Three and in – not just another football blog

Every so often Lawrence Gray-Hodson, a man who made his name in the upper reaches of Division 2 in the 1970s and 80s as well as being a former Scotland and England international, writes a column exclusively for Three and in.

This week he looks at Liverpool and their manager Kenny Dalglish

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There’s an old saying: Romans werent built in a day. Never has it been more appropriate in football terms than it is right now at Liverpool. Kenny Dalglish, the embittered, experienced emperor, is trying to fashion his colosseum, his Appian Way to success, an aqueduct of achievement and a Leaning Tower of Trophies.

Yet short-sighted fans complain and fail to see the bigger picture. Just a few short weeks ago Liverpool triumphed at Wembley, seeing off the valiant but ultimately toothless Visigoths of Cardiff, lifting the Carling Cup – unquestionably the most prestigious lager sponsored trophy in the world behind the FA Cup now that it’s sold its soul to Budweiser.

Sure, the league form is a real worry and the dream of seeing the club back at Europe’s top table, instead of having to feast from the all you can eat Chinese buffet of the Europa League, is gone, but critics are far too quick to get on Dalglish’s back. When he took over this was a club in turmoil and anguish, its fans broken hearted at what Roy Hodgson had done. His crime of being unpopular from the start and not realising it was a dagger to the heart of all real Liverpool fans.

When they made it clear they didn’t much like him, he had the temerity to hang around and try and make things better when an honourable man would have committed peri-peri. Already floundering in quicksand, Hodgson tried to pull his feet out using his own teeth and ended up drowning in a sea of underachievement, smothered by the feathered pillow of fiasco after fiasco.

Dalglish was brought in and told to fight the fire, given just a £100m blanket to do so. Many have been critical of his signings but I feel they need to be more patient. I remember when I made a high profile move to Halifax Town, for three weeks I was the club’s record signing. I can tell you, the pressure these guys feel is incredible. At first I struggled to find my form, the weight of the price tag weighing me down, but after 18 months or so I settled in and had an incredible season scoring seven goals in all competitions. Not bad for a striker those days!

Luis Suarez has been nothing but trouble for Liverpool

Poor Andy Carroll must be feeling much the same way. It’s not his fault that Liverpool’s foreign director of football created a millstone around his neck by choosing to make him the most expensive English player of all time. Similarly, Stewart Downton, Jordan Henderson and Charlie Adam are good, honest British players with too much expectation on their shoulders. It’s like people are expecting miracles, as if spending large amounts of money is some measure of quality when it comes to the transfer market.

I wonder would Robin van Persie be the same player he is today if Arsene Wenger had paid £60m for him eight seasons ago. I suspect it would have taken him some time to mature into the player he wasn’t instantly. And maybe Liverpool need to do more for these players, make them more comfortable. Surely any good Liverpool fan would challenge Carroll to a fight in a nightclub if they saw him out. Not because they wanted to fight him, but because they wanted to remind him of his home town of Sunderland.

Clearly the lack of goals is a problem but the blame for that must fall on Luis Suarez. When you spend £29m on a player you expect instant results and much more quality than he has shown. Everyone knows the bigger the fee, the better the player. Perhaps if Suarez concentrated more on scoring rather than trying to make himself Carlos Controversy all the time Liverpool would be in a much better position. Kenny is absolutely right to feel let down by him and Suarez’s malign influence is spreading, witness the normally placid Pepe Reina filled with Uruguayan fueled rage as he stitched one on that Newcastle player yesterday.

A manager can only send his players out to win games, if they don’t then they’re obviously not carrying out his instructions. Perhaps in his time away from football Kenny might have taken on an eloctution teacher. I’m his biggest fan but his diction does leave something to be desired at times. If he’s guilty of anything it’s just mumbling his team talks in that impenetrable but lilting Scotch brogue of his, but for all the rest Dalglish is untouchable in my opinion.

The bottom line is that managers need time. Andre Vilas Boas didn’t get it at trigger happy Chelsea but Sir Alex Ferguson did at United, and look how they have reaped the rewards. Do people forget how long it took Wenger to win a trophy at Arsenal? What on earth do they expect Kenny Dalglish to do in such a short period of time? The fickle nature and short-termism of the modern football fan makes me sick to the very core of my being.

If winning a trophy and being in the FA Cup semi-final is considered a failure these days, then I’m afraid football has lost its soul, and the usually knowledgable scousers have fallen prey to the beast that lurks in the heart of the game. It is like that film where the Alien bursts out of the man’s stomach but instead of an Alien it will be the rotted corpse of Kenny Dalglish and I will say ‘I told you so’ as he is stillborn into a world which no longer understands him.

In a professional career spanning almost two decades, Simon Smith has played for over sixty-seven clubs. The ultimate utility player, as his pace has diminished Simon has managed to reinvent himself time and again, from poacher to holding midfielder, centre-back to goalkeeper. Now that his website has been closed down, we have exclusive access to his weekly column.

I was as surprised as anyone to see Glenn Hoddle throw his hat into the ring for the vacant England manager’s job. I was similarly (but not quite so) surprised to find out quite how long it has been since he made those comments. They obviously overshadowed his short reign as top managerial dog but that’s hardly surprising. I think that, for me, it’s not so much the comments themselves that I find distasteful; it was the ignorance behind them that was so offensive. ‘England will play in the Christmas tree formation.’ ‘I think that the Christmas tree formation is the way forward for England.’ Even writing those down here make me feel dirty. There were many scapegoats for England’s dismal 2010 World Cup showing but I seemed to be the only one tracing our problems back to those catastrophic two or three games that set us back at least 50 years in terms of tactics.

Maybe this is just one man’s opinion, but I would rather have a manager who is tactically astute and analyses the opposition than one who arranges his players in a shape that he likes. They may look awesome in those aerial shots from the Goodyear Blimp but I think England should be setting their sights higher than that. Perhaps I’m being unfair though. Perhaps Hoddle would be an excellent appointment and we would have great success with a smiley face formation. Who am I to say that his (probable) insistence on a happy puppy playing with a kitten formation won’t get us out of the group stages at the Euros?

