TWITTER WARS: PIERS VERSUS FOOTBALL

Does anyone have a U and a T in this font?

In a list of the most repugnant individuals currently employed to make face in the mediasphere, it is difficult to know where, precisely, one would rank – and ‘rank’ is absolutely the mot juste – that astronomically repulsive twerp Piers Morgan, a man who truly does believe he farts cologne. It’s not important; he’s up near the top – which is where any self-respecting elitist is happiest. 

The most recent phase of Morgan’s journey unto repugnance – or what he calls his career – has seen him become a much sought-after opinioneer, first in Blighty then La-La Land, parping highly-remunerated ideas that come after us all through the ether and lodge themselves in the brain, later to be blurted out as our own: “Liiike, I fink vat…” Some people call it ‘mass entertainment’.

Like all cynically populist-yet-elitist right-wing figures – and as the editor of News of the World, he will have had ample practice at that posture – Morgan has to work quite hard to keep the sneer of contempt from his mug, something that the deadly combination of Twitter and his own limitless vanity will, I suspect, make increasingly difficult. (Although, given that his roughshod ride over celebrity privacy whilst on Fleet Street paved the way for our elevated culture of bin-emptying, knicker-sniffing, pap stalkers, I dare say he giveth nary a shit.)

What has any of this got to with football, you may wonder? Well, if you pipe down for a minute, I’ll tell you.

The FCF’s Hollywood correspondent, Murdoch Burdock (stress on first and second syllables respectively, naturally), brings news of Morgan ‘repositioning’ himself, false nine-style, as a football pundit. Not content with being final arbiter on Britain’s Talent – and certainly, we have been strongly tipped for medals in shooting and fencing at this year’s Olympics – he is now to be found saying stuff like “Mixer!” and “Good knock!” to a flummoxed American audience.

It would be easy to poke fun – and Lord knows I’ve gone out of my way not to keep abreast of his career (I think I accidentally caught 10 minutes of some arrant pre-US ‘documentary’ on Marbella’s nouveaux riches) – but the top of my head, and some brief research, tells me he has a prime-time CNN show, in the old Larry King 9pm slot, and that there have been a few faux pas of late. For instance, a Tea Party politician called Christine O’Donnell, the acceptable face of bigotry, walked off an interview because “he would not stop talking about sex,” and he infamously got the gender wrong of a recently deceased comedian, Patrice O’Neal, to whom he was attempting to pay tribute (grief-surf). Chris Morris was nowhere near either incident, Burdock reports.

One would expect all this of an imbecile, particularly one as shallow and deluded about his place in the world as the toerag formerly known as Piers Stephane Pughe-Morgan, but that hasn’t stopped him from turning his unctuous gaze toward O jogo bonito.

Credentials? Well, apart from slotting easily into the niche of ‘vituperative Limey’ (see: Mrs Robinson, S-Cowl), apparently Piers is an Arseho– …I mean, Arsenal supporter – which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense: he probably once had to review Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, however intellectually stretched; he certainly epitomises the post-Sky gentrification of football already skewered in The Fast Show; and he would thus have eenie-meanied a team when the glory still spurted from the Henry-Bergkamp axis. 

Piers: proof positive that Britain doesn't Got Talent...

You’ll not be surprised to learn, assuming you don’t already know, that Piers has a history of gushspouting footballistically on Twitter. During the recent Arsenal versus Man United match, during which Andrei Arshavin was roundly booed for, er, being told to go on the pitch by Wenger – a decision derided by Robin van Persie, too, remember – as replacement for tyro winger Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, widely regarded to have been the Gunners’ best player at that point, Morgan flicked the following spunk-gobbet at his Twitter Clarice Starlings: “I’m speechless. Never seen a worse substitution in my time as an #Arsenal fan. Shocking. And for Arshavin???? Nonsense, Wenger. NONSENSE.”

Burdock’s sources confirm it was all this football-related chatter – and maybe also the fact that we’re all so fucking dumb that we’ll tune in just to see how shit he is – that got him a job as guest pundit on ESPN. Imagine! It would be like having Ruby Wax or Jerry Springer commentate on the cricket. Anyway, the professional lasher-outer promptly tweeted of his new expertise, doubtless assuming there to have been a ceasefire in Syria out of respect for his epochal appearance or hoping the Twitterati would blow smoke up his ass and feed him grapes. Of all people, wee Michael Owen – who, despite the ongoing fizzle-out of his career, does exist – took virtual umbrage and defended Football’s territory from such impostures. Man-to-man, not zonal.

Here is the charming exchange from what soccer experts and media observer observers in those parts of the YooEssEh? where clichéd mobsters still go about their nefarious business are already calling “Soopoib Sunday”:

PM: 2 hours till I’m live on air as expert pundit re Chelsea/Man Utd for @FoxSoccer – be afraid @WayneRooney @RioFerdy5 @themichaelowen

MO: pundit maybe but please, you, an ‘expert’. Do us all a favour

MO: only in America could someone like you be asked to go on tv to talk about football

PM: careful Benchwarmer, or I’ll have to focus my expert eye on you to America later

MO: And that’s the problem in this world. Clueless people like you somehow get in a position to talk about something 

MO [cont]: they have no clue about in front of millions of people. Football is full of it. 

PM: thing is, Benchwarmer, I’m more likely to score a Prem League goal than you these days.

Miaow.

I’m not sure of any ‘previous’ – there are only so many minutes in the day; only so many Prozac this side of intensive care – but note his delightful facility with the put-downs. Heart-warming stuff. Lovely, cute bullying. The kind of man you’d want your daughter to marry…

Not content with picking a rumble with one cherubic favourite of the Mums of Middle England, Santa Banter (as he’s known to the Mexicans who clean his pool) then got embroiled in a spat with Gary Lineker, one that seemed to develop from the previous tête-à-chest between Owen and Morgan:

PM (straight tweet): Fox are airing Chelsea/United match on main network today, before Superbowl. Giving Americans the chance to watch some real football.

