French speaking Belgium has been eclipsed politically thanks to industrial collapse, and the rise of the country's Flemish half has been reflected in football, too – until now, reports John Chapman
On Sunday April 20, Standard Liège defeated Anderlecht 2-0 to become Belgian champions for the first time in 25 years. Standard’s coach, the former national-team goalkeeper Michel Preud’homme, was given the keys to the city and politicians queued up to talk about the rebirth of Wallonia.
Three blood-curdling stories, one from the present day, two from the past, of the players who fell foul of their own supporters. Jonathan Barnes, Phil Ball and Al Needham explain
James Scowcroft, Ipswich Town
As Ipswich Town took the lead in their home fixture with bottom-of-the-table Reading in March, the celebrations of a certain section of the 19,000 Portman Road crowd were, to say the least, half-hearted. The displeasure of the fans is at the identity of the scorer – the man in the No 10 shirt. Rarely has a player been able to divide a set of fans as drastically as James Scowcroft.
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