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11 April 2008 ~
The arrests of Karren Brady and David Sullivan this week in connection with a police investigation into corruption received wide coverage in all the daily papers. Except for one. There as no mention at all, not even a paragraph, in the Sun, for whom Karren Brady is a regular columnist. As mentioned in a previous Howl, Karren is prone to spreading rumours about football people’s sexual indiscretions in the weekly My Brum Diary. This might suit the paper’s prurient approach to such matters but it’s still a very odd thing for a football insider to do. Last Saturday, for example, she asked “Which well-known Premier League director has holidayed for years with his mistress staying in one hotel and his wife, unknowing, in another?” Next week Karren will ask readers to guess how many Premier League directors enjoyed reading about how “football’s first lady” has been helping police with their enquiries.
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 Badge of the week
Ilves Kissat means Lynx Cat in Finnish. So what on earth's that? It might be a water vole and as such bears a resemblance to Howl regular Paul Jewell, but it’s nothing like the only non-domestic cat native to the Nordic countries. Evidently tiring of such complaints, the club from Tampere changed their badge during the 1980s to more closely resemble a lynx. In 1998 Ilves merged with smaller neighbours TPV under the boring name of Tampere United and have since won three league titles. However, the feline motif is still borne by the ice hockey section of the club, the most successful in Finland, while Ilves and TPV have continued as lower league football teams.
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There was a striking line in an Independent article about the Glastonbury festival this week. Recounting how live BBC coverage revitalised the event in the late 1990s, it goes on: “Glastonbury jumped headfirst into the mainstream, becoming part of the urban sophisticate’s cultural calendar, along with the Edinburgh Festival and the first day of the football season.” Readers often complain of being stuck in an August turnstile queue behind someone called Seb telling someone called Hugo about how easy Alex Kapranos is to work with. Or they’ve been been near-deafened by tannoy messages “for Banksy to meet Jude at the main gate”. It’s always such a relief when the sophisticates drift away again in September.
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Historic football websites No 2 ~ Partick Thistle – The Early Years
I like the idea of a football website sounding like a compilation CD of lost outtakes and bedroom demos. It’s fascinating to follow the club’s peripatetic young life – when the team moved to Muir Park in the 1880s, the Scottish Athletic Journal reported: ‘The new field will be one of the best in the country. Situated in Dumbarton Road, it is being used as a strawberry field at present.’ Their next venue, Inchview, was so poor that the players preferred away games. Next stop was Meadowside, now located ‘beside the present north entrance to the Clyde Tunnel’. Use this site to plan your next Partick Thistle Historic Walking Tour of Glasgow. Ian Plenderleith
Know an ancient site?
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Spotting players
from Martyn Bell
“The Century FM radio network broadcasts regionally in both north-west and north-east England. Both stations have a ‘three legends’ football phone-in. The north-east ‘legends’ were, in descending order of legendariness, Malcolm Macdonald, Bernie Slaven and ex-Sunderland man Eric Gates (who has the singular middle name of Lazenby). In March 2007, however, Gates abruptly disappeared off air with all sorts of lurid rumours surrounding his departure. It was at this time that I saw him swaying down a city-centre street in Sunderland, resembling a particularly unattractive scarecrow with lank hair fluttering in the late night breeze. The lack of a microphone wasn’t stopping him loudly holding forth. The next day’s Newcastle Chronicle reported that Century had put Gates on ‘gardening leave’ after a contract wrangle. Unusually, this required him to turn up for his appointed work at the station without ever going on air. Gates has since been replaced in the Sunderland role by 1973 FA Cup-winner Mick Horswill, who has more claim to legend status but makes Gates sound like a consummate broadcaster.”
