Football journalism

really liked sid lowe's interview with Monchi https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/may/17/sevilla-monchi-liverpool-europa-league-final

"Negotiations come next, where you have to know the market, have an alternative, and be realistic. “The guy selling a Seat Leon will claim it’s a better model,” Monchi says. “Kanouté wasn’t the first option; we were going after Fred, the Brazilian. We wanted [Kevin-Prince] Boateng before Keita. And if a player says: ‘Chelsea want me,’ I say: ‘What are you talking to me for, then?’ But if Swansea or Spurs want you, let’s talk. I sell the city, the club: a serious club that pays as promised, which sounds trivial but isn’t.”"

lol

:)

https://twitter.com/SkySportsNewsHQ/status/732665863497650176

What Ancelotti lacks in fire, he more than covers with deep, deep sanity.

https://next.ft.com/content/720cae92-1c32-11e6-a7bc-ee846770ec15?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Flife-arts_lunch-with-the-ft%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3628180/Roy-Hodgson-football-man-course-England-thankful-manager-that.html

He has been to the opera but would rather listen to Sixties pop and soul

Translating the piece, the 22-year-old said: “Today is the birthday of my princess.

My love I wish you a happy birthday, good health, peace and that God always blesses and protects you.

Thanks for everything you do for me, thank you for making me so happy. I feel so loved.

It is good at the heart of the people when you have someone to share a great love.

Like the breeze of the morning, so you arrived.

A perfect optical love, a bridge on a river of pain, in my life a beautiful dream came true.

A gift sent by my Lord.

Congratulations my great love.”

Coutinho and Aine have been married since 2012 and the pair seem very happy.

Kevin McCarra gone missing in Avignon. Worrying.

https://www.facebook.com/hugh.stewart.146/posts/10154316375224337

Confirmed he's been found safe and well.

"A three-times world player of the year, the headline act for Portugal is entering the zone marked high-end functional footballer as with each outing the dazzling performer who wrests contests his way recedes in the distance.

At 31 this is understandable. Unlike England’s 1966 World Cup triumph, a sonnet by Shakespeare or a burgundy grand cru, elite athletes do not age well."

-_-

henry winter's book about the england national team really is quite smthg. he goes to great lengths to shoehorn in terrible jokes. eg when describing the 1990 WC s-final he mentions gazza being told to stick close to matthaus except gazza doesn't know who matthaus is. this lack of awe about opponents is summed up by winter as "no fear and lothar"

or when england secure a 0-0 draw in rome to top their group in WC '98 qualififying and thus avoid a playoff in moscow in november which would have meant going "to russia in gloves". the whole book is like this, kinda amazing.

goes out to interview steven gerrard in l.a where it's hot and humid -"california steamin'".

http://tvnewsroom.site/images/news-staff/henry-winter/henry-winter-Image-0001.jpg

he is like three drawings on from nult in an "evolution of football man" graph.

in his chapter on the supremacy of the premier league over the england national team he goes to a pub/bar in L.A where they show epl games on a saturday morning, or as winter would have it - california streamin'.

also gets in a chapter on 'washbag culture' (which should be the new prem thread title really) where waddle, barnes, mark wright bemoan the youth of today seemingly forgetting that the england teams they played in never won fuck all either and in some cases failed to even qualify for tournaments.

Mark Wright - When I was an apprentice I had to clean boots, make tea. You can't get them to even make tea nowadays - Health and Safety.

