Macular Degenerate or Is Arséne Wenger Legally Blind?

Arsenal coach Arséne Wenger takes a loss to Manchester United badly!

Many of you don’t like Arséne Wenger. Being the big-hearted, forbearing person that I am, and admiring his dexterity with the English language, which is far superior to my own, although I can’t say I ‘like’ him, I can definitely say I admire Wenger's gift for making Arsenal into the greatest Selling Club in the world. There’s that and his rigid adherence to a fast, pretty, short-passing mechanized style of play that reminds everybody of the style he taught the guys who make FIFA Soccer for PlayStation and XBox360. Until Arséne, the notion of ‘walking the ball into the net’ was a joke. Now it’s taken seriously. No one can walk the ball into the net with the same willful panache as Arséne’s Arsenal artistes.

Fluent in five languages, Wenger is a man who insists he has "no other hobbies." Perhaps a vacation may be due. During the two press conferences before the game on Saturday, August 29 against Manchester United, the Arsenal boss twice alluded to a E.U.F.A. 'Witch-hunt' after his striker, Eduardo, was charged with diving during a Champions League victory over Glasgow Celtic and was, subsequently, suspended from two E.C.C. games.

"I find it a complete disgrace and unacceptable," the Alsatian barked. "It singles out a player to be a cheat and that is not acceptable. I believe you can debate whether it is a penalty or not, but this charge implies there was intent and a desire to cheat the referee. Having seen the pictures again, nothing is conclusive. It is a Witch-hunt."

By 'pictures', I believe Wenger means that he looked again and again at the same video most of the rest of us saw. If Eduardo, who made no contact with any other player before throwing himself to the ground as if a bullet had felled him, was moved by some divine force of nature, only his coach knows exactly where this force comes from. One is certainly left bamboozled enough by what Wenger actually saw to wonder if the F.A. might, instead of insulting Wenger with the aforementioned suggestion that he ought to take a break, simply send him on a trip to the optometrist's office.

Beaten on Saturday by a disappointingly anemic Manchester United side, despite the predictions of a preponderance of opinion among the pundits, ex-players and the press, Wenger was too big a man to claim that the linesman was wrong when he called Robin Van Persie’s last second goal offside. Instead, Arséne went on a rant about Manchester United playing 'anti-football.' Wenger also babbled out various bellicose insults in the direction of referee Mike Dean for letting United "repeatedly foul" his side.

"I have seen a player make 20 fouls without getting a yellow card. You don't need me to tell you who, but their player gets away without a yellow card. It's quite amazing," stormed Wenger. When someone in the press corps mentioned that his players had received six yellow cards of their own versus United's three, Wenger moved on to a new questioner. In truth, it's the usual case of Wengeresque deja vu again. Indeed, after a very similar 2-0 defeat at Old Trafford in 2004, his players having been issued nine yellow cards and an F.A. fine, Wenger's only defense was to attack the referee and to try to steer the discussion in a new direction. Martin Samuel and Kevin McKenna, two of Britain's more conscientious football reporters persisted with their questioning about the Gooners' predilection for petty fouls, but, in each stated example, Wenger insisted he hadn't seen any of them. Not a one.

"How is it you expect me to comment on something I clearly did not see," he insisted with a Gallic shrug

Darren Fletcher's "20 fouls" having gone unpunished, Wenger used this excuse of "persistent fouls" against his pure, naïve charges to twist the argument around toward the new subject of diving. This after E.U.F.A.'s decision to ban his star striker Eduardo from two games after he was caught diving and then simulating an injury by the referee in a Champions League win over Glasgow Celtic on the previous Wednesday. Indeed, another Arsenal player, Emmanuel Eboue, was cautioned for diving against United, although, obviously, it goes without saying that Wenger insisted he had not seen it. Both United and Celtic, Wenger repeated, "directly targeted my players."

To be sure, Michael Carrick and Darren Fletcher were tackling Denilson, Eboue and Sagna hard and conceded a number of dangerous free kicks. These fouls were witnessed by Wenger. "I don't know (why they went unpunished). You should ask the referees. I don't know." To an unbiased eye, this kind of hard-tackling, no-quarter football is what the game is really all about. To Wenger, however, his macular faculties constantly being, as we say in England, "on the blink," contact in general and tackles against his players in particular, must genuinely seem crude and brutal.

For fairness' sake, I tried to find an entry on 'temporary blindness' in both the Yahoo Health Encyclopedia and on the web site of the American Optometric association. There was nothing. Anyone with vision worse than 20/200 which cannot be corrected with corrective lenses can be considered legally blind.

According to the A.O.A. "A legally blind person with vision of 20/200 has to be as close as 20 feet to identify objects that people with normal vision can spot from 200 feet. So a legally blind person needs a distance of two feet to spot the letters on a standard eye chart that is 20 feet away. Legal blindness is very common in older people because eyesight tends to worsen with time and age. Approximately 135 out of every 1,000 people over the age of 65 are considered legally blind. Only about 10% of legally blind people read Braille. A much smaller percentage use white canes or guide dogs."

Many of you will insist that I am biased or insane, but I honestly believe that Arséne Wenger is a macular degenerate. It's quite logical to believe that he's legally blind, or, at best for him, although not necessarily our beloved game, often—very often! —temporarily blind.

Cloughie Agonistes: The Greatest English Manager Finally Gets His Due

'The Damned United' by David Peace
Ivorismo Rating****

'Provided You Don't Kiss Me' by Duncan Hamilton
Ivorismo Rating***

'The Damned United'
Directed by Tom Hooper. W/Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall & Jim Broadbent
Ivorismo Rating**

Parkinson: You're a bit besotted tonight, aren't you,Cloughie?

Clough: Oh aye! Cheese and onion pie, meat pud, chips and a lot o' Boddies.

Freud: Ee-yuch! Disgusting! Your stomach is a wasteland.

Clough: I remember when there were no food on't' t' table, you big silly puff. I'll be as besotted wi' me own self as I want to be.

Parkinson:They do call you ol' big 'ead, don't they, Cloughie?

Clough: Oh aye! But I say, if tha've got it, flaunt it!

My long-term memory is pretty good. This previous conversation, although I may not be remembering it with any sense of absolute exactitude, took place on Granada's Mike Parkinson Show when I was home visiting Manchester in the summer of 1979. I never saw an odder group on the telly than that go-getter Manc journo host Parkinson, his musical guest, the squeaky-voiced jazz chanteuse, Blossom Dearie, Clement Freud, one of England's leading cultural critics, host of a witty cooking show and the absolute flaming progeny of Sigmund Freud, and, my favourite Englishman ever, Brian Clough. On this warm summer night, a fortnight or so after his Nottingham Forest club had won the European Cup for first time, Cloughie was in his pomp.

My Dad, another Mike, having betrayed my grandmother's Socialist memory by voting for Margaret Thatcher, was on a sort of mock-elitist guilt jag. The Sex Pistols were "Human Fecal Matter." Jeanette Winterson was a "Filthy Lesbian cow." Brian Clough, he insisted, always wearing that big rosy-cheeked grin, "always acting like he knows somet'' you don't," always disrespectful of the old guard of the game, wasn't a good coach. "He just got jammy twice!" silly old Mike said. This tirade only served to make me love the one and only Cloughie all the more.

Brian Clough died in 2004 as a result of decades of alcohol abuse. Irascible, truculent, snarky to the nth degree, possessing a dry, anarchic tinderbox sense of playful wit, viciously ambitious, dogged by an army of personal demons, with a personality shaped by the cruelty of childhood poverty and a personal playing career destroyed by injury, Brian Clough, like Robert Johnson before him, had a hell hound on his trail. Always self-promoting, always bragging, a regular guest on any late evening talk show willing to have him, Clough was like a character out of a late-1950s northern kitchen-sink, working-class novel by Alan Sillitoe or John Braine. He also, by the by, just happened to be able to coach top-flight football teams into giving reality to the nation's dreams.

The English love their game of football, but have produced only three successful managers in the modern game. The first two, Alf Ramsey and Bob Paisley, were referred to by Cloughie as 'Sir Alf Wank 'and 'Bobby Pisshouse.' The winning coach of two European Cup champions in 1979 and 1980, his Nottingham Forest team, populated with only British players, all of whom were purchased on the cheap or out of the club's academy, executed Cloughie's unique kind of exciting entertaining football. To be sure, the man only passed away five years ago, but Britain and football in general have undergone a complete renaissance since 1980. Televised all over the world, the English Premier League is a moneymaking machine dominated by foreign investors and players from all over the aforesaid world. This is not a bad thing, to be sure, but, in a post 9/11 world, many fans hark bark to simpler times. Clough looks great in retrospect. So much so, in fact, that they've erected statues of him outside the stadiums of his two best teams, Derby County and Nottingham Forest.

