subject spilt their six-pack of beery moralistic banter around dubious ‘comparisons’ between the Olympic brilliance/properpeople combo as epitomised by Katherine Grainger/Mo Farrah/Justaboutallofthem,actually and (say) Rio Ferdinand. Following that massacre, in which it was scientifically proven that too many footballers really are wankers with the sensitivity of er… oil tankers, I begin to reconstruct the football model in a Danny Boyle-like pastorale. Because diving, screaming abuse at the ref and owning 5 rolexes is well out of order, right? So.

In this anarchic tumble I will again try to key you in to football’s anti-gems – the dollops of doo in the matrix – suggestive or reflective of wider issues. If this seems obtuse, my counter would be simply that I reckon fans feel like this, in spluttering, impassioned bulletpoints. It’s personal. Stuff that gets my wick then, includes;

  • Strikers seeking only to ‘draw’ a foul, or better still a penalty whilst bearing down on goal –or, increasingly, anywhere on the goddam pitch. The traditionally burning, gurning desire of the No. 9 to smash one in the top corner now being gone.
  • Pretending to be religious whilst crossing the threshold of the park.
  • Endless and often aggressive abuse of the referee/officials.
  • Petty appealing for ‘everything’, including everything that patently isn’t ‘ours.’
  • Diving and acting and the generally associated trying to get a fellow pro (hah!) sent off.
  • Note to above; in particular the diabolical histrionics around any slight contact with the face. I’ve seen Scotty Parker – otherwise a proper throwback to good ole English terrierhood – feign acid attack to his fizzog; unforgivable. And diabolically prevalent.
  • That general crassness around money.
  • That general crassness around seemingly knowing the value of nothing.
  • Specifically on Teams England FC – even given their prevailing mediocrity – the galling lack of achievement when Big Days arrive. (And I’m not just talking about penalties.)
  • More than this, the stultifyingly dull and ungenerous manner in which England teams have performed in these major tournaments. Where they play no meaningful football; where they seem pale unbelieving shadows… barely even ticking the ‘honest triers’ box. This chronic unbelief, this inability to rise when atmospheres are at their most magnificent is surely hugely telling of their relative smallness as people as well as damning of England systems? It’s what makes fans wonder if they care… and rightly or wrongly, football fans watching our Olympians and Paralympians will and do wonder why the hell the footballers can’t lift their game like this. Sorry… did I go off on one ?

Much of this counts as a digression I know. So I will attempt to retreat to my argument over Gentlemanly Conduct.

The crassness in Premiership football combined with the Hodgson-led slink back (apparently) to philosophies 30 years plus out of date means there is a crisis in the soul of English football; a real one. It may be business as usual in the Prem but it’s a sour business. Particularly when compared to the smiley-roundedness of what we have seen on tracks, on water and generally all over this summer. Nobody believes in the players because they are mercenaries. They dive, they cheat, they lack much of what is broadly regarded to be sporting. The managers routinely offend our intelligence, either through blandly pursuing the Offer Nothing ritual that is the ‘face the cameras’ moment, or, in the case of someone like the now departed Dalglish, by being actively hostile to the notion that folks might want to know something. Something real. The presiding emotions – if any are apparent – are closer to a kind of barbarism than sport. And football is… a sport.

My Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct is a loose and I hope likeably unthreatening but genuine call for that tumbleweed moment to turn into that lightbulb moment; for some change. Footie is so in my blood it’s not true; yet I find myself turning elsewhere, increasingly, for that daft but preciously sustaining glimpse of triumph or grace. Because too much in the game is not good enough; leading me to ask why and what might be done.

My conclusion is that a recalibration of notions of respect – and the Law of the Game around this – is necessary. This seems central to the major problems (and major turn-offs), namely the poor or disrespectful or dishonest conduct of players and managers.

It’s one of the great no-brainers of world sport that footballers must be in whatever way works re-educated in terms of their relationship with referees in particular. This will probably mean bans for abuse, fines in the modern era being sadly meaningless. Beyond this, I contend there really is a role for some panel of wise men or women who review controversial moments or incidents that in some way bring the game into disrepute. They should be empowered to penalise offenders against sportsmanship as well as the Laws of the Game.

I realise the difficulties around such a panel but see little hope for improvements unless at some stage player X is materially judged against for obvious simulation – for example. If this necessitates changes or extensions to the laws so be it; that might where that politically unsound but retrievable Ungentlemanly Conduct concept comes in.  Making things or people better.  Then 3 former players or officials in a room – job done.

