Over the line.

I've enjoyed the world cup so far - there've been some upsets, some good goals, and, of course, a good dollop of controversy too, not least on Sunday, as England and Mexico exited the competition. Both teams were the victims of mistakes which use of technology might have prevented, and in both cases, the mistakes did not matter (at least mathematically, if not temporally) to the final result. One thing that has really irked me, though, is the way that the media (specifically BBC and ITV in their live coverage and analysis) have addressed the issue of technology.

Both broadcasters have pushed the line that they cannot understand why video technology is not being used; indeed Mark Lawrenson makes this point so often and with such ferocity that it would almost be unsurprising to find a monthly cheque from the producers of Hawkeye landing on his doormat. Both broadcasters made it a major thread of their post-match discussions, but while opinion was somewhat divided amongst the pundits, there was never a strong argument made against its introduction. Those with reservations, such as FIFA, were cast in the role of Luddites, and equally mocked for their lack of foresight and demonised for the effect it had on the English team's defeat.

I find it annoying that rather than taking the opportunity to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of technology in the game, this complex issue was presented by both broadcasters as an obvious solution being held back by pencil pushing "suits". This characterisation is misleading at best and tabloid at worst, and such a visceral reaction will not have been at all persuasive to those whose votes are counted on the matter.

Also, sorry it's been so long since I posted - it's very clear now that life is getting in the way pretty much permanently. I make no promises on the timing of my next effort, but hopefully it'll be easier now that I've broken my silence.

Double blow.

This is an update to my post of a week or so ago about the situation at Newcastle. It is necessarily football-related, so if such things are anathema to you, then feel free to ignore it.

This evening Mike Ashley has released a statement about his intentions to sell the club. The full text is here, and it is well worth reading for a look at the emotional and logistical problems running a modern football club. It makes me feel hugely sad to see someone who has managed to get hold of something they love and respect feeling backed into a corner to the point where they need to give it up. I love Ashley's attitude to being an owner who's not afraid to mingle with the fans, and up until the end of the summer, I think he had the backing of the vast majority of them.

Possibly the only thing Ashley did wrong was underestimate the double-edged sword that is Keegan. Getting him back was a master-stroke, and meant that as long as Keegan was happy, the fans were happy. Unfortunately the flip side of this was that if Keegan became unhappy, so did the fans, and this unhappiness boiling over into protests was the least that could be expected if such a popular person is percieved as having been forced out.

The only mention he makes to the transfer issues at the centre of the recent problems is to say that he prefers to buy young talent rather than big names, and that this conflicts with what the fans want. He says: "The fans want this process to happen more quickly and they want huge amounts spent in the transfer market so that the club can compete at the top table of European football now".

I agree with nufc.com, that this is a misreading of the situation. The fans want success, and they want the team to play good football. They will be willing to wait 3 or 4 years or longer for the success as long as the team is playing good, passionate football. We would much rather be an Arsenal than a Chelsea, but to talk about nurturing young talent on one hand and then selling James Milner, one of our major proven young talents, on the other is to send confusing messages.

Ashley's plan for the club is brilliant on paper - it is exactly what we need as a club. Had the statement come out as a plan of action at the beginning of the season, every supporter would be behind it. Even Keegan must have been behind it in theory. The only differences come in practice, when the wage bill needs to be cut, and the manager insists he needs to keep players. When we need replacement squad members, but the manager doesn't like the ones the scouts have found. When the scouts go over the manager's head and the board buys the players anyway. These are the areas of disagreement. These are the areas the fans and manager are unhappy.

Ashley then says: "I have the interests of Newcastle United at heart. I have listened to you. You want me out."

I don't think this is necessarily what the bulk of the fans do want. I think the fans are reacting to the loss of Keegan badly, and lashing out. If Ashley really wants what's best for the club, I think he needs to stay and prove to the fans that he has their best interests at heart.