Some observers have also raked up his close relationship with Eileen Drewery and some less noteworthy comments he made about karma. Regarding the England job, Hoddle confused me on Monday when he said, ‘If I were to die tomorrow, my life would be incomplete.’ Wasn’t the whole problem that Eileen said everyone gets loads more?! Reincarnation is a complex issue. Roberto Baggio is a practicing Buddhist and I always found it tricky during my time in Italy to convince him to do anything he didn’t want to do. The whole ‘you only live once’ thing doesn’t really hold much water. I believe it’s the same for cats. Fair play to The Divine Ponytail though, he didn’t know a lot of English but he learned enough to utter just one sentence to me. ‘Perhaps in your next life you’ll be reborn as a footballer.’ Cracking banter, that’s the sort of thing only close friends can get away with!

Hoddle is clearly hoping to put his mistakes behind him and is worried that they will not cost him to dearly in the future. It is something that we can all relate to even if we don’t all create absurd paradoxes in our own logic while doing so. A few years ago everything was lined up for me to have a second spell at Luton Town. The bossman was new to the job and I think the chairbossman took a backseat when it came to signings so they were all happy for it to happen and I was keen to lay one or two ghosts to rest at Kennilworth Road. The fans were quick to fill in the bossman and chairbossman about my previous stint and had clearly not yet forgiven me. The protests were intense and very well attended.

I was a striker when I first plied my trade in Bedfordshire and I must say I wasn’t at my most prolific. I had one especially barren run that came to an end at a home match against Wycombe. I buried an easy chance and made straight for the fans. I punched the air and made it clear just how much the goal meant to me. I reached down to stretch my shirt for the badge kiss. I am still not sure what it was that made me sneeze, perhaps I’d overdone the pepper on my pre-match cheese, but I can see how it could have looked like spitting from a distance.

I know I could have done a job in my new role as a midfielder and I often think about what could have been. Absolutely no hard feelings this end and I just hope that Hatters fans have forgiven me now. I’m still available. If you provide the antihistamines then I’ll provide the solid keeper performances!

In other news I see that Wayne Rooney has broken the arm of a fan and it is good to see not only that it was an accident but that he has already been forgiven. Happy the kid is alright and he’ll have a heck of a story for the rest of his life! In actual fact the lad was a United fan in the home stand at Wolves so if anything Wayne was saving the stewards a job as he’d only have been evicted anyway. I know first hand the dangers of away fans sitting in the home end at a ground. More times than I care to recall I have heard boos emanating from ‘our’ fans whenever I touch the ball so clearly the police are doing a pretty shoddy job of separating the supporters. Good on Wazza for taking matters into his own hands.

Must be said that even us pros can be a bit wild when pulling the trigger in those pre-game warm ups! I’m still reminded of the time that one of my looseners ended up in the stands and caught a baby on the head. It must be noted that it was a mishit and also skimmed the advertising boards so it’s not fair to have a go at me about not having enough power in my shot to wake a baby. Admittedly (and thankfully) there was not enough pace on the ball to cause the baby any distress but it did wake her up so those chants were completely inaccurate. I’m not ashamed to say that they got to me a bit and I did miss a few sitters as a result. It was also selfish of me to deliberately over-hit every corner to try and make a point.

One to Watch

Now, I spend a lot of my time absorbing as much football as I can. I love how much Premiership and Football League football coverage there is out there but I also like to scour the more obscure leagues that a lot of people miss. There’s a lot of talent out there waiting to be discovered so I’ll bring you a ‘one to watch’ every now and then. This week: Lionel Messi. He’s only 24 but has already bagged a few goals for Barcelona. I really think he could become a decent player.

Follow me on twitter, @simon9smithpro

In a professional career spanning almost two decades, Simon Smith has played for over sixty-seven clubs. The ultimate utility player, as his pace has diminished Simon has managed to reinvent himself time and again, from poacher to holding midfielder, centre-back to goalkeeper. Now that his website has been closed down, we have exclusive access to his weekly column.

Thursday was no ordinary night in the Smith household. Instead of an evening slumped in front of Channel 5 watching Ice Road Truckers, Clarissa and I spent this most unusual of Thursday nights slumped in front of Channel 5 watching football. Manchester United were comprehensively beaten but their poor rich neighbours suffered the agony of an exit on the away goals rule. If there was anything to cheer the English it was the sight of Joe Hart heading up for a corner in the closing stages for the second time in a week. This desperate bid to save the game earned unanimous plaudits as his last gasp header so nearly sent City through but, as so often seems to be the case, there is one rule for the big clubs and quite another for the rest. Hart was applauded for his attacking instinct against both Swansea and Sporting Lisbon but at one point a few years ago I was doing it almost every week for Barnet and, without meaning to blow my own trumpet too much, far earlier in the game. Was I praised for attempting to break the deadlock in cagey encounters? Was I forgiven when the bossman made a substitution after we won a corner (something it’s generally established is a bad idea) and the amount of time that elapsed coupled with the crowded area caused me to forget myself and instead of nodding the ball into an empty net, pluck the ball out of the air with my hands and go to ground to help run out the clock? Was I able to re-establish my place in the side after the seven consecutive games in which I was still stranded in our opponents’ half when they scored? No, no, a hundred times no. Football can be a cruel mistress. Still, it wasn’t entirely in vain. I like to think of myself as something of a trailblazer and it seems Harty learned a thing or two from this old pro. I wish I could say similar about the game between Chelsea and Napoli the night before. With Chelsea 5-4 up on aggregate I really felt the keeper should have gone up for a corner late on. A goal from Cech really would have rounded off a special European night for Chelsea but sadly he remained rooted in his box. Pity, an opportunity missed.

