Lennonism

I said I wasn't going to write about Neil Lennon, or James McClean, but sometimes you have to do as your conscience dictates -:

Derry. 30^th January 1972. Bloody Sunday. British paratroopers summarily execute 14 completely unarmed, wholly innocent members of the Nationalist community taking part in a peaceful march for Civil Rights. This was long before the idea of a Backstop, before parity of esteem, respect for divergent traditions or any other of the glib clichés supposed to denote the winds of change that the Good Friday Agreement brought about in the Six Counties, had been thought of.  It was a time when the British Government used their occupying army to openly collude with Loyalist paramilitaries and the RUC in replicating apartheid era South African norms of repression and state terror to subjugate the entire Nationalist population; not just those seeking self-determination outside the scope of Westminster rule.

Just to bring things up to date; 47 years later not a single person responsible for slaughter on Bloody Sunday has been called to account for their actions, from the military top brass who planned the attack to the squaddies who committed the murders to the politicians who covered the whole thing up. Meanwhile, Stoke City footballer James McClean, a proud son of the Bogside, suffers unending abuse each October and November, both on line and in real life, for practising free speech and refusing to dance to the dog whistle flute band jig of British militarist populism by not wearing a poppy. McLean’s latest Instagram posts, among family snaps of his wife and kids who’ve received innumerable death threats because of his stance on poppies, include a tribute to those whose blood was spilled, and lives ended on that fateful day almost half a century ago.

I didn’t want to write about James McClean or Neil Lennon or, by reputation and inference, Martin O’Neill or indeed any footballer from the nationalist community in the north of Ireland who have become cyber and terracing hate figures in British, and especially Scottish, society for the supposed crimes of being Republican sympathisers. However, in the febrile atmosphere whereby any passionate, articulate and high-profile Catholic from the Six Counties is assumed to be a supporter of the Provos, despite the fact that the Army Council of the IRA announced a permanent cessation of all activities on 28^th July 2005, I simply must comment on events pertaining to the initial suspension and subsequnt departure of Neil Lennon from the role of Hibernian manager.

Being honest, I have no idea what James McClean’s voice sounds like, as I’ve never heard him speak. In a coincidental parody of the Section 31 gagging order on Sinn Fein members in the Republic, McClean is never heard on British television. I don’t know for certain, but I’d imagine this is his choice and fair play to him for refusing to set himself up as a soft target for media manipulation and the resultant unending abuse he would endure, whatever the subject he was commenting on. In contrast, Martin O’Neill, his voice tending to the falsetto when agitated, and the controlled almost monotone that signifies Neil Lennon’s strident, unbowed tones are as alive in my head as if the two of them were sat next to me.

Now, for many reasons I ought to dislike Martin O’Neill, specifically his lifelong support for Sunderland, the club who sacked him after barely a year in charge, and his dire final year in charge of the Irish national team following the failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, but I like the bloke. Not just for his cussed and disputatious nature, but because he was a stylish and artistic player back in the day, as well as a particularly effective manager at Leicester City and Celtic, as well as a decent one with Aston Villa. Before the miracle of 2015/2016, O’Neill’s stewardship of the Foxes, whereby he took them to 3 League Cup finals and won 2 of them, was seen as a high-water mark. Moving on to Celtic in 2000, after the fiasco of the John Barnes managerial debacle, O’Neill restored the Parkhead club’s habitual dominance over the original Glasgow Rangers club that eventually folded in 2011, laying down a marker with a 6-2 win in his debut Old Firm game and subsequently recording 7 successive wins in future fixtures. The fact O’Neill left in 2005 to spend time with his wife, who had been diagnosed with cancer at that time, shows the quality and principles of the man. You may not like him, but you must respect him. While it may be true that his tactics at Sunderland and with Ireland showed him to be something of a dinosaur in the modern game, his latest, and probably final, posting at Nottingham Forest, with the cheerful, happy-go-lucky, natural comedian Roy Keane again at his side, will be less subject to public scrutiny and obloquy, allowing him to specialise in uncomplicated, percentage football that will prove effective in the second tier.

One of the repeated criticisms of O’Neill is that he is a long-ball merchant. The fact is though; you do not reach the final of a major European competition and lose in heart-breaking circumstances, simply because you launch the ball long downfield as often as possible. You get there because of astute planning and by assembling a good team and one player who was central to everything O’Neill achieved at both Leicester and Celtic was Neil Lennon. Bought from Crewe Alexandra for £750,000, Lennon immediately took his place in the Foxes side that went up via the play-offs in 1996, becoming a mainstay in the team and appearing in all 3 League Cup finals. However, perhaps his most notorious appearance was in a more passive role in April 1998, when Alan Shearer deliberately kicked Lennon in the head in the closing stages of a dire 0-0 draw at Filbert Street.

While the referee deemed the incident as not worthy of punishment at the time, the FA had no choice but to charge Shearer with violent conduct on the basis of video footage that showed the barbarity of the attack. At the FA hearing, Shearer’s legal team stated that if he were to be punished for the assault, which would mean he would have been suspended for Newcastle’s FA Cup final appearance against Arsenal, he would make himself unavailable for that summer’s World Cup in France. A hasty conflab between the blue blazers resulted in Shearer being let off scot free to the incredulity of the entire football world. I lost a lot of respect for Shearer after that incident but, paradoxically, gained a whole lot more for Neil Lennon who, as is often conveniently forgotten, spoke eloquently as a defence witness that day, insisting any contact had been purely accidental. This did not seem to register with the wider football public.

