It’s 2008: the blogging revolution has been absorbed by the establishment press and propped up as a new ‘form’ of journalism.  Just read Andrew Sullivan’s recent apologist screed on blogs in the Atlantic.  Apparently, the do-it-yourself amateur element is no longer intrinsic to the blog as literary form.  Professionals can do it too.  Blogging has gone mainstream.

Be that as it may, professional sportswriting, particularly on the one ineffable sport we all adore — football — resembled blogging long before some old lady in Arkansas decided to write daily missives on the bowel movements of her new kittens.

That’s because even with all the stats, injury lists and betting odds, when it comes to football, mainstream journalists are still just a bunch of apes groping a big shiny monolith, hammering out intuitive reactions on Diarra leaving Pompey or Allardyce taking over at Blackburn with no better grasp of the truth than their unwashed readers.  It’s just once upon a time they could fool us into thinking they were ‘experts’ because they were in the newspaper and we weren’t.

Then came the Internet, and along with it the amateur sport-blogger.  As when Blackburn Olympic ushered in an age of Northern working-class football dominance by winning the FA Cup in 1883, the line between amateur and professional started to blur.  Now in order to keep up, once-proud feature columnists have stooped to blogging on-line, writing more frequently for less money.  That’s the bad news.

The good news is these writers are pretty damn good.  Sean Ingle’s guardian.co.uk/football still leads the pack, providing a plethora of seasoned writers writing on rotation, from Jonathan Wilson to Paul Wilson to Paul Doyle, reminding everyone that amid all the Interweb dross, a good writer is still hard to find.

Other sites are catching up though, providing more blogs and improved reader interaction.  Just how long the mainstream football media can lord it over the rest of us remains to be seen, but for now mainstream bloggers are still among the best on the Internet, an encouraging sign for professional hacks everywhere.  Here are five mainstream bloggers who stood out in 2008.

I’d like to thank Soccerlens award-winners Run of Play’s Brian Philips and Sport is a TV Show’s Fredorrarci for their help in compiling this list.  As with all ‘best-of’ lists this one is entirely subjective, so rather than hurl invective just write in with some of your own.

1) Jonathan Wilson

J-Dub has had a banner year, publishing the surprisingly-entertaining Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (Amazon). His blog for guardian.co.uk, poking around developments in Eastern European and Russian football, was especially relevant in a year when Zenit St. Petersburg won the UEFA Cup and Russia entertained so mercilessly at the Euros.

2) Gabriele Marcotti

Martin Samuel may win all the awards, but Marcotti is timesonline.co.uk’s people’s blogger.  Loved and hated in equal measure, he certainly never bores, and brings a much-needed continental perspective to the behemoth that is the Times, He also sports a thorough tactical knowledge that never bleeds into the pretentious.  Well, usually never.

3) Stephen Goff

Yes, the token North American.  Goff gets a nod by virtue of being a voice in the wilderness, providing one of the few cogent mainstream voices on North American soccer.  Although hardly an exemplar of style, Goff does resemble a real blogger, writing dense aphorisms on the sometimes-ridiculous developments in soccer over here in the New World.   More of these needed.

4) Sid Lowe

Sid is one of those writers we all want to be, gallivanting around Spain with his doctorate under his arm, translating for La Liga megastars at various press conferences, voicing off brilliantly on the Football Weekly podcast, all while writing one of the best blogs on football anywhere in the world.  Needless to say, I hate his guts.  If you want to get involved in Spanish football and don’t speak Spanish, all you need is Sid.

5) Marcela Mora y Araujo/Tim Vickery

I’m cheating a bit here and splitting number five down the middle.  Tim gets it because he makes the rest of the BBC look amateurish beyond belief, and Marcela gets it because she is one of the few writers on South American football who avoids the usual clichés about chaos, bad administration and individual flair.  Plus you gotta love her public school accent.

Honourable mentions include Simon Kuper (as always), Barry Glendenning (the Fiver’s not really a blog), Tim Stannard and Simon Talbot over at FourFourTwo, Canada’s former Globe and Mail soccer blogger Ben Knight, and about a thousand others I’m sure I’ve left out.

