First race at Chester Racecourse‘s prestigious May meeting this afternoon is the Fat Gary Sports Earl Grosvenor Handicap. I’m just glad I’m not the chap who has to break this news to his lordship.
Did it not occur to anyone, at either Chester Racecourse or, for that matter, Fat Gary Sports, that this may just be the biggest car crash of a sponsored race title all season?
Or does the jingling of coins really trump absolutely everything these days?
Ibrox, home of Rangers Football Club. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There are people far more qualified than me to explain the mess in which Glasgow Rangers’ finances currently find themselves. One aspect of the fall-out from the Scottish FA’s damning verdict on the club last week, however, is worthy of note.
It concerns the man many hold out as the villain of the piece, Rangers’ owner and “keen supporter” Craig Whyte, who was banned for life from Scottish football and hit with four fines totalling £200,000, for bringing the game into disrepute and failing to follow Association orders.
Now even if one were to put the most positive spin on Whyte’s tenure at Ibrox and concede that he inherited a fiscal time bomb not of his making and simply found it too complex to defuse, I believe Rangers’ fans would still be entitled to expect certain things of him. This is a man, after all, who said when completing his purchase last year:
“Rangers is a great club with a great future. It has the best supporters in the world and I will do everything possible to protect and enhance the club’s standing going forward…The guiding principle from the outset has been to get the right deal for Rangers.”
So a degree of solemn reflection in light of the Scottish FA’s decision might be expected, surely? An appreciation that cheap point-scoring was best left to another time, out of sensitivity to fans who feared their world was falling apart.
And also a little humility, perhaps, given how guilt wells up in even the most blameless of decent men when calamity occurs on their watch.
What Rangers’ fans got, however, was this:
“Moments after the SFA announced the panel’s findings late last night, Whyte told Press Association Sport: “Tell me how it is going to affect me? I couldn’t care less.
“It makes no difference to my life whatsoever – and good luck collecting the money. It’s a joke.” – RTE Sport
Say this for Craig Whyte: if he does nothing else for the game, the dismissive, toe-curling callousness of that line has surely revealed to all but the most hopeless dullard the true nature of the new money that now controls too many of our professional football clubs.
These are not “keen supporters” the way you and I understand the term. Their enthusiasm, I suspect, tends to last only until an accountant’s spreadsheet suggests that their support might be more keenly applied elsewhere.
Glasgow Rangers might consider themselves well shot of Craig Whyte. Sadly for football in general, I fear there are plenty more where he came from, all of them, I’m sure, adamant that their guiding principle is to get the right deal for “the best supporters in the world”.
The Stanley Cup is awarded to the NHL champion. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Don’t close the lid on that ‘special relationship’ coffin just yet. It seems there is still stuff that unites John Bull and Uncle Sam after all.
The publication of the kind of NHL standings that the league office would probably rather keep mum about, ranks all 30 NHL hockey arenas in the order of their beer prices.
At current conversion rates (all prices are apparently in $US) that makes top whack £6.16 a beer and bargain basement £3.87. Note that a UK pint is equal to around 19.2 US ounces.
From this not so much mouth-watering as eye-watering display of profiteering pricing strategies, it would appear that English Premier League football fans can take heart.
Their North American cousins are being every bit as royally screwed as they are.
Cheers!
Excuse the cynic in me but there’s a reason I roll my eyes whenever football fans in the UK talk about ‘having a dialogue’ with their club or with the game’s administrators whenever there are rumblings of discontent. I’ve watched the way businessmen operate for so long that I can’t hear the term ‘fan forum’ without the phrase ‘peeing in the wind’ passing through my mind.
You really want to make a difference in the game you love? Then you have to take the one step of which too many fans seem scared.
You have to stay away.
Yes, I know it’s your club and you’re proud of that loyalty that goes above and beyond what its proprietors often deserve but you need to know that those people dance to one tune only. The bottom line.
Across the Atlantic, this man gets it. It won’t be the thinly-veiled scorn of his reply to a season ticket demand that registers with his beloved Cleveland Browns, magnificent though that is, it will be the sting in the tail. Withholding money.