It seemed from the day of that challenge onwards, it was open season on Neil Lennon; despite being partnered in midfield by the loathsome Robbie Savage, all criticism was focused on the man from Lurgan. It was no surprise when he jumped ship to join his mentor O’Neill at Parkhead at the first opportunity. In 7 years as a player with Celtic Lennon, like Scott Brown in recent times, combined being the idol of the Tic fans and a folk devil for the opposition; his ability to control a game, combined with a ruthless streak of ambition that mirrored Roy Keane’s, as well as an unrepentant persona, saw him on the end of innumerable death threats from Loyalists, both armchair and actual. Like O’Neill, Lennon received bullets through the post and endured physical assaults when going about his daily business. Worse though, despite playing for Northern Ireland during an era of relative peace, Lennon was subjected to vicious sectarian abuse from his own fans while captaining the side, unlike O’Neill’s remarkably hassle-free appearances in the dark days of the 70s and 80s.

Lennon stepped down from the Northern Ireland team in 2002 to concentrate on playing for Celtic, which he did with distinction until 2007. His last game saw the Hoops win the Scottish Cup against Dunfermline Athletic and he left on good terms to play briefly for Nottingham Forest and then Wycombe Wanderers, two clubs very close to Martin O’Neill’s heart in point of fact, before returning to Celtic, first as Reserve Coach in 2008 and then as manager, following Tony Mowbray’s departure in 2010. While his appointment was seen by many as a natural succession, it was a high-risk appointment, bearing in mind Lennon’s passionate nature. Overall, his 4 years in charge were a great success; he won 3 successive titles and the Scottish Cup on 2 occasions. However, following a frank admission of his struggles with depression on account of the pressure cooker environment in which he worked, Lennon departed Celtic in summer 2014. 

Mind, having walked into the train wreck that was Bolton Wanderers in late 2014, trying to juggle £80m debt, the threat of administration and a transfer embargo, he may have pined for the sectarian brickbats that flew his way at Ibrox and Tynecastle and, on being appointed Hibs manager in summer 2016 in succession to Alan Stubbs, he was soon to renew his acquaintance with the vile abuse that Rangers and Hearts fans get away with as a matter of course. During his tenure of the Easter Road hot seat, Lennon was attacked by Morton players, assaulted by opposition fans at Tynecastle and subjected to a barrage of coins at Ibrox, with the official narrative stating that Lennon brought it all on himself by being a mouthy Taig who didn’t know his place.

Without question, Hibernian are one of the world’s greatest clubs and Easter Road is a palace of football. That said, there have been some desperate times on the pitch in Leith in recent years, as the cycle of boom and bust is endlessly repeated. After the glorious football during the Tony Mowbray era and the superb 5-1 League Cup final win over Kilmarnock in 2007 under John Collins, who left the club, having been frustrated by a lack of ambition and funds from the boardroom, things got ugly for a while. Mixu Paatelainen achieved little, John Hughes was only a marginal improvement, Colin Calderwood was predictably dreadful, Pat Fenlon was out of his depth, despite 2 cup final appearances and Terry Butcher, who took Hibs down in 2014, was the worst of the lot. The unheralded appointment of Alan Stubbs was a stroke of genius; who would have thought that the cumbersome centre back would be such a devotee of total football? In the toughest ever Scottish Championship, Hibs came up short in 2015 and maddeningly lost again in the play offs the year after. When Ross County, totally against the run of play, defeated Hibs in the 2016 League Cup final, it seemed as if the traditional Hibs way of gallant underachievement was the only way the club would go. And then, the magical moment when David Gray’s unstoppable header tore into the roof of Wes Foderingham’s net, released 114 years of pent-up passion as the Scottish Cup came back to Leith for the first time since 1902.

In the delirious aftermath of this incredible triumph, Stubbs left, and Lennon came in. It would be fair to say the Lurgan native is not a romantic. He rolled up his sleeves, assembled a strong side and strolled to the Scottish Championship. Back in the top flight, Hibs played sparkling football in 2017/2018, summed up by an incredible 5-5 draw on the last day of the season against Rangers, which saw The Cabbage finishing a deserved and encouraging third. Not bad for first season back, but still not enough to make Dempster, Farmer or Petrie release the purse strings. Lennon, as ever the target for sectarian abuse from the terraces and institutionally racist harassment from the SFA, cut an increasingly frustrated figure as the Hibees stuttered along in lower mid table this season. In many ways, the surprising thing about Lennon’s suspension on 25^th January and departure 5 days later, was that it took so long to happen. It seems remarkable, considering the strictures he worked under and the abuse he endured, that he hadn’t quit the club before as, rather like Rafa Benitez, his palpable anger and disappointment with the owners appears to have made his position untenable.

I sincerely hope Lennon returns to his role with Hibs, if at all possible. If not, I hope he replaces Benitez at Newcastle as I’m sure his brand of football will be the perfect antidote to the sterility of the Spaniard’s tenure. If there is no chance of a brokered peace between Lennon and the Hibs hierarchy, then the club have an enormous task to replace him; obvious names such as lifelong Hibby Gordon Strachan or the unemployed Alan Stubbs come to mind, but if the board try to do it on the cheap, as so many times before, by appointing some has-been or never was, then the unavoidable thought that the wheel of fortune has revolved towards another period of mediocrity at Easter Road, becomes a compelling one.

