Barcelona FCF

A very useful piece by David Conn, explores the structural differences, real and imagined, between Manchester United Football Club and Barcelona. As the two giants of world football strut out onto the world stage to slug out the UEFA Champions League Final, the apparent difference will be plain for the whole world to see. The Catalan club will be proudly wearing the Unicef name emblazoned on the front of its shirts, a symbol of moral standing, while United will have the AIG logo, the ultimate symbol of reckless financial speculation, a company now existing only thanks to a massive US Government bailout. Read More…

Football’s tribal terrace chanting

If ever there was a sporting intractable, a conundrum outside of the realm of rational thinking, it is the question of football terrace chanting. The chants are sometimes warm and amusing but more often, outright insulting. By definition they have to be. That much is clear. Who could imagine terrace chanting without that nasty sting in the tail? Tom Lamont has produced an excellent discussion on this complex, mainly British phenomenon.Football chants offend just about every norm of civilised behaviour, or should I say bourgeois civilised behaviour.

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More Than Just A Game: Football v Apartheid by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close

The promotion on the front cover boasts, The most important football story ever told. Not only was I mesmerised by this story from the very start, but by the story’s end I seriously began to wonder if this book was a genuine contender for the title. The story is amazing enough in itself. The South African prisoners on Robben Island, a place made famous by Nelson Mandela’s thirty year imprisonment, organise firstly a football league and later an entire prison Olympics in the face of the most severe brutality meted out by the Apartheid prison authorities.

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The Meaning of Sport by Simon Barnes

I didn’t want to like this book from the very start. The fact that Simon Barnes is chief sports writer for the Times was an inauspicious marker. Anything that falls under the umbrella of the Murdoch media empire is sure to be tainted. Then there was the distinct whiff of Oxbridge about the opening few chapters complete as they were with clever literary references and a liberal sprinkling of Latin, French and German phrases. To make matters worse, Barnes is one of those ‘horsey’ people with a total preoccupation with all things equestrian. Not exactly the sport of the proles.

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What sport tells us about life, By Ed Smith

Some two years after Barnes barnstorming epic, former top notch cricketer and fellow Oxbridge graduate, decides to tread pretty much the same territory and for me he does a rather solid job. He presses many of the same buttons as Barnes exploring the contradictory nature of sport and the conflicting motives of both athlete and spectator. The first couple of chapters set the tone of what is to follow with Smith setting out his philosophical stall very much in the manner of Barnes. Sport, smith tells us, appeals equally to two apparently contradictory world views. First, the notion of a golden age of true heroes from which we have gradually declined.

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Foul Play – What’s Wrong With Sport by Joe Humphreys

It was like a gift from the gods. The thorny question of giving unquestioning allegiance to a corporate monster called Chelsea FC was weighing increasingly heavy on the mind. As each season passed the whole corrupting football affair was becoming less and less tenable. So when I stumbled on the book that put it all in some kind of perspective you can imagine my heartfelt joy. I was no longer alone in my torment. At least one other human soul had come to the conclusion that something was seriously rotten at the heart of our new global religion. If there were two of us, perhaps there were more. Read More…

Olympic Legacy – What a Joke!

I started day-dreaming about the legacy idea way back in the year 1999 when the then Blair Government was pontificating about a Millennium legacy. I dreamed of a National walking and cycling track that linked all the major population centres with all our wonderful national parks and our delightful seaside towns. Capital outlay would be minimal. Local job creation would be considerable and it would send all the right messages for the twenty first century; environmentally friendly, individually healthy, community orientated and spiritually uplifting. Instead we got the vacuous Corporate Dome, corporately sponsored, individually mind numbing, community dumbing and spiritually alienating.

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Your Charity Makes Me Sick

Over the past years I have had dealings with a number of sporting charities and each one in their own way has done an excellent job in helping to develop grassroots sporting opportunities. My most recent contact has been with the Greenhouse Schools Charity, a charity that has been particularly proactive in the sport of table tennis and has been largely responsible for a mini renaissance of table tennis in London, particularly at school level. In fact, the club that I helped develop and manage over the past twenty years, London Progress, has now come under the Greenhouse umbrella and is now commonly known as Greenhouse Progress. Read More…

The Chelsea Syndrome

I can recall clear enough, even though I was just ten at the time, the day my sister and her boyfriend returned home from a football match armed with a gigantic glossy poster of Chelsea Football Club. You know the type. The whole squad including the coaches, the reserves, the backroom staff and the management neatly arranged in three rows with the front row kneeling, the middle row somehow rising above them and the back row standing tall and proud. I’m sure that football clubs still produce those standard set piece posters, no doubt at ridiculously inflated prices for their globally marketed fan base.

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You don’t know me!

The very fact that you’ve probably never heard of me or thousands like me, who toil away building our respective sporting clubs to varying degrees of success, says a great deal about our national sporting media and by extension, the nature of our commodity driven society. Small local sports clubs with their loyal, dedicated administrators simply do not bring in the mega bucks. Premier League Football is the only real show in town; the gladiatorial contests of our times, and virtually everything else plays second fiddle. Tennis, cricket, golf and rugby have their annual jamborees. F1 and horse racing are always there by virtue of big money backing.

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Marcus Trescothic: Coming Back To Me

I’ve come to Trescothic’s autobiography five years after its publication but I’m certain the key issues raised are more relevant than ever. Clinical Depression and mental illness generally are perpetually with us as is the taboo associated with them. The causes of clinical depression are complex to say the least, and there is no ready consensus around either its essence or its remedy. There probably is a kind of consensus that the causes of depression lay somewhere in an intricate but indeterminate cocktail of biological, genetic, psychological and social factors. Notions of a chemical imbalance, genetic predisposition, childhood trauma and attachment issues, and of course extreme anxieties around work, relationships and debt are all brought to the therapy table.

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