I’m looking for a new sub-genre of electronic music, exemplified by Röyksopp’s The Drum and Brian Eno’s Spider and I.
Brian Eno supplies a lot of music for this sub-genre. It’s Bright Blue Day from Apollo – Atmospheres & Soundtracks. And Spinning Away from Wrong Way Up, his album with John Cale. Also This from Another Day On Earth.
It’s mostly calm and contemplative, but not purely ambient. It can also have rhythm and beat, but the overall feeling is a sense of ecstasy, dreamy beauty and transcendence.
Some of it is undoubtedly in the music of Isan, though I’ve yet to identify a specific track.
It could be in Zodiac Shit, by Flying Lotus, from the album Cosmogramma, although most of the latter is just a confused jumble of noise.
It’s definitely in Kraftwerk. Probably Neon Lights off Man Machine.
It is A New Career In A New Town by David Bowie, from Low.
It’s likely to be very evident in David Sylvian. There was certainly something of the sublime on every album in the beginning. From Backwaters on Brilliant Trees to Campfire, Coyote Country on Gone To Earth and Mother And Child on Secrets Of The Beehive.
It could be in New Order’s Thieves Like Us (Instrumental). Maybe in the first album by Electronic.
I’d say that one big qualifier for the sublime is that it has to be uplifting. So this would discount music of a hauntingly beautiful but depressing tendency. And the instrumentalisation has to be essentially electronic.
Much of it would sit somewhere on a line between ambient and rock. It isn’t about the style of a band, but purely about the style of a song.
I’m still trying to identify which song from Gui Boratto on Take My Breath Away it would be. Probably Opus 17. Then, of course, there’s The Field’s Over The Ice from Here We Go Sublime. This is probably where the idea came from.
And there must be several Luke Vibert tracks that touch it, without ever being wholly it. Wow! It’s Now! or Sparky Is A Retard from Rhythm, for example. Or Prick Tat from Lover’s Acid. Not forgetting Yello. Something humorous like Otto Di Catania from Flag.
I seem to have come round full circle now to where I was over a year ago when considering the link between the art of Marc Brown and electronic music. This was the discussion of the sublime, as I recall it, that instant transport into raptures of delight as soon as you see/hear something. In art it’s easy. I only have to look at the early Pre-Raphaelites, Van Gogh or Rothko. But in electronic music?
To be honest, the sublime is not just in electronic music, but that’s mostly where I find it these days. Many songs from the 60s carry this sense of the sublime for me. Everything from Let’s Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot Men to Eloise by Barry Ryan and Albatross by Fleetwood Mac to Mr Armageddon by The Locomotive. It’s in The Beach Boys and The Beatles.
It’s in snippets from songs, but not the whole songs. It’s the keyboard introduction to Light My Fire by The Doors and many of Ray Manzarek’s knob-twiddling in other songs, such as the forward-backwards keyboard loop in the middle of Hello, I Love You. It’s in You Disappear From View by Teardrop Explodes. And Tainted Love by Soft Cell. It was in early Human League. It’s that bit in Vienna by Ultravox, when the speed picks up.
The mood of the whole song may not be sublime, but there’ll be an element of it that just does it. The introductory whoosh and piping refrain of Radioactivity by Kraftwerk. Much of the background production of Joy Division’s Closer LP. The soaring and diving keyboard in the middle of The Man Who Dies Every Day by Ultravox. So, we have to be careful to remember that the taste of sublime is sweet.
There is nothing that says it has to be twiddly keyboards that make the sublime. That’s just where I mostly seem to find it. In Mr Armageddon by The Locomotive, it’s the trumpet break, as it is in Miles by Miles Davis. And yes, it is Neil Young’s guitar solo in Like A Hurricane or Phil Manzanera’s in Roxy Music’s All I Want Is You. But it can be voice. As with Jimmy Somerville in Comment Te Dire Adieu. Or Astrud Gilberto singing How Insensitive or So Nice. Andy Williams singing Wives And Lovers or Moon River. I Left My Heart In San Francisco by Tony Bennett. Elvis in his quieter numbers: Are You Lonesome Tonight?, Crying In The Chapel, Wooden Heart. I was listening to Michael Franks on Jazz FM this morning. There’s an element of the sublime in his voice. Naturally, it recalled Scritti Politti (and it’s clear that Green Gartside took his vocal style and intonation from Michael Franks) and the work with Miles Davis on Provision. That has the sublime element.
With the sublime, there are connections between songs. Röyksopp’s You Don’t Have A Clue from Junior is the sublime sister of The Associates’ Party Fears Two, 27 years apart. A perfectly sublime tribute from one band to another.
With Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Roadrunner is the sublime song of coming of age. Full of joy, transformation and the moment. But electronic, it ain’t.
Looking back, the sublime is definitely in Oxygène Part IV by Jean Michel Jarre. In the summer of 1977, the combination of this and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Kraftwerk’s Showroom Dummies completely knocked me sideways from my obsession with Punk. These of course are now classics. The challenge is to identify the sublime from new music I encounter now. I may get that instant ecstatic movement, but will it last through time?