After reading through his statement and looking at the work he has done, I think most fans would want him to continue to run the club. I think they want someone in charge who is passionate, and I doubt we'll find anyone better than Ashley on that score. We also want a manager who is passionate, and we'll never find someone better than Keegan on that one. Ashley and Keegan are the perfect people to run the club together, and to lose them both in under a month due to what seems like a personality clash, or a disagreement of style, is heartbreaking.

Dethroned

This is another post unsuitable for those people not a fan of football...

Back in January, I wrote about the possibility of Sam Allerdyce leaving Newcastle, and the problems I had with the way the club and in particular the media were handling the situation. Allerdyce, of course, left the club, and Keegan was brought in. Now, less than nine months later, it's being reported that we're in the ludicrous situation of being managerless again.

I don't have as much to say this time, because really there isn't much to be said. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding about the role Keegan was expected to play, or the power he was expecting to have, but for a club like Newcastle to lose a manager who was adored by the fans, who had begun to shape a team and who had barely 20 competitive games in charge, and to do so because they wouldn't allow him to have control over the players he was managing is not only ludicrous, but also shameful.

There is quite simply no way for a manager to get his team playing well week-to-week if he cannot guarantee that he will have the same players available a week later. And a manager cannot be expected to improve a team if he is not in control of who is bought and sold. And if a manager is not in charge of which players are playing for the club, then he can't be held responsible for the team's performance.

If that was the situation at Newcastle (and it is a situation that has been rumoured to be present many times over the last decade), and it was this situation that caused Keegan to walk, then good on him, because to work under those restraints is not to manage, but to simply be a coach and a figurehead for media attention. Keegan is a better manager than that and a better man than that, and if that was the choice to be made, then leaving was the correct decision.

Frankly, I'd be concerned about the credentials of any manager willing to step into that kind of position to replace him.

Of course, if he was sacked, then it's almost more ludicrous, since we've now had four managers in the four years since Robson went (taking any recent chance of competitive success we might have had with him), and none of them appear to have been given any freedom at all. Someone needs to be given two or three full seasons to shape a team, irrespective of league position. If that cannot be guaranteed, then I wouldn't be surprised if Newcastle continue to finish low-mid-table and churn through a manager a year for the next decade.

I thought Keegan was the perfect person to take on that challenge, and for him to be forced out in such a short space of time leaves me angry and disillusioned.

UPDATE: Ok, so in actual fact, no one seems to know what the hell's going on...

UPDATE: For a worrying few days there, it looked like I might have been ranting aout a resignation that never happened, but no, he's gone.

Who to support in Euro 2008

The Guardian is running a series of pieces, where writers or commedians from the respective countries try to convice us to support their team in the world cup. Today was the German's chance and his first reason was:

1 Avoid shoot-out heartbreak
Many tears were shed after Steve McClaren's England team failed to qualify for Euro 2008 ... but let's face it, it's going to be business as usual for British football supporters. Just like during the domestic season, you will have to cheer on a team full of foreigners. Why not make that team the three-time World Cup winner and universally revered superpower that is Germany? You wouldn't know, but there is nothing better than celebrating sporting victory. Supporting Germany will give you a once-in-a-lifetime chance not only to back the winning team but also to forgo the heartbreak of losing in a penalty shootout. Germany has not lost a penalty shootout in a major international tournament since 1976.

Nothing particular to add from me other than it made me laugh.

Think I'll probably be supporting Spain, they deserve to win something at some point. You?

The Beautiful Game.

Yeah, this is going to be a football-oriented post, so look away now if that's of no interest to you.

The Premier League is considering a change in the league timetable to introduce one extra match per team per season (taking the total to 39 per team) to be played abroad in one of five designated 'host' nations, with the result counting towards the points total for the season. The move is designed to allow the League to 'showcase its product' in foreign markets, since the market in England has become saturated.

