The Archive

While there is a certain inevitability about this home victory, it’s only August and these two clubs have very different expectations and requirements from a season in League One, writes Julian McDougall

Away, at Hillsborough. In the days leading up to and following this match, it is in the news again with speculation about relatives of the 1989 disaster victims getting access to crucial documents and Billy Bragg releasing a song about the phone hacking scandal called Scousers Never Buy The Sun.

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Mark Segal explains a campain to allow fans to watch games with a pint, like in other sports

It is the age-old quandary for a football fan. Do we leave the pub now and get to the game before kick-off, or have another and miss the first five minutes? It happens every week and inevitably it is always the wrong decision. But what if there was a third option? What if you could get to the ground in good time, buy a beer and take it up to your seat in time for the start of the game?

That’s what happens in cricket and both codes of rugby, but if you tried at a football ground you would be breaking the law. A new campaign is trying to change this anomaly. At their most basic the arguments calling for the scrapping of the law, which was first enshrined in the 1985 Sporting Events Act, are hard to dispute. The campaign’s backers claim that it is finally time to remove the stigma of being a football fan and give them the same matchday experience as supporters of other sports.

The campaign was only launched in June but already has the backing of 40 of the 92 Premier League and Football League clubs and various other bodies including the Football Supporters’ Federation, who claim reversing the ban would stop the last-minute crush as hundreds of fans knock back their pint and rush up from the concourses for the start of a game.

Supporters say it will also stop binge drinking among fans and help increase revenues for clubs who are feeling the pinch during a prolonged economic downturn. So the first instinct of many who are faced with discriminatory law against football fans is to support this cause. But, even as someone who has experienced the worst excesses of “crowd control” down the years, this campaign leaves me feeling uneasy in the extreme.

The first thing to point out is that football crowds haven’t really changed that much since the Act was first introduced. The way they are forced to watch a game is certainly different and, in most cases, far more pleasurable. But in a crowd of 20,000 there is always going to be a not-insignificant number who don’t necessarily go looking for trouble, but will not back down if trouble finds them. 
We need to admit that not all football fans are like the ones to which the Sky cameras are 
always drawn.

Now add into this group constant access to alcohol during a 90-minute period where events are not always going to go their way and you are opening up a new point of 
potential conflict. Fighting between rival sets of fans may no longer take place inside grounds, but there are plenty of examples of fans of the same team wading into each other during matches.

There is also the constant movement in the stands as you have to shuffle up and down as someone slips to the bar every five minutes, and comes back again, and do you fancy being showered in beer when an important goal go in?

Comparisons with other sports are also fatuous. While it’s hard to claim a football crowd is any more passionate than those that watch rugby, they are certainly more volatile. And again adding more alcohol to the mix is not going to calm things down. While canvassing opinions I found support for a reversal of the ban to be about 50-50, so it’s interesting then that a recent report claimed that all the clubs who had voiced an opinion so far were right behind the campaign.

Could it be that clubs, already fleecing fans at the turnstile and in the club shop, are looking for more ways to make money without fully thinking through the consequences? Some argue that the law could at least be tweaked to end the ludicrous situation where corporate clients are forced to draw a curtain in their executive box to shield the pitch before they can open a bottle of beer. But then you can’t support a campaign based on ending discrimination, only to discriminate against those who can’t afford the best seats in the house.

At its heart there is something a little naive about the whole endeavour. In case it had escaped their attention, crowds don’t gather in large numbers every week to enjoy a huge communal session, they go to watch a football match. And even the most hardened of drinkers among them would admit they can wait 45 minutes between each pint.

From WSC 296 October 2011

Gary Andrews delves into this year’s FA Cup, which kicked off with a pioneering move that offered free football streamed online (for adults only)

When Ascot United were drawn at home in the FA Cup’s extra preliminary qualifying round to Wembley FC, their board may have reasonably expected a gate of around 100. That would have been a wild underestimate. After 88 fans watched their midweek Hellenic League draw against Ardley United, a record crowd of 1,149 made their way to the Racecourse Ground.

Those punters weren’t the only ones watching the tie. On Facebook 27,000 tuned in to a live stream of Wembley’s eventual 2-1 victory, all of whom chose to stay in on a Friday and watch two teams playing five steps below the Football League. That’s more than the average attendances of eight Premier League teams. The reason can be summed up in one word: Budweiser. The all-American beer hardly seemed the most natural fit for the FA Cup when the sponsorship was announced in June. Since then, however, the brewer appears to have demonstrated a better understanding of the competition than previous sponsors.