Most importantly though, if Lennon is driven out of Scotland, for whatever reason, it will provide the brainless Billy Boys with another reason to think their unacceptable attitudes and crass, illegal behaviour is acceptable. That must not be allowed to happen.  

Socially Inept

Andy Warhol’s late 60s assertion that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes was undoubtedly a glib, throwaway remark, born of the slogan-heavy counter cultural zeitgeist. However, half a century later, if one adds the prefix in to famous, bearing in mind that the concentration span of your average armchair, social media addicted Sky and BT football sponge is around the time it takes to boil a clutch of hen’s eggs, then the albino Slovak charlatan’s words start to ring true.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a bairn, trolls were mythical creatures that hung around under bridges, frightening goats. They certainly weren’t socially inadequate, mindless morons whose sole source of human interaction was via a repeated series of vicious and deliberately hurtful comments on the Internet, aimed at people they didn’t even know on a personal basis, purely for some kind of perverse gratification that psychiatrists would be better analysing than I. Alright, so part of that was as a result of the Internet not having been invented, but you get my point. In the halcyon days of my youth, bullies persecuted you to your face, not behind your back. You knew who they were, what they were about and, generally, how to minimise or end the, predominantly physical, persecution they were able to inflict. Unfortunately, technology has taken that immediacy of interaction out of the equation.

Of course, there were still a few faceless bullies back in the day; the papers would regularly tell tales of “poison pen” letters sent to noisy neighbours and blowsy barmaids from prurient net curtain-twitchers whose moral code was outraged by people actually enjoying themselves in the staid, suburban 1970s. That said; the scarcity of such campaigns of vituperation is what made them newsworthy. These days, it appears that every other day there’s some blank-eyed, dough-faced dullard with borderline personality disorder getting sent down for a series of snide Facebook posts, attacking the poor parents of some teenager who has died in tragic circumstances. Such needless and unremitting cruelty is beyond my comprehension; then again, I don’t see the need for the relentless waves of abuse, directed at media pundits and semi-celebrities who espouse different, or even difficult, opinions. It’s crazy enough that people start frothing at the mouth about politics, but when it’s football that gets the keyboard warriors in attack mode, then the world really has gone mad.

Without question, austerity has made our society a more vicious, bitter entity. Unlike the Thatcher Years when we were all united against the common enemy, the dread hand of media manipulation and an increasing sense of frustrated alienation has caused a proliferation of antagonism towards the most vulnerable and marginalised members of society; asylum seekers, the homeless, the mentally ill and other unfortunate soft targets for irresponsible ire get it in the neck for being weak and somehow to blame for the current malaise. Anyone seeking to point out this standpoint is a load of right wing claptrap, especially on social media, risks getting it with both barrels from the lumpen on-line louts; accusations of being part of the LBGT, cappuccino-sipping, bourgeois intellectual, self-perpetuating metropolitan elite are fired scattergun, without consideration for the rules of spelling and grammar, but often with the bizarre inference such opinions render the person advancing them to be a closet paedophile.

Football, being seen as the property of satellite broadcasters and their dullard demographic, can be a particularly fetid swamp of ghastly opinions and vile, destructive anger on social media. Of course, it all depends how you interact with it; for instance, the renaissance in fanzines a few years back, through the emergence of Stand, The Football Pink, Duck, Mudhutter, View from the Allotment End, West Stand Bogs and several others, enabled me to compile a list of followers who took football seriously, but who understood the deeper importance of the game as social glue that binds proper fans of all clubs together. Sadly, it seems as if I’ve discovered a small oasis of sanity amidst a desert of madness.

The oxygen of publicity that feeds and nurtures the media circus that surrounds professional football in this country can be best illustrated by the level of debate on social media. Facebook and in particular Twitter, are the virtual battlegrounds for cyber firms of brainless authoritarian populists.  There may be less claret spilled than on the platforms of London railway termini 35 years ago, but the anger, posturing and profane language is essentially no different to dust-ups in the distant past, with Everton, Leeds and Sunderland still the front runners in terms of self-mythologising. One essential difference these days is that the targets for mindless macho ire are not dressers, scarfers or stragglers, but commentators, journalists and pundits. When vacuous idiots like Adrian Durham or Martin Samuel post or posit another tiresome opinion that lacks even a nodding acquaintance with the truth, thousands of Carling-swilling Neanderthals, waving their Smartphones like illicit craft knives in Lime Street Station, use pudgy fingers to punch out another quasi-illiterate tirade in response. What the furious fat blokes fail to grasp is that this is exactly the response Talk Sport or the tabloid press hope to engender. It’s the equivalent of clickbait to entice the DFLA version of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells into intemperate invective. It has to be pointed out that such conduct is unbecoming and does little reputational good for either side of the equation.

