A small portion of despair and enlightenment delivered to your inbox every Friday
22 February 2008 ~
Friday morning and the papers are full of stories of Paul Gascoigne’s berserk behaviour during his residency at the Gateshead Hilton that caused him to be sectioned on Thursday. Already TV production companies will be pitching ideas for documentaries, at least one will have the working title of The Fallen Idol. The synopses will include the terms “edgy” “iconic” and “darkly comic”. When the programmes get made – and there is enough material for a series – most of the people who made a packet out of their association with a public personality called Gazza will find that they are too busy to appear.
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 Badge of the Week
from Mike Innes
Japanese fourth-tier outfit Kamatamare Sanuki acknowledge their local area's association with sanuki udon noodles by being perhaps the only club in the world to have a cooked foodstuff on their badge. This is also reflected in the club mascot, Kama-chan (who has a bowl for a head and noodles for hair), pictured with his diminutive sidekick Tama-chan the egg. Image: Wikipedia
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Among the many club owners queuing up to pour scorn on the Game 39 plan was Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, who’s just recently become a lifelong fan of QPR. “The current idea the Premier League is putting forward isn't very good, he told the Mirror. “They probably wouldn't find it very easy to convince someone in Singapore to have Wigan playing somebody over there.” Actually, Bernie has a better idea: “I'd have the top four clubs who are known worldwide playing six matches against each other in a mini-league. I'd run it completely separately and export it to whoever wanted to buy it. Not sharing the money with any of the rest of the league or anything like that.” In another interview last week, with the Daily Mail, Bernie also expounded on his political outlook: “I hate democracy as a political system. It stops you getting things done. I think people should have decisions made for them. A good dictator is better for a country than a democracy.” You just know that Bernie will be voted on to the Football League management committee at the earliest opportunity. And then we’ll see some changes.
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Something for the weekend
A result to watch out for
from Mike Ticher
It’s the A-League grand final between the Central Coast Mariners and Newcastle Jets on Sunday. What’s the point of a “grand final”? After the regular season the top four clubs (out of eight) play an unnecessarily convoluted series of play-offs to arrive at the final two. League winners and grand final winners qualify for the Asian Champions League, but since Central Coast won the league, that’s both these teams.
Who are they? Geographically the two closest A-League teams, both just north of Sydney. It’s billed romantically as “the F3 derby”, and that freeway will feature heavily as thousands of disgruntled fans battle to and from the 40,000 Sydney Football Stadium – controversially chosen to host it even though there’s a one-day cricket international going on next door at the SCG.
Who to howl for? Central Coast. It’s Tony Vidmar’s last game before retirement (and he admits “I’m a first-past-the-post man”), plus Craig Foster wants Newcastle to win because they play prettier football.
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from Cameron Carter
The sports headline on the Yahoo News page on February 20 read “Carlos Tevez pounced in the 87th minute to hand Manchester United a 1-1 draw with Lyon”, prompting its reader to click on the Results link to read more. The full story then began “Carlos Tevez pounced in the 86th minute…”.
Now, we know he pounced – that much is clear – but did he score in the 86th or the 87th minute? Why doesn't the headline match the story linked to it? It's a minor irritation perhaps, but so is the bite of a Tse-Tse fly, and you get yellow fever from that. Why can't internet journalists working on the same story just get the minute of the goal the same – it doesn't have to be correct – if only to make things more tidy. Can anyone reliable clear up the mystery of when Carlos Tevez scored? ---
Spotted this week
from Ian Dunford
“Not exactly a recent spot but I did once have a reasonably priced cup of coffee and a slice of Black Forest gateau in a London cafe run by someone who played in a World Cup semi-final. This establishment was Strikers in West Kensington, owned by Boncho Gentchev, formerly of Ipswich and Luton who played for 12 minutes in Bulgaria’s World Cup semi v Italy in 1994. Boncho was there in person, in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, chatting at a corner table with a couple of what I assumed to be his fellow countrymen – one of whom had an explosive cough that sounded like a sea lion requesting fish – while Mrs Gentchev ran the customer service area. Boncho is now on the coaching staff at Hendon in the Isthmian Premier, and still gets a game in midfield despite being over 40 – he doesn’t seem to be running the catering concession, however.” ---
This week in history ~ Division One, February 21, 1981
Results
Man City’s derby win capped their revival under manager John Bond who replaced Malcolm Allison after a terrible start when the team failed to win any of their first 12 games. Midfielder Steve Daley later revealed that Allison would get the players to lap the pitch while he stood in the centre circle and yelled “How do you feel?” to which they were expected to respond “Sharp!”.