Along with the statues comes a mountain of hack biographies, a comically whitewashed, badly ghostwritten memoir and now even a movie. The only one of these pseudo-bios that reads really well is Duncan Hamilton's 'Provided You Don't Kiss Me.' At the same time, an exiled writer of thrillers, David Peace, has given Ol' Big 'Ead the starring role in what is absolutely the best football novel ever written. The fact is that Sports Fiction in general usually leaves me feeling nauseated after consumption. Books like 'The Legend of Bagger Vance,' 'Fat City,' 'Shoeless Joe,' 'The Natural,' 'The Dying of the Light,' 'Bang the Drum Slowly' and 'The Rise of Gerry Logan,' coat their characters in a thick sauce of clichéd syrupy sentimentality. Professional sports, however, is devoid of romance. It is a world populated more accurately by greedy, venal owners and equally greedy, vain, spoiled, hubris-ridden athletes and their agents. I can think of only one novel, David Storey's 'This Sporting Life' that deals in something resembling truth about professional sports. Storey's book is a classic of politicized Social Realism. The concept of the Angry Young Man at war with his social betters, still holds up well. Its harsh prose takes pride in its devout diligence toward plainness. By comparison, in 'The Damned United,' Peace has produced a master work that is muscular, sharp-witted and brilliant. His prose also allows for some moments of the deftest purple. No mean feat.

Which brings us back to Brian Clough. A World-Class striker for Sunderland F.C.--the scorer of 251 goals in 274 performances--he had his leg shattered at 26 by a vicious tackle. Already bumptious and shiningly charismatic, with a Mephistophilian chip on his shoulder, Clough, the abrasive one, paired himself with an easygoing tactician friend, Peter Taylor, and set about managing the only club who were willing to hire him, Fourth Division Hartlepool United. In two seasons, Clough had improved Hartlepool, who for more than 22 years had been anchored in the very basement of the league, to a spot at the top of the table. This was when Derby County came calling for him.

Clough took a mixed bag of mediocre players and way-over-the-hill small-time veterans, pruned away the no-hopers and forged them into a force to be reckoned with. Derby County were a small so-so competitive club with ambitious ownership when he took over in 1967. The rest is all legend. Building a team from scratch with a mixture of tough veterans and ambitious youth from other small town teams, Clough took Derby from the Second Division to the First within three seasons. After coming second to his nemesis, Don Revie of Leeds United in 1971, Clough led the team to the First Division championship in 1972. Constantly at odds with the Derby County board over his side-career as a T.V. pundit and the limits of a thrifty transfer budget, Clough began repeatedly agitating for a big job at one of the richer clubs like Manchester United or Spurs. Ultimately, inevitably fired for insubordination, Clough and Taylor agreed to coach at Second Division Brighton. It was then that Leeds United, a very rich club with a penchant for thriftiness, stepped in and made him successor to their coach, Don Revie, who took the England job after the firing of the aforementioned Alf Ramsey.

Hired by Leeds, Clough found himself suddenly in charge of the champions of England. His long time best friend and assistant, Peter Taylor, however, wanted no part of a move to Leeds and stayed at Brighton. Thus began Clough's short-lived sojourn at Leeds United. Only in charge for 44 days, Clough somehow managed to alienate everyone at the club and yet get them to pay off his contract. Free again, Clough was offered the job at perennial Division One also-rans, Nottingham Forest. After making up with Taylor, Clough led Forest to successive championships and two European Cups. Again, what made Clough remarkable while winning all these trophies, was his ability to locate cheap, talented lower division players and put them together with veterans who were past their best and win things. Only Bob Paisley had more success, but his was partially a result of his being part of a free-spending, ambitious club culture at Liverpool which was at odds by about a million miles from any situation Clough ever found himself in while coaching penny-pinching, low-budget obsessed clubs like Derby and Forest! Openly, wantonly jealous, Cloughie would say of Paisley and his free-spending Liverpool F.C.: "If I 'ad Bobby Piss'ouse's brass, my team would be more infallible than the bloody Pope!"

Peace's second 'serious' novel comes from a very different place to his previous work. The Red Riding Quartet' 'eventually grew out of his obsession with the Yorkshire Ripper case. In 2003, Peace was named 'Best Young British Novelist' by Granta magazine. His fifth novel, 'GB84', set amid the historic 1984 miners' strike, was published in 2005 to much critical acclaim. Peace’s sixth novel, 'The Damned United' (2006), focuses on the forty-four days Brian Clough spent battling the forces of evil at Leeds United F.C.. Like 'The Red Riding Quartet,' it reads like a thriller.

The novel is rendered as a first-person narrative by Clough about the disastrous 44 days in 1974 when he took on the manager’s job at Leeds United. After taking charge at the country’s most ruthlessly successful side, Cloughie found himself at odds with an organization and a bureaucracy put in place by his predecessor, Don Revie. Imagined from the inside, Clough’s battles with intransigent players, an interfering chairman, a Uriah Heapish board of directors and the soul-destroying unpredictability of the game itself, develops an odd poignancy that echoes beyond the boundaries of sport, or the usual first-person monologue clichés. At one point, journeying to a match on the outcome of which his job may depend, he reflects how, “Saturday comes again, welcome or not, it comes again like it always does, welcome or not, wanted or not, another judgment day — The chance to be saved, the chance to be damned.”

That sentence, typical of the incantatory rhythms and repetitions of Peace’s prose, sums up the weekly trial by football that Clough faces. Success or failure, justification or damnation, always hang agonizingly in the balance. A football manager may seem an unlikely sort of tragic antihero, but Peace’s eccentrically idiosyncratic imagination transforms Clough into something close to one. At the same time, Peace's deft use of the first-person monologue allows the reader a window into the peculiarly British obsession with class betrayal. The men who make up the boards of the football clubs Clough manages are self-made, bootstrap, mini-oligarchs used to using intimidation and a check book as a means to an end. All their bad behavior gets them when they attempt to bully Clough, however, is reprisals. As a committed Socialist, or so Cloughie insists, these men are not the kind of Tory Old Boy network it's easy to hate. They are worse. They are class traitors: Working Class men who have abandoned their roots. Indeed, Clough wastes no time in telling them this. He also goes on talk shows and tells the people, the fans, that the owners and certain players are a poison rotting the game from within with their relentless greed for cash and victory. Brian Clough takes no prisoners and makes no new friends.

Clough wins, but in his own unique way. He gets rid of players he doesn't want. He buys the players he wants, athletes who are a part of his unhidden agenda.

"Where is the consultation? Where is the conversation? The respect and the trust?" the Chairman of Derby County's board of directors wants to know.

"There wasn't the time," you lie. "There were other clubs knocking."

Thus, ultimately, Brian Clough manages to get himself fired at Derby, and moves reticently with Peter to Brighton; but, just can't take a return to third division mediocrity. Once Leeds United offer him the job, Cloughie has to take it. He may not actually like anything about Leeds United, but they are champions and have lots of money that he can spend. Working his anarchy from within the belly of the fatted beast appeals to him. Clough may have passed himself off as a committed socialist, but Peace's creation is a committed, ruthless anarchist if and when it suits.

Like a missionary, Clough wants to win, but in an entertaining, extraordinary way. One that goes against the Leeds United penchant for winning ugly. Most fans for other teams like the entertainment provided by crafty dribbling and ball-handling. Leeds United fans, however, genuinely love thuggery. A cynical, winning team for a cynical group of fans. Yet Cloughie will not compromise with any of them. They will do it his way. "The lads won't like it," a trainer tells him. "They don't like change. They like consistency."

"Tough fucking shit then," I tell him and head inside the place to the deserted, silent restaurant; deserted but for the first-team, sat staring into their tomato soup, waiting for their steak and chips."

In no time, the players, the fans and the board all despise him. "Leeds United hate Brian Clough. Brian Clough hates Leeds United. Dirty Leeds. Dirty, fucking, cheating Leeds. Don Revie’s Leeds. The cheating fucking Champions. Leeds United, the country's most hated club. Dirty Leeds. Dirty, fucking, filthy Leeds! They didn’t win it! They stole it! Pour another drink. Light another fag."

Peace delivers words and sentences which resonate and syncopate into lovely rhythmic little codas. Like the voice of the people forming a chill echo outside a cold, deserted Leeds' Elland Road stadium. Chop! Chop! In and out of italics, down that corridor, past those trophies, down them stairs, cutting between Clough’s glory at Derby and his damnation at Leeds, 'The Damned United' bobs and weaves, the minstrel telling his tale of spite, jealousy, camaraderie and recrimination. Twelve years of dues-paying and success are spoiled by forty-four days of Job-like, partially self-inflicted misery. Bereft of his erstwhile best-buddy, shotgun-rider, right-hand straight-man and scapegoat, Peter Taylor, Cloughie is on his own at Elland Road and the hair shirt he wears is of his very own design.

But Cloughie’s not listening. Down the corridor. Round the corner. Down the stairs. Cloughie has plenty of suggestions as to where they can stick said advice. Down the corridor. Round the corner. Down the stairs. Cloughie doesn’t believe in God. Up the stairs. Round the corner. Down that corridor. Cloughie doesn’t believe in luck. Pour another drink. Light another fag. Cloughie doesn’t believe in professional fouls, pressurizing the referee, diving, time wasting, getting people sent off, dossiers, tactics or strategy! Cloughie doesn’t believe in Don fucking Revie. He wants to burn his desk, his chair . . . his fucking legacy. Pour another drink. Light another fag.