GL: Shame we don’t get Fox here. Would be intrigued to watch your analytical tactical input. Could be quite something.

PM: I’ll send a tape. They call me ‘Lineker with looks and brains’ over here.

GL: Must be down to your stunningly successful football career.

As is the way with Twitter, this then prompted a multi-sided exchange (slebs and plebs alike), for which we probably require a three-dimensional format in order to represent it adequately. Nevertheless, the meatiest part of said subsidiary ding-dong(-ding) was a spat between Piers and – I kid ye not – Lord Sugar, the latter having chimed in that Morgan’s punditry was “embarrassing to say the least” (Lineker: “Surely not?”), the former defending himself against the accusation that the Arsenal fans hate him, to which Sugar retorted: “deluded again, maybe hate is wrong word, they just think you talk double barrelled boll…”

And he was like “Everyone hates you, Peez”. And I was like, “Like, you best, like, fuck off, yeah?”

Lineker then suggests getting the pair of them on a MOTD spesh as pundits. As you’d imagine he would have been had the offer been to carry out a liver transplant, Piers, predictably, is up for it: “Let’s see who’s Top Dog, Shugs”.

So far, so banter… 

Perhaps drawn by the licentious description of “erudite entertainment,” he then posted a fawning blog on his Fox Soccer punditry (tagging Sugar, Lineker, and Owen in the tweet), at which point he’s again gently teased by Salt ‘n’ Lineker, before it all then prrrrroper kicks off, blud, ya get meh:

GL: You must have been up all night trying to find that blog

PM: They’re flooding in. Expecting the BBC to be in touch very soon.

GL: Spoke to the powers that be at the BBC and they are very interested in you… Staying in America

PM: I just spoke to the powers-that-be at CNN & Fox. And they said: ‘Gary who?’

GL: Ah well, there’s always the rest of the world

PM: I currently air in 200 territories / countries – how you getting on? #SmallPondMinnow

GL: I think the 2 world cups I played in probably edged that.

PM: Hmmm. Next time you’re in LA let’s stroll down Hollywood Boulevard together & see where the crowds surge, ‘Mr 2 World Cups’.

GL: You asking me out on a date.

PM: Yes. Mwah x

PM: We actually have a lot in common. Neither of us has ever won the World Cup, European Championships or Prem League/1st Div.

GL: Or have a golden boot… Oh sorry Piers I forgot I’ve got one in the attic

PM: Ah yes, here’s the fabled ‘golden boot’ in action [he posts a link to Lineker’s penalty miss vs. Brazil in 1992, one that would have equalled the England goalscoring record]

GL: I have no recollection of those images, didn’t fake them did you? [Deft use of satire from Lineker here, alluding to the Leveson Inquiry]

[At this juncture, a mystery racehorse owner from Chester appears]

MO: No surprise to see you have been on Twitter a week and Big Breasts has already started spouting his rubbish at you.

GL: I know, bless him. You can tell all he ever wanted to be was a footballer.

PM (to MO): Did you give Noddy’s pal tips on how to take penalties, Benchwarmer? [Link posted to Owen missing an open goal against Barcelona in a pre-season friendly!!] 

MO: Don’t need to lardy. He scored 48 goals for England, end of story.

PM (to GL): Of course, you’d never fake images – now would you, ‘National Treasure’? [bizarrely, he posts a link to GL in latex for a crispvert]

GL: You should see me now I’m working out.

Aside from the obvious question (whether Morgan had some flunky at hand to trawl YouTube on his behalf), you have to marvel at the abject peurility dribbling from Piers’ gob – truly, we are living a new Renaissance. I’m sure he never browbeat anyone, ever, for failing to be sufficiently patriotic when at the Screws or Mirror (research assistant is off sick today; will have to leave this as conjecture for the time being), so mocking Lineker for missing a penalty seems slightly cheap and dishonest.

It is all truly desperate, craven stuff. And behind the playground nastiness is the brazen smugness of Morgan – evidently, he thinks he’s now a player, a man of influence, maybe an icon. He has probably given his penis a nickname. He must be hoovering up gigantic quantities of boliviana to maintain such exorbitant levels of strutting narcissism. Did I mention he is friends with Kevin Pietersen? 

Anyway, like the true staminabeast he is, Piers promptly left his braying school chums to stuff $50 bills in the cunts of Russian strippers* and pootled on back to Twitter, where he found the eco-house-dwelling son of Neville Neville, fresh from a shift of proper punditry on Monday Night Football. Neville was ready. He’d decided to get tight, not let him turn, and generally show him on to his weaker side, at which our ever-loquacious, zeitgeist-riding hero offered this contribution to the social media site’s gemütlichkeit:

GN: Self-praise is no praise

PM: Not much danger of any form of ‘praise’ in your case, Ratface

GN: Don’t need praise. I’m not insecure. Hope this move is permanent to US

PM: I’d invite you out to Hollywood, but they’d only arrest you for possession of an offensive face in a built up glamorous area

GN: Happy in Lancashire thanks Piers. I’d invite you to Lancashire but you’d only end up chopped up inside some meat pies or eating them

PM: You should try a few pies, Ratface – fatten yourself up a bit. The Worzel Gummidge look is a bit last year

GN: Was widescreen tv invented for you. Is that life stories thing still on?

PM: I know one thing Ratface. You in High Def TV is the nearest thing to Dante’s Inferno I’ve ever seen. Life Stories back in 2 months

GN: Got any guests that don’t cry and we actually know on this series? #scrapingthebarrel

PM: By the way, who fights your battles for you now – since Uncle Roy fell out with Grandpa Alex?