People generally seem to think the away goals rule is a good thing but it is not without its faults. Take Thursday night for example. Without the rule, the 3-3 aggregate score would have meant the scratchcard of a penalty shootout. Everyone loves penalties, particularly the keepers. It really is a lovely moment when you stride up to your opposite number for good luck hug. Where else can I find a cuddle and a pat on the bum apart from when I buy my fish? I speak from experience when I say we are afforded very few opportunities to embrace as players and the fans tend not to like you spending too much of a game focused on finding an opportunity. They’ll never admit it but all footballers love a cuddle. It’s why refs let a lot of holding go at corners. This is not to mention that the accumulated effect of these cuddles is to combat homophobia in football in a far more effective manner than any BBC Three documentary.

The away goals rule is not tantamount to a hate crime although it can also lead to nastiness. I recall at Arsenal losing 2-0 at home in the first leg once during a European knockout game. We failed to score in the away leg, drew 0-0 and went crashing out 2-0 on aggregate. Each of our 0 goals counted double but even that wasn’t enough. We were punished for failing to get any crucial away goals. On another occasion we were away first leg, got a decent 0-0 draw in Moscow, then at Highbury we were 3-2 up with seconds remaining. With away goals counting double it actually meant we were 4-3 down. Fortunately we got a corner and, eager as ever, I rushed forward. Bizarrely Anders and Smudger seemed content to keep the ball in the corner and the bossman was gesticulating that I should get back in goal. These guys seemed content to win on the night but crash out of Europe. A bizarre lack of ambition. Sadly Smudge was dispossessed and I was lobbed from the halfway line whilst desperately trying to get back. And who do you think ended up copping the stick for our exit? No prizes for guessing. Nobody else seemed to realise we’d have gone out anyway but that’s just the nature of sportswriting in this country I suppose. As a keeper, being a scapegoat comes with the territory.

Having said all of this, the away goals rule was implemented to encourage teams to attack away from home; this can only be a good thing. I simply think the rule should be uniform across the board. It should be implemented in the league as soon as possible. Further still, away goals should count double in the scoring charts. Nobody wants to see Pele’s scoring records last forever, that’s boring. It’s brilliant when these things are broken. Imagine just how many goals Van Persie would have got last season if this rule had been in place. I’m sure some very clever bods with their computers could work it out but even I can deduce it’d be a hell of a lot!

Everyone loves a keeper going up for a corner; along with an outfield player going in goal it’s pretty much the best thing about the beautiful game. In ice hockey the keeper comes out more often than not in the death throes of a game and in basketball the keeper goes up with every single attack. I really think this is the reason football has never gone huge across the pond. If away goals were introduced for league games then Harty and myself wouldn’t be the only ones going up for corners every game. And if there’s one thing we all love, from fans to managers, it’s an open game with lots of goals and very little focus on defending.

Follow me on twitter, @simon9smithpro

In a professional career spanning almost two decades, Simon Smith has played for over sixty-seven clubs. The ultimate utility player, as his pace has diminished Simon has managed to reinvent himself time and again, from poacher to holding midfielder, centre-back to goalkeeper. Now that his website has been closed down, we have exclusive access to his weekly column.

The use of goal line technology is an argument as old as Time (my sister’s dog) – somewhere between ten and fifteen years. How many times are we going to have to see a goal not given that should have been before the powers that be allow common sense to prevail? QPR are the latest side to be victims with their goal against Bolton ignored en route to another defeat. On a side note, it was great to see Owen Coyle not only come out to acknowledge it was a goal, but also to give the keeper credit for a good save. Keepers like Adam Bogdan and Roy Carroll make it look easy to claw the ball back from behind the line and not look guilty but that is not something you can teach. The thing is, not giving a goal isn’t always just the difference between getting relegated with 29 points and getting relegated with 30 points (just kidding Super Hoops. I look back fondly on my time at Loftus Road and wish you well).

I have always been pro-technology and think it’s vital we don’t just stop at the goal line. I remember a similar decision costing us gravely back when I was a centre half at Reading. We were one-nil up with about sixty minutes to go when the ball clearly went out for a throw. Gary Peters got some stick for not playing to the whistle but the rules of the game state there needn’t always be a whistle for throw-ins.  Play went on and they took possession of the ball when it would have been our throw. Seven minutes later they score and we go on to lose the game. As soon as the equaliser went in, I was straight over to the ref asking for an explanation. My arguments fell on deaf ears as he claimed to not even remember the incident. Just eighteen months later we found ourselves relegated. So nobody can tell me these sorts of decisions don’t have a significant impact. People say that refs and linesmen do a difficult job and get all sorts of stick but were the officials from that game getting grief and abuse a year and a  half later when we went down? It’s not possible to know but it seems highly unlikely that they were washing horse manure and eggs off their car like I was. I tell you, if you’re on the wrong end of a decision like that and you spend your days on chat rooms and introducing yourself to fans in pubs, then the stick is unavoidable. They say that these things even themselves out over time but that would only be the case if football were played to infinity. We all wish it was, but it isn’t.

The other decision being discussed this week was the correct one made by Sian Massey who got the offside call bang on at the end of Man City’s loss to Swansea. What should have been a correct decision that is almost immediately forgotten became a chance for boorish bore Andy Gray to weigh in with a PR exercise in patronisingly dishing out praise to convince the world that he isn’t the man that he definitely is. I have never had Sky television and so my life had always been blissfully free of his ‘punditry’ although I am often saddened by my limited access to The Simpsons and QVC.

The first time I heard of Andy Gray and Richard Keys was when I was informed that my soon-to-air Talksport show was being cancelled. I had spent a year in meetings with various production companies and executives proving my worth and developing a vehicle that we all felt was acceptable. All of a sudden I’m told via text message that I’m being bumped to make space for people I’d never heard of. The worst part was that the news was broken to me by a lovely young shop assistant in the T-mobile shop who I sought help from when I couldn’t work out why my phone was beeping.