Consequently, short of dragging you to the book store, let me unequivocally announce that 'The Damned United' is not only the greatest novel ever written about football, it is the best book ever written about sports ever! 'The Damned United' throws reality and fiction into a blender, transmogrifies the accepted truth, hits a shot on the volley past a diving goalkeeper into the back of the net. Yes, please: Pour another drink. Light another fag.

In Duncan Hamilton's 'Provided You Don't Kiss Me', you'll find a nice nonfiction companion piece. Mostly concerned with what happened after the years at Derby and Leeds, Hamilton avoids the usual pitfalls of what I'll call hackiography. Still, lovers of abstract truth may not want to sway this way. Often this biography is one which makes Cloughie's irascibility seem somehow cute. It is the one which got the blessing of Clough's wife and kids Yes, it says, he was known to drink on duty, punch employees, generically referred to journalists as "shithouses", and extemporaneously produced brilliant epigraphs and one-liners, not to mention the rumours that he took a bung(bribe) whenever club transfers took place. No matter. Cloughie got results.

Playing the Boswell role we get Duncan Hamilton, once a teenage reporter on the Nottingham Evening Post, thrust into 20 years of what he calls "spurious intimacy" with the Nottingham Forest manager. During their first meeting, Clough insists they drink Scotch at 9.30 a.m. Later, having written that Forest's morale is low, Hamilton is paraded before the team and screamed at by Clough: "You're banned for ever from this ground. For ever!" Two days later, Clough calls him back: "Where are you, shithouse? I've got a story for you. Fancy a glass of champagne?" All can be forgiven, but no sleight will remain forgotten. Slowly, Clough becomes "like me Dad" to Duncan. Indeed, on hearing the young man stammer, Clough offers to phone him every day for a fortnight to help cure it. Quite how this would help cure the young reporter's affliction Cloughie never explains, but it seems to be an act of kindness.

Strategically, Clough was always very unpredictable as a coach. He lived to ignore the most commonly used tactics. He liked to buy good players and come on in an artificially gentle way to them, like some gentle guru, shocking everybody's expectations. One day, Clough catches Hamilton reading Freud's 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.' Disgusted, he goes on a prima donna diatribe: "I don't need a boring book by Freud to show me how to do all that... it only takes seconds to change someone's outlook with a word or two."

Hamilton witnesses triumph as Forest win two European Cups on a budget. Unfortunately, by 1993, he is observing "the disintegration of a man as well as a team." It's good, although sad reading. Cloughie can't cope with the modern footballer. The announcement by one of his star players, Justin Fashanu, that he's gay absolutely freaks him out. Later, red-faced and inebriated, Cloughie is in a state of agony over whether or not to buy certain players. After agonizing over signing striker, Stan Collymore, for weeks, Cloughie ultimately loses him to Liverpool and then goes on a true bender.

Hamilton gave up football writing after Clough retired, rendered somewhat cynical and bitter by some of the worst aspects he'd witnessed of Clough and his acolytes. Yet, in 2004, when he hears of Clough's death, he weeps like a baby. In an obituary, Hamilton writes that "Clough the vaudevillian obscures Clough the master manager" and that the public ought to forgive his faults because he "cared about the spirit of football and the need to play the game stylishly and without cynicism."

One book is a masterpiece. The other is at least a fun read. So, I wonder, what would Clough think of these lives of Brian? "Not bad for a pair of shithouses!" I'm sure he would say.

Last, but not least, is 'The Damned United,' the film. The performance by Michael Sheen as Cloughie is interesting, but odd. Obviously, the poetry of the book is lost. And Brian Clough, a big, lumbering 5'11" Centre-Forward is rendered as a sort of slightly fey, rapid-fire comic who dabbles in football. To be sure, Sheen and Timothy Spall, who plays the gangling 6'2" Peter Taylor as a sort of short fat Falstaffian foil, are creditable. Clough is a much nicer person in the movie. There are certainly not too many "Shithouses" utilized, to be sure, as Clough becomes another larger-than-life real English 'character' up there with Winston Churchill, the Kray Brothers, Margaret Thatcher, Billy Bunter and Fred Karno. Sheen can at least pass, dribble and kick the ball about a bit. You can take the kids to this one, to be sure, but keep your expectations low.

Born Again: How the Deep-Lying Midfielder Position is Reviving Careers

In football, as it's played today, central midfielders have become the most important players on the pitch. Due to the growing importance of the transition game, the roving role of a post-to-post player demands competence in both defense and attack. Finding the right player, however, is difficult. The position demands an innate intelligence. The ability to improvise and shift on the fly. Caught out of position, a central midfielder can leave the defense open and vulnerable to quick counterattacks. Marooned at the back, often in position to fill in holes left by marauding full backs or wingers charging into midfield, they may also leave the striker(s) isolated if they can't move up the pitch in support. Consequently, knowing how to utilize a central midfielder is absolutely the key tactical decision a manager has to make.

The phenomenon of our times is the notion of a deep–lying play maker. One who sits deep in a pocket in front of the defensive line, using a virtuoso's quiver full of long and short-range arrows. Attacks and counterattacks are begun using a wide range of passes. Historically, a deeper midfielder had been what, in the late 60s and early 70s, was known as a 'sweeper,' a hard man, an enforcer. Someone capable of thuggery, mayhem and gamesmanship, but also blessed with the ability to tackle like a ton of bricks. Beyond protecting the defense, and breaking up plays, his job usually stopped at passing the ball to more creative players around him. Theoretically, at least, this type of player needn't be the best natural footballer. All that was necessary was a good sense of tactical discipline, brute strength and tackling ruthlessness.

A deep-lying play maker, however, has no particular need for brawn. Coaches who use a deep-lying play makers are generally absorbed in playing possession football. Atypically, instead of utilizing the long kick, the goalie rolls the ball to a defender, who, in turn, passes to the play maker sitting just in front and sets the attack in motion. Andrea Pirlo and Michael Carrick are the finest examples of deep-lying play makers currently in the game. No disrespect is meant toward Claude Makalele, once the absolute epitome of said job description; unfortunately, he is now three seasons past his best, although still strutting his stuff with Paris S.G.

Pirlo began with a small club, Brescia, before moving to Internatzionale Milano. At Inter he played a more attack-minded role. The ideal at the time was that Pirlo, as an attacking midfielder, be capable of both working on the wing and inside. He'd be fed by a sweeper, have a full panoramic take on the action in front of him, pass short and long balls and then run to slot in wherever a forward attacked, while, at the same time, he'd always be looking to make that single assassin's pass, the one which rips apart the opposition defense. Bought to connect with the defensive midfielder, Vladimir Jugovic, and enhance the attacking skills of Alvaro Recoba and Christian Vieri, Pirlo found himself at odds with the silky skills of the Uruguayan. Recoba has a lot of talent and a marvelous ability to hold on to the football. Unfortunately, his 'ball hog' style and an innate unwillingness to pass and share left Pirlo lost.

Sold to A.C. Milan, Pirlo found his dream coach in Carlo Ancelotti. A rapturous admirer of the little Congolese magpie, Claude Makalele, Ancelotti loved his minimalist, vanity-free style. Makalele won the ball with his quick feet, not savage tackling. He would hold the ball, assess a strategic situation and quickly fire off a killer pass. Ancelotti saw that Pirlo’s extensive passing skills would be well suited to a similar, deeper role and moved to play him further back in midfield next to Gennaro 'Rhino' Gattuso, the archetypal midfield enforcer. Thus Gattuso become Pirlo’s hard-core right-hand man. Rhino was all over the pitch while Pirlo probed, winning the ball, allowing the slightly-built Pirlo the freedom to work his magic.

Since his move to Milan, Pirlo has won one Scudetto, two Champions League titles, and, along with Rhino and a second tough customer, Daniele De Rossi, was instrumental in Italy’s 2006 World Cup triumph. It’s not hard to make a case for him as the best player in the world in the deep-lying role and it’s not surprising that there are rumours that Ancelotti would like to take Pirlo to Stamford Bridge, no matter what the cost. If Ancelotti gets the go-ahead from Chelsea's oil oligarch owner, Roman Abramowich, Pirlo is going to cost Chelsea at least £40M.

Michael Carrick came through the ranks of the old youth conveyor belt at West Ham United, alongside Joe Cole and Rio Ferdinand. He quickly gained a reputation for his long stride and accurate passing, earning himself a PFA Young Player of the Year nomination for the 2000/01 season. However, once the Hammers were relegated from the Premier League, Carrick decided he wanted a new club. Consequently, the Geordie kid, sold to Tottenham Hotspur, went through a renaissance under the tutelage of Coach Martin Jol and his staff. His talent, overshadowed at the Hammers by Joe Cole's flash bag of tricks, only needed a little nurturing to bloom. Very much instrumental in Spurs' finishing in fifth place in the 2005/06 season, Carrick's splendid passing displays caught the eye of Sir Alex Ferguson, who spent £18M on him in the summer of 2006. Ferguson, having never properly replaced the divine passing skills of David Beckham, long since sold to Real Madrid, felt he had finally obtained the missing link for his team to once again win the European Champions Cup. Fully matured for the 2007/06 season, Carrick's radar passing dissected the likes of A.S. Roma, Olympique Lyonnais, Villareal and Barcelona on the way to winning it all.