Witness the recent contretemps between Rio Ferdinand, ably assisted by Richard Keys, and Newcastle United fans. As a former Newcastle fan, sickened by the appalling mismanagement of the club by the loathsome Mike Ashley who has driven me to the bosom of my beloved Benfield of Northern League Division 1, I have to declare an interest here. I also have to declare some sympathy for the opinions advanced by Keys, who correctly pointed out Rafa Benitez, is ultimately to blame for Newcastle’s league position as he picks and trains the team, though suggesting he buy players with his own money is beyond stupidity. Of course, such nuanced debate is utterly beyond the pale in the theatre of social media warfare, where 280 characters is the limit of articulate debate. However, let’s put it out here from the very start; Ferdinand is as thick as a whale omelette. His still unbelievable defence for drink driving back in his West Ham days that he didn’t know Alcopops had alcohol in them, set the bar particularly low for all future public displays of his intellect, crowned by his preposterous excuse for missing a drug test that it had slipped his mind, got him an 8 month ban. His ill-founded, ill-judged and inaccurate comments about Newcastle were predictably oafish. These pundits don’t do any research and inarticulately speak out the top of their hats, continuing to get broadcasting gigs as they were half decent at kicking a ball around minimum of a decade ago.

What bothers me is that Ferdinand’s struggling clothes company have been bailed out by Sports Direct, who are now the sole vendors of his tasteless, USA-inspired range of tacky leisurewear. Ferdinand’s comments about how Newcastle fans should be grateful to Ashley struck me as payback for digging Ferdinand out of a hole. Unfortunately, some Newcastle fans couldn’t leave it there and began taunting Ferdinand about his late wife. Such conduct is simply appalling. This is not acceptable behaviour in a civilised society. Meanwhile, Richard Keys is a deplorable, oleaginous dinosaur. His dismissal from Sky for sexual harassment, for which he has singularly failed to apologise, sums the man up. The fact he cheated on his wife with his daughter’s best pal is equally reprehensible, though I’m not sure the woman involved deserves to have her part in the whole sordid affair examined from a decade distant.

As the procession moves on and the shouting is over, Ferdinand and Keys remain smugly in situ after their 15 minutes of infamy, their opinions challenged but unchanged. Never apologise; never explain. The vast majority of unthinking football fans have still been hoodwinked into believing Mike Ashley is doing a great job and that Newcastle fans, who only hate him because he’s a cockney, are deluded malcontents who demand their team wins the Champions’ League every year. Sadly, it’s still the case that most people prefer a simple lie to the complicated truth.

Mind, things are considerably better nowadays than during the semi-anonymous messageboard era before Twitter, when every Kriss, Kris and Chrissy could adopt a tough guy persona and get away with it. The Newcastle United board I went on between September 2003 and February 24^th 2007 was a bear pit; the on-line equivalent of the Hellfire Club, owned by an ex con Monkey Hanger who’d never set foot in SJP. The modern day equivalent of the Medmenham Sect who wallowed in the amoral cesspit of their own making included David Caisley, who as you’ll recall defrauded me of £500 after I’d offered him a roof over his head, but he wasn’t the worst by a long chalk. Other habitués included an educationally subnormal assembly line operative with hydrocephalus, an atrichorous Munchausen sufferer who used the forum to write pornography , a socially inept accountant with anger management problems, a stereotypical pisspot lawyer, a pair of repressed gays, a moronic expat with fake hips living in a cabin outside Yellowknife and a dentist who has gone from a car crash personal life to living la dolce vita in Dubai, from where he boasts about the number of servants he employs and the gaudy watches he buys on a weekly basis, while his mates back here work their arses off for the West End Food Bank.  How glad I am none of them are still in my life, though I’m glad to know the amiable, retired IT bod everyone liked, as well as a couple of proper pals; one of whom parks his car in my drive for work each day and the other I still play five a side with. They are, of course, the exceptions.

Of course, the best solution is to ignore the bluster and invective and be satisfied you know the truth. As Miss Gartlan, my Year 2 Primary School teacher was fond of saying; sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me or my football team. I’ve got a chairman who does that all by himself.  

The Year of Reading Vocariously

Perhaps it was an unconscious reaction on my part to escaping from 30 years of scholarly servitude, or perhaps it was laziness pure and simple, but I’m almost ashamed to admit didn’t read more than a couple of books in 2018. Of course, my lack of literary engagement was the cause of a nagging sense of deep disappointment at my errant refusal to better myself with books, so once Santa had been and the pile of unread volumes on the nightstand had grown alarmingly, I decided it was time to do something about it. Hence, 2019 has been nominated the Year of Reading Voraciously and here are my reviews of everything I’ve gazed upon since the Feast of Stephen.

Ronnie Drew: Ronnie – The first of my Christmas gifts from Ben, this rather reminds me of John Peel’s Margrove of the Marshes, in the sense that it falls between the stools of biography and autobiography.  Back in early 2008, Ronnie Drew was six months into writing his biography when he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. Up to that point, he’d produced two lengthy, laconic chapters about his early life; warm, witty and insightful material that made it clear that he was an engaging writer as well as a great singer and storyteller. With the encouragement of his wife Deirdre and his family, he continued to think about the book and conducted a number of interviews to keep things ticking over, supposedly until he was well enough to resume work on it. But sadly, much as he wanted to, Ronnie did not get to finish his story. However, his daughter and son, Cliodhna and Phelim, put together Ronnie's work on his memoir along with his other writings, interviews, a wealth of photographs and other material from the family archive, and contributions from close friends, to create a book that is a compelling portrait of, and a fitting and loving tribute to 'the king of Ireland'.

