Three and in – not just another football blog

On Saturday Wayne Rooney elbowed James McCarthy in the side of the head. It was unprovoked and worthy of a red card.

Despite video evidence Rooney has gotten away with it. Ref’s chief Mike Riley said:

Mark took the correct course of action with this incident. In this incident Mark was following play but caught sight of two players coming together and he awarded a free-kick because he believed one player had impeded the other. We should be clear that Mark did nothing wrong in officiating this incident as he acted on what he saw on the pitch.

Clearly Clattenburg didn’t see what happened. You might suggest he did but I choose to think he didn’t. I choose to believe that he was unable to see exactly what Rooney did and it’s only the vagaries of the system, which says a player can’t be punished by video evidence for an incident already dealt with, which has prevented Rooney getting the ban he deserved. I choose to believe that had he seen Rooney’s elbow he would have sent him off. The decision to give a free kick was based on his belief that it was just a coming together.

I try not to buy into referee conspiracies, the widely held belief that Man United get away with more than anyone else, for example. You might think that, but ask United fans and they won’t agree. They’ll say Arsenal get away with more, or Liverpool, or Chelsea. It’s a matter of perspective. And as fans we can only have one.

And while I think the game has some issues if referees really are bent then we’re in big trouble. What has to change is the rule, the loophole, which prevents referees taking a second look at something they may have only caught out of the corner of their eye. In this day and age it’s stupid and prevents justice from being done.

So while Clattenburg is never going to top anyone’s list of ‘officials that are better than Stevie Wonder’ the real issue is the rule which has let Rooney get away with violent conduct.

And take part in three games crucial to United’s season. He’s a lucky boy.

The away goal is one of football’s most precious commodities. I remember when United were trailing 3-0 to Real Madrid in 2003. When Ruud van Nistelrooy netted a last minute strike to reduce the deficit, Clive Tylesdley’s joyous shouts of “AWAY GOAL!!!” made you think the Dutchman had converted a clincher rather than a consolation.

As it happened, United went on to get hammered in the second leg too. But Tyldesley was probably still running around the room after Van Nistelrooy’s effort: Away goals have taken on disproportionate significance in European football.

Last night, in a rematch of 2010′s final, Bayern Munich celebrated a 1-0 win at the San Siro thanks to a late late goal from Mario Gomez. After the game, manager Louis van Gaal was bullish about his team’s result. And, of course, that extra bonus: the “away goal”:

“It was a very good game, very attractive and everyone can be happy with the game, it was fun. It must have pleased everyone who watched it. Of course we have a better chance of progressing now because we scored an away goal.”

Whilst Gomez has most certainly scored a goal, and one away from home at that, it comes without the mythical properties that make the ‘away goal’ so valued: it cannot decide the tie. Their is no possible result in the second leg that can allow the ‘awayness’ of Gomez’s goal to prove decisive. It is, sad to say, merely a ‘goal’. Sorry Louis.

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Thanks to @Marcotti for bringing to light this strangest of reactions

It’s symptomatic of football at the moment that every good performance somehow opens a door to a potential transfer. At least in the eyes of the press.

As we all know, regardless of who you support, every transfer window means your team will be linked with countless players. The bigger the team the more players you’ll be close to ‘swooping’ for. And not just regular swooping. ‘Sensational’ swooping. Or ‘shock’ swooping. That’s if they’re not busily engaging in ‘battle’ with another club over that player.

And mostly, and when I say mostly I mean 99% of the time, there’s about as much truth the story as there is in a politician’s explanation as to where he got that cash he keeps in his safe. Yeah, yeah, your friends had a whip around. You won it on a horse. Pffff.

So when Jack Wilshere played outstandingly well against Barcelona the natural consequence of that that is to be linked with a move to Spain. Forget that he’s just broken into the Arsenal first team. Forget that he’s yet to reach 50 first team appearances. Forget that he’s a young player who still has a lot to learn. Let’s whack out some lazy transfer nonsense.