Unlike Pirlo, Michael Carrick has not made the most of his England chances. England, although deficient in other positions, have a wealth of players capable of shining in a central midfield role. An impressive performance in Berlin alongside Gareth Barry in England’s 2-1 win over Germany clearly showed that he could play the international game. The problem for Carrick has been, however, that his main rivals, Frank Lampard and Stevie Gerrard are flair players, much more intent on scoring than being the kind on-field instigator that is Carrick. Tooled to suit the more spontaneous game of give-and-go utilized by Gerrard and Lampard, Fabio Capello's England team just don't seem to need Carrick's game. Still, there are many of us out there who believe that the opposite is true. Lampard and Gerrard will shine against ordinary and mediocre teams; but, that Carrick's passing game will be exactly what England need to take their game to the next technical level if they want to defeat the likes of Brazil, Spain, Argentina, France and Italy at the 2010 World Cup.

In the recent 2008/09 English Premier League season, Xabí Alonso, Jermaine Jenas and Stilian Petrov played key roles in midfield for their clubs, but proved slightly less successful. At Liverpool, Gerrard and Torres relied on Alonso to begin attacks from a deep position, dexterously feeding the short ball to Gerrard and, longer, usually over the top passes for Torres. Opta Statistics clearly showed that Alonso was the first player in the league to complete 1,000 successful passes. How weird that Alonso had a career season while his coach, Rafael 'The Tinker Man' Benitez was desperately trying to sell him in order to buy the crude talent of Gareth Barry. Alonso's problems are less in his style of play, because he is capable of doing everything Pirlo and Carrick can do only with more physicality, than the odd tactics Benítez uses to support him. Possessed of probably the finest defencive midfielder in the world in Javíer Mascharano, Benítez prefers that he run interference for the second striker, Gerrard. rather than protect Alonso.

Coach Harry Redknapp of Spurs has also chosen to marginalize a player who has the talent to be a world-class deep-lying midfielder in Jermaine Jenas. Redknapp has preferred to defer to the physicality and speed of Wilson Palacios and Didier Zokora, even though neither one of them is much of a passer. Although Zokora has been sold, Redknapp seems to prefer using the big bench-warmer, Tommy Huddlestone in his place, rather than using Jenas' more sophisticated finesse style. Things will look up for Jenas, however, as Inter-Milan's boss, Jose Mourinho, aims to buy the lad use to replace the ageing Patrick Veiera in partnership with his midfield enforcer, the wide-bodied Sulley Muntauri.

Stilian Petrov was the most consistent performer for a callow young Villa team which flirted regularly with the Premiership top four in the first half of the season. Petrov's long range passing ability complemented Villa's quick-on-the-break counterattacking style of play. Having mostly played on the wing in the Scottish Premier League at Glasgow Celtic, Petrov found himself competing with three young speedy wingers in Ashley Young, James Milner and Gabriel Agabonlahor. Under the wise tutelage of coach Martin O'Nell, Petrov has found a brand new niche as a deep-lying midfielder. If Villa's erratic defencive midfield pair, Nigel Reo-Coker or Steve Sidwell, manage to get it together, Petrov could yet take Villa to the next level.

Gaetano D'Agostino

Pirlo definitely rules in the deep-lying role in Italy's Calcio, although two young pretenders, Udinese’s Gaetano D’Agostino and A.S. Roma's Alberto Aquilani have stepped up the competition. Like Pirlo, D'Agostino used to play in an advanced role just behind his strikers at his old club, A.S. Roma. Unable to make the grade at Roma, where Francesco Totti stood between him and the first-team football, D’Agostino eventually ended up playing for Messina before being sold to Udinese. In D'Agostino's second season in Udine, Pasquale Marino was hired as coach. An Ancelotti acolyte, Marino took D’Agostino’s passing ability and moved him to deep in the midfield. The midfielder’s long range passing then caught the eye of the national coach, Marcelo Lippi, who, because Pirlo was suspended over a red card incident, called D'Agostino up to the full Italian squad for the first time in November 2008. D’Agostino made his first appearance for the Azzurri against Northern Ireland in June 2009. His other rival for an Italian national team place, Alberto Aquilani, is much more physical than Pirlo or D'Agostino, but lacks that penchant for executing the perfect killer pass. No wonder he's being chased by Italy’s big three, Chelsea and Liverpool.

Surprisingly, the role of the deep-lying play maker is still conceptually new. Pirlo, Petrov and D’Agostino have revived fairly ordinary careers. An apt conclusion is that there are a number of players out there with the ability to play in that position but don’t know it, and, more surprisingly, coaches don’t seem to know it, either. The Petrov example, because he was such a clever 'jinky' winger, might lead you to imagine that any player with high-quality technique and ball-distribution skills, like, say, Kieran Richardson of Sunderland, Chris Eagles of Burnley or Simeo Sabrosa of Atletico Madrid, are naturals for the job. A certain kind of vision, an ability to relax and a unique gift of intellect are necessary for this kind of player to succeed, however. Accompanied by a hard man, a creative deep-lying midfielder has that bit of protection he needs in order to make a positive impact on game day. He is very much like a quarterback in American Football.

The role can clearly play a big part in the game everywhere. In Italy the pace of the game is slower and the gamesmanship of defenders allows any deep-lying midfielder constant access to the ball. Interestingly, in England, where the game is often played at a frantic, frenetic pace, midfielders get little time on the ball; nevertheless, the role of the deep-lying play maker can be utilized to allow flair players an extra second to pick out a pass. Only in Spain, where every player seems to want to hold onto the ball, will the concept probably not work. Being converted in soccer terms is like being Born Again in the Real World. Revival=Survival!!!

The 20 Worst Signings of the Premier League Season

During last summer and the January window, a promiscuous amount of dosh was lavished on some really dreadful footballers. Here, for your consideration are Ivor's Top Twenty Worst Premiership Signings of the Season:

1. Dimitar Berbatov: Manchester United’s £32m languid, lazy Bulgarian has only done one thing successfully since leaving White Hart Lane. He has broken up the neck-breaking high-speed diamond attacking machine that saw Rooney and Tevez do the awesome spade-work to supply Ronaldo's goal scoring exploits in 2007-2008. His tame old lady farting of a penalty kick at Tim Howard in the FA Cup semi-final against Everton may have been the last straw to United's fans, but it will only serve to make our stubborn Gaffer love him all the more. With Ronaldo and Tevez most likely gone this Summer, expect Ferguson to retool the forward line around Berbatov.

2. Robinho: At £31M, Robinho was expected to deliver upon his massive potential instantaneously when he joined Manchester Shitty. To be fair, the lad has delivered more than a few spectacular goals and his often breathtaking ball-handlings skills are splendid. The problem is that, when he's not in the mood to perform, which is most of the time, he is invisible on the field. To be sure, Robinho prefers playing off the right wing, coming in from behind the striker. Unfortunately, because the youth striker brigade of Evans, Calceido, Sturridge, and, formerly, Jo, didn't score and Craig Bellamy and Valery Boijnov are a sick-note, Robinho has often been expected to be the striker. Well protected by the referees in Spain, not to mention the goon squad antics on his behalf from Mohammadou Diarra and Gago at Real Madrid, Robinho has received no such special treatment in the E.P.L. I believe he's way too good to remain a flop, but he needs to stay out of the nightclubs and find a better club.

3. Ricardo Quaresma: The little Gypsy winger was expected to fare just as well as his Portugal nationalk team wing partner, Cristano Ronaldo, when they came up together in the Sporting Lisbon academy. Having failed three seasons ago at Barcelona, Quaresma returned to Portugal with F.C. Porto and was a huge success. This season, the self-styled 'Great One' Jose Mourinho decided to take another gamble on him at Inter Milan. For the £20M spent, Mourinho expected instantaneous brilliance. Quaresma, however, flopped spectacularly again. Thus the Tsigana wizard of the dribble so pissed off Mourinho that he loaned him out to Chelsea during the January transfer window. More of the same has followed at Chelsea, although no one professes to understand why. If you ask me, it's all about nurturing and personality. Quaresma thrives in the company of family-oriented coaches like Carlos Queiroz and Paolo Bento. I see no reason for him to flop in the bosom of Manny U or Spurs under the feel-good coaching of Sir Alex Ferguson or Harry Redknapp. Indeed, if Cristiano Ronaldo leaves for Real Madrid, Inter might happily dump their expensive mistake in the Gaffer's lap for cheap, especially if we sent Nani t'other way. Hint! Hint!

4. Jimmy Bullard: Poor Phil Brown is the Yorkshire version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, "Oh, Boy of Tears." Hull City paid Fulham £6m for the brave, hard-working, but injury-prone midfielder with the idea that the ever-grafting ginger one would help stop the rot and end their slide down the table. Naturally, Bullard injured his knee only 37 minutes into his very first game and will now miss the rest of the season. Watch for him to recover next season, gag on the Championship Division, and return to the premiership in January.