Self-effacement was Ronnie's default position and the real sadness of this book is that it only contains 74 pages of his putative autobiography, as it is immediately apparent that as a writer, Ronnie had a real 'voice'. He conjures up nostalgic but unsentimental images of the Fifties in Ireland and these passages are rendered even more vivid by his eye for detail and his careful use and life-long respect for the syntax of the English language.

Depictions of his coming of age in the Fifties, which takes him from Ireland to England to Spain and home again, is never less than warm, witty and often hilarious. When he hits lyrical passages and relaxes, the writer in him spins a beguiling yarn, where the images literally jump out of the page. Ronnie recounts how his low self-esteem was a legacy from the Christian Brothers, masterful psychologists who specialised in ritual humiliation. There are moments when uncertainty infects Ronnie's prose and just when you would like more detail, he infuriatingly hurries on, as though he feels he might be detaining you with his boring nonsense.

Before the coda of final quotes in the book, there are 30 glorious pages containing passages from the scripts of various shows Ronnie performed over the years. Once again, the meticulous use of language and the intellectual rigour that Ronnie brought to his performances highlights his erudition across the arts in general and about the art of showmanship in particular. The short essays by Ronnie's friends, Michael Kane, BP Fallon, Niall Toibin and Mike Hanrahan, all illuminate Ronnie in different ways and the leavening of quotes and stories from and about Ronnie, are unfailingly entertaining and revealing. All in all; a cracking read.

Brian Glanville: World Football Handbook 1970/71 - When Brian Glanville left Charterhouse aged 17 in 1949, he reluctantly became an articled clerk after it was made apparent to him that football journalism was no career for a gentleman. All that was to change later that summer when he walked into the offices of the Italian Corriere dello Sport in Rome, cutting short his vocation and grasping his lifelong vocation. The newspaper made him their English correspondent, even though he couldn't speak a word of Italian. A similar sense of confused bafflement that Glanville endured must assail contemporary readers who, with the notable exception of the erudite and elegant George Culkin who alone carries a torch for football writing rather than journalism since Paddy Barclay retired, are served up endless screeds of banal, emotive doggerel pretending to be perceptive analysis by the egotists in the Fourth Estate.

This particular style of reference work, a kind of Rothmans Yearbook without the statistics, has been rendered utterly superfluous by the internet, but it is worth considering for the force of Glanville’s strident voice and forthright opinions. Spades are called spades from front to back, in the kind of tired patrician’s narrative voice that puts one in mind of Gore Vidal on the terraces of White Hart Lane and the touchline at Hackney Marshes. Writing the year after Brazil’s triumph at the Mexico World Cup, Glanville expresses a love for Ajax and Celtic’s attacking play as well as, unsurprisingly, venerating Italian defensive strategies, but he does in it a way that places him closer to Machiavelli than Ian Murtagh. A charming anachronism that was a joy to read.

John Hegley: These Were Your Father’s – Like a kind of real-life John Shuttleworth wedded to iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets, John Hegley has been the Poet Laureate of Four Eyed Nerds for more than 35 years. I first became aware of him in summer 1984 with the debut release of his first band; Living in a Mobile Home by The Popticians. Strangely, I found no need to engage with his subsequent work that I found trite, mannered and trying just that bit too hard to be consciously whacky; the literary equivalent of the natural born loser searching vainly for sympathy shags.  Picking up this slim volume from a charity table at work, I wasn’t surprised to come across page upon page dedicated to musings on: his father, Luton, Jesus, spectacles, dogs, potatoes, love and his failure to find it. There is an intriguing series of poems about a surreal camping holiday that veers away from the self-conscious attempts to get a laugh from every line, but it wouldn’t be enough to encourage me to read any more of his winsome tripe.

Simon Hughes: And God Created Cricket - We’re only a couple of months away from the start of the cricket season, thank goodness. Consequently what we once called broadsheet papers will soon be stuffed with opinion pieces lamenting the decline of cricket. At the moment the complaint is about the introduction of the 100 ball fiasco. Such an article may well be run under a headline such as “Why isn’t cricket fun any more?” or “A menace to English cricket”, which as Simon Hughes has discovered, were  headlines that ran in the in the summer of 1930. And the object of their ire? Donald Bradman.

This is the point about cricket, as characterised by Hughes: today’s disaster is the future’s heroics. Hughes’s romp through 400 years of cricketing history is full of such moments when the game, and consequently wider society as a whole, was reckoned to be going to hell in a hand cart. The introduction of professionalism, the incorporation of overseas players into the English system, the advent of the one-day rules, venal administrators flirting with Sky TV: all of them were seen at the time as indicative of cricket losing its way.  Hughes is a spirited and entertaining, if occasionally consciously provocative, guide through the vicissitudes of God’s own sport: 400 years of peaks, troughs and manifestly unjust umpiring decisions.

The former Middlesex and Durham seamer’s theories about the game’s development are inevitably coloured by his own experience..When he talks about those he played with or against, his prose shines. He is brilliant on Geoff Boycott, surprisingly harsh on Ian Botham (he calls his captaincy “narrow-minded and intolerant”) and hilarious on Phil Tufnell. Hughes has travelled widely. As a broadcaster and entrepreneur, he has engaged with the game well beyond the boundary rope. He has been employed to try to arrest its slide in the West Indies and brought in to exploit its phenomenal growth in the Indian subcontinent. Wherever he goes, he is greeted by the same old refrain: the game isn’t what it used to be. Looking back on the summer of 2009 when he wrote this book, following the packed houses of the ICC Twenty20 World Cup and the heaving stands of the Ashes, we might conclude that it isn’t what it used to be: in retrospect it may appear miles better. This would be the ultimate historical irony that Hughes might address in his next book.

