Come anticipate Fabio Capello's two years as England manager with me

I have not read RW's latest article. If anyone believes in a magic transformation of this team then I think they are mistaken.

My problem with Barton I suppose is her strained 6th-form pretentiousness. I don't really think Williams has that, though it's true that he is unusually an 'aesthete' type for a sportswriter (and he's not only a sportswriter).

unusually? so you haven't heard of barnes, winter, lawton (the other 3 broadsheets' equivalents)

I hate broadsheet football writing

Lawton is comparable, perhaps more a moralist than an aesthete? (They go together, perhaps, here.) Barnes I do not read. Winter I would not trust - I assume he is a right-wing hack and I don't think he is any kind of idealist, far from it.

I wouldn't mind him being an "aesthete" except that to me it's so pompous, plus in sport a team wins a game, and history records that, in art nobody wins. Plus that metaphor above about the well worn canvas is just really bad, dull writing to me.

My problem with both of them is that they play on this idea that referencing "great works" somehow enhances their prose by default, but neither ever do it in a way that makes me think or pick particularly thought provoking parts of a "great work" to quote/use.

EG Barton quoting Proust a few weeks back and just picking some ultra simple line to back up a glowing indie review...I mean if you're going to quote those people I'm not sure just a line works anyway. The parts of Musil or Flaubert or whoever I'd want to quote are 3/4 pages long.

If you're going to write about football it helps if you know a bit about football first, then you can do all the fanndydangle I'm-a-proper-writer stuff afterwards, these guys usu. do it the other way round

ronan completely otm, nothing to add

David Lacey was even worse. Whole articles of clever clever word play saying NOTHING. Plus when he did say something he was always wrong.

I hate broadsheet football writing

I know what you mean, but I don't mind the rest of the Guardian's lot. Paul Doyle is always good, but he's usually only online.

The fact that they were ALWAYS WRONG, is what stopped me reading the Guardian's football apges

I don't mind Kevin McCarra.

Martin Kelner is good tho he writes more about TV coverage etc.

That was around the time that Arsenal were playing the best football that ever been played in the history of the universe ever ever ever - whenever that last happened, as it does periodically (xp)

Henry Winter was the most unashamed Gooner poet IIRC.

I've always wondered why there are no Arsenal fans on ILX

all living in their hampstead mansions counting their millions amirite

That's the players

all living in their hampstead terraced apartments counting their signed henry shirts

in art nobody wins

sorry but this made me laugh, maybe even out loud!

why?

just in that "they used to say i'd never make it as a stand-up but NOW who's laughing?" kinda sense.

I've always wondered why there are no Arsenal fans on ILX

Hi there! I forgot to mention because every football thread turns in to a Spurs discussion, so I ran away and hid.

Not wishing to intrude on private grief etc etc etc

Ha ha ha

you people are fucking MENTAL!

Big slagging off not just of Barton (OK) and Williams (I don't really agree but this is predictable) but also David Lacey (who knows more about football than most of us will ever know about anything), while praising www hack Paul Doyle and, and, and ...

wait for it

OK, deep breath

...

MARTIN KELNER!!!

I rest my (pillow) case.

Incidentally, I would like to reassure ILX's small contingent of Spurs fans that I will be bringing my nine game strong Aston Villa Away Jinx to White Hart Lane this Monday. Previous beneficiaries of my morale-sapping presence have included Marlon Harewood (16 goals a season West Ham vintage), Nicklas Bendtner and, perhaps most shockingly, Charlton Athletic FC.

haha....gimme Kelner over Williams any day.

well, once a week

Sorry pinefox, but David Lacey? You could not be more wrong.

Unless you were David Lacey yourself

To be honest if I was given a load of unbylined football comment articles I'd find it pretty difficult to put a name to any of them apart from maybe Martin Samuel or Adrian Chiles doing his 'remember the day West Brom stayed up' thing.

I do quite like the Fiver-style "all football is shit" tongue in cheek liveblogged coverage in the Graun tbh, it beats fucking Fletch and Cheesey and the gang

Martin Samuel is amazingly obese

yeah but there's that French football pundit who is basically their Samuel but another 10 stone heavier

http://ilovebubbadogs.com/bubbapress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/andre.jpg

this guy, yeah?

I think Aston Villa could very well win at WHL on Monday.

In fact that is so obvious it was not worth stating.

Why is Harry Pearson a great football writer for When Saturday Comes and an absolutely dreadful one for The Guardian? Sub-editing?

