England Must Have A Big Man; The Universe Demands It
August 10, 2012 § Leave a Comment
First published on SB NATION, 9 May 2012
They don’t tell you about the dreams.
Becoming manager of England? It’s a lot to take in. They stick you in front of the press and expect you to answer questions about why you’re not somebody else. They walk you round the vast underground hangar that holds generations of official England kit in every shape and size, including the rejected Euro ’96 goalkeeping kits, and the range of St George’s Cross rain ponchos that Steve McClaren never got the chance to approve. They take you round Wembley: this is — well, was — where Kevin Keegan resigned in tears. It was a toilet then. It’s a slightly newer toilet now. That isn’t a metaphor. « Read the rest of this entry »
Through Gritted Teeth #44: Alan Pardew
November 16, 2011 § 3 Comments
by Scott Oliver
I’ve often wondered whether ‘irrational hatred’ wasn’t a tautology. Isn’t loathing always ‘irrational’? If not irrational, then unconscious, at least, conscious justifications merely giving our more base, primordial sentiments the ex post facto sheen of legitimacy? Or are there genuinely rational grounds for hatred — the implementation of systematic genocide, say, or the so-called ‘ideological’ call to destroy a supposedly morally degenerate civilization — perfectly sound reasons that can be objectively agreed upon, and consciously assented to by all of ‘right mind’? I have a feeling that to seek to justify hatred in this way makes you, inescapably, as demented as Hitler or Osama bin Laden, and to ‘hate’ them in turn would be an undeniable waste of psychic resources, pity seeming more appropriate. « Read the rest of this entry »
Through Gritted Teeth #30: talkSPORT
July 21, 2011 § 5 Comments
by Mark Critchley
Oh hairy Icarus! Fly not too close to Molineux’s golden midday blaze lest thy bristled appendages and waxy coiffure droop, and a firestorm thus rage. January was the cruellest month, with its fall from Super Sundays — a heap of broken images. Here you and Andy sit, like a three-legged pony and rusty fridge in this divot-ridden field of broadcasting pretence — brought to you by The Big Red Building on Golders Green Road. What the fuck is The Big Red Building on Golders Green Road? Hush dear boys, for it matters not. You’re with Talksport now. The country for old men. Where blokes go to die.
Or perhaps, to live … « Read the rest of this entry »
Wishing the days away
February 3, 2011 § 1 Comment
So. That was the transfer window that was. Now that the fax machines have powered down with a contented sigh, and the microscopic seeds of radiation have nestled comfortably into the grey matter of agents, it’s time to reflect on one aspect of this strange and weird transfer business. Eloquent explanations have been provided elsewhere of the problems with the window itself, or the surrounding circus; but what of the very grist to the mill: the transfer rumour, those strange and fickle will-o’-the-wisps that haunt the football’s sticky marshes, tempting stumbling travellers onto imagined horizons. « Read the rest of this entry »