5. Jo: The 'Fro-barneted Brazilian striker represented £19m down the toilet for Manchester Shitty. He couldn't buy a goal at the City of Manchester stadium, and, together with his fellow Brasilenhos, Elano and Robinho, had Sparky Hughes tearing his hair out. Never mind, Shitty's owners have oodles of oil dosh! They'll be okay. Surprisingly, having been loaned out into the more nurturing arms of Everton's Davie Moyes, Jo has performed well for the other Scousers. As the Toffees are unlikely to be able to afford to come up with the readies to make any move permanent, it will be interesting to see which club ends up taking on this erratic, yet sometimes brilliant lad.

6. Robbie Keane: Sure, Liverpool managed to recoup a fair chunk of the £20m they paid Spurs for the Irish forward. Still, despite the fact that Rafa Benitez keeps implying that the signing was somehow not at all his idea, this was a disastrous stinker of a deal for both clubs. A real grafter, a courageous player with physical presence—someone like Emil Heskey or the improving Bobby Zamora of Fulham—was what was needed as company up front for Fernando Torres. Either one of them could have been useful during the squeaky-bum title run-in, but, in signing Keane under false pretenses—he may be the least physical striker in the premiership—the Scousers sewed the seeds for one more season of beautiful loserdom. That is unless you think second place will do and that Yossi Benayoun can keep saving Liverpool for ever.

7. Deco: The £8m schemer, a great midfield general for two ECC Champions at Porto and Barcelona, was breathtakingly good in his first few performances for Chelsea. Unfortunately, between a spate of niggling injuries and some very lack luster games, the Deco of old has disappeared when put to work with Ballack, Lampard and Obi Mikel. One of the major factors in Felipe Scolari's firing, and an embarrassment to the club, I expect him to be flogged at a bargain price into the warm, tender clutches of his old boss, Jose Mourinho, at Inter this summer.

8. Huerelho Gomes: For £11.5 Spurs expected more from this erratic Brazilian keeper. Signed from PSV Eindhoven, where he'd burned all his bridges with two coaches, the Chairman and the fans, Gomes, at 6'4" with a huge hand span and scores of posted YouTube highlights, promised much. To be sure, Big Phil Scolari, his old coach at Cruzeiro, called him the most underrated goalie in the world and urged Juande Ramos to sign him. His first 10 games at Spurs were, however, a flapping nightmare. Yet in big games against the big four, Gomes has performed big. Go fig-ya! Anybody know a good Portuguese-speaking analyst?

9. Fabricio Coloccini: How much? £10.3m? Poor poor pathetic Newcastle!!! Another bust of a buy. Dennis Wise's purchases must have had Mike Ashley in tears. He's got a fine head of hair has the young man, but the Argentine stopper looks overmatched against the likes of Emile Heskey, Kevin Davies and Darren Bent. Enough said! Not to worry, he'll be dumped on the cheap and will look like a world-beater at Rangers or Paris St. Germain. Of course, it would be tantamount to putting the boot in if I also mention Xisco (£5.7M), or Guttierez (£8M)

10. David Bentley: Worse in the profligate stakes than even Newcastle and Keano's Sunderland when it comes to consistently crap signings, Spurs paid Blackburn £15 million for the ex-Arsenal and England midfielder, with up to an additional £2 million based upon “future performances.” Arsene Wenger may be many things, but he's not daft! One breathtaking goal against Les Gooners aside, Bentley has been dreadful. Perhaps he ought to head back up north where he's appreciated. Surely Sparky can remake and reboot the lad at Man Shitty? His sterling performances at Ewood against Manchester United and Liverpool for the Rovers seem like a fuzzy long-distance memory.

11. Paul Robinson: The ex-England goalkeeper was Paul Ince’s first signing for Blackburn. "Rubbish! You're rubbish!" the Blackburn fans chant when he gets near the ball. At £3.5m Robinson wasn't a bad gamble for the sarcastic, arrogant Ince; unfortunately, since Incey got fired, whatever confidence Robinson once had is long gone. He panics when faced with floating crosses and is more passive then ever when communicating with his defence. I gather that Hollywood is remaking the Three Stooges. How about casting Robinson, Scott Carson and Calamity James?

12. Anton Ferdinand: Sunderland paid West Ham £9M for Rio’s little bra'a. Anton is no Rio, that's for sure, unless you're talking about some of Rio's bad habits. To be sure, the lad has a lot of potential, but Sunderland need stopper help now. Why did a certain El Hadji-Diouf, heretofore only known for slapping his wife around, now at Blackburn Rovers, ignore the peaceful lamentations of the Q'ran toward his fellow man and try to beat Anton's head in? Something about this young man seems to get other folks' nose out of joint. It doesn't seem like he'll ever be able to live up to the hype caused by his big brother's long shadow, however. Returning to one of the London clubs might be an attitude changer, though.

13. Johan Elmander: Bolton’s £8.2m Swedish striker Johan Elmander looks he is running through a tub of custard out there. A devastating force in the French league, he seems lost and overmatched in England. 6'4", with the look of a Thor-like comic-book character, or maybe a lamer, limper version of Jan Vinegoor of Hesselinck or Jan Köller, Elmander has managed to make Gary Megson look pretty gormless. Although, he looks like a tank, Elmander performs like a jellyfish. The odd man out on a club full of hard cases, look for his imminent return to France.

14. Dave Kitson: For £5.5m, Stoke thought the rangy red-headed striker from Reading would be a perfect finisher for their tall, tough, well-shaped side. Melancholy and languid, even when things are going well, Kitson seems lost without Stevie Coppell's coaching. Unfortunately for Stoke, after 16 games and no goals, and being renamed 'Shitson' by all and sundry, he was a disaster. Loaned back to Reading, he still looks very tentative and depressed.

15. Scott Carson: Valued at £10M two seasons ago before botching up numerous opportunities for England, the Scotty Dogg was dumped by Liverpool on West Brom for £3.75m. Running neck and neck with Pauly Robinson, Carson has made so many cock-ups over Albion's long, miserable season that every Dummy Brummy out there winces when his name is mentioned. Rebuilding his confidence in the Championship may yet turn out to be a blessing. He'll certainly be the most expensive goalie in the Championship Division next season.

16. Borja Valero: West Brom paid a club record fee of £4.7m for Valero to Real Majorca. Formerly a midfielder in Spain's World Championship winning youth team, Valero has made 29 appearances this season, not one of which anyone has noticed him playing in. Valero seems very much intimidated when he has to go up against the likes of Mascharano and Marouane Fellaini. Still, the coach, Tony Mowbray, insists that Valero is his future team leader, despite the relentless chorus of booing from fans. Big plans: Let's hope Borja doesn't just disappear into thin air.

17. Tal Ben Haim: The ruthless Israeli stopper's £5m signing from Chelsea seemed like a fantastic idea at the time because he'd had so much success under Sparky Hughes at Blackburn Rovers. The year he spent at Chelsea sitting on the bench, being totally ignored by his coach, fellow Israeli Avram Grant, seems to have completely made his confidence disappear, however. Now on loan at Sunderland, he has a docile centre-back partnership with Anton Ferdinand. Both look like they would be much happier at home in bed. I wouldn't be surprised to see him happily returning into the clutches of Big Sam at Blackburn next season.

18. Nicky Shorey: An expensive buy for Aston Villa from Reading at £7.5m, he has been in and out of the team for the whole season because of a series of niggling injuries. A sometimes spectacular left back for Reading two seasons ago, he looks lost in the claret-and-blue. Caught out of position a lot, Shorey tends to often find himself stranded in a forward wing position when teams execute a quick breakaway. Schooled by Stevie Coppell in a Reading system that allowed him much more freedom and utilized his ball-handling skills, Shorey will need a lot of patient coaching from Martin O'Neill this Summer if he's to stay and succeed. Will he ever be able to work off the superb, high-speed skills of Ashley Young, though?

19. Kevin Nolan: The highly-regarded Nolan was once thought of us as 'the next Keano.' Tough-tackling, energetic and a fine, accurate passer of the ball, he was a kind of Captain/Prince for Sam Allardyce's rowdy set of Bolton Wanderers' bruisers. Sold for a surprisingly low £5.5M to Kevin Keegan's Newcastle United, many pundits thought he would be the ideal enforcer to put some steel into the spine of the Toon's anemic midfield. This has not been the case. The game of managerial musical chairs at St. James' seems to have stripped Nolan of all confidence. Perhaps if he could hook up again with Allardyce at Blackburn!?

20. Hugo Rodallega: Expectations were high for this large, yet lightning-quick Colombian striker. For thrifty Wigan Athletic, the investment in a £4.5M striker was a big gamble. The top scorer for Colombia in the South American qualification rounds for the FIFA Under-20 last year, Rodallega had every big club in Europe watching him and salivating. His purchase by Wigan was definitely a coup. His success in the last Mexican league season at Necaxa did not, however, prepare him for the speed and brawn of the EPL. Wigan's manager, Stevie Bruce, has been very successful at buying and selling on cheap South and Central American players because of the club's wise investment in some very good scouts. The jury is still out on Rodallega, however. If he doesn't work out, look for Brucey to return to the low budget players again.