I did some research on Gray and Keys and found that they were embroiled in a great publicity storm following some off-air comments that were picked up by the cameras (If you also missed the story, there’s some stuff you can find on Ask Jeeves). I listened to their comments and was surprised to learn that in broadcasting such comments were common and that this stuff went on all the time. I had no idea that this was the way that people in punditry behaved but that is exactly what Keys and Gray kept insisting. Seeing as I had been shunted off Talksport in favour of them, I figured they must know more about the industry than I do and so I vowed to follow their example. I had some leads I could follow and a couple of meetings sorted out for potential gigs. I wasn’t proud but if talking to people in the broadcasting industry about smashing and hanging out of the back of things was the way to get my own Talksport show, then that is what I would do. I can now tell you categorically that this is not something that is rife within the broadcasting industry and for now I will be forced to stick to my role as outside analyst for five live as a regular caller to 606.

Anyway, my original point was that we need to embrace new technologies and that’s something I’m trying to do. I’m not that knowledgeable about social media (something my son tells me is summed up by the fact that I’ve been on Google Plus for six months. I was excited to be introduced to twitter and send messages to a lot of my old mates like Sav, Pat Sharp and Justin Bieber but it seems that looked like spam so I’ve had 25 accounts suspended. Still, I’m getting the hang of it and think this one will stick so give me a cheeky follow at @Simon9SmithPro. It’d be great to hear from some old fans.

In a professional career spanning almost two decades, Simon Smith has played for over sixty-seven clubs. The ultimate utility player, as his pace has diminished Simon has managed to reinvent himself time and again, from poacher to holding midfielder, centre-back to goalkeeper. Now that his website has been closed down, we have exclusive access to his weekly column.

I feel for Andre Villas-Boas, I really do. We’ve all been there. And I don’t mean the managerial magic roundabout. I know better than most what it’s like to be given too little time. And at Chelsea no less.

Picture the scene: Stamford Bridge, 1992. Tony Cascarino and myself are at the top of our game and scoring goals for fun in training. This was my first big money move as Chelsea had splashed out nearly £1.5 million on Paul Elliott MBE and Celtic threw me in too just to sweeten the deal. I was excited. My first game was a pre-season friendly at Boreham Wood. This was the big time.

Sure, I was nervous. Who wouldn’t be? No easy games at that level and the Wood are no mugs. I figured the most important thing was to get through the first 10 minutes unscathed. Unfortunately fate (a.k.a. Dennis Wise) had other ideas.

At times of stress I can get quite gassy. I make no bones about that. This I knew. What I didn’t know was that the captain of Boreham Wood’s ’47 Athenian League second division title winning side had sadly passed away that week. This would quite literally be squeaky bum time during the minute’s silence before the game.

Well, we’ve all been there. However hard I tried to think about not farting, the more difficult it became to not fart. Eventually one popped out that was simply too loud to ignore. My situation wasn’t helped by Wisey comically covering his nose and pretending to retch. What irritates me most is that sure, it was a loud one, but fairly scentless. Dennis is a lovely bloke but part of me still hasn’t forgiven him for that.

The crowd went ballistic; largely I should add, as a result of Wisey’s mime antics. So this was what it must have been like in Galatasary. Welcome to hell. The Hertfordshire mob began chanting, ‘You’ve shat and you know you have.’ Before things escalated any further, the bossman came over and told me to disappear down the tunnel. I didn’t even get that opening 10 minutes. I wasn’t given enough time. Robert Fleck took my place and bagged a brace. Where’s the justice in that? He didn’t even kiss the badge.

A fortnight later and it’s Kerry Dixon’s testimonial at the Bridge. No margin for error this time. I eschew my traditional pre-match pound and a half of cheese and focus on the game in hand. It’s all about proving my worth and making sure I do enough to warrant a place in the side. Kerry, a tremendous servant of the club is bowing out after a decade and boy is he on fire. Twice he rounds the keeper and strokes the ball towards an empty net. I’m in the zone though and twice apply the finishing touch just to make sure. I’m on a hat-trick and there is a stunned silence throughout the ground. I can see the disbelief on the faces of some fans. They’ve clearly never seen a debut like it. Then, after half an hour, we get a penalty. Kerry plops the ball on the spot and pauses. As he looks with a tear in his eye into the stand behind the goal, I can sense his apprehension. Nobody wants to miss a penalty on their testimonial so I run up and take the weight from his shoulders. The keeper didn’t even move. Pure class. I expect to be mobbed. A hat-trick on debut. This is the stuff of dreams. But no. None of my team-mates embrace me. The Chelsea fans have broken their reverential silence and begin to boo. I’m touched as I realise they must be trying to steel me for future away matches where my prodigious talent will no doubt draw some stick. It goes on for what feels like forever and does begin to get quite nasty. I look over to the bossman for validation. My number’s up. I’m being subbed. A chance to soak up the adulation after a job well done perhaps? Far from it. The jeering continues unabated but sadly not loud enough to drown out the sound of the bossman assuring me, in no uncertain terms, that I’ll never play for Chelsea again. And I never did.

Sometimes, at a club like Chelsea, even a hat-trick isn’t enough. AVB was a good man with a good beard but ultimately it wasn’t enough. It annoys me that he got so much stick for losing the dressing room. That’s happened to me countless times over the years, Craven Cottage in particular is a labyrinth of windy corridors, almost impossible to find your way around. It’s not as though he was ever late for kick-off or anything.

What next for AVB? Well, Villas his middle name so I wouldn’t bet against him replacing Alex McLeish sometime soon. Some cynics will suggest there’s no link between name and club but I’d point out ARSENe at Arsenal and MANCini at City. Not to mention, when I’m down about the state of the world, I’m often cheered up simply by recalling the fact that, between 1998 and 2003, Wolfgang Wolf was the manager of Wolfsburg. And who would rule him out of taking on the Wolves job next? My own middle name is Randy so you’ll have to ask the missus whether I live up to that one!