PM: Why don’t you come on? Bring Uncle Roy to hold your hand for you if you’re too nervous

GN: I’d like to see you interviewing Roy. Hope your security is good

PM: It’s the best – my Chief Bodyguard is Patrick Vieira. Your [sic] remember him, the one who sent you running to Uncle Roy every 5 minutes?

GN: Was that the night we won 4-2 while I was supposedly bricking it? Don’t believe myth Piers he squirted a water bottle!

PM: At least he had a bottle – you used to lose yours the moment Vieira clapped eyes on you

GN: You been watching MU v Ars for the last ten years. We did alright on the physical front I felt. I Never felt uncomfortable. [It’s unclear whether the capital N is a deliberate pun on his name or a typo caused by that letter sequence always bringing the upper case out of him]

Cerebral stuff, this dribbling, splattering Twitterhoea. It’s like Baddiel and Skinner’s History Professors. “See that mug? That’s you, that is”. Edifying, it is not. One can only hope that HMCR don’t allow the oleaginous parper back in the country. Let’s face it – and this is the only absolute precept you should ever hold – anybody who describes anything as a bit “last year / month / week” quite frankly deserves to be shot before their pathetic neurotic bilge infects us all. Now is the new then. 

And spiritually, I'd add... 

OK, right, so we’re all agreed that, not to put too fine a point on it, he’s an absolute throbber. Good. All the fish in our barrel are dead.

Now, given the hyperspeed at which Slebdom works (I mean, @AnfieldCat already has over 50,000 Twitter followers), we could soon have made-for-TV career swapsies between Piers and Arsène Wenger – entirely plausible given that Le Prof started to consult Piers pretty regularly on footballing minutiae shortly after this August outburst of his (five months before the aforementioned tweet about The Ox): “Wenger signing ANOTHER kid for big money? When will he realize we need experienced defence, not more young strikers #Arsenal #Chamberlain”. Uncanny foresight.

Anyway, on this job-swap show, Wenger would go out to “a built up glamorous area” and interview vapid ‘entertainers’, while Morgan comes and manages Arsenal – or “Woolwich Arsenal” as he insists on calling them – for a season. The results would be hilarious. I imagine Piers would turn half the Emirates into a giant corporate lounge for the various neo-aristos with whom he fraternises, their easy and spontaneous creation of famebience captured by a special camera and beamed over the big screen whenever the match is in a lull. To make them happy. Happy and inferior. And happy about their inferiority. Furthermore, the rest of the stadium would have the already steep price of their tickets hiked further, he would build an imperial box (as seen in Roman coliseums) where the Arsenal bench used to be, and potential new signings would be forced to do a 7-minute slot of keepy-uppies in front of Morgan at Cobham, at the end of which he – and some famewhore-for-rent – would pronounce an inconsequential verdict, most of the words being sucked straight up his nose. Finally, whatever the problem, he would chuck some money at it. Literally.

Right, I’m off to commit suicide. Ciao.

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* This image – the apparent misogyny of which is expressed from the POV of the probable worldview of Morgan ’s circle of ‘friends’ – contains some artistic licence. Not unlike Piers’ punditry.

Originally published by The FCF

CIAO CAPELLO!

Occasionally – very occasionally – False 9 gets it wrong. We had previously suggested that JT’s ouster as Il Capitano was Don Fabio’s doing, the result of crossed wires, language barriers. We thought it may also have had something to do with a bizarre strategy the Italian had been formulating, involving selection based solely on surnames. When the papers were leaked to False 9, we immediately believed them to be ‘surnamist’. 

No. It was all a game of Trading Places, as this image proves. Definitively.

So, Fabio’s gone. We are sure he’ll, uh, take it on the chin... 

As for ’Arry, we think that – should he be offered the England job, and not John ‘You Can Bring Your Fucking Dinner’ Sitton or Barry Fry – he ought to sit on the bench in a Pearly King outfit. And he should select Michael Brown’s mum, if only for the comedic possibilities that her getting leggy at the end of extra-time present... 

Congratulations, English Football. You’ve surpassed yourself again. 

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CREDO, ERGO SUM (I BELIEVE, THEREFORE I AM)

Conform, or ye shall be cast out...

As Nietzsche, the great philosopher of ‘herd instinct,’ knew only too well, the truly free thinker often speaks up when ‘his’ culture is at its cocksure, self-congratulatory zenith/nadir. Just as the England Test cricket team’s recent ascent to world number one status saw me adopt the apparently heretical view that the domestic county game still needed a radical overhaul (many saw causality not correlation in the latter’s apparent rude health), so Liverpool’s Week of Beating Manchester and romp past some lambs in Wolves’ clothing has left me feeling little different than I did ten days ago in the wake of that abject defeat at Bolton. At the time, I was bemoaning the team having the cutting edge of a space hopper, a position to which I’m still beholden, despite many – the dutiful, obedient herd – believing the grounds for argument have now been swept away.

Tempting as it is to paraphrase the old Club 18-30 slogan – two swallows don’t make a summer – I shall not be so churlish as to deny the importance of these major scalps. Nevertheless, a sense of proportion – a scarce quality in the excitable world of Premier League football – is one I’m trying to cling on to as the roiling rivers of righteousness rise and pick up speed. Thus, it seems to me that these victories do nothing to vitiate the feeling that had settled in me after seeing Liverpool fleeced by the Trotters as easily as was Trigger in The Nag’s Head, the sense that King Kenny’s Revolution [tempted to pun that as ‘Kevolution’, in the manner of Rafalution, but felt there were acronym-based drawbacks], if not running aground, was increasingly losing momentum. 