Richard Whittall writes the amateur and sometimes amateurish blog A More Splendid Life.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

“In most ways I am content not to know such information, and to think of sportswriting not as a real profession but more as an agreeable frame of mind, a way of going about things rather than things you exactly do or know. A reasonable guess is a source of pleasure, since it makes me feel like one of the crowd rather than a human FORTRAN spitting out stats and reducing sports to unsavory accountancy. When sports stops being a matter for speculation, even idle aimless, misinformed speculation, something’s gone haywire…”

– Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

“You’d think anyone with a passing interest in sport would know that the most reliable, bullshit-free place to find out the likelihood of something happening is to check the odds on a betting website.”

– Barry Glendenning

During Euro 2008 in Vienna, the Guardian decided to send a camera crew to film the Football Weekly podcast journos in various states of play. Short clips of mock-tourism around Vienna alrernated with frattish Wii tournaments and Croat-filled street parties. Ostensibly the least successful video, yet one that stuck out the most, was a four minute minute film of Barry Glendenning enjoying a beer and some sauerkraut while watching the Romania-France group stage match.

The game, you’ll recall, was a dud, a deadly boring defensive parlay. Glendenning is seen alone, slowly drinking his beer and smoking cigarettes, at first mugging to the camera and then trailing off as the game descends into nothing. We know the game is terrible, yet he watches, transfixed and with a hint of real disappointment giving the lie to his flippancy (he texts to someone, presumably James Richardson, “are you watching this shit?”). In the end, he asks that the camera be turned off like a bereaved loved one after a tragedy.

Many posters on the Football Weekly blog remarked on similar experiences, sitting in empty bars, watching abjectly miserable matches yet unable to look away. Modern football disgusts us with its scandals, transfer fees, officious stats and journeymen divas, yet we still hold on to something outside of our own cyncial shells that keeps us coming back to the empty pub. Barry Glendenning, perhaps more than other football journalists, exemplifies this contradiction.

His audio work is the weaker of his gifts. Glendenning is, by his own admission, a failed stand-up comic. He is not a rapid-fire laddish pun-spinner in the English mold — his role is more hipster curmudgeon, ratcheting up his outsider status as a farmer’s son from the County Offaly while wearing Pixies shirts and bigging up his Brixton hood. On the Football Weekly podcast, whole minutes pass with Glendenning silent, brooding over metered stats and propped up controversies. And then he’ll suddenly pipe in, ravaging someone or another’s politically correct faux outrage, or making idle predictions on matches based more on his prejudices than on the typical signposts of choice — injuries and stats. It isn’t exactly ‘ha ha’ stuff, but you notice when he isn’t there and the podcast descends into bland enthusiasm.

His written work is superb. His daily info-email, the Fiver, is laden with adjectives and adverbs dripping with icy contempt for football’s bureaucrats, mercenaries and moneymen. This invective almost rivals his complete disdain for any hint of righteous anger on the part of football’s ‘aggrieved,’ whether taking on the toothless ‘Just Say No’ approach to racism within England’s temples of intolerance, the football grounds, or taking on Rio Ferdiand’s holier-than-thou ranting over everyone’s favourite minimum-wager, Ashley Cole. His minute-by-minute reports too have an off-the-cuff wit, well-formed on a minutes’ notice. He is clearly a journalist’s comedian, able to scratch out pithy lines on the post, in time for deadline.

He has many critics, some justified, many simply partisan football supporters. Glendenning’s ranting against Big Four supporters sometimes tips into the absurdly self-negating – his views on Sunderland are left unchecked, and his loyalty to Roy Keane in particular sometimes grates. And it’s true — the man can’t rhyme off Marseille’s starting eleven at the drop of a hat, and he is constantly accused of not being a proper journo for his lack of Guardian Football front-page blogs. But his acerbic style, contrasting the dry autopsies performed over and over by football’s self-appointed scribes, comes closer to the ugly truth of Modern Football. He may be bored watching the football, sitting and texting about the pointlessness of it all, but you can see behind it all a boyish hope that football will transcend its roots in money and madness.