Us fans feel that stuff is wrong and needs righting somehow. Having a foot in other sporting camps I can tell you that rugbyfolks and cricketers and sportsfolk generally really are offended and really do relentlessly mock the arrogance and the lack of honour (however pompous that might sound) amongst footballers. The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct has been (and is) about representing that amorphous groundswell-thing against crap in football. Crap behaviour, crap attitudes, crap awareness. Football… take a look at yourself.

The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct; part two.

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Previously I have made heartfelt but no doubt ludicrous generalisations about TeamGBsters being better people than say… Rio Ferdinand, the Olympics having shown up the inadequacies of our football stars through the inconsiderate revelation of dee-lightful rowing chap after unassumingly lush cyclistess. Rio – a deliberately relatively inoffensive choice, as it ‘appens – in interview, would stand no chance against… well… against any of them. Imagine the poor fellah pitched into some comparison with (specimen-of-all-specimens?) Katherine Grainger. Nuff sed.

I hope to move on from this unlicensed judgementalism by getting further into the issue of, the contrasts re respect in sport. This is something even I slightly fear threatens to align me with a currently mercifully subterranean (to-the-point-of-imaginary, actually) arch-conservative group fronted by that former decathlete now eminent flopster/middle distance scapegoat Michael Gove but such are the dangers of the hunt for the righteous . (On that political orientation thing I will just confirm that my own lunacy tends to spring awkwardly from the softish left rather than the anal right.) However because  footballers do seem to have no respect and this does I think draw more flak than almost any other complaint against yer Rooney and yer Terry, stuff must surely be said.  About respect.  But… respect for what?

Broadly, the Olympians – our Olympians, for let’s be honest, we didn’t see too much of the rest of the world’s – were universally received as beacons of treble-fabulous good; partly, surely, because of the obvious contrast with footballers? Wherever you looked there was modesty and rounded good-humour of the sort last seen in football circa 1953 when some bloke called Matthews skipped round a bewildered First Division whilst supping mild, knitting nightcaps and discovering the potato; all to general hat-throwing acclaim.

Now the accuracy or validity of any emotion against shallowness, arrogance and disturbing unworldliness amongst footballers may be open to debate.  It is nevertheless certain that large chunks of us – even those who consider ourselves fans – feel they behave, in the widely used vernacular, like wankers. This is often due to their petulance or lack of respect for officials. We understand that players have in the moment some urgent need to express disappointment or to otherwise ‘react’. It does not follow that this reaction might need to be so essentially cheap.

In rugby circles the drama-queendom and simulation in soccer means coaches tear into footballers for precisely these shameful or cynical episodes – acting or disrespectful and inflammatory celebrations being particularly offensive to the rugby community. Coaches in the 15-man game do routinely warn their own players against such dishonour, such poncification – I know, in coaching rugby myself, I have done this.

So it really is true that footballers are held in contempt by many in the rugby community. How many of them appreciate this, I wonder? Or feel the moral depth of that contempt? Would such awareness make any difference? Unknowable – so let’s get back to rules; respect.

First I should probably mention that for those unfamiliar with footielaw (and footie does have Laws not Rules, interestingly or not) Law 12 now includes what was previously recognised as the Ungentlemanly Conduct Law. Now if I understand it correctly kindof subsumed into Fouls and Misconduct, this throwback to the age of honour and imperial plunder is still in use for discretionary expression by refs and, more commonly, though with little discretion, in the bullshitfest that is general discussion and punditry around the game. I think it’s chronically under-used potential reiner-in of modern ills.

For surely this anachronistic, slightly pompous-sounding Ungentlemanly Conduct thing has rather a lot going for it – or could have – alongside its weirdly inappropriate non-PCness, which we need to recognise.

For one thing it unashamedly implies a kind of moral compass; suggesting in its dangerously dated manner that some woolly goodness, some reflection even may be beneficial to the game. (A note here that perhaps you don’t need to be a misogynist traditionalist necessarily to applaud transgenerational sporting values.) Secondly, its non-specificity lends itself to flexibility and discretion. Thirdly, football needs something to latch onto, some cause to cling to or gather around and it may be that post a wonderfully enervating/invigorating and sporting Olympics this notion of good or ‘gentlemanly’ conduct might just help football re-brand. It certainly might help those trying to keep the thing in order.