Röyksopp are the standard for the sublime. There is something of it in all their music. If you still don’t get the sublime, start here. It’s no secret that I think there’s something of the sublime in Mantovani. But for me, that’s what Röyksopp are: a perfect melange of Mantovani, Kraftwerk, The Associates and themselves. All of which makes them the modern Abba. The sublime is never complex.
All this wondering about the sublime begs a big question. What is it about all this music that makes it sublime, for me? It’s highly likely that much of it is connected to memory. Or is it just that, the particular song, or part of a song, leaps out head and shoulders of the rest and then imprints itself in my mind alongside whatever else happens to be around at the time?
So, for example, when listening to Röyksopp’s Vision, I’m sitting on the Tokyo metro, listening to all the different electronic jingles and tunes as the doors open at a new station. Yet the track You Don’t Have A Clue from the same album, Junior, has me on a bullet train to Kyoto. I got to know and love that album while on holiday in Japan. For me, it will always have that connection. Whereas Let’s Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot Men always has me sitting on an Anglesey beach as an 8 year-old. And Oxygène Part IV sees me in the Lake District, on holiday with school-friends, Rog and Simon, aged 18, shortly before heading off to Bradford University. So, do I have to be receptive enough in the first place to acknowledge the sublime in music? What comes first? The music or the environment and circumstances?
For me, the sublime is a journey of great expectation. It’s about always being open to discovery, radar on, receptors tuned, just in case. One of my favourite authors used to be Colin Wilson. He had a name for what I’m talking about: peak experiences. For some people it would be spiritual. The only chemical stimulant worth experiencing, the sublime simply expands the moment, so that everything is here and all seems possible. It can personalise a moment in time for perpetuity. Sublime songs stop me in my tracks. I just have to listen.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Wednesday 18 August 2010
Monday 16 August 2010
The revival of English football
Here comes Arsene Wenger again, as disingenuous as ever. Calling the new club squad quota rules ridiculous. Whingeing about how it will badly affect the chances of his club to keep competing domestically. His successful club may have to play 65 games in the season. Whereas a less successful Premier Club might play as few as 40. But what Wenger is actually against is this equalising measure that puts what seemed like the guaranteed success of his club at risk. He’s against fairness. He’s against anything which interferes with his self-proclaimed and long-pursued right to qualify for and win the Champions League.
The top English clubs (the same top clubs year in year out, note) get to play in Europe every year because they finish at or near the top of the league. Squad equalisation puts that automatic qualification under threat. Potentially, it opens up the game to new and upcoming clubs. Blimey, we might even get different clubs finishing in the top four year on year, without the need to spend millions on foreign players to do it. But that wouldn’t be fair for Wenger. He came to an already rich club in the Premier League with many advantages. A great coach with continental ideas. A foreign coach with fantastic contacts, able to dip into the youth academies of top French and Spanish clubs and lure out youngsters nurtured and raised from childhood in better systems. Three doubles later, Arsenal haven’t won a pot for 5 years. Ironically, it’s been their lack of squad depth towards the end of the season that has seen them fall when handily placed. So, when Wenger finally gets the money to spend on players, after ten years of canny buying, cradle-snatching and new stadium building, he finds that he is unable to grow his squad to the level required to challenge Manchester United and Chelsea. Not allowed. His fellow Europeans, Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, have introduced the same quota system into domestic football that has existed in European competition for years.
Of course, Wenger tries to deconstruct this move in his own inimatable way, saying that the quota system’s goal designed to produce talented young English players is flawed. “There are as many foreign players in Spain as in England. You can sign players from all over the world in Spain. So why do they still produce players and we do not? It’s down to the coaching.” I love the proverbial ‘we’. By which he means England. Since when has he cared about promoting English players? To be fair, most top managers just want the best talent they get, English or not, and aren’t going out to deliberately develop English talent. But Wenger is the arch exponent of the tendency to remove English players entirely from English club football under the disingenuous claim that the talent just isn’t there. While on the other hand promoting coaching alongside top quality foreign players as the only way to bring on homegrown talent. You can’t have it both ways, Arsene. Finally, your time may well be over. Yes, you’ve signed up for another contract, taking you to 2014, and we believe you when you say your heart belongs to Arsenal. But, as much as we listen to what you say, we watch what you do. And those of us who want to see a strong national team do not believe that what you are doing helps our cause.
It’s all coming to a head. Wenger rightly asks that the Premier League has to decide whether it is here to be the top league in the world or to prepare the national team. After nearly two decades of the Premier League, we are now at that pivotal moment. It is only ever likely to go the way of big money. In the background, I think there’s already a movement to circumvent such interventions for equalisation. The G14 wasn’t set up so that any of its members would ever again disappear into mediocrity or oblivion. American businessmen have not taken over Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool just for a short term return on investment. The big English clubs, probably backed by their big European G14 co-members, are half-way towards a breakaway push, in alliance with American soccer.
