Search: ' David Baddiel'

Cameron Carter on Mourinho's touchline overreations and Goals Goals Goals

He may be as prone to smiling as the late Pauline Fowler on a fruit and pulses diet, but José Mourinho is clearly having a laugh. No one in football management has ever used the media in such Machiavellian fashion, or employed quite so varied means of annoying and disquieting his opponents. Brian Clough would routinely intimidate and lecture interviewers, but this was purely for his own benefit. Joe Kinnear had Wimbledon employing noise pollution and a no-lightbulb-in-the-away-toilets policy, but the nurturing of a gang mentality was the only purpose. Alex Ferguson introduced to the modern game the potent psychology of the throwaway remark, but seldom strays from this tried and tested area of work. Mourinho, an entirely new strain, pops up on our screens with a bewildering array of techniques and the deadpan delight in his art that marks out the obsessive genius.

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You've got to laugh. Well, probably not. Cameron Carter reviews the World Cup shows that did for comedy

After the initial frenzy of World Cup-related programming in May, terrestrial television apologetically dropped everything except coverage and highlights once the tournament began. The one exception was Rio Ferdinand’s World Cup Wind-ups, notable only for the host’s immoderate laughter at “stunts” such as David Beckham being made slightly late by a bogus chauffeur, and the fact that Ferdinand resembled the female saxophonist from The Muppet Show in his heightened state of elation.

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WSC was first published in March 1986 and soon found itself part of a publishing boom. Al Needham casts his mind back to the heyday of football fanzines and what his own favourite, Nottingham Forest’s ‘The Almighty Brian’, meant to him 

Like many writers, I got my start in fanzines. In the mid-Eighties, I had an idea that was so obviously brilliant, I used to lie in bed wondering why no one had thought of it yet. So I bought a typewriter from an old woman on the next estate, emptied the local WH Smith of every bit of Letraset they had, monopolised the Banda machine at college and produced the first ever, erm, American football fanzine. (Five hundred back issues of Third and Long are still available in my Dad’s loft, if anyone’s interested. No? Fair enough.)

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Ron Atkinson gets a shot at redemption reporting on the Milan derby. But, as Simon Tyers reports, it didn't all go according to plan

British television’s attitude to the continental club game used to be so simple – apart from the odd European final on Sportsnight, it would be an occasional goalkeeping error on Football Focus. But the weekend before Christmas a Sky and Setanta subscriber could have watched league games from seven different nations. Not all the coverage enjoys the greatest production standards – France’s Le Championnat goes out in Monday’s very early hours on Channel Four and features the same person on presentation and commentary, as if production company TWI had a particularly savage round of cost-cutting just before it was commissioned – but the two most obvious leagues at least have live slots with decent profiles, even if the thought put into them has not all been well directed.

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Smart-casual wear and laid-back pallyness proliferated on both channels during Euro 2004, even if expert analysis did not. But, says Cameron Carter, the pundits' humour was no worse than Skinner and Baddiel's

 I t started tensely and just got worse. Before the Portugal v Greece game many of us were troubled by Dull Host Anxiety – you may yourself have experienced this on hearing the voice of Norah Jones wafting earward as you pull off your mittens outside the neighbours’ door. I sat there on day one fearing that in the opening ceremony Portugal would be reduced to a demonstration of the port bottling process by a giant Eusébio doll, aided by Lisbon schoolchildren holding dining-table-shaped balloons. So it was with some relief that I learned Portugal had in fact discovered the world and taught it how to exist. To add colour to the nautical scene, several hundred citizens dressed as orange sperm arranged themselves into a representation of a giant football, a spectacle only partly diminished by a shot of two of the sperm clearly chatting about their costumes on their miraculous journey to the ball-womb.

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