Anyone I've missed out on? Any comments? Please be in touch.

Adeus, Patrão!

I’m already getting emails from friends in Brazil. They are very disappointed that Luiz Felipe Scolari was fired by Chelsea. There was a lot of hope that Scolari’s success would open the gates for other Brazilian coaches to ply their wares in Europe. So far, when the Brazilian national team wins the World Cup or the Confederations championship, it is seen by a fickle public as one more triumph for their brilliant flair players. My friend Carlinhos put it this way: “When we win, our players take all the credit. When we lose our coaches get blamed.”

Yet strategy and organization are absolutely a key component of Brazil's successes. As in any country, Brazilian coaches have worked hard to perfect a balance between attack and defense. After all, who created the back four? Bela Gutmann may take credit in his memoirs, but he happened to dream it up while coaching in Brazil. Whoever and whenever is less important, however, than the fact of its implementation. The bottom line was that at least one of the wingers needed to drop back and help out in midfield.

Brazil's brilliant 1970 team meant to retain possession forever. When the ball got taken away, however, Utopianism fell by the wayside and Mario Zagallo's boys retreated behind Tostão. 4-5-1 was born. This concept of five players in the middle, running a whirling dervish of a revolving 'diamond,' not only demands flair and adaptability from players, it also requires an innate intelligence and an ability to improvise.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Let the collective competitive World Cup record speak for itself. Germany and Brazil have each played 92 games, but Brazil, surprisingly to some, have conceded far fewer goals. This is why they have won the tournament five times.

Consider this also. The best Brazilian players all tend to have left for Europe by the time they have turned eighteen. Access to the best mature players is a perk Brazilian coaches no longer have access to. Consequently, the scales have tipped. Denied the most exquisite talent, coaches have become much more decisive figures in the domestic leagues. The pluralistic vision of a smart, savvy coach is more important than it's ever been. All those fair-to-middling players, once condemned to careers combating relegation, playing in the more physical second division and early retirement to jobs as coaches, now have hope.

Consider how European teams have counted the cost of this new status quo. In 2005, Sao Paolo beat Liverpool with a display of tar-baby style absorption and quick counterattacking in the World Club Cup Competition. The next season Barcelona took the same treatment from Internacional. The coaches, the peripatetic, Paolo Autori, and the zen-calm Abel Braga, had their players performing in a ruthless, disciplined manner that belies every Brazilian stereotype. Nine men played behind the ball. Passing was short. The tackling was meaty and for keeps. Each team won by a single breakaway goal.

Kudos to these coaches indeed. Yet another problem presents itself here. Brazilians are all for tourists. Yet they don't like gringos playing football in their leagues. In Brazil, Gringo is the unfortunate word of choice for all foreigners. A number of players from Argentina and Paraguay in particular have played in Brazil and are constantly, relentlessly booed. It's not an issue of race, though. Black players like Faustino Asprilla from Colombia have not been welcomed, either. "A Gringo is a gringo is a gringo!" insists Carlinhos. "Foreigners can come here and sleep with our women, but we will not countenance cheeky, arrogant Gringos polluting our beautiful game." Yes, indeed, even superstar players, from neighboring countries, like Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascharano for Corinthians and that nice Jewish mensch from Buenos Aíres, Juan Pablo Sorin of Cruzeiro, are classed as Gringos" and booed.

It's all a bit ironic, especially considering the cultural and ethnic diversity that Scolari had to deal with at Chelsea. Big Phil, as the nasty English press love to call him (Every coach has to have at least one Fleet Street nickname), has always succeeded as a coach because he has a lot of guile and a natural ability to motivate player squads. Sometimes, however, this is not enough. The shortest simplest explanation may be that he had a hard time chatting with such a diverse group of players because, previously, he has always exclusively relied upon his dexterity with the Portuguese language. Still, the amount of time he spent with the club seems incredibly brief, especially considering that all this took place before Scolari got the opportunity to coach before the knockout phase of the European Champions Cup.

What hurt Scolari in particular was his inability to motivate the brilliant, but incredibly sensitive striker Didier Drogba. A number of unnamed players told The Guardian reporter, Barney Ronay, that the last thing they were looking for was a new dad. This father-figure persona did not go down well in London. Felipe in particular, likes to play the grand Brasilenho patrao. Indeed, Dunga, the Brazil National team coach and former longtime team captain, is well known for criticizing the national compulsion with fixing the societal problem of absent fathers.

When Brazil won the World Cup in 2002, Don Felipe was absolutely the undisputed patrao of what was referred to as "Scolari's family". By comparison, in Italy, France, England, Spain and Germany, as Juninho Pernambucano says of his manager at Olympique Lyonnais, Louis Puel, "I love this man because he treats me as a professional."

Scolari also made the mistake of picking out some transfer targets with difficult reputations. It was all bound to upset the higher highers at Chelsea, especially their Russian mobster oligarch owner, Roman Abramovich. Scolari pined for Robinho, the thumb sucker with an affinity for, at best, rough sex, or at worse, rape. Robinho is a fine, flair footballer, but, as they've found to their cost at Santos, Real Madrid and Manchester City, he needs a team of psychiatrists to accompany him wherever he goes. He also lobbied for the alcoholic Adriano, another one with an affinity for violence against women. Juninho Pernambucano was the leader he wanted for the midfield, but the Chief Executive, Abramovich's lick spittle, Peter Kenyon, wanted nothing to do with coughing up 15M in pound notes for a 37-year-old. Kenyon compromised, however, and allowed Scolari to bring in Deco, Jose Bosingwa, Ricardo Quaresma and Mineiro, a plodding 34-year-old Brazilian midfielder recently put out to pasture by Werder Bremen who loves his patrão. Save for the star Portugal right back, Bosingwa, his other purchases have flopped.

This insecure need to use old favorites and compatriots definitely telegraphed the wrong idea to the club's thuggish owner. Still, to be fair, coaches who want to deliberately create cliques to divide and rule the clubhouse are asking for trouble. Scolari seemed, to all intents and purposes, unwilling to embrace a wide, wicked gringo world.

Since being fired and paid off to the tune of, depending on the source, 7, 18 or 21M, Felipe Scolari moans that his Chelsea team was not capable of "thinking Brazilian" enough. This is a bizarre point for Scolari to make considering he was made his name in the mid-90s coaching practical and ruggedly functional winning football teams in Gremio and Palmeiras. Perhaps the problem was that, although he was cosmopolitan in a Brazilian and Portuguese sense, he simply wasn't cosmopolitan enough in a European sense.

Still, Don Felipe's resumé is absolutely fantastic. His seven months at Chelsea may, ultimately, prove fortuitous. The old macho may now be mentally better tooled to coach another team in the Premiership or La Liga. If the brilliant Scolari has learned from his mistakes, he may yet succeed and be the one who opens the door for his colleagues back home to charge through.

The Ultimate Dummy Brummies

This one is for Will Ansell and Gerry Kelsall, tragic victim of Villa. On to victory, Walsall! While you're away from the Motherland, work on your Urdu, lads!
Instead of coming up with an all-era Villa team, as requested, I made up collection of the best players ever from the Birmingham area teams. Terry Hennessey may have been the most underrated midfielder ever!

Billy Wright

Gil Merrick

The Best of the Best
Gil Merrick (G)
Don Howe (RB)
Billy Wright (CB)
Ronnie Flowers (CB)
Steve Staunton (LB)
Terry Hennessey (DMF)
Bryan Robson (DMF)
Archie Gemmill (AMF)
Willie Johnston (LW)
Trevor Francis (ST)
Andy Grey (ST)

Team #2
Phil Parkes (G)
Derek Parkin (RB)
Paul McGrath (CB)
Joleon Lescott (CB)
Stephen Warnock (LB)
Norman Deeley (RW)
Ray Barlow (DMF)
Tony Brown (DMF)
David Wagstaffe (LW)
Steve Bull (ST)
Cyrille Regis (ST)

Team #3
Bill Glazier (G)
Ray Ranson (RB)
Roger Hynd (CB)
Bryan Sharples (CB)
Mark 'Psycho' Dennis (LB)
Malcolm Page (DMF)
Peter Broadbent (RW)
Paul Merson (AMF)
Bertie Auld (AMF)
Ronnie Allen (ST)
Geoff Astle (ST)

Grandpa Robben Finally Gets it Together!

“Grandpa got it up!” is how my crazy Madrideño friend, Dagoberto put it in an email. The mean-spirited pundits at Marca, La Vanguardía and Ultíma Hora, who have been tearing the reputation of Arjen Robben to pieces for the better part of two seasons, have had to change their tactics, too. Injured more often than fit, Robben would have to bear the insulting chant of “¡Malcreado!” whenever he did play. Whether he was wincing after being substituted, sitting on the bench with a sour disposition on his elderly gentleman’s face, or sitting in the rich fan’s seats in an expensive Saville Row suit wearing the Grinchean mien of an infant with no toys, Arjen Robben has been belittled too often, for too long. Of course, 36 million euros is a lot of dosh. Actually, it’s the fifth highest transfer fee paid in Real Madrid's history, behind only the four, world-famous Galacticos Figo, Zinedine Zidane, the Brazilian Ronaldo and David Beckham. There has never been any doubt about the lad’s talent, but, finally, having been injury-free for half a season. Robben is finally showing that he is the best left winger in the world.