This quota-based intervention will give Wenger and his ilk all the impetus they need but the battle for the soul of English football is now truly joined. I’m glad these new rules are making Wenger’s pips squeak. Something had to, if, that is, the English Premier League is not to become the Brazilian Premier League by 2015. By then, Wenger will probably be calling it a day in England. If this quota intervention had not happened, his legacy would be on the one hand a fabulously successful Premier League in terms of overall quality, but with many clubs in massive debt; and, on the other, an increasingly dysfunctional and troubled national England team culled from players in the poorer sides and even those from the Championship...a bit like Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I like Arsene Wenger. It’s great to see some intelligence in a game dominated by thick bricks. But I don’t like what he’s done to English national football or his contribution to the preservation of an increasingly remote top four that think they have a God-given right to success at the expense of everyone else.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
The top English clubs (the same top clubs year in year out, note) get to play in Europe every year because they finish at or near the top of the league. Squad equalisation puts that automatic qualification under threat. Potentially, it opens up the game to new and upcoming clubs. Blimey, we might even get different clubs finishing in the top four year on year, without the need to spend millions on foreign players to do it. But that wouldn’t be fair for Wenger. He came to an already rich club in the Premier League with many advantages. A great coach with continental ideas. A foreign coach with fantastic contacts, able to dip into the youth academies of top French and Spanish clubs and lure out youngsters nurtured and raised from childhood in better systems. Three doubles later, Arsenal haven’t won a pot for 5 years. Ironically, it’s been their lack of squad depth towards the end of the season that has seen them fall when handily placed. So, when Wenger finally gets the money to spend on players, after ten years of canny buying, cradle-snatching and new stadium building, he finds that he is unable to grow his squad to the level required to challenge Manchester United and Chelsea. Not allowed. His fellow Europeans, Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, have introduced the same quota system into domestic football that has existed in European competition for years.
Of course, Wenger tries to deconstruct this move in his own inimatable way, saying that the quota system’s goal designed to produce talented young English players is flawed. “There are as many foreign players in Spain as in England. You can sign players from all over the world in Spain. So why do they still produce players and we do not? It’s down to the coaching.” I love the proverbial ‘we’. By which he means England. Since when has he cared about promoting English players? To be fair, most top managers just want the best talent they get, English or not, and aren’t going out to deliberately develop English talent. But Wenger is the arch exponent of the tendency to remove English players entirely from English club football under the disingenuous claim that the talent just isn’t there. While on the other hand promoting coaching alongside top quality foreign players as the only way to bring on homegrown talent. You can’t have it both ways, Arsene. Finally, your time may well be over. Yes, you’ve signed up for another contract, taking you to 2014, and we believe you when you say your heart belongs to Arsenal. But, as much as we listen to what you say, we watch what you do. And those of us who want to see a strong national team do not believe that what you are doing helps our cause.
It’s all coming to a head. Wenger rightly asks that the Premier League has to decide whether it is here to be the top league in the world or to prepare the national team. After nearly two decades of the Premier League, we are now at that pivotal moment. It is only ever likely to go the way of big money. In the background, I think there’s already a movement to circumvent such interventions for equalisation. The G14 wasn’t set up so that any of its members would ever again disappear into mediocrity or oblivion. American businessmen have not taken over Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool just for a short term return on investment. The big English clubs, probably backed by their big European G14 co-members, are half-way towards a breakaway push, in alliance with American soccer.
This quota-based intervention will give Wenger and his ilk all the impetus they need but the battle for the soul of English football is now truly joined. I’m glad these new rules are making Wenger’s pips squeak. Something had to, if, that is, the English Premier League is not to become the Brazilian Premier League by 2015. By then, Wenger will probably be calling it a day in England. If this quota intervention had not happened, his legacy would be on the one hand a fabulously successful Premier League in terms of overall quality, but with many clubs in massive debt; and, on the other, an increasingly dysfunctional and troubled national England team culled from players in the poorer sides and even those from the Championship...a bit like Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I like Arsene Wenger. It’s great to see some intelligence in a game dominated by thick bricks. But I don’t like what he’s done to English national football or his contribution to the preservation of an increasingly remote top four that think they have a God-given right to success at the expense of everyone else.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Friday 13 August 2010
Saying goodbye to dubstep
Much dubstep has disappeared up its nihilistic fundament. Most of what now passes for dubstep sounds like deathmetal cybergrunge. It’s unlistenable. Even major practitioners like Benga have fallen for the race to create the next theme tune for Top Gear, the acme of irritating TV irrelevance. After coming up to a brilliant climax with Diary Of An Afro Warrior, we get Phaze One and crappy, stereotypical stuff like No Bra, No Panties (classy, eh?!). And I really wouldn’t wish that on even Jeremiah Clarkson. The dire collection released by The Ministry Of Sound this year entitled The Sound Of Dubstep is another miserable case in point. 46 tracks of absolute vuvuzela earpain. The freedom of the internet means we all now have to be quality filters of the multi-dimensional wall of music out there, even within any one genre. To cut it short, that really means we just choose what we like listening to. OK, if we’ve time, it doesn’t stop us creating a list of what’s what. And very few people are memorable in this dubstep dramascape. Benga merely sounds like the best of the rest, when the rest is nothing but a bowel blockage. For sheer consistency and the creation of a particular sound, it’s Burial and label-mates King Midas Sound, as far as I’m concerned. These days, I’m no longer into car crash histrionics. I want the sound of modern Mantovani. Which reminds me. Röyksopp’s Senior is out a month today and I’ve just downloaded The Drug as a taster. But I’ll wave goodbye with a soundtrack of 13 on the 13th...
