Three and in – not just another football blog

We should have known.

The Mail has about as much ability at humour as it does at level-headed, sensible liberalism. Turns out the post we made yesterday captured the Mail plagiarizing Dirty Tackle.

We would like to apologise to Dirty Tackle for not being aware of their running ‘holding his face gag’ (we can’t read all the blogs in the world, you know!), as well as apologising profusely to both our readers for such a serious error of judgement regarding the Mail.

To make it up to you, here’s the famous Daily Mail headline generator, which is always good for a laugh.

It won’t happen again, we promise. Please don’t leave us. We can change.

There are two sides to every story, as they say. FC Barcelona is a great example of this.

Story 1 - a team of wonderfully gifted, athletic, highly skilled, incredibly hard working and well drilled players, augmented by the incredible Lionel Messi who lifts their football from the sublime to the ridiculously sublime. You can’t help but admire the way they try and play, attacking, more attacking, close passing, a high intensity pressing game and just a fantastic ability to unlock teams in the final third.

It’s a beautiful thing. Or it just be a beautiful thing, because now we have:

Story 2 – a team of inveterate cheats, conmen, divers, and actors who seek to gain advantage in the most unsporting way possible at all times. In Mascherano, Busquets and Dani Alves they have a trident of footballing flimflammers who showcase the very worst in the modern game. The slightest contact, or even none at all, and they go down, wailing, shrieking, crying, acting, trying to get their opponent booked or sent off.

You might call it clever play. It’s not. It’s shameful cheating, nothing less. And they’re not alone. I accept that Barcelona’s style of play invites challenges, they nick the ball away at the last second, but Xavi and Iniesta like a jump in the air. Pedro too. Puyol ‘uses his experience’. Or, to put it another way, he cheats. They all do it to some degree and they’re put to shame by Lionel Messi who must get kicked and fouled more than any footballer on the planet and most of the time tries to stay on his feet.

He’s not whiter than white, no professional player is, but often Messi gains an advantage by staying on his feet instead of going down clutching his face/knee/ankle as if he’d been pole-axed.

For me, this Barcelona team’s legacy is tainted by the cheating. You can play great football without diving, without pretending to be kicked when you weren’t, and the thing about it is that no matter how often we see replays of them engaging in this behaviour it doesn’t change.

So they don’t care that they cheat and that’s an insult to anyone, Barcelona fan or neutral, who loves what they do when they actually play football.

One has to be careful when the saying the title of this post out loud lest somebody assume you were talking about Butch’s urine.

Anyway, it’s half-time in Madrid and Spurs are 1-0 down. Co-commentating with Alan Parry, Ray Wilkins has referred to Spurs constantly as ‘we’. Yes, Ray Wilkins who played for Chelsea, Man United, Milan, Rangers and QPR. The Ray Wilkins who made a grand total of no appearances for them. The Ray Wilkins who was assistant manager of Chelsea. Who are supposed to hate Tottenham.

It was ‘we’ this. ‘We’ that. Yet then, as everyone was asking ‘Why the fuck is Ray Wilkins referring to Spurs as we?’ he told us.

“I say ‘we’ as an Englishman”.

Ahh, that’s ok. So when Ray Wilkins refers to ‘we’ he’s talking about the good English team. The one with all those Englishmen in the starting line-up.

All three of them. Ignore the Brazilians, French, Croatians, Welsh etc. Nice to see Sky replace a lecherous misogynist with a jingoistic nationalist.

Talk about equal opportunities.

John Aldridge, former Liverpool and Ireland striker, doesn’t seem to understand quite how Twitter works. It’s a bit like this:

- Famous footballer or ex-footballer posts something vaguely controversial, perhaps about rival fans

- Fans of famous footballer or ex-footballer RT or say “+1″ or “well said”

- Neutrals might respond to ask a question or engage in conversation

- Rivals fans will bite back, either through infettered invective, personal abuse, or defend themselves by pointing out the perceived hypocrisies of someone criticising them for something when, in fact, the famous football or ex-footballer’s fans are guilty of crimes FAR worse than that.

Yesterday Alridge was at a Man United v Liverpool youth match. He didn’t like some of the singing and said so. Then the rival fans chimed in and there was back and forth. As you might imagine words like ‘twat’, ‘cunt’ and my personal fave, ‘shithouse’, abounded.

