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.

From a story about Barcelona’s players appearing on stage with Shakira to celebrate their Champions League win.

Unless Busquets is even worse than I think that’s nicely done.

Somebody did something naughty last year. But we shouldn’t be allowed to tell you what it is because they have a lot of money and have bought one of those things you’ve only heard of recently. But you can know who the other person involved was, sure, she’s not that rich anyway. The slag. And anyway, she probably tried to blackmail our poor hero and then sell her story to some grotty tabloid that insists on calling the police ‘cops’. Oh yes, we can say that about her – besmirch her character, and why not? She’s clearly the ‘bad guy’ here. And she’s not allowed to deny it! Or tell her side of the story at all, in fact, because she doesn’t have as much money. Result!

In the first instance, this may sound unfair to you, but really you just need to stop and think about it. What if the naughty boy was a premiership footballer? The poor soul has to go and run around in front of a crowd of partially-unsympathetic football fans. They might chant nasty things about him! How would he ever get over such a thing? It could well still be on his mind as he drove his Ferrari home to his multi-million pound mansion. What if he was still thinking about it that night when he was eating steak in a gourmet restaurant? Or, god forbid, weeks later, when he’s lying on a beach in Hawaii trying to recover from months of a health & safety-defying workload of running around in the fresh air for several hours a day? Not so sure now, are you?

And all this, before you even consider possibly the most important thing. His family. What if his wife and children were to find out about him betraying them with another woman? It would destroy them! Won’t somebody please think of the children! Surely the provision of a secure and supportive family unit is the responsibility of the press, the courts and most of all, the unrelated single woman who has callously slept with a married man. How can she ever look his wife and kids in the face again?

Obviously there are no totally innocent parties here, apart from our unnamed hero, but surely we can at least all learn a lesson from this…

Never a year goes by without the future of the current England manager and speculation over his potential replacements dominating at least one slow-sports-news week. It’s a go-to topic, like ‘Fabregas Wanted by Barcelona’, ‘Giggs is Really Quite Good, Have You Noticed?’ or ‘Terry Family Member Questioned by Police Over ——-‘

One of the recent speculators’ favourites, after getting Tottenham into the Champions League for the first time in their history, is the excitable Harry Redknapp.

On the one hand he seems to be a good man-manager, he’s tactically-competent, and has brought several teams from ‘lowly’ positions (as, in some cases, he’ll never tire of reminding us) to arguable over-achievement. And over-achievement is something the national side is yet to sample. You never know – they might like it – the media certainly would.

But for all his white-flag-waving at Manchester City, Harry also spends a lot of money to bring his teams success – not a luxury afforded to national managers – so would the quality at his disposal in the England set-up be enough to work his magic on? There’s certainly plenty there, with a decent crop of youth creeping in already, but would it be enough?

And would he be able to handle the ‘big personalities’? Harry’s got a bit of a history of falling out with players and though he’ll do his best to keep it internal, it’s pretty obvious when players like Bentley and Pavlyuchenko are only justifying big transfer fees by doing an extra-high-quality job of warming the bench. How would he react to being undermined by an ex-captain, or having a star-striker tell him to procreate off? And what if he, god forbid, froze-out a star player during a tournament? How would he handle the media-frenzy at every following draw or loss?

Perhaps the biggest loss he’d have to handle in moving to a high-profile team, would be his pressure-relieving tactic of telling everyone who’ll listen that his team don’t have a chance against their opponents but that they should just get credit for ‘having a go’. I’m not sure that kind of talk would be met with much sympathy when England lined-up against Denmark. Or Belgium. Or Liechtenstein.

It seems that Harry’s real talent really is, like many other lauded managers who suddenly lose all respect as soon as they fail to make the grade in a higher-expectation role (step forward Woy) getting the best out of average players. To take England to the next level we need someone who can get the best out of quality players. Someone the players ‘like’ purely out of fear of upsetting. And as far as I can see, there are only two working managers we’ve seen in the Premiership recently who fit that bill, and one’s far too Scottish to take the job.

I’m sorry to say it English-manager-demanders, it would be great if we had a home-grown manager capable of getting the results we’re all so desperate to finally achieve, but if we want to get anywhere with the current crop of Lamborghini-driving English talent, there’s only one man for the job. And he’s Portuguese.

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.

Maybe it’s because I’m a soft Southerner, but I honestly can’t see what’s wrong with wearing a snood. When Samir Nasri & Co donned the tubular neck scarf for the first time, they can’t have imaged the reaction they’d provoke – partly because on the continent some footballers, like Gigi Buffon, have been wearing them for years.

Despite the insistence of certain managers, including Arsene Wenger, that the scarves actually provide a safeguard against injury, the old school of the British game have come out in force against them, with Alex Ferguson reportedly banning them from Old Trafford and claiming that “real men don’t wear snoods”.

That’s right, Fergie.  Real men, like Wayne Rooney, elbow people in the neck when they’re not looking and then run away.

Notts County manager, Ferguson acolyte, and self-proclaimed ‘Guvnor’ Paul Ince is the latest to speak out about snood-gate:

“Back in my time, and I sound old now, it was black and white boots and that was it.

Now you’ve got snoods, people wearing headphones when they are doing interviews, which I find disrespectful, pink boots, green boots, you name it they’ve got it, tights – they’ll be wearing skirts next.”

Terrible, isn’t it. The youth of today and their superfluous fashion accessories.