Auto-da-fe

Yet before the naysayers parp indignant, what is undeniably more pressing than the arguments themselves – and of more urgency for the overheated psychological ghettoes of the fanatics of all stripes, all clubs – is whether such dissenting opinions can be voiced without risk of being wheeled off to the wrack, the asylum, or to some solemn auto-da-fé. (All this in theory, of course; I’m fully aware that nary a hair on the head of reality will be flustered by any of this.) Are our intimate, personal feelings merely reflex actions designed to keep us from ostracism? Is blind faith the only possible attitude one can adopt in order to be a true supporter? Credo, ergo sum. Nietzsche, again: “Everything unconditional belongs in pathology”. 

Let me be absolutely unambiguous: my wish to defend the right to be critical does not mean I covertly want(ed) Dalglish to be sacked. If there’s jerking to do here, it’ll be my cock, not my knee, ta.

What I’m saying is this: while ‘his’ ‘charisma’ was evidently crucial in steadying the ship last season, a task that may have proven beyond pretty much anyone else, and while his man management appears – insofar as this can be perceived from outside – to have been astute, there remain large question marks over his dealings in the transfer market (those Trotters, again) and thus valid doubts as to his ability to build a team: i.e. to select parts and make them best fit together as a whole. 

Beane-counter

Yes, yes, I am aware of the mitigation. Either the recent results – which, pre-Wolves, was a run of 6 points from 18 in the league, including games against the other three of the bottom four – are due to Suárez’s prolonged absence (the answer to which is surely: “Like, hello!?! Er, contingency planning!?! Not having too many eggs in a particular basket ought to be a lesson learnt from the Rafa years…”). Or, the ideologues and apologists will say, the squad is the dastardly work of a combination of highly-paid list-writer Damien Comolli and badly applied Moneyball theories – the point of which was that Billy Beane paid under the odds for the quietly achieving and unheralded players that he picked up.

In fact, the shopping under Dalglish has recalled that Mark Williams’ character from The Fast Show, the one that’s asked to pop out for a loaf of bread and pint of milk (or any items belonging to the same phylum of consumer goods) but instead – “even better than that” – returns with castanets, a pestle-and-mortar, and some WD40. Or Downing, Henderson, and Carroll, as they’re better known… 

Andy runs from the petrol-wielders

Despite the goal against Wolves, Carroll of course remains the biggest blot on Dalglish’s copy book. He is to intelligent movement what Shanghai is to carbon neutrality. Notwithstanding his role in Saturday’s winner, he has generally cut a forlorn figure at Anfield: if not galumphing hither and thither, then harrumphing equally aimlessly. And he cost £35m, a purchase akin to a 16-day cocaine bender, when all you’ve got to show for it at the end is the business card of a cosmetic surgeon who promised vaguely to rebuild your septum.

Of course, I’m more than aware that the Liverpool faithful catechize thus: Suárez + Carroll = Torres + Babel, give or take a mill’ (I’m unsure whether that phrase in the equation has an appropriate Greek symbol). However, and even though economics has long since seen off psychoanalysis as the intellectual discipline housing the most blaggers and pseuds, the problem is clearly that the transaction sent a message to the market, much in the same way that Chelsea Regan, by allowing herself to get fingered on the stairs at Jordan Morgan’s party, might as well thereafter have gone everywhere in a SLAG T-shirt (a non-ironic one, I mean, the sort that would be worn by a Western woman who’d been naïve enough to flaunt kneecap while walking around central Tehran as she was bundled on State TV for a peremptory and unconvincing confession en route to her live stoning). Subsequent behaviour is affected by past actions: “precedents”, I believe they’re called. Hence the fees for Jordan and Downing.

Anyway, with his loping stride and uprightness and ponderousness and lack of mobility or speed of thought (or sense of where he might need to be in order to bring the degree of difficulty of his next headed chance to within the narrow latitude afforded by his form/talent), Carroll resembles nothing so much as a giant Penny Farthing. And is equally archaic. Now that the only club rich and/or gullible enough to take him has rejected the chance to swap him for their astronomically deluded, universally reviled and cosmically greedy ex-skipper, there seems only one possibility left for Liverpool. I thus await the day Mike Wedderburn announces that the Big Geordie has been destroyed in a blaze, a grubbily ill-conceived white-collar insurance job…only for there to emerge sightings of Carroll on Dartmoor, like an expensive, exotic pet – a lynx, say, or puma – that grew too large for owners who hadn’t properly thought through the purchase and were forced to let the beast to go feral, since when it has roamed the mossy uplands, hungry and able to think of nothing save killing (at which point he’d probably make a more than useful target man, I imagine…). 

Craig's list...

All of which has recently left Liverpool bereft of forward options. Granted, Craig Bellamy, while clearly one vertebra short of a spinal column, offers a distinct threat (no, not like that; I said distinct). But Dirk Kuyt, without the garnish of goals, has increasingly resembled a tired old lettuce – are those brown-fringed and mulchy leaves still usable? On Saturday, even Tuesday, yes, we bulked out an insipid fish finger sandwich. But for how much longer?

So, what can be said of both Liverpool’s football and the manager’s vision?

One would hardly expect Dalglish to own up to his mistakes; after all, his statements are bound by pragmatic concerns, not truth-telling. Even so, and despite the commendation of his man management above, the censure levelled at his players in the aftermath of the Bolton game was pragmatically illuminating. Accusing them of lacking the fundamental values of the club – respect for the opposition – invited a couple of immediate thoughts: first, surely he has ample opportunity to remind them of these values in the dressing room; second, is this a smokescreen for their lack of cutting edge? Blaming their absence of ‘values’ allows him to justify manoeuvring players toward the exit (whence the Carroll swap story), while simultaneously protecting his footballing judgment. 

What price piety?

 So, again: what can be said? What is permissible?