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One of our favourite publications, The Non League Paper reports this week on some unusual reasons for players to have missed matches lately. Hillingdon Borough midfielder Michael Murray aggravated an ankle injury stepping off a bus, while Droylsden defender Lee Roche couldn’t make their game with Exeter because he was on jury duty (“though he had been in the dock himself following his own goal in the 2-2 draw with Aldershot”). Best of all, Wealdsone discovered that their newly acquired American defender Rhett Bernstein only has a short-term visa rather than a work permit. This means that he can’t play in a game anyone has paid to watch. Maidstone manager Gordon Bartlett said: “It sums up our season – as one door opens, another one smashes us in the face.” All the world is here. ---
Tales From The Landesliga ~ No 4
WSC contributor Matt Nation's series about watching lower-league football in Hamburg
For many Hamburger, doing sport often extends no further than wearing the kit. There are balaclava-clad Nordic walkers who don’t make it further than the end of the road. There are lycra-encrusted cyclists who spend longer eating their pre-ride bucket of pasta than they do sitting on their bikes. There are tennis players called Hotte, with expensive tank-tops and the serving technique of a cook on Shrove Tuesday, who hit the ball over the fence for five minutes and then retire to the clubhouse for a Herrengedeck of lager and schnapps. And there are park footballers who put on a white shirt, red shorts and blue stockings and turn out for Hamburger SV III, ie HSV thirds.
It's understandable in a way. After all, the stiffs' stiffs are just a few dozen players away from a game against Bayern Munich. One gastroenteritis epidemic of a Friday tea-time at the first team’s canteen coupled with an outbreak of mass indiscipline among the reserves and these lads could be lining up in the Champions League next season. Some of them even look vaguely like the first-teamers. The scampering centre-forward with an eye for offside is redolent of former terrace darling Mehdi Mahdavikia. The centre-half is every bit as ponderous and doner-thighed as current stopper Bastian Reinhardt. The diddy little captain, with his furrowed brow and over-ambitious passes, could be German midfielder Piotr Trochowski’s big brother. Even the old bloke in the dug-out, all astronaut-helmet spectacles and pickled-cabbage complexion, looks like Uwe Seeler taking the rise out of himself.
However, one old Horst Hrubesch jersey doesn’t a decent Landesliga team make. And hosts Sportverein Eidelstedt von 1880, who, with a crew-cut back-four, a round-shouldered midfield shuffler and a centre-forward built like Raseem from the Arabian Knights cartoon, look every inch the pub team, rip them apart. The visitors take an early lead, but spend so long cocking their ears to the crowd that Eidelstedt equalise almost immediately, and then bludgeon in a second just before half-time. After the break, however, HSV demonstrate just how much the professional habits of their more illustrious club-mates have rubbed off on them: they give it large to the match officials, bollock each other incessantly, get abductor injuries and even manage to get a man sent off for applauding a perfectly correct refereeing decision. They lose 4-1.
As HSV slope off to the dressing room, they get it in the neck from a historically aware local pensioner with the voice and gait of Jack Douglas. “Hah! We Danes stuffed it to the Prussians!” His elderly mates laugh that belly laugh that only men laughing at other men laugh. The players look up at the nine-foot high letters on the roof of the HSH Nordbank Arena, just the other side of the marshalling yard at the back of the pitch, yet barely visible through the rain. They seem further away than ever.
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WSC Trivia ~ No 10
The film company making Catwoman, starring Halle Berry, requested some copies of WSC for use as props in a scene in which one of the supporting cast, a keen footballer, is seen at home reading magazines. We subsequently sat through the film, one of the biggest Hollywood flops of recent times, but there was no sign of WSC, even in a wastebasket. There might be a great big close-up in one of the deleted scenes on the DVD but we can’t face it. ---
 Stickipedia
A mine of information constructed from sticker cards
Ron Atkinson, Atlético Madrid Futbol 89
Ron appears to be hurrying from the airport, clutching directions to Atlético Madrid’s stadium or possibly his contract. Appointed in October 1988, he lasted three months, which was about the average for Atlético’s insane president, Jesus Gil y Gil. Two other British managers were in La Liga at the time – Howard Kendall at Athletic Bilbao and John Toshack in the first of three spells with Real Sociedad. In the same era, Jock Wallace spent a year at Sevilla while Colin Addison had one season each at three different clubs including Atlético Madrid where he succeeded Big Ron. The Spanish term for a football coach, el mister, is a reflection of the major British influence on the early days of professional football but there is little trace of it today. Chris Coleman is the only manager from the UK to have worked in Spain in the past decade, spending five months at Real Sociedad this season. The fact that their results improved considerably after he left can only be a coincidence.
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