Patti Smith; Just Kids - When I was 12 I fell in love with Patti Smith’s music. Over 40 years later, Piss Factory, My Generation, Gloria, Dancing Barefoot and many others remain as vital and compelling as they were when I heard them in the first flush of my pubescent lust. Consequently, I was delighted to receive this volume as my second Christmas present from Ben.

Patti Smith was 20 years old when she fell in love with Rimbaud. By the time she read Illuminations, the poet had been dead for over 70 years but that did not seem to matter. "My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced."  Much of the first half of Just Kids is dominated by Rimbaud and countless mentions of the other important men in Smith's life, most of whom shared the principal attributes of being French, dead and terribly artistic. Baudelaire, Cocteau and Genet all merit frequent references. After giving up a child for adoption she buys a one-way ticket to New York and disappears into an ocean of artistic pretension.  Fortunately both Smith and the book are saved from imploding with self-satisfaction by a chance encounter with a green-eyed boy called Robert Mapplethorpe. In Mapplethorpe, Smith finds her spiritual twin, a man as obsessed with artistic creation as she is. For the next 12 years, against the vivid backdrop of 1970s New York, Mapplethorpe and Smith would live together, support each other and share jointly in their burgeoning success as artists; Mapplethorpe as a photographer, Smith as a poet turned singer.

Although Mapplethorpe later came out, his relationship with Smith remained intimately cocooned from the outside world. As the title suggests, their lasting friendship was defined more than anything by its innocence and purity. The relationship with Mapplethorpe infuses her writing with necessary human warmth. The knowing references become less frequent and she concentrates instead on crafting a moving and delicately handled dual memoir, a love letter to the man who became her real-life Rimbaud.  Living in a succession of squalid New York apartments, spending what little money they had on art supplies and surviving on day-old doughnuts and lettuce soup, both Mapplethorpe and Smith took their first tentative steps towards becoming the artists they so desired to be. Mapplethorpe, always the more focused and ambitious of the two, started to make collages by ripping photographs from male pornographic magazines. To save money, Smith suggested he take his own pictures and a star was accidentally born. Some of the early portraits are reproduced here, Smith's gaunt elegance and dense-eyed gaze staring out of the pages in black and white. It was Mapplethorpe who took the iconic shot of Smith for the cover of Horses.

Although both Smith and Mapplethorpe eventually went their separate ways, as she got married and had two children while he embarked on a long-term relationship with the collector Sam Wagstaff, their spiritual closeness remained. When Mapplethorpe was dying of Aids in 1989, he poignantly comments that they never had a family, Smith responds: "Our work was our children." And it is true that in many ways, Just Kids is a compassionate portrait of an unconventional marriage; an intimacy forged through a shared artistic vision. In both the tenderness of her expression and the beauty of her prose, there is no doubt that Patti Smith has given us a fitting memorial to her lost love and to the art they created together. Sadly though, Mapplethorpe comes across as an unbearable egotist and self-obsessed narcissist.

David Keenan: For The Good Times – Two years ago David Keenan’s debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, the story of a fictional post punk band from Airdrie, took my breath away with its subject matter and vision. With his second novel, Keenan has trumped that with the incredible story of an unrepentant IRA volunteer reminiscing about his 1970s and early 1980s Active Service salad days, where the armed struggle was accompanied with a soundtrack of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra.

Sammy’s memories pivot on his friendship with a fellow republican, Tommy, whose father helps them make their name among paramilitary high-ups when he tips them off about a hidden stash of weapons from Libya. Any sense that Keenan is glamorising the bloodshed rubs up against the relentless pratfalls complicating Sammy’s operations, as all too often events change direction, or get catastrophically out of hand. Retrieving that arms cache entails ending up waist-deep in raw sewage; one early-morning assassination has to be passed off as stag-do shenanigans when a homeless man buttonholes Sammy just as he’s trying to dump the victim’s body in a bin. At one point, his commander says, “Stop acting like fucking clowns... see if the IRA could dispense with Irishmen altogether, we’d be one fuck of a formidable fighting unit.”

Needing to lie low, a visit to Glasgow proves eye-opening, not least when the pair find themselves invited to an orgy with a gang of Orangemen and their amorous Loyalist ladies of the night. There’s so much going on in this incredible novel, from dream sequences to segments recasting the action as a superhero adventure,  it proves alarmingly easy to forget what we’re actually reading: the unrepentant testimony of a Republican soldier who dedicated his life to the cause of Irish self-determination. This is a brave and brilliant book.