Richard Whittall also writes at A More Splendid Life.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

The result read England 3, Belarus 1, with Steven Gerrard on the score sheet, and yet like night following day, the pundits were still assessing Capello’s success in dealing with on one of the most tired clichés in Modern Football — Gerrard v. Lampard.

That the two cannot play together has been part of journo orthodoxy since 2001. Conventional wisdom tells us because Gerrard sat out Euro 2004, England played great football (precisely up until Rooney’s broken metatarsal).

In fact, whenever Gerrard has been left out of the England line-up with Lamps there to take his place, England apparently plays ‘champagne soccer’ — witness the hooting and hollering among print journalists following the Eleven Lions trouncing of the Ten Croats in Zagreb. Yet even after Saturday’s thrashing of Kazakhstan, some normally reserved members of the English press were calling for Gerrard to hang up his England shirt for good.

Sometimes the English press is like a biologist who thinks he can tell you something about human nature by studying the behaviour of white blood cells. If they’re not clamouring about Beckham’s relative position on the pitch (less of a problem now as he’s turning into an eightieth minute sub), or fretting about Rooney moving ‘too far forward,’ or hemming about Rio Ferdinand ‘pushing up out of position,’ or hawing about how Ashley Cole ‘doesn’t run up the wings like he used to,’ they’re whingeing about Gerrard and Lampard ‘cancelling each other out.’ You wonder sometimes if these are footballers or sub-atomic particles wrenched apart by some enormous collider. Position one here, and position one there, you’ve got either a nuclear meltdown or a black hole.

I can’t think of any other national setup where debates are posited along these lines. France is stinking up Europe at the moment, but most French onlookers suspect Domenech’s tactical naiveté, not whether Ribery is getting ‘cancelled out’ by Malouda. What does it say about a player’s adaptability if, positioned next to a player of equal or greater ability (I’m not taking sides here), he is suddenly unable to make a pass, take a shot, or lay off to a player on the wing?

I believe Gerrard and Lampard are very talented players. Certainly their respective performances in the Premier League justifies, on paper at least, their continued presence on the England squad. However I’m not yet convinced they’re versatile players. I’m not yet convinced any player in the England team, except perhaps Joe Cole, or maybe Theo Walcott, is truly versatile. Rooney runs around like a jack-of all trades and can still score a goal or two, when he’s not busy shanking the ball into touch. Ashley Cole is a shadow of the defender he was in Portugal 2004. The rest are good enough. But versatile?

Perhaps if journos dug a little deeper and spilled a little more ink, we might get to the root of the problem — England can’t produce total players, let alone total football. Perhaps if we focused a little less on whether England’s players will implode if positioned improperly, and a little more on why they can’t seem to adapt in the first place, we might begin to realize how ridiculous this Stevie G. v. Lamps meme has become.

Richard Whittall writes on A More Splendid Life.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

I can’t help but think that the Guardian’s Rob Smyth said it best the other day when he blamed overly-high expectations for England on two things: the mass-marketed ‘Golden Generation’ featuring the usual suspects – Gerrard, Lamps, Becks, Rio, Rooney and so on – and more importantly, on England’s famous 5-1 brutalization of Germany in Germany back in 2001.

These days, when reality is knock knock knocking on England’s door seemingly in every fixture both major and minor, the boo-brigade still comes out expecting, nay, demanding, a rout of the type we haven’t seen from England, oh, since 2001′s brutalization of Germany in Germany.

Perhaps it’s time the English press, both yellow and proper, get over England and cover them the same way they would cover the cricket — that is to say with low expectations raised once in a while by something exciting like the Ashes.

The insane demands laid on the national team have prevented any levelheaded assessment of an England performance in the press. For the tabloids, it’s blame the foreign manager and then rail how the players are overpaid; for the Guardian and their ilk, it’s blame England’s national program and then rail how the players are overpaid (Editor: and for the blogs, it’s rail against international football and how it’s hurting their clubs, before turning around and railing against how players are overpaid…).