What Ince doesn’t say is that in his day, he himself was guilty of carrying about a superfluous accessory that was otherwise thought to be a brand new addition to the footballer’s kitbag: the air rifle.

Perhaps Ashley Cole should consider offering his snoodlessness at defence.  And hope against hope that Paul Ince is on the jury.

Guest post by Indie Dave

——

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.


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.

-

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.

If this was politics, or any other kind of proper news, they’d already have dubbed this Massey-gate. Andy Gray was the first casualty, mercilessly sacked by Sky Sports yesterday afternoon. Richard Keys has reportedly followed after a calamitous interview with Talksport today, in which his ineloquence and tendency to bend the truth sounded more like an audition for a full-time role on the station. It is, undoubtedly, the end of an era.

Keys and Gray in happier times, before sexism was bad

There are a generation of fans, my sprightly self included, who can barely remember a time before Sky Sports. I can’t remember a Sunday that wasn’t Super. I can’t remember a Premier League goal that wasn’t met with hairy-handed applause and an invitation for the goalscorer to “tek a boo”. I’ve watched so much Sky Sports that I’ve probably become sexist by some sort of strange televisual osmosis.

Funnily enough, it’s exactly that sort of affinity that has led to the pair’s undoing. One gets the sense that they thought they were bigger than the channel – bigger than the game, almost – and were untouchable. It’s a feeling backed up by leaks from inside the corporation.

All the evidence suggests that Sky themselves aren’t entirely displeased by the demise of Keys and Gray. In the ill-fated Talksport interview, Keys alluded to “dark forces” at work, and unless Emporer Palpatine has made an unlikely comeback one can only imagine he’s alluding to some sort of internal plot. Fleet Street corridors are awash with conspiratorial whispers about lawsuits and legislation. Sky have had countless opportunities to support the duo and provide some PR protection. Instead they’ve fuelled the mob with more leaks. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and it’s not just Dennis Rommedahl’s crossing.

Perhaps Sky’s reasoning is less sinister than many imagine: they might feel, as many have suggested since the storm broke, that the double act had become tired. Sky have the audience that Keys and Gray were hired to generate and sustain. Now is an opportunity for progression.

The quality of football programming was a hot topic this summer, with a lot of focus on the terrestrial channels’ substandard coverage of the World Cup. As online commentary becomes increasingly sophisticated, television is caught between trying to keep up with the most engaged fans and pleasing the masses.

Sky have, in the past, struck that balance better than most. People may snipe at Gray’s iPad and touchscreen nonsense, but there were often salient tactical points underlying his analysis. Gray was objectionable and occasionally plain unlikeable but, in my humble opinion, often rather good at his job – especially when compared to the “he played really well” punditry of messrs Shearer and Lawrenson.

Replacing Keys presents no great challenge. As much as he might consider his role significant (ie. relaxing players with sexist “banter”), he now operates in a world where every sportsman he encounters will probably have as much media training as him. It’s a fairly simple anchoring role, and one for which Sky can probably afford to promote internally.

David Jones of Sky

Jeff Stelling seems an obvious choice, though his commitments to Channel 4 might prove problematic. On Monday night, Keys was replaced by Sunderland fan and veteran of Sky Sports News David Jones. Jones’ articulacy and intelligence shone through, and he did his chances of making the step up no harm at all. He’s also very much au fait with the modern football world – he’s an active presence on twitter, and does his research by checking up on a wide variety of blogs and sites. In his Talksport interview, Keys stated with some pride that he doesn’t engage in such activities – perhaps if he did, he’s realise quite how out of touch his views are.

I can understand the campaign to get James Richardson a regular television gig. His work on the Guardian podcast has been absolutely superb, and ‘AC Jimbo’ developed a near fanatical following. However, I’m not sure his face would fit. His irreverence and sideways look at the game doesn’t seem an obvious match for the bombast of Sky. A more considered role on a programme akin to ESPN’s excellent ‘Between the Lines’ might be more appropriate.

Back to the problem of replacing Gray. Jamie Redknapp is inoffensive but for that to be his primary qualification tells you everything you need to know. His Dad is too busy actually working in football. Sam Allardyce has the gravitas but not the glitz.

Michael Cox of Zonal Marking put forward the controversial suggestion of David Pleat, whilst Paddy Barclay took time out from retweeting abuse from angry scousers on Twitter to suggest one from Stewart Robon, Gordon Strachan and Graham Taylor.

Again, I think Sky have something better in their ranks. Graham Souness is not everybody’s cup of tea, but he’s one of the most entertaining pundits on television. He’s not afraid to break the status quo and make a bold statement. And he has played and managed at the very highest level – not that that’s a pre-requisite for intelligent punditry, but it does lend credibility.

Sky’s choice will ultimately be led by protecting their investment in football and retaining their audience. I simply hope they don’t squander an opportunity to once more be innovators, as they were so impressively twenty odd years ago. There is a definite appetite for intelligent discussion around the game. Balance the inarticulate but credible ex-pros with informed journalists. Open the debate out on social networks. Football is an incredibly social experience, so it seems odd that two men sat in studio should be left to dictate the agenda alone.

Gray and Keys were dinosaurs, and are now all but extinct. Sky, however, must seize the opportunity to be at the cusp of the evolution of football programming.

If you missed Richard Keys hilarious interview on Talksport, in which he got into the existing hole and dug even deeper, here’s the whole lot.

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