So let’s just contemplate again, specifically, this thing football has with referees, with its ‘bastards in black’ and on this occasion I promise to jink Steve Coppell-style outside considerations of race before arcing in my devastating cross/theory thing.

We can get a grip on them – referees – there’s something really grabbable in both physical and conceptual terms about their starchy, often geeky authoritarianism drawing them in to our malevolent clutches. They are an almost reassuringly resented presence in football –uniquely so? – there being an extraordinary hostile confluence of opinion upon their role, their nature even.  (But that’s weird, right?)

Led with extravagant charmlessness by the top players and the managers, we the footie public at large – watching either semi-naked on some frosted terrace or listening in to Allan Green whilst our Porsches scoot silently through leafy Mayfair – love to abuse them. We love to abuse them psychotically in fact, with the fullness of our hearts for… for being the ref.

There is a thesis to be written on this alone, this murderous international antipathy to that bloke or woman in the middle; whatever they do; however, pretty much, they do it.
Later, dwarlings, later…

The quality of the abuse of referees in football is peculiarly obscene and its occurrence peculiarly prevalent. It never ends. The players are obviously and enormously culpable in this, as are the managers and there seems to be no significant will from any direction to curb this wholly degrading aspect of the game.

Let me be clear on this. In 2012 swearing is barely an issue – or at least not an issue of the import of racism or homophobia for example. But swearing aggressively and repeatedly and abusively at a referee or an official is. It’s truly an offence in the wider sense of the word and I find it extraordinary that it still goes relatively unpunished season after season.

Very few players are ever actually sent off or banned following such outbursts, yet we see them in gruesome, fulsome high definition in almost every match as players react appallingly to unfavourable decisions. And I know players are under more pressure in the modern game – truly, they are – the exposure being massively greater, the rewards being financially greater. This is no way, however, excuses a disgracefully poor level of discipline amongst players and managers in this regard.

Pity the referees – support the referees I say – with video playback and meaningful assistance from an empowered fourth official and beyond. Currently the man in the middle is utterly undermined by dishonesty and malcontent all around. He or she is there, the Martians have concluded, to collect our madnesses; like some spitbowl for the twisted soul of humanity. And they are in black.

With both a million years of dodgy symbolism and John Terry railed up against them, what chance do referees have?

Well how about if they had a panel of respected footiefolks in their corner? And what if that panel reviewed obviously controversial or mishandled incidents with a view to issuing correctives in the form of warnings or bans to those guilty of (say?) bringing the game into disrepute?

If this group of Goodies riding in to save footie from itself really were concerned to aggressively promote sportsmanship as well as good decision-making, might it even be appropriate for them to use the moniker The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct?  Thereby staking a claim on that apparently unnaproachably difficult playing surface… The Higher Ground.

People… there’s more to come on this.

The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct; part one.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 4 Comments

The 2012 Olympics was a significant success for New Blighty in virtually every way you can think of, including and importantly because it did express some progress towards an appreciation of and national ease with our much discussed multi-culturalism. It’s surely a tad more difficult now to be casually or serially racist? Now that we’ve all seen how wonderfully part of us Mo Farrah/Jess Ennis are, how much we mean to them, even. Only the most outstandingly moronic and impervious xenophobe could bark out white supremacist garbage (or similar) in the glorious wake of such a unifying Olympics, yes?

That may be too optimistic a view. But for me a key memory, a genuinely warming one amongst the admittedly intoxicatingly gathering festival concerned how we look… and how we sound, us Brits. Tied into those abstract notions of place and belonging – notions frequently co-opted or compromised by sometimes legitimate political or cultural discourse – this goodly thing that shone back at us (proper people?) did appear to be about us; our team.

We were a hugely attractive bunch; black or mixed race or whatever. And when our athletes emerged into individual focus from their brilliant blur of TeamGBness, for their post-blow sofa-spots or trackside verbals, they were, despite their ‘diversity’ uniformly charming and generous; they were great company.

Dangerously for those of us attempting to report without lapsing pretty immediately into anglo-corn, our athletes brought back to us virtues feared lost in the age of footballer-generated smog. They really were delightful, articulate and entirely believable as decent specimens of humanity. They were compellingly appropriate if not ideal representatives for us. We therefore revelled in the sense of a shared adventure – inevitably more or less vicariously – but with a persistently humming and occasionally electrifyingly uplifting connection. Because beyond the silverware, the medals, there was a profound general awareness of extraordinary people – them – giving of their best in the knowledge of, or even motivated by, other people – us!