The eminently sane and invariably perceptive Iain MacIntosh, mobilizing something of a ‘don’t-be-lunatics’ argument amidst a delegitimation of dissensus, recently wrote, slightly browbeatingly: “When Dalglish took over from Roy Hodgson he inherited a club that was headed for a relegation battle. […] Dalglish saved the club, he lifted it up the table. He brought passing football and patient, intelligent play. He forged a defence that has conceded just 21 goals all season, a record bettered only by Manchester City”.

Yes, he did both of those things. But here’s the thing: not at the same time. First he created good football, then he ripped it up (not deliberately) for defensive solidity. Toward the end of last season, Liverpool hit a devastating patch of form, with Kuyt, the flaky-in-the-wrong-system Maxi, and the jettisoned (for a vastly inferior replacement) Meireles all feeding off, and rotating about, Suárez’s cunning and darting movement: a team characterized by electric final-third interplay, and all the better for Gerrard’s absence. This season has been largely lumpen, prosaic fare. Conclusion? When Kenny had to improvise, he was able to throw together a nice recipe for good football; since being given the keys to the piggy bank, he has so far been unable to construct coherent, progressive football.

Is the parade of ordinariness – and boy, when was the last time such a pedestrian, average Fergie team visited Anfield? – genuine cause for concern? If so, should we simply shrug like dutiful acolytes? How does it reflect on Dalglish? Spending £35m is hardly a minor decision for all but a couple of clubs in Europe. And it directly affects the speed of the team’s recovery.

Whether or not we think the divine body of Dalglish is the right man for this job – and I do, albeit with caveats – it would be wise to acknowledge the piety that might, a priori, lead to all manner of argumentative contortions and self-deceit, to what Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals as an instinct “in which every lie is sanctified”. After all, let’s not forget the etymological link between credentials (often thought of as an entirely objective and measurable quality) and credulousness. Sometimes, we see what we want to believe, the ‘properties’ or ‘attributes’ that you wish to see (including ‘charisma’), especially when the fervour is strongest.

Perhaps every club has its prophets, its potential messiahs, yet the vehemence with which one must endorse their every last action and not venture any dissenting theories is not a healthy state of affairs. Football is still too pious. And frankly, it all seems too trivial.

It is not an easy thing to do, and should not be rushed, but it is possible to support your team at the same time as abandoning the reflex chirruping of the party line, to depart the now timorous, now tumescent herd, to live life as becoming, not belonging (no wonder that, in the Romance languages, ‘to experience’ is generally the same verb as ‘to experiment’). Tribalism is so un-becoming, with its top-down emotional prescriptions, its pantomime hatred, the utter subjection of thought and belief to a miserable sense of identity, the fetid interiority of it all. One only need look at recent events in Port Said to apprehend the cancerous ‘microfascism’ lurking within the herd and apt to appear when its us/them borders are rigid and the molecules within become overheated, unable to dissipate the identity-system’s energy… Desire is physics. So, try and turn down those passion taps, folks: pride is not a universal positive. Attain immanence, like Viv Anderson. No fixed attachments. Fuck it: let’s play as the UK. Who cares? Nations are artifices, a pious costume for the mute biological process that we are.

They say it’s a terrible thing, to lose one’s beliefs. It’s not. Not if the thing you believe in is a morass of lies, wish-fulfilling fantasies and subjugation mechanisms. Escape, escape! And allow football to escape with you. For, as football shows us every week, in grounds the length and breadth of the country, the last thing we need is the false togetherness of the herd. What we need are tools for conviviality.

Quite urgently.

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WHY JT REALLY LOST THE ARMBAND

I know it's over...

I realize there’s stuff and stuff going on in the world, but none of it is as important as football. So shut up. I have important news.

Apparently, according to ‘sources’, the real reason John Terry was stripped of the captaincy has nothing whatsoever to do with the perpetually haughty sneer plastered to his mug, nor the fact that the Society for People who Refuse to Shake John Terry’s Hand (SPRSJTH) has grown too big for its administrative infrastructure, its dues no longer enough to cover venue hire. 

No, the reason JT has been stripped of the captaincy – and it’s too early to tell whether that’s adequate compensation for those hoping he would be stripped of his supposedly superior white/pink skin – is, as one entirely sane Chelsea supporter put it, “because of that fackin’ foreign cunt we’ve got as fackin’ manager. What fackin’ right has he got…?”

“Fackin’ language barrier, innit?” spake another.

From what I can tell at this early stage – and using an interpreter (ironically, as you shall see) while down in That London – this is what happened…

Mr Capello was in the karsey at Kamikaze, a plush new Japanese restaurant in Notting Hill, contemplating his order – specifically, the amount of chilli he was going to put his sphincter through, or put through his sphincter, which he was giving a pep-talk, having told it to switch off its mobile phone. (“I gonna have arse like a Japanese fag”, the Italian would later accidentally multi-quip.)

When he returned, he asked the waiter what the day’s specials were.

The waiter, having announced himself as a Fulham supporter and speaking very slowly, said “Teriyaki Chicken”.

At that point, Capello’s innate defensiveness, his Latinate linguistic formation, and the fact that he’d sent his translator-flunky off to Christie’s to bid on a Kandinsky screen print all combined to create a perfect storm, one that would blow JT’s gaudy mansion of a reputation to smithereens. Thus, hearing what he believed to be a slur on his courage by having the England team led by JT – for Don Fabio heard “Terryarchy? Chicken!” – Capello promptly issued personal orders for the sacking. Not the FA, as has been reported.

Terryarchy – if Fabio can neologise that, he’s evidently got a better grasp of English than we thought.

GLOSSARY

Terryarchy n. sing.: rule by terries; from -archy: government, rule

Terry n. sing: a moronic Cockney fascist, subgenre of the chav and equivalent to a Glaswegian ned.  