MOUNT KIMBIE Serged from Sketch On Glass EP
BURIAL Raver from Untrue
KING MIDAS SOUND One Ting (Dabrye remix) from Cool Out EP
SCUBA So You Think You're Special from Triangulation
BENGA Loose Synths from Diary Of An Afro Warrior
BREAKAGE Open Up from Foundation
DJ ZINC My DJ from Wile Out EP
FLYING LOTUS Zodiac Shit from Cosmogramma
NOSAJ THING Voices from Drift
PARIAH Orpheus from Detroit Falls EP
PINCH Gangstaz from Underwater Dancehall
SKREAM Kut-Off from Skream!
STARKEY Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
MOUNT KIMBIE Serged from Sketch On Glass EP
BURIAL Raver from Untrue
KING MIDAS SOUND One Ting (Dabrye remix) from Cool Out EP
SCUBA So You Think You're Special from Triangulation
BENGA Loose Synths from Diary Of An Afro Warrior
BREAKAGE Open Up from Foundation
DJ ZINC My DJ from Wile Out EP
FLYING LOTUS Zodiac Shit from Cosmogramma
NOSAJ THING Voices from Drift
PARIAH Orpheus from Detroit Falls EP
PINCH Gangstaz from Underwater Dancehall
SKREAM Kut-Off from Skream!
STARKEY Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Wednesday 11 August 2010
Is English football an incurable disease? Final Part
England will be the first to go
Modern English footballing history started with the USA and Hungary, so it’s fitting that I pen my final piece on England’s football sickness on the morning of a friendly with Hungary, while thinking about what I have to say about a future with America.
Everything is unravelling now. It’s a far from meaningless friendly. For the media is hunting for Capello’s scalp early on this season and this gives them an opportunity. What do they have to do to get him out? Encourage fans at the Community Shield to boo England players? Suggest that Ashley Cole spurned him by refusing to shake his hand at the end? Insist that Capello’s effectively lost the dressing room by constantly repeating how he said that England played with fear at the World Cup? Make him look a chump when players of the calibre of Wes Brown and Paul Robinson can thumb their nose at England when called up? Put forward Irishman, Martin O’Neill as the next England manager, one day after resigning from Aston Villa? Yes, all these things. And more. After all, Capello can and should take it. That’s why we pay him £6million a year.
Although several players have done a Robinson and Brown over the course of the years ahead of their time, notably Alan Shearer and Paul Scholes, the timing of this latest snub just adds to the criticism of the way both Capello and the FA do things. While it does show a lack of respect for players in the modern world, it also reveals the priorities of players – they all cite longevity in playing for their clubs as the reason for international ‘retirement’. Who will be the first player to say, in the interest of prolonging my international career, I’ve asked my club to play me less?
Enough of wishful thinking. Only young upcoming players now need to play for England. So, actually, the real question will be this. How long before Wayne Rooney decides that enough is enough and calls it quits at international level? I give him till he’s 26.
Whose side are the media on?
Most of this stuff takes place in the media. How else would we mortals ever learn about it? For some time, it has felt like it is only our tabloid media that sustains the myth of the national team: (a) that we actually have one and (b) that it is capable of winning anything. The clubs and players long ago gave up on the illusion. Some people don’t even bother to hide it. Last week, Sir Alex Ferguson went on a rant about international football and how there hasn’t been a decent World Cup since 1986. This came after Harry Redknapp’s hypocritical condemnation of the Hungary friendly fixture, just three days before the Premiership season starts. It wasn’t so long ago that he was saying there should be 8 Spurs players in the England World Cup squad. Before they qualified for the Champions League and somebody told him about Spurs’ draining pre-season shirt-selling tour of the USA, that is. Was it only a few weeks ago that England’s so-called best hope for a home-grown national team manager was saying that fans didn’t care whether Saddam Hussein owned their club? If Redknapp is the future for English football, then there isn’t one.