Writing for your audience

The reason I picked out Paul Doyle is that he is the opposite of Lacey/Williams in that he isn't even trying to be a "great writer", but knows ABSOLUTELY LOADS about African and French football and seems to have boundless enthusiasm for it, which he communicates. Same goes for their Eastern European football guy, whose name temporarily escapes me. Not that good a writer, but he knows his stuff really well, and he loves it, and that comes across.

David Lacey communicated enthusiasm for nothing but his own tired, pretentious, vacuous writing.

I don't want to read 'good' football writing, I want to read clear, authoritative and enthusiastic football writing.

TBH I've come to the same conclusion about music writing.

OTM

OI GEEZER YEAH OTM KEEP IT CLEAR AN ENFUSIATIC ALRIGHT TMFD

I want to read good writing, about anything. I wish Stevie T were here to be amused or dismayed with.

I don't think Harry Pearson is dreadful for the Guardian. Next to Martin Kelner he reads like Walter Benjamin.

If you say Doyle knows a lot about those nations' football, good. The East European one you have in mind may be Jonathan Wilson, who has written a book and is a pretty decent writer.

But your comments on Lacey make it difficult for me to take seriously anything else you say. How old are you? Lacey started writing in about 1966, I think. I read him from about 1986 onwards. He can be faulted on knowing too much, in a way - compulsively dropping in facts from very very ancient history. And I have sometimes found him actually TOO factual; and also not ENOUGH of an aesthete - he's actually a bit of blokeish pragmatist, in his football views. But to call him 'pretentious' ... suggests that you don't know what the word means, or you are actually thinking of some other writer.

If he knows so much, how come he gets so much wrong? That's what I object to.

yeah what is this, ARTS journalism?

I accept that he might once have been good and have fallen off. I'm actually quite old, but didn't start reading the football in the Guardian till a few years ago, maybe the last few before he retired

I think pretentious is the right word, as he would dress bland statements of the obvious in pretty similes and horrible word play. It seemed more about the words he was using than what he was saying. That isn't good writing. It's someone aiming at "good writing" and failing.

I don't think it's geezerish to want clarity and enthusiasm in your writing. (Was George Orwell a geezer?) I'm very ungeezerish myself in real life, by the way.

The other thing about David Lacey is that he retired from football writing with all sort of fanfares and encomia and then umpteen years later HE WAS STILL THERE

This has turned into another Guardian-bashing thread, hasn't it? How did that happen?

I have sometimes found him actually TOO factual; and also not ENOUGH of an aesthete

Antijournalism! Send him to Andorra.

Yeah but what about the new Thierry Henry, eh? I mean Theo Walcott, of course, surely to lead England and Arsenal to glory for years and years to come.

Also has anyone mentioned the absurd and scary Setanta three lions intro that goes on forever and ever and the terrible guy who thesped about going in to battle before they'd deem it worthy to show the highlights of the England game? It made me want to not watch football anymore.

I only started reading football journalism kinda recently, and what struck me - as I read Martin Samuel belittling people and not actually reading any of the words they wrote - was that it was all pretty awful.

ILX Gooners = me, Julio

Nick Uptoeleven as well.

Richard Williams is a blokey aesthete. an old blokey aesthete.

David Lacey did not retire from football writing with all sorts of fanfares and encomia. I can tell you exactly how I found out how he was retiring. I was in a pub in Sandycove, Fitzgerald's I think it's called, on perhaps 17 June 2002, with a pint of Guinness, Belgium - Brazil on TV and the day's Guardian in front of me. A small note in a corner said something like 'David Lacey will retire as the Guardian's football correspondent at the end of the World Cup'. That was it, that was the announcement. At tournament's end they ran a page or so of his old works - not classics, on the whole - in celebration. That was that. McCarra, I suppose, was then hired, and I think he was done a pretty superb job, and is a fine writer in his own right. I would probably rather read McCarra than Lacey NOW, at least.

It's true of course that Lacey stayed on to write a weekly column and generally one match report a week. This does muddy the water of what 'retirement' means. Nancy Banks-Smith (whom I don't particularly like at all) DID announce her own retirement and was greeted by a shoal of protest, and is still writing for the Guardian to this day I believe.

The geezer debate has a long history which can perhaps be found elsewhere on ilx. I am not especially convinced that Enthusiasm is a good quality in a writer. There are all kinds of subjects about which one might not, or should not, feel at all enthusiastic.