Surely the team wouldn’t receive this amount of vitriol if we finally assessed them at their proper level — at best, Spain; at worst, Denmark. What’s the hold-up? Shouldn’t years of turgid mediocrity have slapped them down a few pegs by now?

There are probably many reasons for our continued adoration of the England shirt – the all-important 1966 World Cup win, the rose-coloured view of the intervening years (perhaps aided by the fact that all the interesting moments get on Youtube while the duds are in a BBC film bucket somewhere), the flattering FIFA rankings, and in my mind the biggest reason, the rise of the Premier League and its influential English stars.

This leads me to admit an unpopular truth — players within the English national team are probably worth the amount relative to other players in the Premiership. The efforts of a Gerrard, a Rooney, a Ferdinand or a Barry are considered vital for their respective clubs. Sure, like most footballers these players have peaks and valleys, yet injuries to any of them make front page news and garner a lot of managerial quotes, a telling indication of their worth. In any case, a brief glance at their individual stats should end the argument.

So goes the common refrain, why don’t these same star players play well for their national team? The simple reason is that English players cannot adapt when they play outside of their clubs. English football is the most static form of the game in the world.

There is a reason, for example, why continental clubs don’t often seek talented English players — they can’t adjust to foreign playing styles. Think Gazza at Lazio, or Rush at Juventus. The national team presents a similar challenge because international football has its own unique style of play distinct from that of the Premier League. You can’t just switch from playing Chelsea or Manchester United to England and expect the demands will be the same.

Most national teams worth their weight in hype recognized this long ago — France, Germany, and now Russia have a separate and distinct ethos with regard to international play. Players who excel in these national teams aren’t exactly household names within their clubs, but they win because they are moulded to the distinct demands of international football. This distinction has never been understood in England.

England doesn’t even have a national training ground but borrows space from other clubs like vagabonds. The team, a sort of Premier League Greatest Hits, comes together out of the blue for a kick around once every couple of months, a friendly and then right into the qualifiers. Talented younger players like Young, Agbonlahor, and Wheater are told to stay home. There is no attempt at building a proper national side with its own distinct approach.

England has been lucky in that some players are born with a natural ability to adapt. It’s no coincidence that the English player with the greatest stint at a foreign club, Lineker at Barcelona, was one of England’s best goal scorers and contributors to the national team.

However, for most players, this sort of flexibility must be taught. The micromanaging in the press about English player positions – Gerrard should not play on the left, Beckham moves too much to the centre, Rooney must play farther forward — underlines how English players paid millions of pounds are simply unable to adjust to the slightest changes in play. Gerrard the goal-hungry playmaker in the centre becomes Gerrard the ball-shanking bumbler on the left? This is completely unacceptable for a player expected to excel in the international stage.

Yet Gerrard is not alone. English players for the most part look completely clueless outside of the cozy comforts of their coddling English clubs. Debates about positioning don’t have the same measure of importance in other national set-ups because players are used to adjusting to international football. Why not England?

Richard Whittall lives in Toronto and is the author of A More Splendid Life.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Few noticed last week when Juande Ramos called for a shortening of the transfer window, but the nuclear fallout from Monday’s race to the finish seems to support his argument.

Prior to Monday, Robinho had been settling in nicely for another season at Real Madrid, Kevin Keegan was sorting out his first proper season in charge of Newcastle, Dimitar Berbatov was rightly benched for his self-interested transfer talk, and Manchester City were on the verge of proving they were a top-ten club under Mark Hughes.

Now, the chess pieces have been wiped off the board, and in May 2009, viewers will see season highlights from the August portion of 2008-2009 and wonder what year they’re really watching.

Not that these aren’t interesting or even welcome changes. While King Kev was certainly improving during his second Newcastle stint, the appointment had ‘stop-gap’ written all over it, and his lack of action in the transfer window was Keegan’s last straw.

