La nina

Quick sketch in illustrator. Don't get to work much in colour these days. I like this because it's simple.

The game is growing up

A collective spluttering reverberated around the world at 21:35 Greenwich Mean Time, 28th May. It was the sound of culmination, a tipping point of sorts. But beyond anything else, it was the sound of every footyphile on the planet ejaculating at once. A suave young Spaniard hand-on-hipped and skinny-tied his way to victory over a fire breathing Scot. An enchanting aroma of youth and dedication was wafting through the world of football. We were definitely in what would be referred to in the future as an ‘era’. It was exciting.

Don’t worry, I will not be dissecting the Champions League final, or La Masia or the passes of Xavi. There’s enough of those articles to reach the moon, have a five-a-side and then reach back. What really affected me, and I have just seen the benefits of it recently, is the paradigm shift in the way football as a whole is consumed. It’s getting fresh and there is a pride in embracing new methods, whereas before they were sneered at as fruity contrivances that got in the way of slide tackles and being a man.

How does this newness affect the common fan and amateur player? Well I find it is now easier to locate training methods being used by top teams, we are more educated now than fans twenty years ago or even five years ago. Fitness is no longer a dull mystery. In the past if I had an astro league coming up and wanted to be fit for that type of exertion I would consult a website and see what was best for getting there. I found that methods varied wildly. So much so that I might have found myself on an empty pitch running backwards for four miles developing nothing but the ability to telepathetically avoid corner flags, if I had listened. Which I didn’t. Honest.

With the openess brought about by twitter I can now see what sprint patterns Phil Neville will be doing to get fit after a two week holiday. The fact that I know it was in Bermuda with Wayne Rooney and his new hair for company is just an added bonus. What the public can now do is ‘level jump’, a term usually used in business sectors. They can approach the very top tier of the food chain for coveted information so they don’t have to pay a sports fitness expert for specialist regimes.

When Barcelona won a second european title in three years last May they overcame the last great cynical hurdle. ‘It’s hard to win it once, but to win it again, there’s the challenge’ was the dour, boring line that people would wearily trot out whenever passing and then moving to recieve the ball in a different place was lauded. People who previously resisted were broken down. With the majority of opposition now onside it left the winds of changes free reign to bluster about.

It is now trendy to know your stuff tactically. Since football has been appropriated by the middleclasses, the people who used to like bands because nobody knew them now opt for youth players and obscure managers who nobody knows about. Football is the new snobbery and it has gone a bit indie. One thing is for sure, it is now trendy. A potent mixture of middle class youth and experience has been seeping into the game over the past few years. From Mourinho to Guardiola to Villas-Boas the game is getting younger, more educated and with this comes a sexy vibe.

From the first days of the Premier league, where the modern game was a toddler, through boisterous adolescence where money was thrown around like leaves in Autumn, to now when as a settled nineteen year old it looks to mature and learn in new ways, football has been evolving before our eyes at a rapid pace.

An interesting piece in the Guardian by Stuart James, treated us to a behind the scenes look at Wolves pre season preparations. What I found most interesting were the words of Mick McCarthy. He mused over the training methods that he was subjected to in his playing days. His squad would be sent off on a seven mile run and then question why they got cramp or blisters. Jody Craddock mentioned how he had been through a pre season where his team were handed over to the army for a boot camp.

Things are different now. Why run seven miles without stopping when you can run eight hundred metres three times with short rest intervals? If a centre back sprints a distance on average of only two hundred and fifty metres in a match, why train them to run the distances of an up and down winger? Personalisation and tailoring of training regimes are the order of the day. This in itself is not a drastic change. However the person who is in charge of it is.

As McCarthy says about his sports scientists ‘They know their stuff, they went to university to learn so I let them at it. When a builder comes into your house you don’t tell him how to do the job, you let him get on with it’. This attitude is commendable in a manager that would have come from the previous school of thinking. What is notable is how he openly admits that he does not possess the knowledge and delegates the task to his sport scientists. As important as delegation is in a multi facetted job such as football managing, it may be more beneficial to have a more familiar knowledge of the new technology.

This is where the new managers come in. Many of the recent famous names Moruinho, Benitez, Villas-Boas have third level education in the field of sports science. Mourinho had an extensive education and when he was young, helped his father who was a football manager himself. Benitez was a physical education teacher whose father managed a large hotel in Madrid, curiously this could give an insight into the strict and calculated way he organises his teams. It is nearly the stuff of legend already how young Villas-Boas started learning his trade by giving Bobby Robson match reports when he was barely into his teens. All three men were lucky to come from privileged backgrounds which of course is a massive factor in allowing them to reach their potential. Youth and education are seemingly sweeping the top jobs. The notion that you had to have been an accomplished player to be a manager has already being undermined by the success of Ariggo Sacchi with Milan in the early nineties.

With the proliferation of the new attitude the game is becoming a mesh of education and passion. Not only are managers affected, but fans too. Youth and exuberence are beginning to dominate. Being young and middleclass is sexy. Football is growing up.