To his credit Pep Guardiola laughed it off, saying:

He is a great player – a great player for Arsenal. And in any case Arsène Wenger doesn’t sell his best players.

Well, Arsene Wenger does sell his best players but only when he chooses. And the idea that just months after seeing off Barcelona’s attempts to bring in Cesc Fabregas he’d sell the finest English talent the club has produced in years is just staggeringly nonsensical.

I know there’s not much to it, and it was probably a question asked of Guardiola, but that the question was even asked says a lot. And while it’s easy to point fingers at the media, the fans who devour transfer tittle-tattle help provide the market for it.

It’s a symbiotic relationship, each feeding off the other, and each quite willing to point the finger rather than accept their part in it. “We don’t create the demand”, say the papers. “We only read it coz it’s in the papers”, say the fans. Anyway, the point is, in a world full of transfer rubbish, Wilshere to Barcelona is as rubbish as it gets.

Until 2021 when Wenger lets Wilshere and Fabregas go, Overmars/Petit style, for a combined €240m fee.

Just watching the Old Firm derby and, as expected, the Senegalese striker is getting plenty of stick from the Celtic fans.

However, to be fair to Diouf, while certainly a thoroughly dislikable person and footballer, he isn’t the worst thing in the world. Here’s our list of 10 things worse than El Hadji Diouf.

1 – Cancer

2 – Having to eat your own poo

3 – Being trampled by elephants wearing Doc Martens

4 – A weeping, pus filled boil on your helmet

5 - Giving your dad a blow job

6 - Phil Collins

7 – A snot pie with a spunk crust

8 – The quality of the football in this Old Firm game

9 – Adam Sandler’s movies

10 - This list because there’s nothing fucking worse than El Hadji Diouf.

Guest post by Indie Dave

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As I switched from stream to stream last Saturday, safe in the knowledge that I was only missing the 5th, 6th and 7th goal The Arsenal were definitely putting past the Barcodes, I found myself exasperated. Why the fuck, in this day in age do I have to put up with this shit? It’s not the lack of backbone, or even Sebastian Squillaci, but more that fact that I was watching the game on a dodgy stream in the first place.

I’m a season ticket holder at The Arsenal, which means that over the course of the season I’ll see at least all their home games, and fortunately enough the majority of their away games, either in the flesh, or simply because we’re on the telly a lot – probably too much for some people tastes. So it’s only about 7-10 times a season I’ll have to revert to the dreaded Justin.TV stream scramble. So what’s stopping fans from getting every game they want, on demand? The technology is there, the demand I’m sure must be there, yet still nothing. Well the reasons are manyfold, and the balance is very delicate.

Fans can find a range of high quality streams online

The main reason, like anything is money. And it starts with Sky. Can you imagine Sky TV without the Premier League? It’d be pretty worthless, and unless you were a massive film buff, I reckon at least 75% of its customer base would evaporate overnight. Hence the reason Sky are so desperate to retain rights, and why, every 3 years, the Premier League TV deal smashes records.

It currently stands at around £1.3bn over 3 years. About £20m per club, per season, give or take, (and even that sounds small. I’ve seen 2 and 3 times that amount bandied about.) There will come a time, and it’ll probably happen sooner rather than later when Sky will have to say, that’s it, we can’t increase the amount, that’s the limit we can charge our customers, or else we’ll lose them. Now I know Sky aren’t the only show in town, but say for arguments sake that it got to that point, what would happen if the clubs decided to explore an alternative?

One of the reasons why the Premier League is so cash rich is because TV rights are negotiated collectively. Each team gets the same basic amount, with appearances and prize money making up the variation. Unlike in Spain where the clubs negotiate their own TV deals, resulting in the big two, Real Madrid and Barcelona taking a far higher percentage then their rivals. I’m sure they’ll argue that since they are the biggest draws, with the best, highest paid players, and everyone wants to watch them, then they deserve to get the biggest slice of the pie. It does nothing for competition, so in that way the Premier Leagues set up is admirable.

