Friday, 29 February 2008
You shook me all night long
Seismologists are hard at work investigating the cause of this week's Market Rasen earthquake, which is pretty much the first time anything has ever had an epicentre in northern Lincolnshire apart from the explosion in teenage pregnancy.
During this inquiry one crucial piece of evidence must not be overlooked: an important seismic event which took place just four hours earlier in an adjacent region of the Earth's crust. I refer, of course, to Grimsby Town winning away at Morecambe in the first leg of the northern area final of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy.
After all, it is surely no coincidence that Cleethorpes people could be heard shortly afterwards reeling off shouts such as "Only 5.2 on the Richter scale? We should be beating these 8.6", "Booooooo, no ambition, sack the quake", and "You're not fit to move the earth".
And Britain's last major tremor was the Dudley earthquake of 2002. Its epicentre in the West Midlands prompted researchers to conclude that it resulted from a clash between the vastly oversized expectations of Wolves fans and the immense mass of Aston Villa's historical baggage.
Not that earthquakes are the only so-called natural disaster that is really attributable to football. We are told that climate change is responsible for events such as the flooding of Hull last summer, but they never mention that this particular climate change event was precipitated by the second most popular local sport, as the mere prospect of relegation prompted Hull City's 90 per cent glory-seeking fan contingent to bawl their eyes out for weeks on end.
(Incidentally, the Yorkshire floods were remarkable for another reason. After the plight of the victims was ignored by the national media, one local MP dubbed Hull "the forgotten city". This was a tremendous coincidence, as many Grimbarians had already been calling it that for years.)
So two more matches with Morecambe stand in the way of Town's great surge upward from the depths. The Earth's tectonic plates, as we have seen, can make great lurching movements from one position to another, without warning and with potentially destructive consequences – much like the Mariners' form and confidence since the return of Alan Buckley.
One expert has suggested that this week's tremor resulted from "the reactivation of an old fault zone which has lain dormant for tens or hundreds of millions of years".
This is close to the truth, as the fault zone has indeed lain dormant, but only for ten years – and it runs straight through Grimsby. On one side of it is a very recently created upward motion caused by the powerful resurgence of the local football club. On the other are billions of tonnes of overwhelming downward pressure exerted by the irresistible natural force of local pessimism.
During this inquiry one crucial piece of evidence must not be overlooked: an important seismic event which took place just four hours earlier in an adjacent region of the Earth's crust. I refer, of course, to Grimsby Town winning away at Morecambe in the first leg of the northern area final of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy.
After all, it is surely no coincidence that Cleethorpes people could be heard shortly afterwards reeling off shouts such as "Only 5.2 on the Richter scale? We should be beating these 8.6", "Booooooo, no ambition, sack the quake", and "You're not fit to move the earth".
And Britain's last major tremor was the Dudley earthquake of 2002. Its epicentre in the West Midlands prompted researchers to conclude that it resulted from a clash between the vastly oversized expectations of Wolves fans and the immense mass of Aston Villa's historical baggage.
Not that earthquakes are the only so-called natural disaster that is really attributable to football. We are told that climate change is responsible for events such as the flooding of Hull last summer, but they never mention that this particular climate change event was precipitated by the second most popular local sport, as the mere prospect of relegation prompted Hull City's 90 per cent glory-seeking fan contingent to bawl their eyes out for weeks on end.
(Incidentally, the Yorkshire floods were remarkable for another reason. After the plight of the victims was ignored by the national media, one local MP dubbed Hull "the forgotten city". This was a tremendous coincidence, as many Grimbarians had already been calling it that for years.)
So two more matches with Morecambe stand in the way of Town's great surge upward from the depths. The Earth's tectonic plates, as we have seen, can make great lurching movements from one position to another, without warning and with potentially destructive consequences – much like the Mariners' form and confidence since the return of Alan Buckley.
One expert has suggested that this week's tremor resulted from "the reactivation of an old fault zone which has lain dormant for tens or hundreds of millions of years".
This is close to the truth, as the fault zone has indeed lain dormant, but only for ten years – and it runs straight through Grimsby. On one side of it is a very recently created upward motion caused by the powerful resurgence of the local football club. On the other are billions of tonnes of overwhelming downward pressure exerted by the irresistible natural force of local pessimism.