Irvine Welsh: Dead Men’s Trousers – Being charitable, only one of Welsh’s dozen or more novels, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, has truly stunk from first page to last. Some of the Trainspotting spin-offs have been better than others; the Begbie vehicle The Blade Artist was a surprisingly taut and intense triumph, in the way that Ray Lennox reappearing in Crime was a gear shift from his role in Filth, though A Decent Ride only became vaguely memorable once the focus shifted away from Juice Terry the Caledonian mini cab Robin Askwith. With Dead Men’s Trousers, Welsh has achieved the unthinkable; he has combined dull prose with characters we no longer care about. Specifically Renton has become dull and Spud no longer anything other than a marginalised figure of pity rather than sympathy. The complexity surrounding Begbie’s new found karmic state and Sick Boy’s lifelong, inveterate shithousery do still charm the reader. Sadly, the overall feeling one has is that Welsh needed to write a book that included reference to Hibs winning the Scottish Cup in 2016 and everything else is incidentally. David Gray’s majestic header laid plenty of ghosts that May afternoon, allowing the Hibees to leave the past behind them. Perhaps Welsh could take a leaf from that book and spare us any further diminution of the effect the Leith boys once had on us.

Nutcases in Nyon; Zanies in Zurich

The Europa Nations Cup; what's that all about, eh? Goodness knows, but here's something I penned about it in the new issue of Stand -:

You’ve really got to hand it to FIFA and UEFA; the furthest excesses of human imagination simply could not have come up with such a pair of dysfunctional administrative bodies as these two unnatural disaster areas. Patently unfit to rule over the global game, the brazen behemoths immaculately synthesize corruption, avarice, incompetence and stupidity with such effortless style. In fact, if Trump’s inner circle and May’s cabinet (subject to the usual seismic, hourly changes of evil, rapacious, shape-shifting personnel of course) swapped jobs with the nutcases in Nyon and zanies in Zurich, they couldn’t do a worse job than in their current roles. In fact, I doubt any of us would notice the difference.

Before I’m accused of shooting fish in a barrel by picking on such easy targets as the sycophantic and scheming suits, who may well have the kind of self-awareness that makes them accept their utter otiosity, despite radiating the kind of personal arrogance not seen since the decline of the Mayan Royal Family, let me point out this really does need to be said. The truth is, since the joyously unexpected, high water mark of the World Cup, the game’s governing bodies have once more made international football a brutal, tortuous test of endurance. I’m not just saying that as a fan of the team mismanaged by Martin O’Neill, who has failed to bring his tactics out of the Palaeolithic era, whereby the consecutive 0-0s with the North and then Denmark in mid-November served as the best argument for the end of partition since Bernadette Devlin floored Reginald Maudling with a left hook in the House of Commons. I’m saying that as someone who has come to the conclusion that UEFA are more interested in quadratic equations, algebraic formulae and the more arcane elements of calculus than football.

Can it really be 9 months since the World Cup started? Despite the apocalyptic predictions of dystopian street warfare, we ended up with the best tournament in several generations. Almost every team could attack, but hardly any of them could defend, while referees turned were wise to the kind of reprehensible playacting that makes you shout at the telly like your old fella watching Rodney Marsh take theatrical tumbles at Maine Road in late 72. The whole competition was great, from start to finish. In fact, I even overheard people, basking in the afterglow of a month’s worth of quality free-to-air football, expressing enthusiasm for the 2020 European Championships, which is where things become difficult. Indeed, trying to get my head around the complexities of a competition that was recently happy to have 8 finalists in 2 groups of 4, reminded me of the days before pocket calculators, when we old campaigners had to slog through Maths O Level with only a set of log tables to help us. And if you complained all you heard was “be thankful you don’t have to use a slide rule,” whatever that was…

To understand the 2020 European Championships, you first need to understand the complexities of the European Nations Cup.  There are 55 countries playing in UEFA’s shiny new tournament, including Israel, presumably to upset Momentum members, and Turkey, who were the only country to express a firm wish to host the 2020 European Championships, despite most of their stadia being in Asia. Don’t expect logic from UEFA; the fact is, they’re more likely to carry out their long promised financial fair play sanctions against Man City and PSG than have a proper grasp of geography. These 55 countries were ranked in order and split into 4 Leagues, named from A to D in a 12, 12, 15, 16 division. Further to that, Leagues A and B were split into 3 team and Leagues C and D into 4 team groups, with everyone playing each other home and away. In Leagues A to C, the bottom sides got relegated and in Leagues B to D, the top teams went up.  

Relegated from League A	Promoted from League B	Relegated from League B	Promoted from League C	Relegated from League C	Promoted from League D
Croatia	Bosnia	Ireland	Finland	Albania	Belarus
Germany	Denmark	N. of Ireland	Norway	Estonia	Georgia
Iceland	Sweden	Slovakia	Scotland	Lithuania	Kosovo
Poland	Ukraine	Turkey	Serbia	Slovenia

In June, the 4 League A group winners, namely the questionable quartet of England, courtesy of a 12 minute window of adequacy home to Croatia, Holland, who made Germany the new crash test dummies of the continent, Switzerland, after they’d eviscerated a cruising Belgian side,  and Portugal, the first team to qualify, who were also the only country to express any vague interest in hosting a festival of somnolence that knocks spots off even the Confederations Cup in terms of irrelevance, play each other in mini tournament  at the far western edge of the Iberian peninsula, made up of a pair of semi-finals, a final and a 3^rd place play off in early June. Does that sound like a pointless and pointlessly confusing tournament to you? Well, wait until you find out about the qualification process for 2020, which begins in March 2019 and ends in November 2019.