What staggers me most about this suggestion is the sheer bare-faced cheek of the Premier League in opting to change the structure of the competition simply in order to make more money. There is no argument for the improving effect this change will have on the English game, on the League as a competition, on the quality of football played, or on the enjoyment for local fans. Indeed, the BBC Sports editor is quoted as saying: 'Some fans may feel aggrieved, but their concerns will be outweighed in the eyes of the clubs by the financial advantages'. The only reason this change is being contemplated is that the League has realised that it could be making even more money than it currently is by auctioning off the right to host two Premier League games to the highest bidder.

The example that keeps being given in the media is that of the recent playing of an NFL match at Wembley, but I don't really feel that this is a particularly good comparison. Firstly, London as a city did not have to 'bid' for the right to host the game, competing against other cities in terms of facilities and price. Secondly, the game itself was part of the normal running of the NFL season - there was no change to the way the tournament worked in order to accommodate a game played abroad, they just did it.

And this point is the one that I think is the sore point among English fans opposing the changes. Being relegated is an awful fate, and one which teams fight tooth and nail to avoid during the close season. It is hard enough to look back over the season as a fan and think about all the points dropped, but it would make it much harder if part of that retrospective included the fact that you had to fly to Australia to play Manchester United in the middle of a season, while your bottom-of-the-table rivals nipped over to France to play some fellow strugglers.

Sport can never be fair, there are always injuries, disallowed goals, dubious offsides etc., but these are unavoidable parts of any competitive sport. Much worse in my mind is the idea that the points (or even the goal difference) separating teams at the end of the season might have come down to balls being drawn out of a hat. That a deliberate decision is being made by the League to make surviving the competition slightly less down to good footballing ability and slightly more down to luck. Is there any other sporting competition in the world that violates a round-robin system with additional deliberate unbalancing?

It would be less of a problem if it were a rule like "all teams must play one 'home' game and one 'away' game abroad", with the fixtures decided at the start of the season. This would not remove the cheek of the money-grubbing desire behind the scheme, and there would still be issues with choosing the games involved - no one wants to play a six-pointer after a 12 hour flight - but the sanctity of the competition itself would be intact. The balance of the fixture list would be maintained, and relegation would be, if no less painful, at least marginally easier to swallow.

Better yet, how about we play exhibition matches and inter-league tournaments in other countries during the summer, how about we enter the teams into international club competitions and screen matches so liberally around the globe that it would sometimes be easier to see a Newcastle game on television if living in Holland than living in the UK.

Oh, wait, we're already doing all of those things. I guess we're just not getting the 'brand identity' out there enough, though. Ugh.

Big Shame

This is going to be a post about football, so if that's of no interest to you, then maybe best to skip it.

As a Newcastle supporter, I've been following the various crises and disasters this season with barely more than depressed resignation. As a team, I don't think I've seen us actually play consistently well for more than two games for six or seven years, and with back room changes occurring with ever more frequency, it doesn't really look like there's an end in sight.

While I won't deny that the football we've been playing under Sam Allardyce this season has fluctuated between poor and shockingly poor, we're not relegation-threatened, and realistically it's pretty unlikely that we're going to fall into the bottom three. We're not walking through teams, but we're scraping enough points to stay in mid-table, and short of a catastophic second half of the season, a low-mid table finish seems probable. There's no panic, there's no need to rush into anything, and Sam himself said when he took the job that he thought it would take 2 or 3 seasons to get us back into contention at the top of the league. But then after just 8 months of football which was no worse really than that played under Souness and Roeder, he's gone, and we're back to square one.

Apart from the obvious fact that we're playing poorly, two things in particular piss me off about the whole Allardyce situation, and the more general situation of football management. The first is the unbelievable amount of lying that goes on. Clearly you can't run a football club and stay silent the whole time, but when you've got a situation like the one at Newcastle, where the chairman can refer to the possibility of the manager losing his job by saying: "...I find all this speculation tedious. There's a different name every week and there's just no truth in it", one day, only for the manager to leave "by mutual consent" just 8 days later. Similarly, back in October, the new chairman of Derby county "claimed he is '100%' behind Derby's manager and also promised to make funds available for team strengthening in January", and less than a month later manager Billy Davies was gone.