Rumours that Berbatov was on the outs at Tottenham were circulating at the end of last season, so it was perhaps inevitable he would eventually choose to sign for Manchester United. For Manchester City, new owners Abu Dhabi United Group will provide an enormous influx of petrol dollars, which, sadly, seems to be the only winning currency in today’s top flight. Had their bid been made sooner, City would have probably picked a brand new starting eleven and someone other than Mark Hughes to lead them.

Now, let’s suppose the transfer window had closed one day prior to the season opener. Abu Dhabi would have likely swept in sooner after Shinawatra’s tax troubles broke in early August (he was clearly ready to sell from the start of the scandal if not before), thus giving the Arab consortium more time to buy players and pick a new manager to truly make a top four run.

Berbatov would have been compelled to sort out United’s interest before having to put on Tottenham white, and perhaps save United’s blushes during their opening draw to Newcastle.

And speaking of Tyneside, Kevin Keegan could have left with a little more dignity as well as more time for the board to pick a proper successor. Hell, in this alternate universe, Mark Hughes would likely have been available by the opening weekend.

These are of course what-ifs, and there are many who argue that players and managers prefer a few weeks of league play in order to ask themselves, as the song says, “Should I stay or should I go?” This may have been true even a few years ago, but it is now emerging that subjects of ‘shock’ transfers had in fact made up their minds long in advance of the formal announcement.

Christiano Ronaldo was set to leave United for Real back in December. Tensions between Dennis Wise and Kevin Keegan have been well-publicized since last May. While Robinho’s transfer to City truly was shocking, his ambition to join the Premier League after rumours circulated about a move to Chelsea certainly wasn’t.

Why throw fans, owners, players and managers for an opening season loop if the wheels of change were already in motion? And with recent title races coming down to a matter of one or two points, why risk crediting those points to a faded star, gone before the end of August?

Richard Whittall lives in Toronto and is the author of A More Splendid Life.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

West Hammered: MLS Learns from the Pros

While English cynicism used to be a cherished import in the all-too-earnest hinterland of soccer-loving North America, the bile has lost its caché in the past few years. No more, Guardian. Cease and desist, ‘When Saturday Comes’. Your glib asides on the American game, which may have seemed like cutting journalistic insight post 1994, now sounds like the wet-gummed wheezings of an irate undergraduate student moaning about the mainstream music playing in a once indie-oriented pub.

The fact of the matter is thirty drunken Hammers (mostly Americans according to some reports) came flailing toward the supposedly ‘hard-core’ Columbus Crew supporters’ section last week; there were some scuffles, but no reports of major injuries. Even so, North Americans are not in need of protection from police at MLS games; to say as Barney Ronay did recently in the Guardian, that by returning punches to the surging West Ham fans, Crew supporters were somehow emulating a ‘halcyon’ period of English violence is absurd. A noxious social ill is not a hipster trend no matter how many alliterative sentences you manage to spin on the topic.

Mr. Ronay goes on to write of the MLS/Premiership friendlies, “these kind of games are usually genteel, goodwill-infused affairs.” He may have missed the news last year when a group of Aston Villa fans were ejected for light fisticuffs at a Toronto FC ‘friendly’. Shock horror — it seems even normally polite and unassuming Canadians will react when provoked at their home grounds, although we tend to be more known for hockey violence – the Montreal Canadiens’ first round victory in this year’s Stanley Cup resulted in a few blocks’ worth of burned out cars.

Yet Ronay is actually on the money about the MLS’ normally good-natured international friendlies. Hell, we’re even able to control ourselves during contentious Cup finals: this week’s draw between Toronto FC and the Montreal Impact at BMO Field — hardly your typical soccer mom MLS crowd — resulted in little more than some halfhearted anti-Quebecois jabs lobbed at the band of away supporters who sat unprotected in the East stand. Toronto FC had lost the chance to play in the CONCACAF Champions League to a lower division team from Quebec, English Canada’s arch political and cultural rivals, and yet 20000 rapid TFC supporters simply picked up and went home.