Admittedly, it’s not just England. Bayern Munich have just refused to let Franck Ribery attend a World Cup inquest by the French FA, saying they do not have to release players for such a matter. Pre-season training is more important. It isn’t that Bayern are wrong. Or Robinson is wrong. Or Ferguson is wrong. Or Redknapp is an idiot. It’s that these people are individually adding to a collective drive, voiced through a willing media, to discredit international football in the effort to pursue global club football. It’s the logical move from the establishment of the FA Premier League, nearly two decades on. There is more money to be made. At least three of the top English club sides pre-seasoned in the USA this summer (I cannot and will not call the game ‘soccer’). That can’t be a coincidence. These club sides are quite happy to use international tournaments these days as a TV shop window, a kind of lure for a global audience. But their idea is to replace international team football with global club football once and for all. TV media is driving this. Print media, at least in the UK, seems to be on the verge of accepting it at last and moving over to the other side. It is committed to constant hounding of the England team, its managers and players and that part of the FA that governs the national set up. The FA is torn in two and doesn’t know how to respond. In terms of the hurricane that is coming, it knows it is powerless to intervene.
Sweet FA
On 21 April 2010, The FA Premier League was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the International Trade category in recognition of its outstanding contribution to international trade and the value it brings to English football and the UK’s broadcasting industry!!!
Yet last week, Richard Scudamore, chief exec of the FA Premier League, felt bound to defend the Premier League while giving ground on its role in taking some blame for England’s dismal showing in the World Cup. The media didn’t really know how to report this. “What every England fan should expect is that the players we do produce are world class. They should be able to give world class performances at these tournaments - that's our focus,” said Scudamore, attempting to palliate those who point to the decreasing lack of opportunity for English players in our top division. It’s a brazen faced lie. Either that, or, like Crapello, he’s just somebody who’s paid enough to live with an impossible duality – the success of English club sides and a successful England team.
The Premier League is run by the FA. The England national team is run by the FA. Perhaps the clue to the dilemma with English football is in the two letters at the end of the last two sentences. Isn’t the FA responsible for the development of football in this country from top to bottom? The problem is clearly how you define the ‘top’. Some people including me think it should be the England national team. Others think it should be the clubs. In practice, it is currently the clubs. But this failure to agree what the ‘top’ should be, as opposed to what it is currently, prevents us doing what needs to be done at the bottom. Because the ‘bottom’ looks different, depending from which ‘top’ position you happen to be looking down from.
But all this is one huge red herring, to distract your attention from what’s ahead on the big clubs’ agendas – their own suicide – but more of that at the end. Add all this up and it feels like the speeding up of the end for international football. In the sense that, the players already feel they play international football, but at a club level. Why should they have to do it on behalf of their nations as well?! In the Community Shield, Rooney supplied a class pass to set up the first goal. Just like he did all through last season for his club side. Shame about the insignificant tournament in between. The man epitomises the end of English international football. But he is not responsible for the creation of the venal set of knuckle-dragging, under-performing unconscientious objectors who no longer want to wear three lions on their shirt because they see more honour in filling their already over-stuffed bank accounts than they do in representing their country. Let’s raise statues to the greedy or disingenuous or self-serving or plain deluded men who, in creating the breakaway FA Premier League and handing TV rights to Brit-hating foreigners, have ensured that the international game will soon founder and be replaced by global soccer, American style...Greg Dyke, David Dein, Alan Sugar, Rupert Murdoch, the G14 clubs and their owners and managers with the much lauded Arsene Wenger at the forefront (but don’t Arsenal play such wonderful football?! – will you be saying that when they’re the Arsenal Aardvarks playing out of Boston, Massachusetts?).
English football – in memoriam or per ardua ad astra?
When I set out on this journey, I was more optimistic about a possible future for England at international level. I’m now tending to believe that spoilt working class brats like Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney, John Terry, Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand and his ilk are not just aberrations, the first real product of the FA Premier League, but more like the norm. In them, we’re just seeing the vanguard. In which case, I’d rather shove them off onto the global club football stage and watch football closer to home. As Platini says, if you’re sponsored by Coca Cola, why not just call yourself Coca Cola and go off and play wherever Coca Cola can get you the best TV rights? But while there’s still life in this international dream, I’m going to give it space. And raise a last cry, as England take on Hungary this evening.
LISTEN, WHAT I’M SAYING IS THIS: AS A RESULT OF THIS EXHAUSTIVE, DECADES-LONG INVESTIGATION, I CAN CONCLUDE THAT, WHEN IT COMES TO FOOTBALL, THE ENGLISH FOOTBALL DISEASE IS VERY SEVERE BUT IT’S NOT LIFE THREATENING. I’VE COME VERY CLOSE TO SAYING THAT THE ENGLISH WAY OF STUPID FOOTBALL IS INNATE. WHAT I REALLY MEAN TO SAY THAT IT’S THE ENGLISH WAY OF EXPLOITING THE WORLD FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES THAT IS STUPID. FOOTBALL IS JUST PART OF THIS.