Labels: buckley, earthquakes, flooding, football league trophy, hull, morecambe, optimism, pessimism, science, west midlands, yorkshire
Friday, 22 February 2008
Sifting through the wreckage
Wherever things go wrong most of the time, people will always try to explain why, in many imaginative ways. Disasters at Blundell Park are variously attributed to the five-man midfield, the twelve-month year, European fishing quotas, decimal coinage, or Danny Boshell, Paul Bolland and Austin Mitchell all being natives of West Yorkshire.
The explanations can be similarly interesting when our industries and public services suffer, as they often do, the equivalent of one of Town's devastating double relegations.
True, explanation sometimes matters less than retaliation, and when I pay £1.70 to ride two and a bit miles on a bus running 15 minutes late on empty roads, I just spend the journey dreaming up innovative tortures for the bus company's chief executive.
But there is a compelling theory that people are 'promoted to their level of incompetence'. This means that if you're good at your job, you're given a more demanding job, and if you're good at that then you get one that's harder still, and so on until you reach a job you're absolutely hopeless at.
Then you don't get promoted any more – you just keep doing the job badly, and eventually the administrators are auctioning your PC from under your nose and the Government is taking you into temporary public ownership to stop the banking system collapsing and taking the whole of Western civilisation with it.
Superficially, football seems immune to this vulnerability. If a player is promoted from the youth team to the reserves and finally the first team, but is then found wanting, the manager can just drop him or sell him on.
Likewise, a coach who rises through the ranks but then doesn't really cut it as the first team manager can easily be sacked by the chairman. If he's lucky, like Graham Rodger, he might get his old job back, lower down the hierarchy. And ideally the chairmen of First and Stagecoach would be redeployed cleaning discarded bubblegum off the seats.
But a player can't be dropped if no replacement is available. Town's opponents tomorrow, Wrexham, recently lost six games on the trot, conceding 14 goals, then put Gavin Ward in goal to replace Anthony Williams. When Williams played for us, our opponents scored more or less every time they shot low to his left, but he kept his place all season because Town's only other goalkeeper was too busy revising for his mock GCSEs.
And ultimate responsibility for the performance of a club over time lies with the chairman and the board. If they have risen to their 'level of incompetence' (not that I'm suggesting this is the case at GTFC!) then there's nothing much you can do. When disgruntled fans sing "sack the board", the obvious question is "how, exactly?"
The explanations can be similarly interesting when our industries and public services suffer, as they often do, the equivalent of one of Town's devastating double relegations.
True, explanation sometimes matters less than retaliation, and when I pay £1.70 to ride two and a bit miles on a bus running 15 minutes late on empty roads, I just spend the journey dreaming up innovative tortures for the bus company's chief executive.
But there is a compelling theory that people are 'promoted to their level of incompetence'. This means that if you're good at your job, you're given a more demanding job, and if you're good at that then you get one that's harder still, and so on until you reach a job you're absolutely hopeless at.
Then you don't get promoted any more – you just keep doing the job badly, and eventually the administrators are auctioning your PC from under your nose and the Government is taking you into temporary public ownership to stop the banking system collapsing and taking the whole of Western civilisation with it.
Superficially, football seems immune to this vulnerability. If a player is promoted from the youth team to the reserves and finally the first team, but is then found wanting, the manager can just drop him or sell him on.
Likewise, a coach who rises through the ranks but then doesn't really cut it as the first team manager can easily be sacked by the chairman. If he's lucky, like Graham Rodger, he might get his old job back, lower down the hierarchy. And ideally the chairmen of First and Stagecoach would be redeployed cleaning discarded bubblegum off the seats.
But a player can't be dropped if no replacement is available. Town's opponents tomorrow, Wrexham, recently lost six games on the trot, conceding 14 goals, then put Gavin Ward in goal to replace Anthony Williams. When Williams played for us, our opponents scored more or less every time they shot low to his left, but he kept his place all season because Town's only other goalkeeper was too busy revising for his mock GCSEs.
And ultimate responsibility for the performance of a club over time lies with the chairman and the board. If they have risen to their 'level of incompetence' (not that I'm suggesting this is the case at GTFC!) then there's nothing much you can do. When disgruntled fans sing "sack the board", the obvious question is "how, exactly?"