…Here comes that dangerous crop of hagiopoop…

Consequently us Brits were gawping and smiling at heroic effort and deserved success by athletes we were proud to think of as Our Lot – not just because of their winning but because of their winning humility, humour and palpable honesty. Time after time – you pick your own! – we were presented with beaming members of TeamGB who captivated us with their wit and their roundedness during interview. They talked with real warmth and appreciation and understanding and insight and generosity about their event… and often our place in their success. And we loved them for all that.

Okay. So deep breath and yes, remember not God Save but those other lyrics, of Declan MacManus –

No more fast buck / when they gonna learn their lesson

When we gonna stop all of these victory processions?

Maybe the world hasn’t actually been changed. A fine Olympics hasn’t, sadly, undermined the monolithic badness of Growth-worship or manifest greed. (In fact, looking at the sponsors… let’s not go there.) But maybe something in our sporting world got better? And maybe we can nudge or bundle shy or retiring loveliness a bit closer to the front of class?

Already a certain momentum against widely perceived arrogance and ludicrous over-remuneration of modest and frankly often undeserving talents in the football world has arisen. Not that many needed the Olympics to flag up the rolexization of our national game – there being even amongst the tribal and myopic some acknowledgement that players don’t give much for what they get.

So let’s just compare what we heard from Farrah and Ennis, the rowers, the cyclists (again, you name the ones who affected or inspired you the most) with what you might get from Frank Lampard/Rio Ferdinand/Kenny Dalglish. (And I reckon I’ve plumped for 3 gentlemen fairly representative of their milieu – even if one is retired.) And let’s maybe consider some vaguely equivalent post-match scenario.

There would be little chance of unaffected joy from the football side. There would be a patina of rehearsed dullness, in fact. Possibly due to some significant underachievement by a manifestly poor or disappointingly stilted England side but arising too from a widespread Premiership Quality cynicism wherein no real truths must be told and some imaginary defensive line must be held against public knowledge.

Whilst Lampard has the capacity to come across as a decent bloke, he is traditionally unwilling to break through into generous good humour; Ferdinand and Dalglish are less giving than this. Often one or both are deliberately obtuse or somewhere between absent, insultingly bland and openly hostile. There is a chronic disconnect, in short, between these legends of the game and the notion that fans might really want to know what they think of x or y. And critically, there is very rarely any suggestion that they love what they do. Or we don’t feel that.  They don’t share much.

On good days, when I feel the footie-pulse coursing through my own veins, I colour in Frank or Rio’s blandness with memories. Often though, I am spurred to join in with those ‘having a dig.’  I have to confess to having unreasonably enjoyed the diabolical freedoms being an insignificant blogger allows – I know and respect the fact that the likes of @ianherbs @_PaulHayward reign themselves in for national publication – but I can sling verbals around a bit, sound off a bit more – like you. So I can further indulge the dubious belief that our young Premiership heroes are ripe for personal as well as professional evaluation, as they are in the court of popular opinion.

When weighed up for their fitness for purpose as rounded humans, or appreciated in terms of their sensitivities, their understanding of value and yes, place, The Footballers seem embarrassingly feeble. Some might say shockingly or offensively so.

On times I am offended by their dumb scurrying through life, their brazenness. How could they allow a sport so beautiful to be so disfigured with simulation, with contempt for authority, with arrogance of such an epic quality? (For surely they are complicit in all this, if not administratively ‘responsible?’)

There is no comparison, I’m afraid, with what those cyclists give and what most bigshot footballers give. In that loose but majestically fine, tippy-tappily omniscient organ us fans call our hearts, we know something ain’t right. These people – some of these people – simply aren’t good enough. And, therefore, my friends, the Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct will go on.

A Tale of One City?

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Big day for Liverpool Managers, eh? Firstly Roy Hodgson – the appallingly treated ex of the Anfield club – releases a doughtily, relatively predictable England squad; next #kingkenny goes. Perversely, perhaps, I’m more interested in the latter, it being appeallingly clear – so far – of anything smacking of crassness.

This is weirdly both a pleasant surprise and a disappointment of the most nigglingly perverse kind, as the last period of Dalglish’s reign has been characterised by a unique(?) tartness the situation now suddenly lacks; because both the owners side and the profoundly bitter Scot himself have apparently played an anticipation-crushingly dignified blinder. It’s as though a whole lotta calm, whackhh has been twinkled over the scenario by some unlikely, mediating scouse angel. Hence my personal feeling of non-closure – for which I shall naturally seek expensive therapy.