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'NOBODY EVER SAYS THANK YOU': A REVIEW

To propose writing yet another book about Brian Clough must, I imagine, be akin to pitching on a new documentary about 9/11 or submitting a PhD proposal for a thesis about Nazi Germany and the Third Reich – does the world really need another? Do you have anything original to contribute to that body of knowledge? Well, in the case of Jonathan Wilson’s Nobody Ever Says Thank You, it just so happens that the answer to both questions is an emphatic ‘Yes’. 

As a regular contributor to The Guardian, World Soccer magazine, and several other well regarded publications, as well as being editor of the utterly brilliant football quarterly, The Blizzard, a profit-sharing, pay-what-you-like venture originally conceived as a much-needed platform for long- form, in-depth journalism about The Beautiful Game, Wilson is among England’s foremost football scribes, his work both scholarly (the award-winning Inverting the Pyramid being a genealogy of football formations and their mutations) and highly readable, covering everywhere from Eastern Europe to West Africa via South America and beyond. This combination of gravitas and lightness, of depth and breadth of knowledge, pervades Nobody Ever Says Thank You; the result is less myth-soaked hagiography or re-hash of the now dog-eared anecdotes (several are in there, although not always how Cloughie himself had told them, Wilson warning that they “are often good to start with, but have been polished to greatness by manipulations over time”) than an all-encompassing 'map' of a singularly compelling figure against the backdrop of a specific period in English football, one that only briefly overlapped with the synthetic glamour and anodyne corporate straitjacketing of a Sky TV ‘revolution’ that seems now to have been with us forever. 

Why would such a footballing cosmopolitan want to tackle Clough, you may wonder. Well, in part, the book is the author’s tribute to his late father, a Wearsider who considered Clough the greatest player ever to represent Sunderland, despite him only playing a season-and-a-half at Roker Park before a career-ending knee injury on Boxing Day 1962, at the age of just 27. The fact that this book is not from the pen of an East Midlander might account for the lack of kid-gloved veneration – albeit with no absence of fairness or compassion – with which it treats its subject over the course of 550 pages that divide up Clough’s life into five lengthy and well-defined segments: the formative years in Middlesbrough and his playing career; his not-so-tentative first steps in management at Hartlepools and then Derby, to whom he delivered the First Division title; the lengthy fallout at Derby and even bigger ruckus at Leeds United; assembling the team that brought the brief glory years to Forest; and, finally, the years of decline. 

Boxing Day, 1962: "The day the iron entered Clough's soul" 

Formation(s)…

It is of course incumbent on all biographers to proffer theories as to the motives and reasons for their subject’s behaviour and actions, to probe them for habits and traits, to tease out what makes them tick – otherwise, the text is nothing more than an aggregate of facts and/or anecdotes; enjoyable, maybe, but not particularly insightful. Now, if our personalities can be said to be a kind of impermanent cocktail of, on the one hand, various formative experiences infolded into memory and habit (that continue to inform and act upon our present perceptions), and, on the other, the ongoing accretion of the diverse and novel events that befall us, swept in off the horizon before we quite know what has happened and affecting those memories and habits, then Wilson balances the two aspects dextrously, not only bringing to bear much expertise in his analysis of the unfolding present – the terra firma of the football world – but also a deftness and subtlety in his consideration of the terra incognita of Clough’s especially opaque unconscious. Indeed, the psychoanalytic speculations are handled both convincingly and modestly (through the consistent use of such tropes as “perhaps” and “maybe”, rather than heavy-handed assertions about what are of course highly complex phenomena), and yet without falling back on that trite Freudian maxim: “the child is father to the man” (i.e. our childhood experiences make us indelibly, inescapably who we are). 

While the author does indeed acknowledge Clough's mother’s Methodist austerity, aspirationalism and orderliness as a strong early influence (until gradually unravelled by alcoholism, at least) – he even kept her mangle in his Quarndon home as a sort of fetish object – as well as the shame of failing his 11-plus exams in a family of academic achievers, there are other equally significant formative events in his adulthood: in particular, the aforementioned injury – one whose traumatic aftershock would quickly settle into a phobia about having injured players around the squad (he would not allow Trevor Francis to sit on the bench for the 1980 European Cup final) – not to mention the unceremonious way Sunderland dumped him in order to claim their insurance fee, treatment that engendered in Clough a hard emotional carapace and his seemingly callous streak. And then there was his mother’s death on the night of his 38th birthday, the night, too, that Derby secured passage to the semi-final of the European Cup, where they would suffer a controversial exit at the hands of a perfidious referee in Turin – events that become emotionally entwined for Clough and that spark in him, conjectures Wilson, an obsession with winning the trophy akin to that of Captain Ahab’s quest for Moby-Dick (a passage from which is chosen as the book’s epigraph), a single-mindedness bordering at times on monomaniacal insanity. 

Now then, young man 

A benevolent dictator 

Anyhow, for all the interest of his formative years and the welcome reminder that he was a formidable goalscorer as a player – indeed, the fastest to 250 senior goals, albeit only in the second tier of English football – it is of course through the prism of football management that Clough will principally be judged (the book’s title is a quote from one of Clough's and Peter Taylor’s key influences, Harry Storer, in reference to …well, to the thanklessness of management). Thus, after lengthy and nuanced accounts of his political battles with the Derby board, his much-documented antipathy toward Don Revie, and the subsequent, ill-fated 44-day attempt to fill Revie’s shoes at Leeds – a fiasco prompted by both the hunt for his ‘whale’ and native brassneck, one given memorable cinematic treatment in The Damned United – almost half the book is then given over to his time in Nottingham, where the outline that emerges is of that singularly curious mixture of the forbidding and the friendly that we know so well, a managerial style that was part-authoritarian, part-libertarian.

