Dear WSC,
Mickey Parker’s point in WSC No 107 that most football songs require the player’s name to contain four syllables may well be connected to the fact that most popular music is in 4/4 time. (Tom Jones’ Delilah, of course, is a notable waltz-like exception, but what self-respecting footy fans would have any truck with that kind of a limping rhythm?) What concerns me is the rather worrying notion that a player’s whole popularity – and hence his career – can depend on the singability of his name.
This first struck me at Wembley last season when Paul Tait’s winning goal (OK, it was the Auto Windscreen Shield) was greeted with a rousing chorus of ‘Super, Super Kev, Super Kevin Francis . . .’.Last season at Birmingham we had a player called José Dominguez who used to run around a lot, then fall over and lose the ball. The crowd loved him, and I’m sure it had a lot to do with the pleasure to be had from a rousing chorus of ‘José, José, José, José’. On the other hand, Jonathan Hunt became the first Blues player to score a hat-trick in ten years and there was never a hint of a hum in his general direction. Some players can get away with just having an extra superfluous syllable thrown in (‘Stevie Claridge, there’s only one Stevie Claridge’), but others simply can’t: the unsingable Alberto Tarantini managed a mere 24 games for us in the seventies. I suggest that any rhythmically challenged player at the start of their career should seriously consider sitting down with their agent and coming up with suitable alternative names that will guarantee their popularity with the crowd. Pop stars have been doing it for years, and if Savo Milosevic doesn’t do something soon, it’ll end in tears. In the meantime, perhaps WSC readers could write in with suggestions for a suitable song that incorporates the words ‘Jonathan’ and ‘Hunt’. Then again, perhaps not.
John Tandy, Birmingham
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
A look into how club owners business mentality needs to stretch from the football field
Imagine for a moment that we have taken leave of our senses. As is common with those who find themselves in a befuddled state, a single concept has become fixed in our heads, one which we are doggedly determined to communicate to as many people as possible. It might run something along these lines. The Football Trust should be abolished. Far from making grants to football clubs, the government should seek to extract every available penny from them; unlike other businesses, which may be free to relocate abroad, football clubs, even Wimbledon, for example, are tied to specific locations. The Japanese are unlikely to want to build any football clubs over here while they’re still getting the hang of their own, so no harm would be done to ‘inward investment’ by closing down any tax advantages clubs might have.
Gary Oliver examines the latest attempt to fiddle about with the structure of the Scottish League – and explains why the issue is unlikely to go away
St Andrew’s Day, Hogmanay and Burns’ Night – all significant anniversaries in the Scottish calendar. But football fans are accustomed to an alternative winter night ritual: Self-Preservation Day, the annual attempt to force league reconstruction. Eighteen months ago, the clubs formed four divisions of ten and, to secure sponsorship by Bell’s, agreed a five-year respite from further change. A period of stability at last? You must be joking.
Matt Stone heard the Labour Party explain why government intervention is the solution to football's problems
I used to be a member of the FSA. I am still a (disgruntled) Labour party member and a Spurs season-ticket holder. I’m also one of those idiots who would find it difficult to name a ticket price I wouldn’t pay. So I thought I’d probably be interested in Labour’s plans for football, which were unelashed on the world by Tom Pendry and Jack Cunningham at a press conference last month.
Mark Perryman explains why the growing trend for players to get injured during pre-match warm-ups is a symptom of clubs' disregard for some basic principles of physical training
“The game is about glory. It’s about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.” And with these words from Danny Blanchflower the Spurs Way was born. It’s a fine philosophy and can be used to justify the misdemeanours of many a flair player. It is certainly a lot more attractive than anything likely to be provided by the dull followers of work-rate and route one. But at its heart this philosophy has also too often been used to explain away football’s bewildering ignorance of the importance of physical fitness.