 

The statements of course may mean nothing. They are likely to have been prepared under legal advice via the scrutiny of wiser men than the chief protagonists themselves in a room no-one has farted in for 40 years; a room where miraculously pristine glasses of carbonated water appear, unbeckoned at 8.55am and at hourly intervals before being transmogrified into Sauvignon Blanc of a pretty high order come 5.30. That is, somewhere fascinatingly or even fascistically devoid of traces of humanity; or ordered, depending on your proximity to a cupboard full of suits.

Dalglish, having been summoned to Boston when many were expecting him to jet off for a yoga/golf retreat in Birkdale, has been sacked. Whether this was the politely agreed termination of his contract – which seems kinda likely to me – or the converse fraught celtic arse-flap through a defiantly departing kilt we may never know. Dalglish I think mainly saves his hatred and contempt for journalists, so he may have taken a well-argued dismissal with the good grace we are led to believe was mutually exchanged.

I know my sharp view of Dalglish tramples close to sensitivities on all manner of genuinely precious things; life and death things. I am conscious that many Liverpudlians raised Kenny to sainthood during his magnificent and heartfelt joining with families and all concerned, touched or traumatised by the Hillsborough disaster. (I wasn’t there and I can therefore not judge the degree to which Kenny helped). It may even be right that am disqualified from commenting on either that terrible issue or Dalglish the man in the wake of it. What I would say is that believe it or not, I respected Dalglish the player for his rich gifts but have come to dislike what has felt to me like a developing and unhealthy myopia and sourness in the later man. (Which may, of course, be a natural result of bearing such close witness to such tragedy). I think it is both right and probably ‘good’ for Liverpool FC that he has gone, and gone in a dignified way.

That other fellah Hodgson has also been thrust into my defiantly un-hoovered living room today, as always with the slight air of someone quietly battling insidious anal penetration by caterpillars through constant refocusing or adjustment of key muscles up and down the body. He therefore displays the gait of a man in danger of expressing untoward or explosive reaction. This is countered by concerted efforts to talk well and properly, presumably on the grounds that any minute he might scream AHH BOLLOCKKSS WORMMMSS hysterically mid-sentence. Roy talks with great effort and clarity and authority in a manner I imagine the England Football Team in their post-training soporific arrogance might listen to for all of 30 seconds. Hence – wisely – he appointed Gary Neville, who has silverfish but no caterpillars.

Hodgson’s England squad has drawn interest mainly due to the omission of Rio Ferdinand, Manchester United’s medium-loquacious centre-half (i.e. wordy on twitter) and the retention of John Terry and The Astonishingly Unproductive One – Stewart Downing, of Liverpool. Ferdinand is unfortunate in the sense that he is quality; in a markedly pedestrian group he might have been the gazelle. Or he might if he could run. The truth is he has been medium-crocked for some years and despite his real ability to read the game and caress the ball better than most of his rivals, he is patently not fit for top-of-the-range tournament football; regrettably.

John Terry is if not sub judice exactly, under a cloud and therefore lucky to be considered. His chief remaining asset – his durability, his toughness – may be a liability under cross-examination from quick-witted foreign flyers but unsurprisingly he is there for exactly that near-caricature Engerland Through and Through Thing. Fitness-wise, he certainly cannot sprint and therefore may be as big a gamble as Rio might have been; indeed the crux may be that Hodgson dare not take them both and thinks Ferdinand more damaged. All this leaves personal/political issues aside; I make the confident assumption that Hodgson has and will be utterly honourable in this regard. (Bless him). I also suspect that novelty value – and the Neville appointment – will provide Hodgson with an opportunity he may not have had if his tenure had ‘given him time’ to mould his own squad. My guess is that given such time (and minus that Neville) Hodgson would have been subjected to indifference at best from the majority of players and diabolical treatment from the press; pronto.

This is because he is old-school and methodical and on the grindingly elucidating side of articulate rather than inspired; or inspiring; or young; or hep to the funky ipod beat man. Roy is good, don’t get me wrong… but like most of us he is particularly good when people are prepared to listen. At Liverpool, they certainly weren’t.

Where that has left his relationship with his chosen skipper, S Gerrard Esquire, is an interesting point; one of many we are likely to remain unenlightened upon. As with the Dalglish sacking, as with anything; things are wrapped in so much packaging these days.