The second of these two tendencies is perhaps most clearly evinced in his hands-off, almost laissez-faire approach to both coaching and tactics (famously, never practising set plays or discussing the opposition) and in a match-day modus operandi that focussed almost exclusively on mental preparation, on relaxing his players (having of course embedded both his authority and vision of the way the game should be played), often achieved through his gloriously counterintuitive motivational ploys – permitting booze on the way to cup finals, for instance (a projection of his own nerves, and needs, on to his players, maybe...). The ‘despotic’ streak, meanwhile, can be seen in the fact that, despite hardly ever being at the training ground he was still able to make his presence continually felt, ruling by way of a sort of 'principle of reflection' that was instilled in players through unpredictable acts, much in the same way that the grand yet sporadic spectacles of capital punishment carried out in the name of the distant, never-seen monarchs served to pacify the population. (And much like the inscrutable despots of yore, “no matter what he did, it was always assumed he was doing it for a reason, as though he existed on a higher plane and was constantly manipulating mortals, stimulating them to greater heights or dispensing nuggets of wisdom.” Provoking a perpetual, agitated interpretation of what he means, what he wants: is there a more accurate depiction of despotic power than this?) 

Interestingly, Wilson thus dispels the now commonplace notion that Clough's was a rule of fear per se: “What [he] did was to dominate by force of personality, even when he wasn’t there. His unpredictability prevented anything resembling complacency setting in”. He is equally keen to debunk the “absurd” idea that Clough didn’t deal in tactics, despite his frequent protestations against “subbuteo men being pushed around a felt pitch” and scorn for Revie’s meticulously compiled dossiers. In fact, what Clough didn’t do was overburden the players with details – indeed, occasionally he didn’t even bother with team-talks – in marked contrast to such perpetually gesticulating and perhaps inhibiting figures as, say, Rafa Benítez. Rather, he gave each of them instructions that were “simple and minimalist, rooted in Clough’s basic theory that players, having been strategically selected to blend together, should broadly be given responsibility” and which, added up, created the discernible style of his teams. 

Munich, 1979: Moby-Dick is slain

Double acts: Clough/Taylor; Clough and 'Clough'

Wilson notes that the nature of the Forest teams, if not the style, was transformed once Peter Taylor departed in 1982, with underachieving rough diamonds now eschewed for “neat football played by polite young men with short hair who didn’t answer back to referees”. The breakdown in the relationship with Taylor is perhaps the most poignant of the book’s narrative threads – familiar events, true, but here overlaid with genuine insight into the psychodynamics within and between the two. At its best, it was the classic good-cop, bad-cop duo – Taylor the unearther of unpolished gems, Clough the man who moulded them into a cohesive whole – while, crucially, Taylor seems to have been the only person able both to lift Clough from his periodic bouts of morose introspection and to rein him in from his boorish excesses.

The vicissitudes of their relationship encompassed playing together at Middlesboro, where hours and hours were spent discussing the game, ideas carried into diverse management experiences at Hartlepools, Derby, and Brighton, before being reunited for the Forest zenith. Over the course of the book we see how small cracks in the friendship – “fissures” that were at first imperceptible but that would later come to sunder completely the affection and trust between them – might in fact have been there from very early on (in 1959, Clough accused Taylor of deliberately letting in goals) but only later crossed that threshold beyond which they cease to be tolerable. The micro-cracks were perhaps evident in Clough’s fondness for skimming off perks at Derby, and in Taylor’s insecurity and craving for recognition, provoking his ill-fated book in 1981 – all of which would lead, we know, to an apparently “shot” Taylor suddenly turning up in the dugout at Derby. Although Wilson is too careful to say so unequivocally, it is plausible that it was because of his definitive rupture with Taylor – a schism so bitter and with so much mutual treachery and rancour that neither spoke a word to each other after the tribunal to determine the fee for John Robertson’s controversial transfer to Derby – that Clough increasingly sought refuge in alcohol, and also that, once Taylor had died, the end of his reign at Forest was so precipitous and chaotic. Put simply, he was heartbroken; it was the end of a platonic love affair. In many ways, the single greatest tragedy of Nottingham Forest’s history is the waning of their energy, the erosion of these bonds, the loss of two mates’ ability to make each other laugh. 

Of course, an unavoidable thematic constant of the book is the liberal use of alcohol to block out the perceived pain and cruelty of the game – a pain felt so palpably by Clough as a player who had been cut down in his prime, a cruelty intrinsic to a job that so often involves deciding the fate of players (a reluctant despot, then...). It is in large part as an outgrowth of being emotionally taxed in this manner, Wilson argues convincingly, that Clough’s famously brash and bumptious public persona emerges over time – an accumulation of acts of booze-fuelled or booze-emboldened bravado that recall (for me, anyway) nothing so much as Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the eponymous Prince of Denmark famously adopts an “antic disposition” to try and spook various courtesans and family members so as to manipulate their emotional responses and ultimately their behaviour. However, so convincing is he at it that this alter ego comes to take on a life of its own, with those around him – perhaps even Hamlet himself – unsure as to whether he was genuinely unhinged or “but mad in craft”.  

'Clough': TV character

So it is with Clough at Forest, claims Wilson, and then goes on, intermittently, to chart his slide into self-parody, egged on by a media happy for his rent-a-quote polemical shtick, him happy for the adulation, his hammed up bluster and bragadoccio thus becoming gradually sedimented into habit. And as his psychological moorings became less secure, increasingly the question becomes: how much of his famously bizarre man-managerial ruses and public utterances were a performance, an artifice, contrived, and how much were they ‘authentic’ (non-deliberate, spontaneous) behaviour? Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t... In Wilson's account, Clough over time thus became ‘Clough’: literally, a caricature of himself, a mask, a set of public expectations, a tool to control his players, a device to protect himself from the pain of his job, a media entity. To underline this crucial point, Wilson cites the observation of another Clough biographer, Tony Francis, that “what made him difficult to work with wasn’t his genius per se but his recognition of his genius”. In the dugout, where it really mattered, the gambits of ‘Clough’ are shown to tread a fine line between said genius and an “insufferable perversity” (it often being the outcome of his actions, rather than any “internal logic”, that determined the media's evaluation of his antics). 