THE ENGLISH WAY HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN TO EXPLOIT AND IMPORT WHATEVER IT NEEDED TO, RATHER THAN TAKE THE TIME TO GROW IT AT HOME. THE ONLY WAY TO CURE THIS IS TO STOP AND DO IT DIFFERENTLY. BUT WHY CURE WHAT’S LUCRATIVE? IT’S MUCH EASIER TO CONTINUE WITH THE FAILURE THAT SUITS A VERY FEW PEOPLE MOST OF THE TIME AND DISAPPOINTS THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ALL THE TIME. IT’S OK FOR A BUNCH OF DISINGENUOUS STATISTICIANS AND NUMBER-CRUNCHERS TO SAY THAT THE BIG FOUR IS THE WAY IT IS AND THAT MEANS THIS IS THE WAY IT’S GOING. OK, FOR NOW, WE’RE STUCK WITH CHELSKI, ARSENALE AND THE THEATRE OF PRAWNS. I’D BE HAPPY FOR THIS LOT TO MOVE OUT TO BRAZIL, IN ADVANCE OF THE NEXT WORLD CUP, TOMORROW. ALL THIS IS TEMPORAL, TRANSIENT. BUT ONE THING LIVES ON. THE DREAM OF THE BEST AGAINST THE BEST.
I THINK THAT WHETHER FIFA AWARD ENGLAND THE 2018 WORLD CUP IS NOW IRRELEVANT. THERE MAY NOT EVEN BE A 2018 WORLD CUP. A MASSIVE LOST BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY FOR THE NATION, YES. A HUGE BLOW TO OUR IDENTITY, CERTAINLY. YET THE CLUBS WOULD RUB THEIR HANDS WITH GLEE AND SEE IT AS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE A CHANGE AS CATACLYSMIC AS THE BREAKAWAY FA PREMIER LEAGUE.
IT’S PROBABLY TOO MUCH TO HOPE THAT THIS CHANGE WOULD BE SOMETHING POSITIVE, THAT ENABLES INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL TO SIT ALONGSIDE AND COMPLEMENT CLUB FOOTBALL. SOMETHING THAT ENABLES OUR LOT TO PIT THEIR WITS AGAINST THEIR LOT. AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. FOR THE DREAM WE ALL DREAM OF. I DREAM OF.
The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
Where’s it all going? In case you haven’t noticed...America. While you’ve been distracted by the part-time circuses of Russian billionaires like Abramovich and Middle Eastern oil sheiks, the Americans have been taking over your football clubs and turning them into American business machines. Manchester United. Liverpool. Arsenal. Aston Villa. None of these clubs any longer spends ridiculous sums of money on buying players. They allow the playboy billionaires to pay ridiculous sums like £30 million for the likes of James ‘concrete boots’ Milner. They are sellers, not buyers. The American owners want their return on investment. No sooner than O’Neill is gone from Villa than American Bob Bradley is installed as favourite to take over. An American manager in the English top flight? Whoda thought it?
Make no mistake. Despite calling their glorified game of rounders the World Series, the Americans have finally realised that they do not have a universal, global game of their own. Their version of football is a sealed unit. No ins or outs. It’s washed up and there’s no more money in it. These businessmen have seen the emotional grip proper football has over the rest of the world. And they don’t just want some of it, they want all of it. They’ve learned something from the English. If you can’t be it, buy it (the Americans didn’t invent capitalism, the English did; the Americans just perfected it).
So, forget the transition to a European League. Poor old Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini are helpless in the face of the wave of change. History will see them as men who resisted the inevitable: the Americanisation of football. Our big clubs are tired of regulatory UEFA practices and will be playing in America before you can remember that your game used to be called football. Will the rules be changed? You betcha. Are you happy with that? Whaddya mean ya never saw it coming? Ya bought Sky TV. Ya let it happen. Weren’t you listening to Golden Balls? Didya think he was in California for his health?
For those of us who are awake, there is a choice: DC United or FC United. After all, it’s our game, not theirs. We could always start again. Football. English rules.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Modern English footballing history started with the USA and Hungary, so it’s fitting that I pen my final piece on England’s football sickness on the morning of a friendly with Hungary, while thinking about what I have to say about a future with America.
Everything is unravelling now. It’s a far from meaningless friendly. For the media is hunting for Capello’s scalp early on this season and this gives them an opportunity. What do they have to do to get him out? Encourage fans at the Community Shield to boo England players? Suggest that Ashley Cole spurned him by refusing to shake his hand at the end? Insist that Capello’s effectively lost the dressing room by constantly repeating how he said that England played with fear at the World Cup? Make him look a chump when players of the calibre of Wes Brown and Paul Robinson can thumb their nose at England when called up? Put forward Irishman, Martin O’Neill as the next England manager, one day after resigning from Aston Villa? Yes, all these things. And more. After all, Capello can and should take it. That’s why we pay him £6million a year.
Although several players have done a Robinson and Brown over the course of the years ahead of their time, notably Alan Shearer and Paul Scholes, the timing of this latest snub just adds to the criticism of the way both Capello and the FA do things. While it does show a lack of respect for players in the modern world, it also reveals the priorities of players – they all cite longevity in playing for their clubs as the reason for international ‘retirement’. Who will be the first player to say, in the interest of prolonging my international career, I’ve asked my club to play me less?
Enough of wishful thinking. Only young upcoming players now need to play for England. So, actually, the real question will be this. How long before Wayne Rooney decides that enough is enough and calls it quits at international level? I give him till he’s 26.