With managers being granted less and less time, you have to wonder who will go next. Well, here’s this week’s betting tip for you all based on recent events. After West Brom beat Wolves, Mick McCarthy was sacked. After West Brom beat Chelsea, Villas-Boas was sacked. Who have the Baggies got next? Manchester United. With generous odds of 200-1 on Ferguson to be the next man to get the chop, you’d be a fool not to stick a fiver down.

Follow me on twitter, @simon9smithpro

Every so often Lawrence Gray-Hodson, a man who made his name in the upper reaches of Division 2 in the 1970s and 80s as well as being a former Scotland and England international, writes a column exclusively for Three and in.

This week he opines on Spurs title chances

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When I was just starting out as a professional footballer, Tottenham’s 1961 double was still spoken about because it hadn’t happened over 50 years ago. Some of the older pros I played with spoke in hollowed terms of great players like Dave Mackay, Bobby Smith and that inspirational captain Danny Blanchpower.

As time marched onwards that achievement fell further and further into the past, and although there were cup successes (who could forget David Villa running through the Man City defence, his beard still full of his pre-match meal?!), before dribbling the ball into the net. His unconstrained joy only slightly tempered by his countrymen’s decision to invade the Falklands to melt some of our soldiers faces.

There was the triumph in 1991 when Des Walker’s own goal and Terry Venables canny management sent my old mate Cloughy into a spiral of alcoholism resulting in his premature death, and in recent years they’ve won the League Cup a couple of times. So it’s a big surprise to me when I run into Spurs fans and they tell me that they’re contenders for the league. It’s a bit like saying that a white man is a contender for a marathon because he’s level with a Kenyan after 16 miles. We all know how that situation ends up.

Spurs are, and always have been, a cup team. Without doubt this is their best season since the last time they were this high in the league which was a long time ago because I can’t remember it and while I definitely have some issues with my short-term memory I can remember ages ago like it was yesterday. And this isn’t to disintegrate Spurs in any way, there’s nothing wrong with being a team that wins the occasional cup and can’t ever win the league. That just makes them the same as most teams except most teams don’t win the cups so they’re a bit better than most teams.

Sandro: more concerned with his teeth than winning games

It’s not new either. I remember bumping into Steve Perryman in a Soho bar one night back in the early 80s. They were going great guns at that stage but he said there was no chance they’d win the league, blaming Garth Crooks for being a malign dressing room influence, something which came as no surprise. He was the most unpopular man in the league amongst his fellow professionals. Only Everton’s Derek Mountfield came close because he used to run his own finger up the inside of his backside, then give you a poo moustache in the middle of a game.

If I look at this Tottenham team now I see some good, good players. The little magician, Modric. The mercurial Dutchman, van der Vaart. The Welsh wizard, Bale. And the outstanding Russian, Pavlyucheckov. Quite what Harry’s problem is with him, I don’t know, because I reckon he’d outscore your Rooneys and van Persies given the right chance and the right service. If it were me I’d have Alan Lennon firing in the crosses for him all game.

Yet to win a title you need more. You need players with character and Spurs are lacking them. Look at the big Nigerian, Emmanuel Adebayor. His nickname should be Mission Impossible because he self-destructs wherever he goes. How long will it be before he throws his toys out of the tram at White Hart Lane? Ledley King is hailed by many as a great player but he’s lazy, apparently he hardly ever turns up for training! While Scott Parker’s all-action style and Biggles hair cut might catch the eye but it’s no coincidence teams he plays for keep getting relegated.

And that’s not even mentioning Sandro who plays wearing a gum shield. What kind of prissy kindergarten is Harry Redknapp running there that he allows this kind of behaviour. Especially when he’s got a man like Joe Jordan, for whom teeth were a secondary concern, as part of his back room staff. What must big Joe think of Sandro, a man who won’t even put his teeth on the line for his team? How can this group of players hope to win the league when they’re carrying bottlers and cowards like that?

I hope Harry can put things right when he gets off from those ludicrous taxi evasion charges. As if a man like him can’t afford a twenty bob ride across London, because until he gets some real men in the side, the odd cup is the best they can hope for.

‘My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan.’ – Eric Cantona

‘Now we have to wait to see this issue decided and then the Manchester player and I will have to clear things up. Depending on who ends up in the wrong, one of us will have to apologise.’ – Luis Suarez

This Saturday lunchtime, Manchester United will travel to Liverpool for the fourth round of the FA Cup. United’s left back, Patrice Evra, is likely to receive the worst abuse seen on these shores since Sol Campbell crossed the North London divide. I write these words seventeen years to the day since I sat, an impressionable 10 year old, a few feet from my idol as he attempted to quite literally kick racism out of football. Pros and ex pros from every club supported Cantona, the general consensus being not shock that it had happened but merely surprise that it didn’t happen more frequently. A divisive Frenchman taking exception to racist language? Plus ça change. Thousands of words have been written about the Luis Suarez incident but nobody seems willing to accuse the Uruguayan of one significant offence. Being a racist.

Tony Evans, Times writer and Liverpool fan, wrote an excellent piece about his disappointment at the majority of LFC fans supporting the striker but still insisted Suarez had been guilty only of ‘using racist language.’ Indeed, this is the nature of the FA charge. Racist language. Even amongst the United blogs, highly critical of Liverpool and their talisman, most pieces contained a caveat insisting they were not accusing the striker of racism, simply of employing racist language. This seems to have been the case across the board. It’s the footballing equivalent of the argument we’ve all had in which the semantics of whether someone is/is being an arsehole are debated at length. Well, enough is enough.

Let’s try putting it another way; if a man rapes someone, we tend to brand him a rapist. Nobody says things like, ‘Oh yes, he did rape someone on that occasion but really he’s not that kind of bloke.’ But with the race issue it’s totally different. What a difference a letter makes. It’s much like the ‘not that kind of player’ defence used after a player has committed a dreadful foul ending the season of a fellow professional. Just once I’d like someone to come out and say, ‘He is that kind of player, this was an accident waiting to happen.’ Who is that kind of player? And, more importantly, who are these mythical racists? Where do they live? Nick Griffin has consistently stated the BNP is not a racist party so clearly it’s acceptable to say what you like so long as you simply deny the allegations.