None of which is to say that this isn’t a highly effective way to manage, of course, and in among the familiar and not so familiar yarns – the extraordinary theatricality and doggedness of his attempts to secure key signings (McFarland and Gemmill are favourite stories), the brazen and cunning use of the media as PR and political tool – there is a heartfelt vindication of Clough’s considerable post-Taylor achievements at Forest, let alone those of the 1978-80 collaborative zenith and their previous work along the A52. Of the former – three third-place finishes and two League Cup wins for a club with small gates and limited resources that, post-Heysel, was denied the oxygen of European football – Wilson is rightfully effusive, judging the work of the 1980s to be “extraordinary”. Of the latter, he says: “It is hard to overstate the magnitude of what Clough had done… Derby and Forest were not merely provincial sides without a league title to their names, but neither was even in the first division when Clough took over. To lead one modest club to promotion and the league title would be remarkable, to do it twice in the space of a decade was barely credible”.

Method in his madness

 
‘Til death us do part...

And yet… For all the tangible admiration of the author for these achievements, there is much here that might be unpalatable, heretical even, to the eyes of a trenchant, perhaps over-zealous Forest supporter. Then again, it is a self-professedly critical biography and Wilson is certainly no apologist for Clough’s more capricious character traits, his often vicious tongue, his erratic favour and fancy. Nor does he indulge those accounts that merely shrug off all this behaviour as part-and-parcel of his nebulous ‘genius’ – after all, Sir Bobby Robson proved that one could be both successful and pleasant. So, among other things that might be considered delicate, we have: an eyes-wide-open look at the circumstantial evidence surrounding the bungs scandal in the early 90s; mention of the apparent willingness of Clough to return to Derby County in February 1977; reference to a habit of souring the moment of victory, most notably after both European Cup finals; censure for both his ill-advised comments in the wake of Hillsborough disaster and the infamous cuffing of two Trent Enders during a mass pitch invasion; heavy criticism for his graceless, boorish grandstanding after failing to land the England job in 1977 when he acted “like an embarrassing drunken uncle at a wedding”… Then, at the end, there is the sad picture of a man(ager) whose fight has been expunged, one perhaps unwilling to adapt his thinking to recent changes in the game, a spent and broken figure now visibly raddled by the booze and hastily being granted the Freeman of the City as his Empire, finally, crumbles. Each of these episodes is considered by an author with no constituency to sway and therefore no punches to be pulled, and the book is all the better for it. 

And yet… For all these many flaws, and for all that it will come as a difficult and painful read in places, this book is probably going to do very little to penetrate the overwhelming sense of gratitude and love in the hearts of Forest fans (indeed, Wilson points out that, time and again, he inspired sympathy and loyalty in even his most ardent foes). In sickness and in health… And as with any long-lasting marriage, the Forest faithful will no doubt accept – for richer or for poorer – the snoring and farting and dodgy unilateral upholstery purchases in exchange for the magic he brought, the stardust that he sprinkled on the city: a strong line of credit indeed. For Clough – ‘Clough’ – lives on today in the hearts and minds of so many, including carousing magazine editors crossing the Market Square in the wee hours, prompted by some long embedded memories to stop and kiss the statue and offer sincere and heartfelt thanks to him for having improved the quality of his life. 

Freeman of the City

This monumental book is simultaneously testament to an extraordinarily rich life and to a formidable act of synthesis on the author’s part, assimilating the not inconsiderable Clough corpus into a coherent, consistent account of a flawed man of exceptional abilities. Nevertheless, despite this work of synthesis, this is no parasitic ‘meta-biography’ – a book about the books about Clough, some of which remain indispensable – for there is a vast amount of original research here, even if no hugely surprisingly new facts are unearthed. For those less disposed to footballing minutiae, one minor criticism of the text would be its inclusion of several lengthy passages from provincial newspapers (in the North Eastern phase of his footballing life, by and large) that are occasionally as heavy as the old pitches and could easily have been condensed or omitted (although, one can understand the author’s reluctance to jettison an investment of so many hours’ work). At any rate, this is a minor quibble and doesn’t impinge on the remaining four parts – so thick and fast do the anecdotes and events stack up that there’s no need for padding, and one can think of few people in British football who could justify such treatment, a figure so transcendent that there are, of course, statues of him in both Derby and Nottingham.

For those looking for a clear and unambiguous answer to the Clough enigma, Nobody Ever Says Thank You will disappoint. Inevitably. It doesn't attempt to offer the definitive truth – for to seek that would be every bit as Ahabian as was Clough – and, as a result of the aforementioned modesty, there is no final verdict to be found here, nor any pithily bitesize summing up of the sort that Martin O’Neill once famously sidestepped. For Clough was confrontational, amiable, brash, obnoxious, charming, hypocritical, generous, money-obsessed, canny, clever, anti-intellectual, messianic, worshipped, lonely, occasionally xenophobic and self-pitying, often witty, bullying, thin-skinned, courageous, strident and vacillating, a visionary and a compulsive, insecure and self-aggrandising, a boozer, a gardener, a family man, fond of his downtime, an idealist and a materialist, noble-minded and sanctimonious. And above all, Brian Howard Clough was one of a kind. 

This review first appeared on the LeftLion website.

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