Dear WSC
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow-by-blow review of Euro 2008, noting with some reassurance that I’m not the only one driven to distraction by the so-called expert input of BBC and ITV pundits. However your assessment of the Holland-Italy game surprised me somewhat. The furious and defiant ignorance of the laws of the game displayed by Clive Tyldesley and David Pleat with respect to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal were surely worthy of comment, indeed arguably the most damning condemnation of their failure in their roles in providing insight and explanation. Instead, you bafflingly seem to support their case and argue, in effect, that an official ought to base an offside call on whether he believes a player is faking an injury or not. Actually he’d already made that call by not stopping the game to permit treatment to the Italian defender in question, who had in effect left the field without permission and thus had to be playing the Dutch striker onside. One shudders to imagine the Machiavellian tricks that some domestic managers would concoct were it possible to play an opponent offside by tumbling off the pitch in a writhing heap. Next you’ll be condemning cliched and inappropriate English attitudes to the German team alongside an anglicised spelling of “dummkopf”…
Matt Rowson, Watford
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Stories
Barney Ronay spent three weeks in foreign parts. Not Austria or Switzerland, but UEFA Town, a tightly policed, mascot-infested, first-class-all-the-way state dedicated not to football, but to money
According to a UEFA press release, the Euro 2008 mascots Trix and Flix embody competition, friendship, tolerance, teamwork, magic, style, ability and attitude. They also have distinct personalities. Flix is a cheeky scamp, but Trix “is more serious and self-controlled” – qualities not, it has to be said, usually associated with a jobbing actor in an eight-foot cartoon outfit doing the running man. At their unveiling, Swiss tournament director Christian Mutschler appeared completely serious when he said: “I am sure the mascots… will become a vital part of the understanding of the whole event.”
Amazingly, despite England's failure to qualify, UEFA have decided to press ahead with Euro 2008. Ian Plenderleith has a listen to the songs battling it out for European glory
There seem to be a lot of “official” Euro 2008 songs about. Either some songs are claiming to be official when they aren’t or, like the scope of the competition itself, the genre of official tournament song is expanding. Just as some have proposed fleshing the finals out to 24 teams, the continent’s pop stars are demanding there be at least three UEFA-sanctioned tunes. That’s one for each host nation, then another for the tournament overall. We think. Head to YouTube for all the latest attempts to convey the spirit of football into three minutes of mindless music.
The sudden departure of the best-known vice chairman in football is likely to prove a case of ‘au revoir’ rather than goodbye. Jon Spurling looks at the long-term fault lines that have broken open and considers what a David Dein comeback on the coat-tails of Stanley Kroenke would mean for Arsenal
“It’s dead money,” claimed Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood, after sugar importer David Dein invested £290,250 in the club in 1983. The Gunners’ former vice chairman, whose stake in the club is now worth an estimated £60 million, has had an occasionally strained relationship with Hill-Wood, who is also chairman of Hambros bank: opposite forces of tradition and new-right economics have effectively been running on slowly converging lines at Arsenal for a quarter of a century.
Dear WSC
Why does Andy Gray keep saying “pick the bones out of that”? It’s an expression he’s come to use in every post-match analysis he does on Sky, usually in relation to a slow-motion replay of a goalmouth incident. But it’s become so frequent that it’s almost a verbal tic, as though he doesn’t realise he’s saying it. This suggests a deep-seated trauma. Could it be that he is haunted by an incident when he failed to pick the bones out of a fish, say, and consequently nearly choked while in a packed restaurant? Either that or he’s replying a vivid and unsettling dream. But it could be worse. Imagine the look of alarm on Richard Keys’ face as Andy stares into the middle distance and mutters: “The defence was as exposed as someone standing naked in front of everybody they went to school with, plus their mother and other female members of the family.”
James Potter, via email