At the ground, fans were offered cheap beer and free burgers, while corporate razzmatazz was kept to a minimum. Online, users had to become a fan of the beer’s UK Facebook page (providing they were over 18) then click on a bespoke widget on the page to view the match.

Instead of the usual jerky, slow video, the quality of the stream was high, and commentators Dan Roebuck and Stewart Robson had done plenty of research. There were no patronising asides to second jobs as binmen that often characterise ESPN’s and ITV’s coverage, while occasional pitchside swearing and one fumbled handover seemed in keeping with the occasion.

But for Budweiser and the FA, Ascot v Wembley was about more than bringing attention to teams in a round of the Cup that would usually attract next to no sponsorship. Viewed as an experiment, the Facebook stream can be seen as a success and several parties will be analysing the data with interest. Facebook has over 700 million members, meaning there is a large captive audience, both in the UK and abroad. Having “Liked” the Budweiser page in order to watch the game, all users will see the company’s updates in their Facebook news feeds. The benefits to the brewer’s marketing arm are obvious.

Streaming games legally online is not new. All major broadcasters offer online streaming of their live games, while sites like bet365.com have an array of rights to foreign leagues. ITV.com even streamed Wantage Town v Brading Town at the extra preliminary qualifying stage of the competition in 2008. Although ITV did an impressive job, viewing figures were low and costs high, and the extensive coverage was quietly dropped the following season.

With cricket’s Indian Premier League signing a deal with YouTube and organisations as diverse as Major League Baseball and film studio Miramax experimenting with Facebook broadcasting, it was only a matter of time before football decided it wanted a piece of the action. The FA and Budweiser have now shown the appetite is there – the viewing figures for Ascot were certainly more than some broadcasters’ Europa League streams and, you would suspect, Premier Sport’s Conference coverage (although Premier doesn’t release any viewing figures).

With ongoing uncertainty over TV rights, not least due to Portsmouth publican Karen Murphy’s case against the Premier League, leagues and clubs are already having to plan for the possibility of a different media world. Facebook itself has ambitions to grow into a major broadcasting player. Although the cost may be prohibitive for individual clubs below the Championship to produce their own broadcasts (at least of the same quality as Budweiser’s), it wouldn’t be unexpected if the Conference, or sponsors Blue Square Bet, offer live streaming via Facebook when their current deal with Premier expires, if the sums add up.

However, unless Budweiser does further matches, it’s difficult to tell if the figures were down to a one-off novelty factor or a wider desire to watch grassroots football. But a large portion of younger fans were unable to access the beer’s Facebook page due to the age restrictions, meaning the numbers could be even higher if the brewer can find a way around this.

In the short term, it’s hard to criticise Budweiser and the FA too much, as they pitched their initial stream perfectly. In the longer term, it remains to be seen if Facebook viewing can be sustained and, if it can, exactly what kind of broadcasting monster it may spawn.

From WSC 296 October 2011

Henrik Manninen explains how a raft of match-fixing allegations in the far north of Europre has swiftly ended an international experiment

“If I was wearing my cap the bet would be on, and if I took the cap off, there would be no business,” said Wilson Raj Perumal on his chosen method for catching the attention of players during a Finnish league cup game between Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS) and Jaro played on February 20 this year.

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David Stubbs looks at the tabloids’ unique style of football reporting

In Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale’s Stick It Up Your Punter!, their study of the Sun during the 1980s editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie, the authors recount a journalists’ strike during which sub-editors had to write up the football match reports. Wizened old cynics that they were, they decided to turn the task into an exercise of which of them could come up with the most meaningless cliche with which to pad out their copy. The winner was “kick and rush glory boys”.

As with tabloid coverage across the board, their headlines, straplines and copy have, over the past quarter of a century, generated a tag cloud of grab-bag buzz-words – “blast”, “probe”, “lions”, “tragedy”, “flops”, “fury”, “blast”, “swoop”, “sensational”, “glory”, “shame”, “thugs”, “heroes”, and so forth. Not a great deal has changed in 
this respect.
Some have fallen by the way with time. Gary Lineker was habitually described as “hot-shot” back in his mid-1980s pomp, a mode of description which eventually died of hackneyed shame. Even “skipper” seems in danger of extinction.