Labels: blame, buses, business, failure, incompetence, relegation, rodger, williams, wrexham, yorkshire
Saturday, 3 November 2007
You're not bothered any more
Last season I was at Rotherham to report on their match against Forest. It was a 1-1 draw and a fine match, really enjoyable for the neutral fan. There was a great atmosphere too, with a lot of 'banter' between the two sets of fans. I just didn't expect that most of it would be based around an industrial dispute that took place more than 20 years ago.
Younger readers may be surprised to learn that many British people were quite recently prepared to fight against injustice rather than just shrug and say "whatever" and put Strictly Come Dancing on. They may be equally surprised to learn that many British jobs quite recently involved things like digging coal out of the ground, rather than making PowerPoint presentations about leveraging your envisioned outshoring gains to facilitate the delivery of excellence.
So in 1984, when the Government announced plans to sack 20,000 miners, they went on strike. The strike was not widely observed in Nottinghamshire, though, and the bitterness this caused in neighbouring Yorkshire persists to this day, to the extent that Forest fans were being denounced as "scabs" last season by thousands of Rotherham supporters – some of whom wouldn't have been alive while the strike was on.
Perhaps this demonstrates that the young people of South Yorkshire have an admirable awareness of their local socio-economic history that is all too rare in these days of globalised consumer culture. Perhaps, on the other hand, it just shows that they'll use any term of abuse they can lay their hands on.
And the great danger with taunting opposition fans about the collapse of their town's key industry is that it can cut both ways. When Barnsley employed Gudjon Thordarson as manager the other year, they were clearly still sore about Town fans singing "You're not mining any more" in the 1980s, and were subtly reminding us about being trounced by Iceland in the Cod Wars.
Either way, these taunts aren't quite so out-of-date as the Yorkshire Ripper songs that are still performed by a section of the Town support. Blundell Park is not notably populated by people listening to Bucks Fizz or wearing lemon yellow suit jackets with the sleeves rolled up, so there is no good reason to retain a chant that lost any relevance it might have had when Peter Sutcliffe was arrested in 1981.
Nor, of course, is it so morally dubious to berate another community for breaking ranks during an industrial dispute as to make fun out of their having suffered multiple murders. If you're going to abuse the other team's fans then try and do it in the spirit of working-class solidarity rather than by evoking the name of a local serial killer, that's what I always say.
Younger readers may be surprised to learn that many British people were quite recently prepared to fight against injustice rather than just shrug and say "whatever" and put Strictly Come Dancing on. They may be equally surprised to learn that many British jobs quite recently involved things like digging coal out of the ground, rather than making PowerPoint presentations about leveraging your envisioned outshoring gains to facilitate the delivery of excellence.
So in 1984, when the Government announced plans to sack 20,000 miners, they went on strike. The strike was not widely observed in Nottinghamshire, though, and the bitterness this caused in neighbouring Yorkshire persists to this day, to the extent that Forest fans were being denounced as "scabs" last season by thousands of Rotherham supporters – some of whom wouldn't have been alive while the strike was on.
Perhaps this demonstrates that the young people of South Yorkshire have an admirable awareness of their local socio-economic history that is all too rare in these days of globalised consumer culture. Perhaps, on the other hand, it just shows that they'll use any term of abuse they can lay their hands on.
And the great danger with taunting opposition fans about the collapse of their town's key industry is that it can cut both ways. When Barnsley employed Gudjon Thordarson as manager the other year, they were clearly still sore about Town fans singing "You're not mining any more" in the 1980s, and were subtly reminding us about being trounced by Iceland in the Cod Wars.
Either way, these taunts aren't quite so out-of-date as the Yorkshire Ripper songs that are still performed by a section of the Town support. Blundell Park is not notably populated by people listening to Bucks Fizz or wearing lemon yellow suit jackets with the sleeves rolled up, so there is no good reason to retain a chant that lost any relevance it might have had when Peter Sutcliffe was arrested in 1981.
Nor, of course, is it so morally dubious to berate another community for breaking ranks during an industrial dispute as to make fun out of their having suffered multiple murders. If you're going to abuse the other team's fans then try and do it in the spirit of working-class solidarity rather than by evoking the name of a local serial killer, that's what I always say.
Labels: banter, barnsley, fans, forest, history, industrial action, mining, rotherham, striking, work, yorkshire
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