Then you get the situation with any search for a new manager; people are interested, people rule themselves out, there are secret meetings and deals and then suddenly someone accepts an offer. I remember the speculation before Graham Souness was confirmed as Newcastle boss, and when he was posited as a possible manager, he claimed he was perfectly happy at Blackburn, only to accept the job a few days later.

It seems ludicrous to me that there are such huge disparities between what the clubs release as press statements and what they actually end up doing. Either no one running a football club actually knows what they're talking about, or the press is making up stories or the club is willing to lie to the press in order to keep negotiations and disputes a secret. No doubt there are some elements of all of these options that go on, but what it ultimately comes down to is that when a chairman publicly backs a manager, it is taken as a bad thing. There is no way any more for a club to dispel transfer rumours or claims of discontent because no one believes anything in a press release. This then leads on to the second thing that pisses me off, the media.

From almost the moment he was appointed, Sam Allardyce was described as 'under pressure'. There are, we are told 'huge expectations' in Newcastle, for 'a certain kind of football' and there was 'uncertainty in the stands' as to whether he was the right man for the job. Then, after a couple of poor performances, the media picked up on some heckling from the crowd and started to step up a gear. Every time his name was mentioned in the media it carried the tag 'under pressure' or 'under fire', dressing-room mutinies were discussed, boardroom unrest was pondered, and once again we were reminded that the Newcastle fans had 'huge expectations'.

This is after 12 premiership games. What manager could possibly be expected to have sorted a team like Newcastle out after 12 games? Yes, there was some abuse levelled at Sam during the Liverpool game, but we were losing a match at home and even the best of managers is going to suffer some abuse under those circumstances. Much of it was coming from the Liverpool supporters, but apparently the Newcastle fans were lax in 'whistling it down', whatever that means. Apparently the fans were deeply unhappy with the club, and in particular the manager, and there were questions over how long he would survive.

In particular, the media took great pains to remind us again and again that Newcastle fans wanted a return to the free-flowing football of the Keegan era, and that Big Sam's long-ball solution wasn't popular. While not being an outright lie, the sentiment behind it is total crap. Yes, Newcastle fans would love to see the team winning games 4-3 again. We'd love to see a free-flowing style ripping defences apart, with a midfield full of creative players and a constant push for goals. But what supporters would not want that? Yes, I'd love to see us playing like Arsenal, but we're not Arsenal - we don't have the skill and we don't have the team cohesion. I want to see us win. I don't really care if it's messy, but I want to see the players playing with passion and determination, and I want us to grind out results.

If we lose a couple of games then so be it. All teams do that. If we lose a couple of games by gifting goals to the opposition and never threatening to score and with half the team looking like they don't really give a shit and just want to pick up a paycheck, then yes, we're going to complain. Football supporters complaining is not a new thing, it shouldn't be a surprising thing, and it certainly shouldn't be taken as a desire to replace the manager. For goodness sake, John Gregory held on at Villa for what seemed like forever with 'Gregory out' banners hanging from the stadium before finally walking.

Since when did the media decide that they needed to translate what the fans mean? If we want the manager out, we'll make it bloody clear, and up until that point, we just want to see a team playing with belief and determination and the occasional three points. We know that we're not going to be challenging for the title next season, or even the season after, but a manager with a three year plan seemed like our best hope for an eventual return to higher league positions, and I think many fans were genuinely interested to see what he wanted to try and do with the club, but thanks to the hypocritical bullshit of modern football and the ridiculous scaremongering of the media, we'll never get a chance to find out.

And don't even get me started on whether the fans actually want Shearer to take over as manager.