Arjen Robben just isn’t worth it. Nobody seems to have taken the lad seriously since he signed with F.C. Groningen in 2001. Already balding at the age of fifteen and carefully watched over by his baritone-voiced, humourless father, Hans Robben, besieged by agents, the two Robbens decided to keep his business in the family. Depending upon whom you’re discussing his career with, Arjen Robben has been either ill-served by his dad or the man is the best agent in the world. Hans Robben was certainly a figure of disdain for PSV Eindhoven’s owner Harry Van Riijn, but he still signed the boy anyway.

Van Riijn desperately wanted Robben at PSV. Anything to keep him out of the clutches of Feyenoord or Ajax Amsterdam. Hans presented Van Riijn with a list of demands for performance-based bonuses that rivalled anything requested by his senior players. Although Van Riijn did a lot of complaining to the Dutch media about Arjen’s old man, he coughed up the cash anyway. He isn't worth it , was the consensus amongst the old-school Dutch journos at the time after seeing his skinny legs and narrow chest, but Robben soon changed their minds with his breathtaking runs down the left wing and an awesome ability to ride the most ruthless of Eredvisie tacklers. A finicky eater, absolutely unwilling to submit to the healthy dietary demands of the club’s coaches and dieticians, Robben did it his way.

"Robben just isn’t worth it!" Sir Alex Ferguson was the next football overlord to announce it. Manchester United were scouring Europe, looking for another brilliant young winger, to take the pressure off Cristiano Ronaldo. United's initial €7m offer was about to be accepted by Van Riijn when Hans, depending upon whose story you believe, decided to make a call to Peter Kenyon or vice versa. Kenyon, originally the bag man for Manchester United, had already established a relationship with Hans, so that when he moved to Chelsea, he took his ready-made connections with him. Chelsea happily wrote a check worth €18m for the brilliant PSV prospect . It was the first salvo in the ongoing conflict between Manny U and Chelsea. Ferguson may have not believed the 'Flying Dutchman' was worth it, but he took the Premier League by storm in his first season. Their manager, Jose Mourinho, looked like a genius for buying Robben and Damian Duffy from Blackburn Rovers at prices that left the other teams in the EPL gobsmacked but which gave the team instantaneous success in his first season. Chelsea won the Premiership in Mourinho’s first two seasons and Robben rode the tide along with him, becoming a superstar. Unfortunately, it was in only in his second season that Robben’s impact was curtailed due to a string of injuries.

Football is a ruthless business. Certain players who were very slight in their teenage years, like Michael Owen, Louis Saha, Lionel Messi and Arjen Robben, seem, years later, to be suffering from an endless cycle of injury and recovery. In the case of these four, there can be no doubt that they’ve spent more time recovering from injury than actually playing. A really good clue as to the causes of these injuries first came from Lionel Messi ‘s family in an interview with the Buenos Aíres newspaper, Diario Perfil. in 2007. Lionel, who had been born premature, was so tiny when Barcelona signed him as a ten-year-old youth prospect, that the club’s doctors recommended he be given doses of Human Growth Hormones and steroids. Consequently, the endless cycle of injury and recovery that has dogged Messi ever since has made him the poster boy for the side- effects involved in making athletes play guinea pig for rich football clubs and their doctors. I have absolutely no evidence of this, but it takes no major leap of the imagination to believe that Michael Owen and Arjen Robben may have also been ill-used by both their advisors and their clubs and let themselves to be experimented upon.

Atany rate, Mourinho put up very few objections when Real Madrid came calling and offered to double Chelsea’s money. Robben was brilliant, but he had made just 67 appearances in three seasons. The club had already bought Florent Malouda and, so, when Robben’s father dared to discuss a renegotiation of Robben’s contract, Kenyon and Mourinho finally lost any vestige of patience with him. At the same time, to Ramon Calderon, the Real Madrid President, Arjen Robben was the only player available from his infamous superstar shortlist containing the likes of Ronaldinho, the Portuguese Ronaldo, Kaka and Cesc Fabregas that he had used as part of his campaign to get into office the previous summer.

Robben played a minimal role in his first season with los Blancos, although he did well in the final six games of the Liga-winning season , scoring three spectacular goals. Real Madrid, ordinarily the most impatient club on the planet, with a mythic intolerance for even the slightest failure, were very mature, for a change. Back in his hometown of Bedum, Robben was introduced to a Chinese acupuncturist, who helped cure his various leg and back ailments and managed to persuade him to alter his diet and training regime. Finally, Robben’s infamous morning,noon and night ‘diet’ of french fries smothered in lemon mayonnaise, chocolate milk shakes and buttered bread and kebobs was abandoned for fruit and grains.

This season Robben has been brilliant. His legs are now muscular tree trunks. His chest noticeably expanded. He is 25 now and each recent performance seems to supersede its predecessor. Unfortunately, the Madrid press, which used to refer to him as El Malcreado (“The moaning malingerer”) now refers to him as Señor Codicioso (Mr.Greedy) because he keeps possession of the ball and rarely passes. They savage him mercilessly. Yet, for the first time since his academy years, Robben is scoring a lot of goals. Unfortunately, those moments of crowd-pleasing trickery are ruined by alternate moments of shocking naïvete and kindergarden-level decision-making.

The journalistic wolfpack call him selfish, but I genuinely think that the lad is not the brightest spoon in the cutlery drawer and is simply bereft of some of the fundamentals of decision-making that come easily to his brilliant contemporaries, Lionel Messi and Kaka. Simply put, Robben owns little footballing top level football experience at the highest level. So far in his career, he has never played a full season. He looks mature, in fact Robben really looks a worried forty, but seems to not have the foggiest when it comes to choosing the right moment to pass to Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Higuain, Raul, or the new kid in town, Huntelaar. Thus, it’s not hubris that makes him hold on to the ball, but cluelesness. One shouldn’t overgild the lily, however. The best wingers like Garrincha, Georgie Best, Ryan Giggs, Jimmy Johnstone, Jairzinho, Liam Brady and Real’s own Francisco Gento, all held on to the ball for too long and gave their coaches ulcers.

If you’ve been watching Real Madrid’s La Liga matches this season you’ve seen a vast improvement in his overall play. His team-mates, especially the likes of Gutí, Sneijder and Heinze, are equally to blame for Robben’s onfield indiscretions because they are repeatedly trying to find him with their every attacking move. His decision-making and distribution may indeed be questionable, but he has, nevertheless, been responsible, whether through assists or actually scoring, for 13 of Real’s last 21 goals.

The club’s previous coach, Bernd Schuster, was obsessed with having the left-footed player cause mayhem on the right hand side. The new coach, Juandé Ramos, seems to have recognized the telegraphed predictability of this sort of orthodox methodology and uses Robben on the left side more often. Lionel Messi’s season has so far made him the most dominant footballer in the world, but Robben is running a close second to the tiny Argentine. The €36m spent on Arjen Robben, especially considering the ridiculous bid of €200m offered by Manchester City for Kaka, looks like a bargain.

England Already Set to Lose 2018 World Cup Battle

Brian Barwick

Can England avoid another humiliation to follow the train wreck of their losing campaign for the 2006 World Cup and stage the tournament in 2018? The short answer is no. The longer answer posits that we may pull it off for 2022, but only if we make the right deals now. More on that in the conclusion. One thing is for sure, no matter who wins, it will have nothing whatsoever to do with who has the best fan support, the best stadiums or the finest facilities. All that matters is football politics and who can offer the best rewards to to the 24 man FIFA executive membership and get 13 votes.

2006 was a disaster. From the get-go, at the very first meeting, the EUFA President, Lennart Johansson, insisted England had already dealt away its chance, by swapping votes with Germany, allowing it to host Euro '96 at the expense of letting Germany stage the 2006 World Cup. The England contingent denied any such deal, which led to a very belligerent, very public row. Subsequently. England, having questioned Johansson's authority in a very public manner, were eliminated in the second round of votes. Next time, the consensus was within the England contingent, Europe will be with us. This is quite clearly delusional thinking. No one likes England, not just its neighbours in the United Kingdom, but pretty much the whole planet. The English wear lead boots when it comes to negotiations and, additionally, the worldwide success of their television rights deals has made them the object of a deep-seated ambivalence. Admiration is a close cousin to jealousy.

Well, the power of wishful positive thinking sometimes skirts the line of myopic hubris. There will be at least four European bids to consider at the next FIFA World Cup meetings. Both England and Russia will make strong independent bids. Additionally, Spain will team up with Portugal to make a powerful joint bid for the Iberian peninsula; while Holland, together with Belgium, will lobby for the Lowlands. England, Russia, Belgium and Spain all have FIFA executive members. FIFA, unlike EUFA and the IOC,. has no rules forbidding members from voting for themselves. This will only leave four extra votes to spare and England, having already placed itself in an adverserial position last time, can't really count on any help whatsoever from any country. As for the rest of the world, with the South American continent abstaining, there are already proposals entered by Qatar, Japan and Indonesia, while other entries are still expected from Canada, Mexico, China and the United States before the February deadline.