Hull’s Robert Snodgrass starts Leicester title defence with shock defeat

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/aug/14/ander-herrera-chief-inventor-manchester-united-jose-mourinho

while on the left Joshua King is a converted striker who made diagonal runs into positions alongside Callum Wilson [...] This lopsided system is reminiscent of the approach popularised by Egil Olsen when managing Norway – it’s probably no coincidence King is Norwegian.

enjoyed this by Daniel Taylor re: Andre Gray's tweets

There are memories of school (“Ma teacher told me a was a piece of shit.. saw her the other day driving a piece of shit”)

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/09/05/12/37EDD11100000578-3774270-image-m-21_1473073758718.jpg

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3774270/Inside-Wing-s-Chinese-restaurant-s-favourite-haunt-Premier-League-stars.html

https://twitter.com/immolations/status/649362287891980290

✓✓✓✓✓

oh hang on which fitba sribe did i think m white was

Hatoful Journalist

The Telegraph’s sting worked because Allardyce and his associates wanted to believe he was a keynote speaker worthy of payment in hundreds of thousands. Allardyce was then foolish enough to try to impress them with a lot of big talk about third party ownership, plus the odd indiscretion about people in football. He didn’t have to play that game. He could have been immune and untouchable, happy with his new job and his £3m salary, completely focussed and committed. He didn’t have to be trapped. Anyway, that’s it for a short while. I’m taking a break and leaving you with this. If it isn’t huge by the time I get back, I’ll lose my faith in this country even more than I did over Brexit. Until next time.

then samuel drops loyle carner - no cd

Roy Keane has the face of a mercenary.Meet him before the walls of 15th Century Florence and one's heart would sink.

re 2006 Euros, England vs Portugal

At the start Ronaldo comes up behind his Manchester United team-mate and nuzzles him, saying something that seems to be kind but almost certainly isn't, as Rooney then swings round to watch him go. It's like an impossibly beautiful Iago goading a simple lumbering Othello, an impression confirmed when , after Othello gets the red card, Ronaldo comes away with a tranquil smile.

Contained in the media-activity schedule for England’s match with Scotland is this intriguing detail. ‘Friday, November 11. 11am — Two minutes’ silence during walk at The Grove (not open to media, however imagery available on request).’

Football has now reached peak Remembrance. It is not enough for England’s players to be silent in respect for the dead, they have got to be known to be silent and seen to be silent, too. There must be photographs of the silence, so we can marvel at how silently silent it was. Indeed, it raises that old philosophical question: if silence falls and nobody is there to witness it, does it make a sound?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/01/04/strange-beauty-watching-vincent-janssen-tottenhams-ghost-christmas/

http://i.imgur.com/iJBShnV.jpg

yeah might wanna work on that sales pitch

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2018/jan/04/premier-league-possession-manchester-city

this is the most incoherent dreck i've read in some time

That is spectacularly bad. ManC is of a different class this season. That leads to 70% or more possession most games. Taking effing Newcastle to prove a moot point.

"it is much harder now than it was even 15 years ago to bully creative players out of the game. The result is an era in which the likes of Xavi, Luka Modric and David Silva have thrived."

Oh noes brilliant players are ruining the game!

This article coming the morning after what was arguably the best game of the season, uhave2laff

man utd have not quite spent enough to ruin the spectacle of the game by forcing teams to be much worse than them, but at the same time it would be arrogant for us to insist upon enjoying the spectacle, after all, managers just have to win games (unless it's through possession football)

tbfttl, City-Newcastle was probably the most abject game i saw in 2017 and Pep's style has always been unbelievably boring to watch against anyone but a handful of elite teams. It's an issue with City, not the culture of the league as a whole, though. Spurs, United, Chelsea, etc have been involved in plenty of interesting / competitive games despite having over 70% of the ball.

Otm, it's City not the PL. Which makes stuff like this "The Premier League is walking in the shadow of the uncanny valley." utter nonsense (it's a good one for a new thread title tbf).

I love watching City idg the hate

I love watching them too, and don't find them boring at all.

when will pep stop doing it on a wet wednesday night in newcastle?