Ten thousand other fans do likewise and suddenly it’s the Browns who’ll be wanting ‘a dialogue’ and at the earliest possible opportunity.
Thanks to Jay Flemma for the tip-off. Now watch and learn, people. Or nothing ever changes…
I had to look twice, just to make sure they’d got the right Ferguson:
“From the referee’s position, I can see why he didn’t give a penalty when Danny Murphy was brought down…It was a good claim but City could have had a penalty against them at Stoke for a foul by Gareth Barry. Every club gets breaks here and there, you get good ones and bad ones. It evens itself out over the season, that will never change.“
But no, incredible as it may seem, that was Sir Alex Ferguson talking, as reported in the Guardian. It had to be, unless the BBC had been duped by the same imposter:
“It evens itself out over a season and that will never change,” said Ferguson. “You get breaks here and there. Every club gets good breaks, bad breaks.”
Right, so all those ad nauseam rants about referees not up to the job, all those puce-faced tirades about decisions that could make or break your season, all that foaming-at-the-mouth about so-and-so having it in for Manchester Utd (and the thinly-veiled intimidation of the referee appointment system thereby entailed) all that was for nothing, then, Sir Alex?
For over two decades, you’ve given us Victor Meldrew with bells on when all along, you bought into what baseball writer Roger Angell wrote many years ago: “…luck is inescapable and professionals know that in order to win, you must dominate the game to the point where it is no longer a factor.”
I don’t know when the Manager of Year award gets handed out but the Hypocrite of the Season title can, I think, now be safely bestowed.
Assuming it wasn’t all part of some reality TV stunt, which can never be ruled out these days, we must take at face
value Mario Balotelli’s bizarre interruption of an Inter Milan press conference last week.
Some of us must, at any rate.
Not so a number of mainstream media outlets, who slipped quietly into apologist mode when reporting how the Manchester City striker walked into a room at his old club, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Italians were formally unveiling their new coach to the media.
In the eyes of the UK press, it was merely the latest manifestation of eccentricity by the 21-year-old, whose colourful resume is in danger of making the young Paul Gascoigne seem almost grounded in comparison. ‘Madcap’, ‘erratic but inspired’, ‘unpredictable antics’, ‘bizarre’, ‘bonkers’ – journalists everywhere reached for their euphemism of choice.
Maybe without realising it, however, it was The Week that nailed it – “He seemed unconcerned by the furore he had created.”
There you have it. The money quote. A grown man so wrapped up in himself and oblivious to others that all that matters in that moment is what he wants, as amiable as that might be. Mario wants to say ‘hi’ so everything else must be put on hold.
This wasn’t eccentricity; this was rudeness bordering on ignorance and Andrea Stramaccioni’s visible irritation was fully justified. This was the kind of boorishness, what’s more, that fuels the sneers that arise in polite conversation whenever professional footballers are mentioned and I happen to think those low-maintenance, hard-working pros who never let anyone down deserve rather better.
I want to like Mario Balotelli. Goodness knows, the clinical world of professional sport is crying out for mavericks more than ever. The Italian has to learn, however, that the difference between the maverick and the pain in the rear is self-awareness. The loveable maverick never loses sight of the fact that it’s not all about him. The generosity of which Balotelli is reportedly capable needs to be extended from his wallet to his manners and I’m sure Manchester traffic wardens stand shoulder to shoulder with me on this.
But then every cloud has a silver lining and it would be churlish of me not to mention it here. This time last week I thought Britain had a glum monopoly where graceless footballers were concerned. This week, I know differently.
What a bizarre comment by racehorse owner Khalifa Dasmal in the wake of his colt Dream Ahead’s win in the Qatar Prix de la Foret in Paris last weekend.
“I believe the plan is now to retire him. If he raced next year, he would just be winning the same races he won this year.”
Well of course he would: that’s how sport works; with a series of annual renewals that builds tradition and history. I’m trying to think of a sport that produces a completely different set of challenges every year but I’m afraid I’m struggling.
