2008 September

Counting Crows

Sep 11, 2008 By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: Media, Togger

Congratulations to Fabio Capello and his players on an excellent result last night.

To clarify, the last sentence of my previous post was not intended to be a prediction of defeat last night (though I unequivocally expected a Croatian victory), so much as a wider observation on the state of English football and the organisations responsible for its demise.

I hope last night’s victory is one of many more for Capello, a fantastic coach; unfortunately I don’t see it as anything more than another brief but ultimately false dawn. I genuinely hope I’m proved wrong.

And I hope The Manchester Guardian stops running headlines such as “Capello’s Fucking Brilliant And We Always Said He Was” and “Capello’s A Fucking Genius And We’re Going To Win The World Cup So Buy Your St. George’s Flag Now”, which is how the paper’s football page reads today.

Harry Potter really has turned that organ into a bloody expensive arse-wiping rag.

Sleepwalking to disaster

Sep 10, 2008 By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: Sport, Togger

Tricky Dicky Williams waxes lyrical about Croatian manager Slaven Bilic in today’s Guardian:

“Wake up,” he [Bilic] instructed England after last year’s victory at Wembley. “You didn’t lose the game tonight because of the tactics. You didn’t lose because you played one man up front. We were simply a better team.”

He was at his best again yesterday in his hideaway across the border in Slovenia, where he takes the squad before matches in order to remove them from the temptations of Zagreb’s fleshpots. How much, he was asked, has his team improved since they last entertained England almost two years ago?

“Much better, in every possible way,” he said. “We are simply better players, we are better as a team. We’ve had more training sessions. Before that game in Zagreb we’d maybe had 20 or 30 training sessions together. Now we’ve had 150. My players are now two years older. The only guy that doesn’t help is [the 36-year-old] Niko Kovac, but only on paper as he’s playing the best football of his life and will do for another couple of years. All the other guys are no longer 21 but 23, which is important, and we are a better team.”

Bilic’s not entirely unjustified braggadocio aside, perhaps one of the reasons Croatia keep stuffing England is because – by the sounds of it – the Croatian national team trains together 60 times a year.

How many training sessions a year did Sven Gordon take? Or Second Choice Steve?

And how often does Fabio Capello manage to prise the tarnished remains of the golden generation away from the clutches of the Premier League?

Guus Hiddink took South Korea to a World Cup semi-final in 2002 because he locked the 23 players in a training camp for four entire months before the tournament: they were the best-drilled and most disciplined team in the competition.

Brian Mawhinney, Brian Barwick, David Triesman: your boys are going to take one Hell of a beating.

Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?

Sep 9, 2008 By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: Chancer's Paradise, Conservatives, Labour, Media, Politics, Radio, Society

I love the fact that our politicians have apparently decided that nationalisation and governmental intervention is actually the only sensible route to take in certain circumstances, but that none of them will actually say so.

Fannie May and Freddie Mac have this week followed Northern Rock into national ownership: there has been barely a whiff of political or economic dissent to the astonishing development.

Some stuffed shirt or another from Goldman Sachs told the Today programme yesterday that governments have a “duty to intervene” in circumstances such as those that have developed in America, where free markets have failed working people.

That, once again, from Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank.

(I’m sure they said much the same circa 1978 a propos British Leyland and British Steel. The tape of that interview probably just got wiped.)

Most interestingly Dave Cameron’s barely locatable, let alone jumping up and down on the Six and Ten, yelling to Huw about the Trots in Number 10 and the White House and their evil machinations designed to thwart the unchecked progress of global capitalism.

Don’t tell me that the fucking Tories are going to be to the left of Labour at the next election: I’m on a diet and I don’t have the strength to take that…