Perhaps i'm being unduly swayed by the Newcastle game but, having scored early, City seemed barely more interested in playing football than a Newcastle side that were in damage limitation mode from the kick-off. They had 73% possession and a single shot on target in the second half. They can demolish teams when they want to - and were great against Spurs - but they're often perversely negative for a team that has outscored everyone else by twenty.

the newcastle game didn't stand out to me for good or ill, mostly lost in the seasonal deluge of games so I might rewatch highlights, but in general I'd say city are as positive a side as I've seen in the league, not a lot of uninspired passing backwards despite their opponents

https://www.si.com/soccer/2018/01/05/us-soccer-election-president-candidates-campaign-funding

With the U.S. Soccer presidential campaign in full swing ahead of the Feb. 10 election in Orlando, SI.com highlighted the issue of campaign funding transparency this week by asking all eight candidates if 1) they have funded the entirety of their campaigns out of their own pocket, and 2) if not, who their top three funders are and 3) whether those funders have any business before U.S. Soccer.

While the football of this world cup has reached a dazzling pinnacle which promises yet more greatness to come, for its journalism, the opposite is true. Journalists have looked jaded, bereft of the sparkle that once lit up their prose as they wearily navigated their way through the highs and lows of the tournament with their increasingly rusty-looking apparatus. At times it felt like they might suffocate under the weight of their own bloviation, but whether through tenacity or just a lack of other ideas, they held true and saw it through to what feels like an unedifying end.

How did it come to this? It wasn't so long ago that we crouched over our screens in hushed reverence as we let the likes of Ronay bewitch us with those well-measured sentences that pointed towards the ineffability of the greatest moments of football. Somewhere along the way that hunger for pure feeling and the truth of the gut started to eclipse what happened on the pitch. Narratives had to be constructed and fulfilled. Reputations had to be decisively made and destroyed.

In such an intense, tumultuous and claustrophobic world cup perhaps it is understandable that journalists struggled to find time to contemplate the role of fortune in the events that unfolded. Seeing them frantically try to conjure a sense of self-satisfied awe as they struggled against their deadlines was genuinely moving, and one can only feel sympathy for the utter personal devastation each of them will feel once the fanfare dies down and they are left with the realisation that they have overstated the role of feeling and embarrassed themselves in front of millions.

But perhaps even in the centre of this vortex of ouroboric hubris, a kernel of truth remains. Writing shit about football awakens the depths of the soul, inviting both Bacchanalian and Apollonian lenses to better bring in to focus the forces on the pitch. Let these failings stand as a reminder to all that their steadfast responsibility is to reflect the swirling excitement of this glorious game, and to honour it with hyperbole.

https://d2v9y0dukr6mq2.cloudfront.net/video/thumbnail/azmSlLb/handsome-businessman-smiling-happy-make-thumbs-up-good-job-hand-gesture_ssvcxt-pe_thumbnail-full08.png

podcasts man podcasts

just been made aware of this

The cover to my debut novel: COME ON!!! 😎😎😎🚀🚀🚀🤗🤗🤗 pic.twitter.com/WFaQgaKlz0

— jamie jackson (@JamieJackson___) July 5, 2018

Oof

i have a long interview with richard williams in my anthology -- not conducted by me -- bcz, for all the flaws arrayed here, he was an important and very often a very good music writer and editor in the 70s, plus when he worked for island records he discovered and signed roxy music (tho jazz is his deep love). reviewing the two sides of engineer's electronic hum was the correct thing to do: it was a john & yoko record, and tbh they erred in not releasing two sides of engineer's electronic hum along with whatever they did release.

I daf about motors + f1 and find some of Williams' sports writing easily skip-able + maybe sometimes a bit in the style of a very effortlessly competent local rag correspondent, in the job 4 life days. But I like his music writing just fine, haven't read owt for a bit, but his blog is on hiatus atm.

Williams going on about how we should cut Micheal Owen some slack because of what a tough career he's had and how touching his self-interested and purely ego driven comments about his injury record were recently, is making me realise he is very very bad sometimes, and much worse than I thought.

just noticed Pete W's post upthread that calsl Glanville and McIlvanney over-rated, I'm 7 years too late for the FPing