Imagine if everyone had the same attitude to such humdrum routine as Mr Dasmal. Tiger Woods would have retired a decade ago with one of each Major title to his name and Red Rum would have been booed across the Aintree finishing line in 1977, his audience resentful of the fact that it had seen that particular party piece twice already. As for Sir Alex Ferguson: 12 Premiership titles? The poor bloke must be bored out of his mind.
I think Dream Ahead’s owner is being a little bit cute here, hitting upon a silly euphemism with which to mask the same old, same old where the Sport of Kings’ summer code is concerned.
Top-drawer Flat horses retire because their owners feel they have hit the perfect sweet spot between winning enough races to boost their stud value and not losing enough races to prejudice it. Hence, the reign of too many great Flat stallions lasts about as long as a pint of milk: you bunk up their marketability and then retire them pronto – often in the same season – so that they may embark upon an equally lucrative career making babies.
That’s the real reason Dream Ahead may have galloped in anger for the final time. Having several more cracks at winning “the same races he won this year” could possibly make him a legend. Avoiding defeat, however, definitely makes his owners a fortune.
There’s the rub.
Image via Wikipedia
Martin Samuel’s Daily Mail column on ‘plastic Brits’ in the Olympics athletics squad doesn’t exactly cover new ground (not that the validity of his point is diminished by that) but it does at least introduce a fresh opinion on the topic that suddenly had my undivided attention.
Samuels references an interview with England rugby coach Martin Johnson (right) in The Independent last month and it’s safe to say that had Johnson handled a ball in his playing career as surely as he handles the basic concept of international sport, he’d still be picking the splinters out of his rear end after all that time on the bench.
“If we think they’re the right characters and the right people then they can play…It’s what you do and who you are,” he opines, “not particularly where you’re born.” Those who feel otherwise are apparently guilty of “Little England philosophy”.
I leave it to Martin Samuels to point out the loopholes in this dazzling rhetoric. Let me just say that I’ve always had my reservations about the way in which Johnson has been presented as a hybrid of Churchill and Chuck Norris ever since he lifted the World Cup as England captain, and the Independent interview only confirms them.
His brawn is beyond reproach: it’s the other half of the deal where my doubts arise.
Image via Wikipedia
Not a great day at the office for The Guardian‘s Paul Hayward, who believes the cross-city move of Birmingham City manager Alex McLeish to hated rivals Aston Villa should have met with little more than raised eyebrows from either side of the Second City.
And in a passionless, clinical corporate environment, much of what he says would make sense. But this is football and sportswriters like Hayward, who would be the first to bleat about the game losing its passion if they thought it would fill a column, should realise that tribalism, lazy or otherwise, is the inevitable flipside of such passion. It fills stadia, sells merchandise and guarantees football writers work.
Alex McLeish moving from Birmingham City to Aston Villa is indeed neither illegal nor immoral. Alex McLeish leaving Birmingham City because he feared he might be on one of those unspoken win-your-first-five-games-or-you’re-out deals at St Andrews next season, is understandable.
Alex McLeish presiding over the relegation of Birmingham City and then moving to Aston Villa, however, is tactless and insensitive and demonstrates that the insular cluelessness of many footballers does not end when they hang up their boots.
This is a man who managed a club in Glasgow, for goodness’ sake. Did he learn nothing?
Has he even considered how much weight his words will carry next time he’s exhorting his charges in a relegation battle to show some commitment to the cause?
And has he made sure he’s being paid enough by his new club to make worthwhile the risk of becoming one of the game’s great trivia questions: who was the last manager to take two clubs in the same city down in consecutive seasons?
It sounds to me like money has spoken and status has trumped all other considerations. If Paul Hayward seriously thinks that this should be met with a mere sigh by football followers then I would suggest that when next season comes around, he covers the occasional game from the stands, instead of the press room. He is beginning to lose touch with both his subject and his audience.
So Osama reaches the pearly gates, to find Sir Henry Cooper waiting for him.
Don’t you tell me there’s no evidence for design.
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