For what its worth, I do think Suarez is a racist. Does this mean I think he rues the abolition of slavery? No. But, as the late Patrice O’Neill so memorable stated, not all racist walk around wearing pointy hats. Or, as another comedian, Bill Burr, pointed out, ‘real racism is subtle’:

Suarez admits using the offensive term word at least once. I have played in hundreds of football games in my life and never uttered a racial slur. In return, nobody has ever referred to me as a ‘yid’ during such a match and if they had I wouldn’t waste time analysing the precise nuances of their tone. The cultural argument holds no water since Suarez has played in Europe for years. The idea that it was jocular is a nonsense given the comments were made during a heated exchange with a Manchester United player during a spiky encounter at Anfield. A racist word was used in a bid to rile Evra, ergo the offender was guilty of racism. Michael Richards from Seinfeld is branded racist for his ill-advised rant at the Laugh Factory but at least he was attempting (utterly without success) to be humorous. Suarez was seeking simply to provoke. And he should not be let off lightly. Some have claimed an eight game ban is Draconian but most people would be sacked for a similar comment in the workplace.

Almost as bad as the incident itself was the response of Liverpool Football Club as they lurched from one PR disaster to another seemingly only able to dig a larger hole for themselves. First the preposterous sight of Suarez donning a T-shirt in support of himself greeted us. Dalglish besmirched his reputation as the finest player in Liverpool’s history not only by shifting the blame entirely onto Evra but also, perhaps the worst of his offences, wearing the shirt himself. Not a good look on a 60-year-old man. As Paul McGrath suggested, how much classier might it have seemed to warm up wearing Kick It Out tops? Clearly nobody had a word with the Liverpool PR department as Alan Hansen spent the evening using the word ‘coloured’ on Match of the Day before ‘God’ himself (Robbie Fowler) blacked up for a night out dressed as Lionel Richie and rather foolishly tweeted a photograph. Stay classy, Merseyside.

Liverpool seem concerned people think of the club as inherently racist. I do not. Football clubs aren’t sentient beings. It calls to mind Stewart Lee mocking the ‘values of the Carphone Warehouse’ as they attempted to extricate themselves from another race row, on Big Brother. The Carphone Warehouse values involve only selling phones and Liverpool’s are only football related surely. This persecution complex and martyrdom of the Uruguayan aids nobody. Ferguson didn’t instruct the United players to wear T-shirts all those years ago, he calmly weighed up the situation before making any public pronouncements. Dalgligh needs to realise, like Walter White in Breaking Bad, actions have consequences. Oldham’s Tom Adeyemi must have thought the trip to Anfield would be the highlight of his career to date yet it was marred by racial abuse from the Kop that reduced the young midfielder to tears. There can be little doubt that this would not have happened without all that came before. This is a simple case of cause and effect and the Liverpool manager has to shoulder some responsibility.

All football fans tend to be tarred with the same brush but it’s a broad spectrum. The fact that Emmanuel Adebayor is the Spurs player who has had monkey noises directed at him when his team-mate is Gareth Bale illustrates just how stupid supporters can be. That said, I can recall a time when racial abuse was commonplace in the stands, not least that remarkable night in 1995, and I found it genuinely heart-warming to see Suarez booed away at Wigan. Broadly speaking, as a society, we have moved from booing black players to booing racists.

This is a bigger issue than just Liverpool and Manchester United. John Terry meets Anton Ferdinand again this weekend standing by his assertion that he was simply incredulously repeating the racist abuse the QPR defender was accusing him of. Gus Poyet then needlessly weighed in to do little more than sully my generation’s memory of him as wonderful player. The Terry defence is as ludicrous as Matthew Simmons (Eric’s detractor in the vile leather jacket) claiming he was simply shouting ‘Off you go for an early bath.’ André Villas-Boas, like Dalglish, responded to the allegation by immediately stating he would support his captain ‘no matter what’. I don’t understand this. Surely if it’s proven that Terry hurled racial abuse at an opposing player then he should lose the support of his manager. Particularly given England’s Brave’s status as the pantomime villain of British football. And I write as somebody who takes the ball to the corner flag to wind down the clock when playing computer games.

Despite the quotation at the top of the page, Suarez has singularly refused to issue an apology to Evra, opting instead for a Jeremy Clarkson style ‘I’m sorry if anyone was offended by my comments’ cop-out. Or should that be Kop-out? And so the fires continue to rage. If I can be permitted recourse to one final bit of stand-up comedy, there is an old Eddie Murphy routine in which he talks about walking along the street behind an elderly white couple. Feeling nervous, they stop to let Eddie pass. The anecdote concludes with the comic asserting, ‘Well I was so offended I just went ahead and mugged them.’ When the Liverpool fans abuse Evra on Saturday as a direct result of him reporting a racist incident that damaged their club’s reputation, they will be making just as much sense. And we all know where such taunting can lead.

Lawrence Gray-Hodson

Every so often Lawrence Gray-Hodson, a man who made his name in the upper reaches of Division 2 in the 1970s and 80s as well as being a former Scotland and England international, writes a column exclusively for Three and in.

This week he opines on Roberto Mancini’s touchline behaviour
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You’ve got to ask: what is Roberto Mancini? Is he a dapper, scarf-sporting, handsome footballer manager who loves a good ragu, or is he a magician?

If it’s the former then he should get on with the job he knows best: alienating players and getting his team to win matches. Too often in recent weeks though he seems to be on the sidelines wishing he had a deck of cards to play with.

Clichy gets fouled, Mancini flicks the eight of clubs at the ref. Oh look, a trip on Milner and there’s Mancini with the ace of diamonds. Edward Dzeko finds himself flattened by a beautifully timed two-footed tackle and there’s Robert Scarfino shuffling the entire deck. And despite all these cards being different they have one thing in common. Their colour.