Now, regardless of everything else, asking somebody for their name and address on Twitter so you can initiate libel procedings against them is rather naive, you have to say. “Oh here, John. Please, take me to court”. It’s just not going to happen.
And the unfortunate thing is that Aldridge had a chance to make a good point yet allowed himself to get dragged into a childish slanging match. He was caught up in the rivalry between United and Liverpool, Hillsborough songs v Munich songs, and lost the chance to the make the point which journalist Iain Macintosh did:

Hillsbrough or Munich, if you’re using the death of innocent people to score points then there are no excuses. You’re just a prick.

The same goes for Heysel, Istanbul, Ibrox and anywhere else people have died because they went to a football match. It’s not funny.

He’s absolutely right. And that’s the point Aldridge should have made. He was well within his rights to be offended by songs like that at a youth match but instead of taking the moral high ground he made himself look as big a twat as all those who defend that kind of ‘banter’.

I’m not innocent enough to believe fans will ever rise above and stop singing these songs, each using the other justify their existence, but when high profile guys like Aldridge get involved the way he did it doesn’t help matters at all.

While I don’t really agree with Manchester United going into media lockdown after the Liverpool game, I can understand it. Alex Ferguson is short-tempered at the best of times and the defeat to Liverpool was painful and damaging. Coming just a few days after defeat to Chelsea and the Rooney elbow incident it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The camel, let’s face it, wasn’t the strongest camel either. Its back was riddled with spina bifida and bone-rot. Still, I think United have done themselves, and the game, a bit of a disservice.

The more I see Jamie Carragher’s tackle the worse it gets. Nani is lucky in that he lifted his leg off the ground just before contact was made. Had he not, then I suspect the injury would have been far, far worse. The nasty gash on his leg might keep him out for a few weeks but he could easily have been out for months.

The ridiculousness of the system means that Carragher can’t be punished any further but United should have come out and condemned the tackle and how dangerous it was. Sure, Rafael made a bad tackle as well but there’s nothing to say they couldn’t have admitted that. It doesn’t take away from the fact that Carragher’s challenge is exactly the kind that the game should be ridding itself of.

That no retrospective punishment can be made is ludicrous in this era and regardless of what you might think of the United manager his words hold much weight. When we see incidents like Carragher’s challenge it’s important that they get the focus they deserve. Too often football and the media focus on the trivialities, like Nani crying, instead of the real issue.

There should be real debate on how to properly punish those kinds of dangerous tackles and on why FIFA can find the time to ban snoods while continuing to ignore video technology. By failing to publicly address those issues and going into lockdown, I think United are doing the wrong thing.

Ferguson should have immediately condemned the Carragher challenge and swallowed any criticism of the Rafael one. Then, perhaps, we’d be talking about important things, like how to prevent serious injury, instead of what appears to be another strop from the United manager.

Man United’s loss to Chelsea last night was telling. Not just in terms of how it opens up the title race but it gave us another fabulous insight into the world of Alex Ferguson.

Barely hours after Wayne Rooney had gotten away with his elbow, United found themselves on the wrong end of a couple of decisions. Firstly, I thought the penalty was extremely generous. Zhirkov ran into Smalling who made no Denilsonesque wave of his leg. He just stood there and the Russian tumbled.

Then, having already been booked, the exciting David Luiz very obviously and very deliberately fouled Wayne Rooney. It was a second yellow offence, no doubt about it. Especially when you consider what Vidic got his second yellow for. But perhaps Martin Atkinson chose to overlook the foul because it was on Wayne Rooney. Perhaps it was some payback for Rooney’s first half dive.

Whatever the reason for it, it was a poor decision. Luiz should have gone. And the United manager’s ire was understandable. Yet surely after getting away with one over the Rooney incident he’d keep quiet? Nope. That’s forgotten, water under the bridge already, and he directed the invective towards Atkinson.

I must say that, when I saw who was refereeing it, I feared the worst. You want a fair referee, you know … You want a strong referee, anyway, and we didn’t get that.

It will be interesting to see how the FA react to this. Having been accused, wrongly in my opinion, of being in United’s pocket because of Clattengate, they know face a situation where a top level manager has called into question the integrity of a match official.

Like I say, I can understand the ire, but casting those kinds of aspersions on a referee is not something that goes down well at Soho Square. I suspect an FA charge and this time not even Mark Clattenburg can save him.

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.


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”.