The Brass Donkey

Football fans have a curious love for certainties – knowing that this player was definitely better than that one, that one club is clearly bigger than the other – that seems to be a product of the untidy nature of the game itself. Just about every other sport divides up into discreet bursts of action, regular points where the rulebook catches its breath and says ‘this part of the game is over, now this one can begin’. Not so football.

While even something as free flowing as basketball, for example, comes with a 24-second shot clock that turns a match into a series of incredibly detailed set pieces, football lends itself to a constant state of semi-anarchy where anything could happen at any time. Has your team just spent a relentless ten minutes dominating possession and pounding the opponent’s defence? Well, don’t let yourself blink too long, because three passes and awkward deflection off a shin-pad later you might find yourself a goal down without the cruel universe having the decency to let you know the paradigm was shifting while your eyelids were touching.

We’re forever trying to throw boundaries around this sport, little pieces of territory that easier to understand the more bite-sized we can make them. There’s a reason why that hateful phrase ‘in the Premier League era’ has such currency, and it’s not just because Sky dominate the game’s coverage and desperately hope that you’ll never remember a time when paying £500 a year to watch some games on TV was something only a crazy person would do.

So when something as monumental as the undisputed Best Club Side Ever get completely outclassed in a 4-0 drubbing, it’s understandable that people start preparing a new section in their mental History of Football Wikipedia article. Throw in a similarly epochal drubbing for Real Madrid in Dortmund the following evening and the transfer of power narratives are everywhere you look, begging to be written up then carved onto the tombstones of the First Great La Masia team, of Spain’s dominance of European football, of Revista de la Liga being a ratings-grabber on UK TV.

Except the era hasn’t ended…

You can read this article in full at The Football Ramble, an excellent website for an even excellenter podcast.

Episode Six - WarioWare, Inc (GBA) and Starfox 2 (SNES)

One More Go features two Scottish men talking about videogames that meant a lot to them in the past, and how it feels to play them now.

Nicol feeds his short attention span and Barry discovers the SNES’ lost last hurrah.

Download the episode (Direct Link | iTunes | RSS)

BONUS CONTENT AFTER THE JUMP: Enjoy Nicol’s battle-damaged DS!

Read More

Barcelona were teetering, with only 30 minutes remaining to save their Champions League campaign after a lively Paris St Germain performance had left the Catalans looking shaky and bereft of ideas. In the end, it only took them 10 minutes to turn the tie around. 10 minutes and Lionel Messi.

Messi, as you may be aware, is a rather talented football player. So talented in fact, that despite having a hamstring as tight as James Brown’s rhythm section, he was still able to display enough pace and trickery to draw three PSG players in his jinky wake, before playing a ball that eventually found its way to an unmarked Pedro to score.

So if effectively removing one of Messi’s legs isn’t enough to stop him being a rampant footballing force – if he can single-handedly bamboozle a team put together at the cost of more than 20 contentious ex-Prime Minister’s funerals while nursing an injury that would cause most mortals to forego standing up, much less participation in elite athletic activity – then how can he ever be stopped?

That is the question we posed to a panel of the finest tactical minds in the land. These are their responses:

André Villas-Boas, Tottenham Hotspur coach

“First of all, Messi prefers to operate in the vacant territory created by the latency in recovery between the secondary and tertiary midfield stations. His lateral transference creates spatial dissonance in the personnel cycles that are such a basic part of pre-reactive defensive schemes in the high-block strategic configuration.

“Clearly then, the primary option is to have a rotational defensive responsibility assigned on a situational basis, with satellite programs designed to eliminate as many pass-selection recourses as possible. By working to channel Messi’s ludic circumstances into a pre-designated optimum alternative, you can maximise your opportunities to contextualise his influence, allowing the team’s functional side-outs to retrieve position and initiate a retro-incursive response.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to explain that to Michael Dawson in terms that he will understand.”

(Villas-Boas leaves, carrying a glove puppet, a colouring book and the air of a man resigned to failure)

You can read this article in full at The Football Ramble, an excellent website for an even excellenter podcast.

He stabilised, because that’s what he does.

In December 2010, Craig ‘Safe Hands’ Brown rolled into an Aberdeen FC that found itself relegation-threatened and floundering, and he turned that malfunctioning unit into a steadfast lower-mid-table outfit. Craig Brown was never the guy you called for a tilt at glory – no silver-hungry oligarch would ever dial his number ahead of Mourinho’s when looking for someone to throw around a few hundred million petrodollars for his football plaything – but he was always dependable.

As a player, Derek McInnes was the midfield equivalent of a Craig Brown managerial tenure – not a superstar, but a reliable presence to be brought in when calmness and continuity was needed. The concrete, bland sense of security that Brown has embedded all around the Pittodrie foundation will be music to new boss McInnes’ ears.