The bottom three clubs at this point also went down. Brighton saved themselves by winning their last four games while Norwich slipped below them by losing their last two – after severely denting Ipswich's title hopes with a 1-0 at Carrow Road in the 40th match.
Palace went through four managers, including Terry Venables and his former mentor, the ubiquitous Malcolm Allison whose return to the club lasted only six matches. Allison stayed just long enough to sell three players, Terry Fenwick, Mike Flanagan and John Burridge, to Venables’ new club, QPR, for a surprisingly low combined fee. In January new owner Ron Noades brought in Dario Gradi. The team lost their first seven games under Gradi’s management, this defeat at Villa being the fourth in the sequence.
Villa, by contrast, were in the middle of a run of seven wins, though they didn’t overhaul leaders Ipswich until a win at Leicester at the start of April. Ipswich beat Villa three times that season, twice in the league and once in the Cup – a fact which still troubles Alan Brazil who often mentions it on his radio show.
One of Ipswich’s goalscorers in the 3-1 win over Wolves was central defender Kevin Beattie who was playing his penultimate match for the club at the age of 27. Beattie had been tipped for stardom after his England debut in 1975 but his career was ruined by injury.
Liverpool’s draw with Brighton marked the last appearance of their Israeli full back Avi Cohen, who had been their only foreign signing since English clubs had been permitted to bring in overseas players in 1978. ---
WSC Trivia ~ No 4
When he was on the run in 1998, renegade MI5 agent David Shayler contacted WSC offering to write a series of match reports on the World Cup in France where he was hiding at the time (at a location that we are not, of course, at liberty to reveal). Shayler, a Boro fan, had previously been a regular attender at London meetings of Middlesbrough Supporters South. He may be taking less of an interest in football these days, however, as he now believes himself to be the Messiah. ---
 Stickipedia
A mine of information constructed from sticker cards
Frank McGarvey, Liverpool Panini Football 80
This may be a unique case of a player appearing as a sticker in the colours of a club he never played for. Frank McGarvey joined Liverpool in the summer of 1979 from St Mirren having just won a couple of Scotland caps. With Liverpool being the most successful club in Europe at the time, McGarvey wasn’t guaranteed a starting place but was expected to compete with David Johnson as partner for Kenny Dalglish. After several months in the reserves, however, he demanded a transfer and was duly sold to Celtic in March 1980. The following close-season, Clive Allen spent just a month with Arsenal after moving from QPR. This was long enough to appear in some pre-season photos but he’d left for Palace before the pictures were taken for the Panini stickers.
A further update on Colin Beesley (star of Stickipedia 1) from Barry Thornton
“If I may add to the Colin Beesley story, I have news of his further life after Sunderland let him go in the early 1970s and his next club, Stockton FC, folded a few years later. He is married to Bernadette Sleightholme and last year was managing an over-40s side in Stockton. He has two children aged 25 and 20. Bernadette Sleightholme is described as 'a good-looking girl, as I remember' by a contributor to the Stockton Memories website and so we must conclude either that the photo of Colin featured in Stickipedia is an unflattering one (it really does look like a strong breeze), or perhaps a starry-eyed Bernadette was won over by his anecdotes from three years in the Sunderland stiffs. I think this is a happy ending for an overlooked player.” ---
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League table courtesy of www.statto.com: the place to go for football stats & odds comparison – English & Scottish stats from 1871 plus European & International
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