The Future of Football

The big clubs were the first to go. Consumed from within due to fighting over money. Their histories left in tatters, rotting like leathery roadkill, baking in the heat of a summer sunset. Then the TV coverage went. With no football titans the crowds just stopped tuning in. Soon footballing civilisation fell away. Directors and owners were chased from the boardrooms and smashed into the tarmac with crudely fashioned weapons. Stadiums went into disrepair, inhabited by massive tribes of lost supporters, closed off to followers of other teams. As the big teams were now gone, they were resurrected by passionate fans, their storied histories kept alive by drip feed. Rough, savage leagues sprang up providing a home for the recently jobless footballers. They now played for pride, not obscene amounts of money. There was the next match, the hunger for success, the primal scream of the fans, that was all. As football spectactularly imploded sending flaming debris settling upon all and sundry, it somehow scrabbled its shabby pride from the dirt, dusted it off and got on with being something that was admirable again.

Mean Faces looking back from the stands.

Recently I had the pleasure to visit the Indonesian island of Bali. Upon landing in Denpasar airport, I headed for the toilets. Situated right above the urinals was a fish tank. Living there were some bored looking fish. As I took care of business my eyes met with one fish that was nearly motionless. It was, it seemed, looking straight at my penis. After eyeballing it for a while I recalled an article I had read recently that dashed the well known fact that fish have a three second memory. To hell with all that pompous talk of time-lapse memory, they were fully functioning.

As I washed my hands, another man had stepped up and was using the same urinal I had. I glanced over at the fish as I scrubbed. It was in the same place; just staring vacantly at this guys willy. Jesus, I thought, how many willies has this fish seen?

Seeing as airports are open for business at all hours and fish don’t generally take long naps, that amounted to a lot of willies. Doing a quick calculation I estimated that if seven men (a conservative estimate in my opinion) used that urinal every hour on average then that amounted to one thousand, one hundred and seventy six willies seen in one week alone. The annual visual intake of willies that this fish has is staggering; sixty one thousand, one hundred and fifty two willies. Colossal.

How does all this gratuitous talk of willies amount to anything remotely related to football? Well I got to thinking of how seeing this much willies would affect this fish. How would the result manifest itself? I was stumped, how could I figure that out? I’d need an aquatic Sigmund Freud on hand and that was a ridiculous hope. So I began idly trying to make a connection between this fish and its abundance of willy watching to something in a more regular domain of life that I could relate to.

Then it hit me; professional footballers seeing an unnatural amount of faces screwed up into a complete and proud hatred, screaming abuse at them for ninety minutes every match day. How would that manifest itself? Answers on a postcard please (or in the comments, I don't mind).

Let's embrace the beauty of Wayne Rooney (even if it is a thing of pure unadultered fiction)

Park Ji Sungs effort ridden face grimaced at me from the large Singha Beer advertisement on Bangla Road, Phuket, Thailand. Squeezed down in the corner where they’d usually, pardon the pun, park Park or Darren Fletcher not doing keepy ups, was roaring Scouse lad, Wayne Rooney, and Portugese ballerina, Nani.

As I stood gaping back at Park, resplendant in his rare moment of centre stage, a creaky old man trundled by with a possible Thai popstar for an escort. If the smell of stale cigar smoke encrusted on caviar that went to Oxford on Daddys money could be personified in a smug expression, then this geezer was wearing it across his whole face, and possibly some of the side of his head. He noticed the beer advert and acknowledged Park in a way that said ‘let’s enjoy it while we can buddy’.

The view most accessible of Thailand from the Western world is this type of opportunism. A dirty old fella being allowed dabble in the carnal activities of a fabulous young woman and Park Ji Sung given centre stage over Wayne Rooney in advertisements. It hit something home. A realisation blossomed inside me. It had been ready to bloom for sometime but being a Liverpool fan I had maybe (definitely) ignored it. Gazing at Waynes wee face, squashed down in the corner of that advertisement made me realise how much people comment on his looks. Maybe, just maybe, thats why he feels the need to scream fuck off into a television camera when he scores a goal?

Recognition of his prodigious talent is so widespread it may have left people feeling they can freely admonish his face. I feel it may be time for football fans to embrace the beauty of Wayne Rooney. He may not float everyones boat and is quite possibly an avatar sent by the gods of excess and arrogance to show us the way to ruin, but he still has feelings and while he is fair game for his many and horrendous sexual adventures that are needlessly played out in the public domain, his looks are not his choice. Judge people on their choices, not on what they are born with.

Of course we the public need to identify a negative trait in our idols to grossly exaggerate and it’s interesting to cast an eye back over what we chose for each player. David Beckhams trendsetting and model good looks led to the notion he wasn’t in ownership of more than one functioning brain cell. He seemed to do alright for himself capitalising on his marketable image. Cristiano Ronaldos name is synonymous with vanity, (or another old reliable; he looks like a ladyboy). Steven Gerrard is known to be paranoid. Roy Keane was a thug. Gary Neville a much hyped parody of himself.

But where do we find this trait for Leo Messi? What aspect of his personality gives us the reassurance that he is infact human? Can a streak in him be found that tarnishes some of the pure unadultered joy of watching him so wholly implement his vision of what he wants to do with a football upon game after game after game?

I for one hope not.