McInnes’ short managerial career has seen two distinct eras at St Johnstone and Bristol City. At the former, he made a seamless transition from senior pro to gaffer when Owen Coyle was lured away by the bright lights of Burnley. Coyle had been carefully building a promotion-capable side for two years, providing an excellent platform that McInnes developed beautifully, completing the club’s return to the top flight and fashioning a staunch mid-table side, capable of pleasant football and the odd eye-catching result on a budget so tiny – even by SPL standards – that Peter Jackson could cast it as the lead in an epic fantasy trilogy.

Read More

Manchester United will win the league this season.

This may be the least flashy newsflash to ever blink across your eyes, but it doesn’t make the news part any less true. A 15-point cushion and a cluster of rivals who are either lacklustre, limited or waging a cold war against their own coach mean that club captain Nemanja Vidić has been incorporating trophy-lifting and crowd-saluting routines into his own detailed pre-planned training and medical programme for some months now.

This fait is now so accompli that Alex Ferguson this week stated that his target for this season is now to break the record Premier League points total, set at 95 by the muscular vintage of José Mourinho’s 2004-05 Chelsea team. At time of writing, United require 22 points from the 27 that remain available to them – a tricky proposition, but by no means impossible when you cast an eye over their remain fixtures, and factor in a lack of European competition to stretch their resources.

But this United team? Record breakers? Really?

When you think back over the great United sides of recent history, they had at least one department of transcendent, pantheon-level quality. The 2008 team boasted a fluid front three of Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and a pre-tantrum era Carlos Tévez that flitted and interchanged and scored and scored and scored with a joyous, purposeful abandon. The chemistry of those three players at that exact point of their respective careers was glorious, lightning-in-a-bottle stuff, and no team has been able to truly replicate it since.

The 1999 side possessed a four-man unit that will be brought up in misty-eyed pub conversations about the all-time great midfields for generations to come. If more squads today were able to blend the steel and artistry of that Giggs-Scholes-Keane-Beckham axis, reports of the death of 4-4-2 might have been slightly less exaggerated.

Comparing those past team-sheets to today’s must be a harrowing exercise for United fans. When you consider the mediocrity of a Young-Anderson-Carrick-Valencia midfield, whose only function is to play with bare minimum competence for long enough to allow Robin van Persie’s brilliance to secure a win, you have to wonder if that fabled Ferguson wine cellar didn’t start out life in the Glaswegian’s home as a collection of bottled water…

You can read this article in full at The Football Ramble, an excellent website for an even excellenter podcast.

Sunderland vs. Man Utd

Man Utd to win

Sunderland just lost their best player for the rest of the season when Steven Fletcher’s ankle ligaments took one look at the writing on the Hampden Park wall and decided enough was enough. In related news, Sunderland’s best player is Steven Fletcher. Meanwhile, Alex Ferguson has stated that this season’s target is to break the Premier League points record.
If you can find anyone silly enough to bet against a United victory, take all their pennies and don’t look back.

Arsenal vs. Reading

Arsenal to win

Reading may be fighting for their survival, and may have just replaced their pleasant-but-ultimately-doomed English manager with an entirely different pleasant-but-ultimately-doomed English manager, but Arsenal are fighting for something much more important in the modern game – credibility. The entire Arsène Wenger jalopy depends on overachievement to keep the pervading sense of Arsenal superiority good and justified, and anything less than Champions League qualification would be average, dull, and utterly useless. Besides, Reading are not very good.

Man City vs. Newcastle

Newcastle to win or draw

The fire has gone out at Man City. Maybe it was the realisation that almost nothing they do for the rest of the season will prevent them from finishing second, no matter how they might strive or skive – or maybe it was just Mario taking his bathroom hobbies with him when he left in January that extinguished the flame. Either way, Eastlands currently hosts none of the zest that Papiss Cissé is carting around now that the entire Newcastle team is focused on providing him balls to kick into nets – and zest will out.

Southampton vs. Chelsea

Southampton to win

Do yourself a favour – just close your eyes for a moment and say the name ‘Morgan Schneiderlin’. Let the smooth confidence of those Teutonic syllables roll over your tongue. Allow yourself to hear the clipped satisfaction in a foreign commentator’s voice as he describes the calm precision of a Morgan Schneiderlin interception. Permit your mind to wander, safe in the knowledge that Morgan Schneiderlin will provide serenity, security and steel on the pitch and in your dreams.
Whisper it now: Morgan Schneiderlin. Morgan Schneiderlin. Morgan Schneiderlin.

….