They’re all red. Or yellow. Perhaps it’s the continental influence but seeing Mancini waves cards around like that on the sideline makes me sick to my stomach although not quite sick enough to get sick. Maybe sick enough to do one of those burps where a bit of sick comes up but you swallow it down quickly again.

I remember back in my playing days we’d never have dared wave an imaginary card in the air. It would have been a sign of weakness, almost as if waving an imaginary card meant you had an imaginary friend called Aubrey with whom you played in a make-believe world called Cissy Town. Once, when we played Leeds in the cup, our right back Jack Morgan got kicked in the knee by Billy Bremner.

“You’ve gotta book him for that, ref,” said Morgan.

The ref did nothing and after the game, in the player’s lounge, Bremner and Jack Charlton leathered the tar out of him. Normally you’d defend a teammate but this time we stood back and let them pummel him. It’s one thing shattering a bloke’s kneecap, but asking the ref to book him was going too far.

And this brings me to Mancini’s rank hypocrisy when it comes to tackling. Oh, it’s ok for Vincent Kompany to jump in with two feet but as soon as Glen Johnston did it he was opposed to it. It reminded me of people who say ‘Yes, we should allow tinkers to settle with their caravans in fields near housing estates’, but as soon as these noble, pot-selling people come into their area they’re up in arms.

I’d like to see a new rule brought in to wipe this scourge from the game. Any foreign manager who waves an imaginary card ought to be given a red card themselves. They just don’t understand the game here. It is different when Wayne Rooney does it. He’s got a rapport with the refs, they speak the same language, Rooney has grown up knowing where the line is and never quite crossing it.

Mancini is a new arrival. He needs to learn to respect the customs of the country he’s in. I mean, he wouldn’t go to Saudi Arabia, openly drink a bottle of Pinot Grigio and walk around with a sultan’s daughter who he insists wears a bikini. So why does he think he can wave cards and allow his players to do two-footed tackles?

I like the man, his smartorial elegance has brought a touch of the catwalks of Milan to English football, but leave the card tricks to David Dunblane.

United fan Darren Richman plays tribute to his club’s extraordinary manager.

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‘People say mine was a poor upbringing. I don’t know what they mean. It was tough, but it wasn’t bloody poor. We maybe didn’t have a TV. We didn’t have a car. We didn’t even have a phone. But I thought I had everything, and I did: I had a football.’

On the final day of the 2000/2001 Premier League season, Manchester United played Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane. Coming as it did, just a few months before the remarkable 5-3 at the same venue, this match is not so well remembered. With the league already wrapped up, the game was largely an irrelevance for those of us standing in the away section. United lost 3-1 and, unlike our next trip to the Lane, very little about the occasion sticks in the mind. Bar one thing. For the duration of the second half, without interruption, the fans sang ‘Every single one of us loves Alex Ferguson’ ad infinitum. Forty-five minutes without a break, the longest sustained piece of chanting I have ever heard. You see Sir Alex Ferguson had talked about retiring at the end of the season. We had come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. Part thanks, part plea, the noise would not let up. And though received wisdom suggests repetition leads to a loss of meaning, on that particular day nothing could have been further from the truth.

Fast forward a decade. Three weeks ago Fergie celebrated twenty-five years at the helm. On the day that the North Stand was renamed in his honour, I texted a friend to remind him of another day, in 1998, when an acquaintance of ours had suggested it was about time the gaffer was handed his P45. This pal, a Spurs fan, texted back with the words, ‘I can’t wait until you have a normal, human manager.’ Quite. In his very first set of programme notes all those years ago, plain old Alex wrote ‘A man is very fortunate if he gets the opportunity to manage Manchester United in his lifetime and I can assure you that I have no intention of wasting my opportunity.’ Consider us assured. We used to taunt the City fans with chants of ‘25 years, fuck all.’ Perhaps we should replace the expletive with ‘it’ and direct the song at the man for all seasons.

I deliberately decided to postpone writing this piece in order to let the dust settle and the clamour subside a little. I have a friend who will only watch an American drama box set once the series has come to an end as he feels one should not judge things contemporarily. Much as I agree with the sentiment, Sir Alex ain’t off any time soon and I felt I had to write something this decade.

Though gushing, the bulk of the press coverage of this remarkable milestone focused on the myth rather than the man. The papers have always preferred archetypes and love to paint Ferguson as the furious masticator, angrily berating his players for any perceived inadequacies, not much of a tactician but a masterful man manager ruling with an iron fist. Though tempting, this somewhat misses the point. Cristiano Ronaldo, for one, has claimed he never saw a single example of the famous hairdryer treatment during his six years at United. Mark Hughes coined the phrase in relation to his old mentor way back when but people change and none with quite as much success as Sir Alexander Chapman Ferguson.

In that same set of programme notes, that mission statement, Ferguson, perhaps surprisingly, insisted he was not interested in the past, concluding ‘there is only one way to go, and that is forward.’ This is the man’s entire M.O. in microcosm. Alvy Singer was right, a relationship is like shark and does have to constantly move forward or it dies. It’s just that in this case the relationship is with a football club. It is a simple case of adapt or die.

To paraphrase another manager with a decent claim to be amongst the greatest ever to have drawn breath, Brian Clough, I wouldn’t say Ferguson is the greatest manager ever to have lived. But he’s certainly in the top one. Clough, of course, made the claim about himself and yet, for all his success, Fergie rarely talks about himself and the extent of his achievements. Even the twenty-fifth anniversary was marked only by his insistence on extolling the virtues of the great players he feels he’s been ‘lucky’ enough to work with down the years. Winning is everything, the glorification of the Ferguson name means nothing. For all the flak he has received over time, I cannot think of a decision he has made that wasn’t at least intended to be for the good of Manchester United football club. His outbursts are never about showmanship or a desire to be the centre of attention (an accusation that could be levelled at Clough on occasion and Mourinho more readily in recent years). Even the feud with the BBC suggested a man unfussed by how history will remember him. Or perhaps he realises it tends to be written by the winners.