See, the crux of this matter lies with the Premier League ruling that dictates decisions effecting the league require 14 votes to pass it. For the big clubs, it must be killing them, hamstrung as they are by the fact that they are limited to the amount of season tickets they can sell, by the amount of seats they have in their ground. What you will soon find, with more Russian billionaires and Saudi Princes coming to the table, is that magic number of 14 votes will slowly get closer and closer as clubs realise that they have now become more powerful than that which created them, and no longer need its services.

Of course, there will be people who would suggest that the availability of internet streams would badly affect attendances. Well that argument has been going on since the introduction of floodlights, if the atmosphere is so desirable, people will still go, and it’ll be up to the clubs to manage their ticket pricing to make it worthwhile to go to games. If you look at Arsenal, for their Carling Cup games, the majority of seats in the house were £10, and nearly every game was sold out. The reason you see a load of empty seats at the DW? Probably has as much to do with the fact that the seats are so expensive and it’s the club has a ground too big for its fan base, but if they started charging £10 a seat for every game, and financed an online package that offered the fan every game online, with a dedicated club channel, they could be looking at making more than the money due from Sky.

Is the online season ticket the way to go?

It adds up, and if done well could turn a club a real profit, however the Sky cash is the safer be. However, as I said, the time may come when the smaller club is left with no other choice other than to take up the offer, or just like in 1991, the big clubs will once again decide that the smaller ones are killing the game and threaten to break away.

So what would be the magic figure for the digital season ticket? How much would you be willing to pay? If you say going to the pub to watch the match will cost you 3 pints, we’ll say a tenner. £10 x 38? £380 is fairly reasonable, over the course of the year, but still to pay that as a lump sum in June, well it may not be so good.

What about then a monthly subscription? £35 a month? It’s a much as you’ll pay Sky at the current rates, but then you do miss out on watching the title decider, relegation dogfight that your team may not even be involved in. Chelsea TV works out at £4.49 p/m online, but you don’t get any live games, so draw your own conclusions. Would £20 a month be the figure?

The downside of this would be that the owners of the clubs just look at the potential easy money online and then neglect their paying attending customer. For one way of avoiding that, the Premier League would do well to look at America. The NFL operates a Blackout Policy, whereby a home game cannot be televised locally if it is not sold out 72 hours prior to its start time, placing the onus on the club to price the match accordingly to suit demand, to ensure there is a full house. It’s a similar policy that West Ham are likely to have to consider in a few years, when they look to fill their Olympic Stadium, quite how that works out is anyones guess.

So to wrap things up, we know the technology is available, we use it every week. The demand is there. While attendances have slipped somewhat during the recession stadiums are still relatively full. People could argue that it’s the smaller teams that will die, but perhaps we’re living in a false economy, where there ar simply too many clubs, and not enough fans?

Of course this whole scenario would be solved if, like so many other industries, the powers that be, took better notice of what their customers want, and how they consumer their product. However that is about as unlikely as a Newcastle equaliser after being 4-0 down at half …

… oh dear.


If the noises coming out of South America* are to be believed, we are on the eve of the retirement of one of football’s greats.

After a weekend in which we drooled over a wonder strike from Wayne Rooney, the footballing fraternity prepares to bid farewell to a man who scored goals of such audacious quality on a fairly regular basis.

Forwards are often divided in to two categories: great goalscorers, and scorers of great goals. Ronaldo was undoubtedly both.

Yes, in his latter years he piled on the pounds. There was more gelato than golazo. But fat is temporary; class is permanent.

Kevyn Doran on Vimeo has put together this rather exhaustive retrospective. Take a glance at a career littered with goals.

*not all of the noises, of course. As continents go, it’s fairly noisy. But some of the noises, particularly those on twitter. Which don’t really make any actual audible noise. But you know what I mean.