Whose side are the media on?
Most of this stuff takes place in the media. How else would we mortals ever learn about it? For some time, it has felt like it is only our tabloid media that sustains the myth of the national team: (a) that we actually have one and (b) that it is capable of winning anything. The clubs and players long ago gave up on the illusion. Some people don’t even bother to hide it. Last week, Sir Alex Ferguson went on a rant about international football and how there hasn’t been a decent World Cup since 1986. This came after Harry Redknapp’s hypocritical condemnation of the Hungary friendly fixture, just three days before the Premiership season starts. It wasn’t so long ago that he was saying there should be 8 Spurs players in the England World Cup squad. Before they qualified for the Champions League and somebody told him about Spurs’ draining pre-season shirt-selling tour of the USA, that is. Was it only a few weeks ago that England’s so-called best hope for a home-grown national team manager was saying that fans didn’t care whether Saddam Hussein owned their club? If Redknapp is the future for English football, then there isn’t one.
Admittedly, it’s not just England. Bayern Munich have just refused to let Franck Ribery attend a World Cup inquest by the French FA, saying they do not have to release players for such a matter. Pre-season training is more important. It isn’t that Bayern are wrong. Or Robinson is wrong. Or Ferguson is wrong. Or Redknapp is an idiot. It’s that these people are individually adding to a collective drive, voiced through a willing media, to discredit international football in the effort to pursue global club football. It’s the logical move from the establishment of the FA Premier League, nearly two decades on. There is more money to be made. At least three of the top English club sides pre-seasoned in the USA this summer (I cannot and will not call the game ‘soccer’). That can’t be a coincidence. These club sides are quite happy to use international tournaments these days as a TV shop window, a kind of lure for a global audience. But their idea is to replace international team football with global club football once and for all. TV media is driving this. Print media, at least in the UK, seems to be on the verge of accepting it at last and moving over to the other side. It is committed to constant hounding of the England team, its managers and players and that part of the FA that governs the national set up. The FA is torn in two and doesn’t know how to respond. In terms of the hurricane that is coming, it knows it is powerless to intervene.
Sweet FA
On 21 April 2010, The FA Premier League was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the International Trade category in recognition of its outstanding contribution to international trade and the value it brings to English football and the UK’s broadcasting industry!!!
Yet last week, Richard Scudamore, chief exec of the FA Premier League, felt bound to defend the Premier League while giving ground on its role in taking some blame for England’s dismal showing in the World Cup. The media didn’t really know how to report this. “What every England fan should expect is that the players we do produce are world class. They should be able to give world class performances at these tournaments - that's our focus,” said Scudamore, attempting to palliate those who point to the decreasing lack of opportunity for English players in our top division. It’s a brazen faced lie. Either that, or, like Crapello, he’s just somebody who’s paid enough to live with an impossible duality – the success of English club sides and a successful England team.
The Premier League is run by the FA. The England national team is run by the FA. Perhaps the clue to the dilemma with English football is in the two letters at the end of the last two sentences. Isn’t the FA responsible for the development of football in this country from top to bottom? The problem is clearly how you define the ‘top’. Some people including me think it should be the England national team. Others think it should be the clubs. In practice, it is currently the clubs. But this failure to agree what the ‘top’ should be, as opposed to what it is currently, prevents us doing what needs to be done at the bottom. Because the ‘bottom’ looks different, depending from which ‘top’ position you happen to be looking down from.
But all this is one huge red herring, to distract your attention from what’s ahead on the big clubs’ agendas – their own suicide – but more of that at the end. Add all this up and it feels like the speeding up of the end for international football. In the sense that, the players already feel they play international football, but at a club level. Why should they have to do it on behalf of their nations as well?! In the Community Shield, Rooney supplied a class pass to set up the first goal. Just like he did all through last season for his club side. Shame about the insignificant tournament in between. The man epitomises the end of English international football. But he is not responsible for the creation of the venal set of knuckle-dragging, under-performing unconscientious objectors who no longer want to wear three lions on their shirt because they see more honour in filling their already over-stuffed bank accounts than they do in representing their country. Let’s raise statues to the greedy or disingenuous or self-serving or plain deluded men who, in creating the breakaway FA Premier League and handing TV rights to Brit-hating foreigners, have ensured that the international game will soon founder and be replaced by global soccer, American style...Greg Dyke, David Dein, Alan Sugar, Rupert Murdoch, the G14 clubs and their owners and managers with the much lauded Arsene Wenger at the forefront (but don’t Arsenal play such wonderful football?! – will you be saying that when they’re the Arsenal Aardvarks playing out of Boston, Massachusetts?).
English football – in memoriam or per ardua ad astra?
When I set out on this journey, I was more optimistic about a possible future for England at international level. I’m now tending to believe that spoilt working class brats like Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney, John Terry, Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand and his ilk are not just aberrations, the first real product of the FA Premier League, but more like the norm. In them, we’re just seeing the vanguard. In which case, I’d rather shove them off onto the global club football stage and watch football closer to home. As Platini says, if you’re sponsored by Coca Cola, why not just call yourself Coca Cola and go off and play wherever Coca Cola can get you the best TV rights? But while there’s still life in this international dream, I’m going to give it space. And raise a last cry, as England take on Hungary this evening.