It cannot be denied there is a minority of idiots in the MLS who know little of football outside of watching reruns of Football Factories. Some fans will attempt to raise a pathetic parking lot skirmish to the level of an early eighties West Ham/Millwall encounter.

Yet if Ronay and others like him put away their grab bag of wittily penned clichés about American ‘sah-ker’ and instead focus on what is already obvious to most continental Europeans — that drunken fans of English football with cheap tickets at a low-security stadium will sometimes ‘act out’ — they would realize that it’s not MLS fans who are suffering from hooligan nostalgia.

Richard Whittall lives in Toronto and is the author of A More Splendid Life.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

For all those enraged by the hundreds of millions of pounds in inflated transfer fees flying between the stadia of Europe this summer: there was once a bearded man from a long time ago who proposed that the use-value of a commodity or service should determine its price, not market forces. No, I’m not talking about Gandalf, or even Santa Claus — I’m referring to Karl Marx.

Marx fought against wage-slavery long before Sepp Blatter’s little outburst last week, although the former was probably more concerned for the legions of destitute working-class persons across Europe, not 120,000 pound-a-week Portuguese footballers. However, a brief reprisal of Marx’s views on the subject reveals some interesting truths about today’s football transfer market.

Marx thought wage-slavery derived from three primary conditions: ownership of the means of production by a few (the Glazer family today, Real Madrid’s family of shareholders tomorrow), lack of access to the means of production (Ronaldo has no control over the fixture list, team sheets, or television close-ups of his smirking face), and the legions of unemployed workers ready to come in and work for less (Dimitar Berbatov anyone?).

In this light, instead of sounding like an out-of-touch bonehead, Sepp Blatter may have revealed himself to be a very cunning Marxist. For Marx, wage-slavery extended equally to factory workers and writers, proletarians and professors. Although highly-paid professional athletes weren’t much of a phenomenon in the late 19th century, Marx might have actually agreed with Blatter, arguing that Ronaldo is a wage-slave for all the same reasons Joe Six Pack down at the cracker factory is a wage-slave (although Joe Six Pack doesn’t have the GDP of the Ivory Coast in his back pocket).

While I’m not a Marxist and I don’t believe professional footballers are ‘modern slaves,’ the comparison reveals the intractability of the football transfer system. The media needs a story and the public likes nothing better than a villainous mercenary on whom we can unleash our moral outrage, but in reality, players like Ronaldo and Barry are merely victims of bad PR.

Laying waste to contractual obligations has been part of the game well before the famed Bosman ruling, even before PFA pioneer Jimmy Hill successfully lobbied to lift the salary cap in 1961. Scottish journalists at the turn of the twentieth century proudly declared no Scot would be so low as to turn their trade in the English League ‘for base gold,’ but, lo-and-behold, quite a few of them took the opportunity. Players then and now, like everyone else in the football business, are only following the rules of the game by acting in their own best interests (Marx’s idea of slavery).

Every once in a while, of course, a newspaper editorial will rant about how things have ‘gone too far’ since the halcyon days when a team like Burnley could go win the FA Cup, but outrageous transfer fees will still be paid because successful clubs can afford to pay them, and successful clubs can afford to pay them because you and I will pay to follow successful football clubs (well, I follow Villa, so ‘successful’ is relative I guess). This is the reason why the same morally outraged newspaper will go and dedicate a ten-page spread to the European Cup final — football sells.

Which brings us to a truth harder than Stuart Pearce. Whether you buy the thousand-pound season tickets, order the eighty-pound kit on your club credit card, or subscribe to Setanta or Sky to watch your club close-up and edited for the attention-deficit generation, you, the football fan, are fueling player-price inflation. Stop watching the football, clubs go broke, and Ronaldo goes fishing off Madeira.

We may not like him wiping his golden arse with his Manchester United contract, and neither did Bayern fans when Hargreaves did the same thing in 2006, but this will continue as long as the football business is able to stretch your love of the game to its limits. Which will be either until the next Marxist revolution, or when Masters Football really takes off as I’m truly hoping it will.

Richard Whittall lives in Toronto and is the author of A More Splendid Life.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News