First they came for Big Ron,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Big Ron.

Then they came for Rodney Marsh,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Rodney Marsh.

Then they came for Andy Gray,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Andy Gray.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

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Thanks to Darren Richman for this moving and poignant twist on Pastor Martin Niemöller’s words.

We at Threeandin all look forward to the launch of Keysy and Graysy’s new Talksport show on Monday morning.  Finally, they can be as sexist as they like without all that “political correctness” and “equality” nonsense.

Sky Sports, the BBC, and a whole bunch of people on Twitter have reached an understanding about who is to replace Roberto Di Matteo as West Brom manager.

In Di Matteo, the Baggies sacked a manager who had been impressively promoted from last year’s Championship, only to fail to fill his club with sufficient confidence he could keep them in the top flight.

In an ingenious twist, they appear to be replacing him with a manager who had been impressively promoted from last year’s Championship, only to fail to fill his club with sufficient confidence he could keep them in the top flight: Chris Hughton.

Having dismissed the Italian, one figured WBA might go for someone more experienced, or with a reputation for keeping teams in the division.  They haven’t.   They’ve gone like for like.

From the outside, it feels like they’ve made a change for the sake of it.  I’m sure a new face will bring a bit of a boost for a few games, but in the long haul, will it be any different?

Views of Baggies fans very welcome…

Despite missing out on the Olympic stadium to West Ham’s porn barons it has been revealed that Spurs’s move to Stratford is still on.

Stratford-upon-Avon.

According to manager Harry Redknapp this will ensure the traditions of the club will continue.

“The Tottenham way can be compared to that of William Shakespeare who was a triffic bard with a killer left foot, a bit like van der Vaart but with more pace. I know we tried to sign him back in the day. Daniel’s gone round there with a triffic offer but it’s not happened for one reason or another. This way we can maintain the traditions of the club by playing in the shadow the the great man himself”.

It’s little known that Shakespeare, as well as being a poet, playwright and the inventor of Cluedo, was also a soothsayer of high acclaim. Close examination of his works reveal he was clearly a Tottenham fan, and included:

• The Winter’s Bale
• Romeo (Beckham) and Juliet
• Antony and Keaneopatra
• The Taming of Assou-Ekotto
• Ledley King Lear

And, of course, the two classics which sum up Spurs league campaigns every year, “Much ado about nothing” and “A comedy of errors”, as well as the hugely ironic “All’s well that end’s well”.

It’s late in the Wolves v Man United game. United are heading for their first defeat of the season and need a goal. A cross comes in, arriving late, it’s Paul Scholes, a glancing header … oooh … just wide.

Except it wasn’t a glancing header at all. It was a deliberate handball. He put both hands above his head and tried to con the ref. Now, as bad as referees have been lately even the worst of them couldn’t have missed that and Scholes was rightly booked.

On Match of the Day, Jonathan Pearce, doing commentary, called it ‘rascally’. Which makes it sound a bit cheeky, like it would have been kinda ok if he’d gotten away with it. You can imagine what Mick McCarthy would have said after the game.

“Oh that Scholesy, what a little rascal he is with his rascally handball and his rascally tackling. How can you complain about losing two points when it’s him slapping one in?”

Or, to put it another way, he’d have gone rightly mental. Perhaps the defeat was punishment enough for United, and perhaps everything else that went on meant his ‘rascally’ handball didn’t get the coverage it might have in other weeks, but it was a fairly nasty piece of cheating for which Scholes has been given a free pass by the media.

If he’d stopped one on the line, as he has in the past, he’d have been sent off. Should there be any difference trying to score one with his hand (and as far as I can remember he’s done that before and gotten a red card)?

Comments: I don’t want this to turn into a ‘If Scholes were foreign …’ debate. Let’s keep it on topic. So should trying to score with your hand be the same as stopping one on the line?