LISTEN, WHAT I’M SAYING IS THIS: AS A RESULT OF THIS EXHAUSTIVE, DECADES-LONG INVESTIGATION, I CAN CONCLUDE THAT, WHEN IT COMES TO FOOTBALL, THE ENGLISH FOOTBALL DISEASE IS VERY SEVERE BUT IT’S NOT LIFE THREATENING. I’VE COME VERY CLOSE TO SAYING THAT THE ENGLISH WAY OF STUPID FOOTBALL IS INNATE. WHAT I REALLY MEAN TO SAY THAT IT’S THE ENGLISH WAY OF EXPLOITING THE WORLD FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES THAT IS STUPID. FOOTBALL IS JUST PART OF THIS.
THE ENGLISH WAY HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN TO EXPLOIT AND IMPORT WHATEVER IT NEEDED TO, RATHER THAN TAKE THE TIME TO GROW IT AT HOME. THE ONLY WAY TO CURE THIS IS TO STOP AND DO IT DIFFERENTLY. BUT WHY CURE WHAT’S LUCRATIVE? IT’S MUCH EASIER TO CONTINUE WITH THE FAILURE THAT SUITS A VERY FEW PEOPLE MOST OF THE TIME AND DISAPPOINTS THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ALL THE TIME. IT’S OK FOR A BUNCH OF DISINGENUOUS STATISTICIANS AND NUMBER-CRUNCHERS TO SAY THAT THE BIG FOUR IS THE WAY IT IS AND THAT MEANS THIS IS THE WAY IT’S GOING. OK, FOR NOW, WE’RE STUCK WITH CHELSKI, ARSENALE AND THE THEATRE OF PRAWNS. I’D BE HAPPY FOR THIS LOT TO MOVE OUT TO BRAZIL, IN ADVANCE OF THE NEXT WORLD CUP, TOMORROW. ALL THIS IS TEMPORAL, TRANSIENT. BUT ONE THING LIVES ON. THE DREAM OF THE BEST AGAINST THE BEST.
I THINK THAT WHETHER FIFA AWARD ENGLAND THE 2018 WORLD CUP IS NOW IRRELEVANT. THERE MAY NOT EVEN BE A 2018 WORLD CUP. A MASSIVE LOST BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY FOR THE NATION, YES. A HUGE BLOW TO OUR IDENTITY, CERTAINLY. YET THE CLUBS WOULD RUB THEIR HANDS WITH GLEE AND SEE IT AS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE A CHANGE AS CATACLYSMIC AS THE BREAKAWAY FA PREMIER LEAGUE.
IT’S PROBABLY TOO MUCH TO HOPE THAT THIS CHANGE WOULD BE SOMETHING POSITIVE, THAT ENABLES INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL TO SIT ALONGSIDE AND COMPLEMENT CLUB FOOTBALL. SOMETHING THAT ENABLES OUR LOT TO PIT THEIR WITS AGAINST THEIR LOT. AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. FOR THE DREAM WE ALL DREAM OF. I DREAM OF.
The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
Where’s it all going? In case you haven’t noticed...America. While you’ve been distracted by the part-time circuses of Russian billionaires like Abramovich and Middle Eastern oil sheiks, the Americans have been taking over your football clubs and turning them into American business machines. Manchester United. Liverpool. Arsenal. Aston Villa. None of these clubs any longer spends ridiculous sums of money on buying players. They allow the playboy billionaires to pay ridiculous sums like £30 million for the likes of James ‘concrete boots’ Milner. They are sellers, not buyers. The American owners want their return on investment. No sooner than O’Neill is gone from Villa than American Bob Bradley is installed as favourite to take over. An American manager in the English top flight? Whoda thought it?
Make no mistake. Despite calling their glorified game of rounders the World Series, the Americans have finally realised that they do not have a universal, global game of their own. Their version of football is a sealed unit. No ins or outs. It’s washed up and there’s no more money in it. These businessmen have seen the emotional grip proper football has over the rest of the world. And they don’t just want some of it, they want all of it. They’ve learned something from the English. If you can’t be it, buy it (the Americans didn’t invent capitalism, the English did; the Americans just perfected it).
So, forget the transition to a European League. Poor old Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini are helpless in the face of the wave of change. History will see them as men who resisted the inevitable: the Americanisation of football. Our big clubs are tired of regulatory UEFA practices and will be playing in America before you can remember that your game used to be called football. Will the rules be changed? You betcha. Are you happy with that? Whaddya mean ya never saw it coming? Ya bought Sky TV. Ya let it happen. Weren’t you listening to Golden Balls? Didya think he was in California for his health?
For those of us who are awake, there is a choice: DC United or FC United. After all, it’s our game, not theirs. We could always start again. Football. English rules.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