The difference between the two managerial heavyweights is aptly summed up, oddly enough, with reference to Frank Sinatra. The idol of both coaches, the Forest legend once claimed of ol’ blue eyes, ‘he met me once.’ This soundbite is quintessentially Clough; pithy, witty, arrogant but brilliant. Sinatra did not meet Ferguson though. In 1989 the two were supposed to have dinner together. United lost away at Charlton during the day leaving the boss in such a foul mood that he cancelled dinner and went home on the bus. It is one of the few decisions Ferguson regrets to this day and tells one a good deal about the nature of obsession. Watch his interviews carefully and you’ll notice the word ’challenge’ recurs more often than any other and he’s much more likely to reflect on the final day on the 1994/1995 season than any of the twelve title successes. The man will be seventy on New Year’s Eve and has won everything there is to win yet is still driven by an obsessive fear of failure. I happened to catch a quiz show between players and staff on MUTV last Christmas and Ferguson’s side wiped the floor with Giggs, Neville and Carrick. Not the strongest opposition perhaps but the manager’s single-mindedness shone through as he barely consulted his team-mates and still stormed to victory. I suspect in that moment they knew how Mike Phelan feels.

It is almost impossible in sport to compare different eras. For a multitude of reasons there can be little doubt that the Barcelona of today would beat the 1970 Brazil side. Context is everything and this doesn’t necessarily make modern Barcelona the greatest ever football team. What is remarkable about Fergie is the manner in which he has straddled the divide and succeeded in an era of Clough, violence and pitches resembling the Somme all the way up to the present day. The game is almost unrecognisable yet the result is identical. Perhaps the most significant thing you can say about the man is that the story of the Premier League is his story, the one constant pushing the narrative forward. The hero or anti-hero depending on where you came in the lottery of life. The protagonist.

Ferguson has risen to every fresh challenge over the quarter of a century he has managed United. Initially he had to overcome Liverpool and the weight of history, then he had to take on Blackburn and Jack Walker’s millions, Wenger’s Arsenal came next with some of the finest football ever seen on these shores, finally he bested Chelsea and Abramovich outlasting even the ‘special one’. For the record, Mourinho himself refers to Ferguson only as ‘the boss’. Hard to believe there was once a time when there was actual discussion of whether Wenger was the greater manager. Now Ferguson faces City and possibly the greatest challenge of his managerial career. I wouldn’t back against him having the last laugh.

On Yom Kippur this year I went to synagogue with a book of Ferguson quotes disguised as a prayer book and read it cover to cover. Initially I felt bad about breaking the second commandment on the holiest day of the year but then I recalled I need only beware false idols. It brought to mind a Passover choon entitled Dayenu in which we list all of the gifts God has bestowed on us (brought us out of Egypt, gave us the Torah, yada yada yada) and conclude each line with the titular word, the rough translation of which is ‘that would have been enough.’ Even just one such wonderful blessing would have sufficed.

If He had brought us our first title in 26 years? That would have been enough.
If He had brought us our first European trophy since ’68? That would have been enough.
If He had brought Cantona to the club? That would have been enough.
If He had brought home 2 European Cups? That would have been enough.
If He had placed us on top of a certain perch? That would have been enough.

A successful manager need simply get it right more often than he gets it wrong. In football, you don’t have to be good; you only have to be good enough. Last season’s title triumph was perhaps the most pragmatic of the twelve but in a sense that makes it Ferguson’s finest achievement. One could even argue it was a transition year and yet still his side ended the season as champions. The team reflected their maker, as always, and proved extremely difficult to beat. Even in his finest hour, the treble triumph, unprecedented in the history of English football, United, as so often before and since under Sir Alex, left it late. It happens too often to be deemed mere coincidence, that never-say-die attitude comes from the top. Fortune favours the brave. Pundits have lost count of the amount of great teams the man has fashioned, four or five at last check and always with an eye on the future. Put it this way, if I had access to just one immortality pill then I’d give it to Sir Alex Ferguson and die safe in the knowledge that I did the right thing. Football? Bloody hell.

Last season, when Rooney requested a transfer and all seemed lost, Ferguson delivered arguably the greatest performance of his reign. One could have formulated a hundred different ways to handle that situation and none would have been quite so effective. Ferguson opted not for silence, anger or histrionics but instead for emotion. He displayed his fragile side and allowed himself to look vulnerable, quite unheard of prior to that press conference. Like Mel Gibson in Ransom, he turned the situation on its head and used the cameras to his advantage with all the cunning and guile acquired through years of experience. One can only hope that, when May rolled around, some of the Premier League prize money was used to buy young Wayne a dictionary in order to look up the definition of ambition.

I believe, as a fan, the most one can hope for is that come April your team is still involved in some important games. For the best part of two decades United have been there or thereabouts in the league during the latter stages of the season along with an outstanding record in cup competitions. I was born in 1984 and as a result, in pure footballing terms, I know nothing of pain. I say this not to gloat but because I actually realise quite how lucky I have been. I trust Fergie enjoyed a decent glass of red on his silver anniversary. Here’s to another 25 years.

Although the pressmen of the 90s loved to characterise Ferguson and Wenger as polar opposites with the cultured, professorial Frenchman at odds with the abrasive Scottish football man, nothing could be farther from the truth. By all accounts Wenger has very few interests outside the game and spends his time almost exclusively viewing matches whereas over the years I have heard Ferguson espouse on topics ranging from Shakespeare and American military history to the Coen brothers and classical piano. Astonishingly well read, I wonder if Sir Alex has ever come across the following quote, from Jonathan Safran Foer, a particular favourite of mine and one which I used last year in a piece about Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes but bears repeating here I think:

‘If you love someone, you miss them while they’re still there.’

Every single one of us loves Alex Ferguson.