You can read the rest of this article and gamble your heart out at buddybet.com.

It’s been quite a journey for Swansea City. Just a decade ago, it was all crumbling terracing, a last-day reprieve from relegation to Non-League purgatory and Leon Britton at the heart of midfield for the Welsh club. Nowadays, they enjoy Michael Laudrup, Michael Laudrup’s impeccable hair, Premier League football in a shiny new stadium, a Michu to call their very own and Leon Britton at the heart of midfield.

The Swansea story has been a triumph with many parents. Forward planning and sensible financial husbandry laid the foundations for Roberto Martínez, Paulo Sousa, Brendan Rodgers and finally Laudrup to build a very cosy house on top. Such clear continuity of coaching philosophy has allowed Swansea to evolve naturally through divisions and personnel, arriving at their current exalted plane a well-oiled machine – and with plenty of scope to improve in years to come.

But not this season. Improvement is done for this year.

There was a general skepticism last summer that Swansea could possibly top the achievements of their debut Premier League season this time around. A comfortable mid-table finish on the back of some delightfully intricate, neutral-wooing football represented success beyond the wildest dreams of such a modest-spending club, and the Premier League had in the past bestowed a brutal sophomore slump on similarly precocious upstarts. Laudrup’s previous managerial career was also cause for arched eyebrows, with solid boom periods of triumph interspersed with harrowing busts of poor form and off-field calamity, in a karmic CV that suggests Laudrup conducts training on a desecrated pet cemetery or something…

You can read this article in full at The Football Ramble, an excellent website for an even excellenter podcast.

Episode Five - Chrono Trigger (SNES) and Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (N64)

One More Go features two Scottish men talking about videogames that meant a lot to them in the past, and how it feels to play them now.

An all-apocalypse special, as Barry goes era-hopping and Nicol gets stuck in a recurring loop. THE END IS NIGH.

Download the episode (Direct Link | iTunes | RSS)

The Ramble has come into the possession of this draft document from the highest levels of the Chelsea executive, leaked by a disgruntled employee. We’re not a liberty to divulge our sources, but we must acknowledge our gratitude to the circle of honour that exists between fellow bloggers.

Dear Loyal Chelsea FC Fan,

We’ve listened.

How could we not? The pride and the passion of the true Chelsea FC supporter is difficult to ignore at any time, but when 41,000 voices sing as one during a fantastic Stamford Bridge matchday, no one could be deaf to their desires.

You want your Chelsea FC back. We want you to have it.

Chelsea FC are therefore delighted to announce that the next permanent First Team Manager will be you, the fans.

Who else could measure up to the high standards of our Club? What traditional manager working in the game today would not be found wanting, or indeed has not had the job for three to five months at some point in the recent past and already been found wanting? We’ve had it with managers, Roman’s had it with managers, and we believe that you’ve had it with managers too.

Managers will always let you down, in the end. They might win a trophy or two, but then they’ll do something unforgivable like oversee an inadequate number of goals scored at home to Everton…

You can read this article in full at The Football Ramble, an excellent website for an even excellenter podcast.

Although the more traditional signs of spring having sprung are eluding us somewhat this year – what with the amount for snow collecting on the stoic brows of stranded commuters increasing rather than reducing as March hurtles past – more modern indicators of the season are blinking away frantically as the relegation battle in the English Premier League starts heating up.

Spring is a time of rebirth and rejuvenation, and Wigan Athletic have taken that concept to heart in the last two seasons, shuffling their way dismally through the fixture list until they hit mid-March, when they strap on a wholesale shipment of Billy’s Boots and effortlessly hoover up victories from their bewildered opponents on their route to safety and another well-earned nine-month hibernation.

Unusually, Wigan have decided to begin their assault on league survival with a victory in the FA Cup. Not immediately useful, but the dominant 3-0 success away to Everton contained enough of the hallmarks of the Wigan-Athletic-Late-Season-Survival-Winning-Final-Form-Evolution to have confidence surging through Gary Caldwell – and terror through all those who face him.

Only a month ago, Reading were looking like the team to haul themselves from the mire on the back of a series of impressive late comebacks and a spate of Adam Le Fondre goals. Sadly, you should never put your trust in spates, and four defeats in a row since that run of form have seen the club’s ownership swallow hard, dispense with the safe pair of hands attached to Brian McDermott, and – if rumours and betting exchanges are to be believed – look to install noted stability-magnet Paulo di Canio instead.

Fans of an unbalanced risk/reward ratio and dynamic swearing are advised to keep an eye on the Madejski Stadium over the next two months…

You can read the rest of this article at STV Sport, the comprehensive and compelling website for Scotland’s largest commercial broadcaster.