All of these words have one thing in common. Like the word “pesky”, which was only ever uttered by the likes of Little Plum in the Beano, they are at once deadeningly familiar and yet unspoken by actual people in real life, least of all tabloid readers. A particular example of this is “shaker”, used not to allude to a member of The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, but to convey in six letters an injury scare.

These devices also function to contrast with the inconsequential reality of the football world on a day-to-day basis, as well as the warily, dully discreet equivocations favoured by players and managers when talking to journalists. Much as on Football Focus they’re forced to jazz up a teeth-grindingly tedious interview with a Scott Parker by switching in and out of grainy black and white or zooming in on his hands, so these words add a falsely incendiary gloss.

So, in October 1986, we read in the Daily Mirror that Tony Adams was Gunning For Kerry Dixon on the eve of an Arsenal v Chelsea fixture. Here are the fighting words from Adams whose psychologically warfaring mood that headline captures: “All First Division strikers need careful watching and facing Kerry will be another good test for me.”

Look for sensationalist cliche and you would assume the first port of call to be the Sun. It’s certainly had its moments of crass extremism, such as Argies Get Their Revenge, following England’s World Cup exit to the Hand of God goal in 1986, or the pillorying of Messrs Robson and Taylor. However, it’s almost disappointing to find, on closer inspection, that their coverage throughout the 1980s and 90s was restrained by the standards of the rest of the paper.

So, when flicking through its 1980s pages, with those abysmal Franklin cartoons, red-baiting and headlines like Rape: Why Men Are Hidden Victims, there is also relatively considered prose from the likes of Martin Samuel. Nothing masterly, mind, still tabloidese, with every paragraph beginning with the words “And” or “But”. Yet by no means as addled or moronic as you might fear. Even in 1996, though the coverage of England’s semi-final against Germany is depressingly festooned in flags of St George, there is virtually no “Kraut” bashing.

That, infamously, could not be said for the Mirror under Piers Morgan’s editorship. It was prior to England v Germany that he produced the mock-up cover of Stuart Pearce and Gazza in tin helmets and the Achtung! Surrender headline, a stunt which he recently described as prompting a “massive sense of humour failure” on the part of his detractors. It turns out he unapologetically regards the cover as a sense of humour 
success.

This wasn’t a one-off. From the mid-1980s onwards, the Mirror was more startlingly prone to martial imagery than its Wapping counterpart, real Orwellian “war minus the shooting” stuff, tastelessly so a time when hooligan firms were squaring up to each other for real – indeed, you could read all about these “thugs” and their “nights of shame” on the aghast Mirror back pages.

The word “killer” is deployed frequently and airily on its back pages, Leeds manager Billy Bremner is “blitz Billy”, Paul and Clive Allen, up against each other for QPR and Spurs, are a “family at war”. Man Utd are “shell-shocked” to be beaten 1-0 at Wimbledon, while a 15,000-strong fans’ petition to regain the their ground and presence at a club meeting goes under the headline 
VALLEY WAR. The gruesome, bloody details follow – police were called as directors Derek Ufton and Michael Norris “reeled under a barrage of questions”.

Then, of course, there are those trenches, from which the likes of Crystal Palace are forever charging “with bayonets fixed”, in which burly, yeomen English defenders line up side by side, in which the real nitty-gritty business of football is conducted, and to which the foreign influx would probably be averse. In the Daily Express, in 1992, James Lawton worried about how “battle hardened” Eric Cantona, then of Leeds, would prove in the impending Premier League season, in a piece titled Dainty Eric Must Face Up To Trench Warfare.

If foreigners weren’t conspicuous in tabloid-land decades ago, black footballers certainly were. If you hadn’t noticed in the 1980s that John Barnes, for instance, was black, then the tabloids were on hand with constant reminders. He was, in 1988, our “brightest black pearl”, or, according to Emlyn Hughes, the “best black player ever produced in this country”, an important distinction. In 1986, Steve Curry in the Express felt obliged to describe the “happy Calypso manner” in which Barnes told him he would be prepared to play anywhere for England.

However, when Barnes, Ricky Hill and Brian Stein flew unannounced to Jamaica to take part in a fundraising match there was Fury At Missing Black Aces in the Mirror. Much has remained constant in tabloid coverage. Though Wayne Rooney’s rise has prompted a depressing increase in the penchant for dreadful name-based puns, the England team still vacillate between “lionhearts” and “flops”, as opposed to the routinely, chronically middling 
mediocrities that they are. But some things at least have changed for the better.

From WSC 295 September 2011