Now, as a Newcastle fan I’ve no intrinsic objection to baffling tournaments with recherche qualification criteria; after all, our last 2 trophies were the 1969 Fairs Cup and the 2007 Inter Toto Cup. However, I’ve really got to take my hat off to UEFA and put my thinking cap on to comprehend this work of inconsequential complexity. Having failed to find a credible host nation for the tournament, the game’s top brass decided instead on 11 host cities, spread from Dublin to Baku and Glasgow to Bucharest, before the semis and final finish up at Wembley, presumably as it’s the biggest ground available. The shrouded this desperate ploy in a tissue of horseshit that proclaimed UEFA were doing their bit to take the international game to every corner of the continent. Yeah, righto…

If that sounds unwieldy, then listen to this; despite not having announced where the group stages will take place, during which the 24 qualifying teams will be whittled down to 16 for the knock out stage, only 20 of the 24 spots for the finals will from the main qualifying process, leaving four spots still to be decided. The 55 teams will be drawn into 10 groups after the UEFA Nations League (five groups of five teams and five groups of six teams, with the four UEFA Nations League Finals participants guaranteed to be drawn into groups of five teams), with the top two teams in each group qualifying. The draw seeding will be based on the overall rankings of the Nations League, which was supposedly the incentive for countries in the bottom tiers not to treat the Nations League like the sporting equivalent of Comic Relief, where everyone turns up in shit Fancy Dress and nicks off early to the pub. What a great reward for all the perennial UEFA minnows though; only 8 hammerings instead of 10. They’ll be dancing in the streets of Vaduz and Auchtermuchty because of that.

So, and this is the really great bit, following the qualifying group stage, the qualifying play-offs will take place in March 2020. The 16 teams of the remaining 35 with the best record in the Nations League get split into 4 “paths” (I’m not making this terminology up you know), based on the 4 qualifying Leagues for the Nations League, with the winners of each “path” needing to come through a pair of 2 leg ties to get a place in the Euros. There will be a “path” made up from each of Leagues A to D countries who finished third, fourth or perhaps lower in the 10 Euro 2020 qualifying groups. We’ve gone from the simplicity of the beautiful game, to a kind of speed-dating repêchage meets pass the parcel, whereby the likes of Moldova and Cyprus will grind out a pair of attritional 0-0 draws and an interminable penalty shootout, for the honour of securing a chance to be pasted by Belgium or France.

Frankly, we may as well do away with domestic leagues if all we’re going to be doing is attempting to qualify for tournament finals 365 days a year. After all, there’s the small matter of the next UEFA Nations League in 2021, before we get to the sporting epicentre of venal corruption, when we all head to the pop-up tournament built on the spilled blood and unmarked graves of forced migrant labour; Qatar 2022.

Curiously, an end to the mundane treadmill of domestic football is probably something FIFA’s Grand Poobah Gianni Infantino would be pleased to introduce. You see the problem with the meritocratic principle in football is that it occasionally produces unpleasant results, like Leicester winning the title and gate-crashing the Champions’ League cartel, or Real Madrid having a crap season and looking likely to miss out on qualification. Clearly, this is not what the storied legions of sponsors want. You’d find the monolithic football corporations operating in Spain, England and Italy, though one hopes not Germany whose laws demand purity in both beer production and football club ownership, are vehemently opposed to uninvited outsiders trying to get their snouts in the trough and feet under the table. For Manchester City and Paris St Germain, their particular interpretation of the concept of Financial Fair Play is keeping as much cash as they can for themselves and cutting their floundering domestic rivals adrift. What the avaricious football megacorps want is a semi-hermetically sealed European Super League, to maximise income streams and avoid the minimal prospect of any team of talented outsiders upsetting the apple cartel by the vulgar expedient of actually daring to win something that should, by divine right, belong exclusively to the big boys. And don’t you just know that if this ever got off the ground, Ajax, Benfica, Celtic and a school of big fish from tiny ponds would be demanding a European Super League second tier.   

Thankfully FIFA, in the shape of Le Grand Fromage Infantino are dead against such plans, as the last thing FIFA wants is a breakaway European Super League. Infantino has announced himself ready to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted Corinthianism in our sport with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of FIFA fair play, by banning for life any players who take part in such a competition. Fantastic to see a footballing reference to Colombia that relates to the 1948 El Dorado financial fiasco that led to bans for Alberto Di Stefano, Charlie Mitten and Neil Franklin, rather than a sordid tabloid confessional by a failed second tier starlet who lost it all after he was caught on CCTV doing bugle off his credit club in the bogs of a Droitwich nitespot.

Of course, there is nothing remotely honourable about FIFA’s opposition. The thing is, Saint Gianni reckons he has the solution to all the game’s ills; we simply need a FIFA club World Cup. After all, we all know just how fabulously successful and widely ignored the annual World Club Championships have been. In fact, the only time it ever crossed my consciousness was when Man Utd dropped out the FA Cup and the third round got played before Christmas in 1999/2000. That was a bad idea and was never replicated. Same as the dismal Premier League experiment of playing the Cup Final before the closing round of league games. Other than the play-offs, I can’t think of a single administrative bright idea that has done the game any tangible good, unlike playing modifications like giving attackers the benefit of the doubt for offsides and banning keepers picking up back passes.

There’s a lesson in all of this; if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Now close your eyes and remember Germany imploding against South Korea or Belgium storming away to get the winner in the Japan game. That’s what football is about; poetry not maths. Keep it simple. Keep it clean.