Thanks to Vladimir Putin's persuasive manner and suave sense of charm, Russia have become the favourites to stage the tournament. Everyone is still amazed that Putin and his army of American-style ex-athletes and spin-doctors managed to steer the 2014 Winter Olympics away from heavily favoured Salzburg. One might think that Russia's use of its huge natural gas resources as a blackmail tool would hinder rather than spoil its chances to receive votes from the ECC nations, but the opposite seems to hold true. Spain and Portugal, both of whom have hosted tournaments recently, are unlikely to win, but will certainly receive all three South American votes and be able to instigate something advantageous farther on.

The real problem with England's lobby concerns those who are charged to make it. As in all things British, pedigree always supersedes competence. The Chairman of the Football League, Lord MaWhinney, was, unfortunately, born without any vestige of personality beyond the ability to grunt, nod and count the number of heads populating stadiums. Unfortunately, although Sir David Richards, Chairman of the Premier League is popular throughout the footballing world and very much admired for his ability to cut fantastic television broadcasting deals despite a wobbly worldwide economy, he is persona non grata with the F.A.s bigwigs. Led by its Chief Executive, the bombastic Brian Barwick, and his stuttering, sycophantic Socialist sidekick, the Chairman, Lord Triesman, the English Football Association stumbles from failure to failure. Even the most generous pundit would agree that these two have made a repeated series of cock-ups concerning the England national team and Wembley Stadium. It took two resounding errors in the hiring of Sven Goren Eriksson and then his second assistant, Steve McLaren, not to mention the pathetic imbroglio involving the on/off hiring of the brilliant ex-World Cup winning coach, Felipe Scolari, in between, for them to embarrass the nation before the world.

The Russian/American model of using a mixture of athletes, former athletes, financial experts and scores of savvy P.R. people is what England needs. Barwick and Triesman should step aside and let the professionals take over. A brilliant meritocratic cabal of proven business people like Sir David Richards, Sir Richard Branson, David Whelan, David Dein, Peter Kenyon and Phil Gartside should take charge. Cosmopolitan professionals and ex-pros, especially those who can speak a smattering of another language or show off English ethnic diversity like Gary Lineker, Glen Hoddle, Mark Hateley, Chris Waddle, David Beckham, John Barnes, Paul Ince and Rio Ferdinand. This group would not only be a little more diverse than those involved now, but would also have a fair bit more sophistication, sass and pizazz than the usual suspects, verbally and emotionally inhibited Old Schoolers like Bobby Charlton, Bobby Robson, Bryan Robson, and the two mumblers, Alan Shearer and Trevor Brooking. Utilizing the likes of Rio and Becks is probably slightly risky if they don't learn their lines, so to speak, but both are youthful and charismatic and present something completely completely different to a world that often shudders at the discourse of old traditionalist hacks like Barwick, Charlton and Brooking.

Knock! Knock! You Can't Come Out!

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Sol Campbell

There's a story to go with this post. I've read about censorship. I've been massacred and humiliated by editors over the years, for sure. Goes with the territory, right? Still, in the case of this story, I've pissed some people off by not naming names. Ahmed Shah, the owner/editor of Soccer Forum, requested I write this story in the first place and is man enough to 'fess up on Soccer Forum where it was first published.. I certainly wouldn't have written this story, otherwise, simply because it's not, in and of itself, a subject I own much interest in. Anyway, after making editing suggestions on a couple of drafts, Ahmed accepted this story.  I believe I show no vindictiveness in my text, nothing that's either libelous or malicious. Sweeping all this 'smut' under the carpet never works, anyway. I'd really like to hear from folks out there as to what they think. Thanks Ahmed! Soccer Lens is easily the best footie site, so far very much untainted by the stink of filthy lucre. Thanks people! To see the original publication and see reader replies, please go to: http://soccerlens.com/gayfootballers/16694

One Summer night in Miami I got traumatized. I'm pretty much open to all things. Yeah, I'm fairly liberal and open-minded about all things, I like to think, unless you mess with my religion. I got my head turned forever, though. You don't know who you are until you're tested.

My wife and I were on vacation in Miami. My daughter and her boyfriend are seriously into dancing, so we all got dolled up in our good clothes and went out to Blue, a famous gay dance club, because it was Meringue night. Once we'd polished off three pitchers of Daiquiris, I no longer felt distracted by the sight of men necking and dancing. Out on the floor we all went, tripping the light fantastic to a couple of loud Nicky Pacheco bachatas. At some point, Elsie, my wife, began whispering something I couldn't quite hear clearly in my ear.

"Thazyou gwokipo," she kept saying." "Thaz you gwokipo."

"What ?" I kept saying back, the trebly bass turning every peripheral sound into a wobbly buzz.
"Say what?"

"That's that goalkeeper!" she finally managed to shout into my ear. "The goalkeeper for *^l+*%2 !"k2%$&5."

And sure enough, as I stared at the back of a shaved head and then looked down to see muscular forearms and, connected to these forearms, two hands, inside the bald guy's trousers, holding onto his buttocks for dear life, the sheer horror of it all began doing neurological pool hustler tricks inside my id. As they jerked and twisted around to the beat, I somehow sussed it before I saw his face. It really was *^l+*%2 !"k2%$&5.'s goalkeeper. This goalkeeper is someone I admire tremendously. A player who had, more or less, won everything there is to win, and, arguably, at the time, the number one goalkeeper in the whole world of football: The beautiful game!

Yet I felt woozy. Him? Gay?Wow! I had to sit down and anesthetize myself further with a couple of shots of Wild Turkey. I'm certain I stared at him for the rest of the night, but if he did notice me gaping, he sure didn't show it. Now I've mentioned religion already. Frankly, I'm not religious in a traditional sense. Organized religion does not particularly appeal. I worship at the altar of my family. Yet my only other true love is football, and I worship in a diligent, orthodox fundamentalist way. I didn't want gay footballers on my radar. I wished the issue away. The next day, according to the celebrity gossip columns in the two local newspapers, there were pictures of him night clubbing with his also-famous Canadian model 'girlfriend.' Anyway, again, I wished the issue away.

It was not a big deal in my head one way or another until his form went bad after he’d supposedly gone to war with *^l+*%2 !"k2%$&5.'s legendary coach over his 'night clubbing.' What happened to him next--once the famous coach decided he feared the power of the media and the affect of a scandal on his team’s dressing-room-unity more than losing one of the best goalkeepers in the world--was brutal. After letting him languish in the reserves and promoting a young American prospect who had been waiting patiently on the bench, *^l+*%2 !"k2%$&5 let him go on the cheap and his career seemed to spiral even further downward after he was involved in a spitting incident during a friendly in a Middle East country when he was playing for a big French club. Soon he was let go by them to an even smaller club as he became an emotional basket case, both on and off the pitch, and the subject of much malicious gossip and ridicule throughout the incestuous world of football.

Was the famous coach in the wrong? Homosexuality in the workplace is still subject to a huge amount of stigma. Certain professions like politics will turn a blind eye to such personal foibles and a handful of others wallow in them. Prejudice and discrimination, stemming from negative social attitudes toward homosexual males in particular, have historically lead to a much higher prevalence of mental health disorders among gays compared to their heterosexual peers, according to psychologist IIan Meyer. Meyer also points out that the working world has been 'loosening up' a lot over the last decade. Professional sports, however, particularly team sports, offer no refuge for anyone who chooses to be openly ‘different.’ Athletes who might otherwise be reasonably laissez-faire about other forms of hedonism involving sexuality take on a sort of Fascist mob mentality when their group is challenged from without or within ("The Sexual Health of Monorities" pp. 171-172).

Consequently, the coach then has to think of himself as both an alpha male leader and the facilitator of group harmony through his beta-male lieutenant, the team captain. The rejection of rebellious, individualistic behavior among athletes was described by the anthropologist Edward Bernays as the psychology of the subconscious and its byproduct, Convergence Theory, which holds that groups, in and of themselves, will not have a conditioned response to 'different'' individuals. (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/ Crowd psychology).

Coaches rule in team games and they are the ones who bring in statutes and regulations to help elicit a conditioned response from the team toward players like our goalkeeper. It’s not really important who this player is. It is important, however, to understand that he very much typifies a certain kind of lifestyle that team athletes are forced to work against together, yet anonymously for the sake of emotional and financial survival. Amidst all this psycho babble, the thing that shows itself most clearly is irony. In a sport where individual flashes of brilliance transcend the ordinary, the notion of the collective soul clashes with the will for individualism that all great players own. This is the genius of the game itself, what Manchester United's manager Sir Alex Ferguson refers to as "the peaks and valleys of the team and the game when you manage to achieve perfection" ("The Treble")

Depending upon which survey you read, homosexuals number between 5% and 13% of any society. This means that there are, for example, at least 14,000,000 homosexuals in the United States. Can we then state with some certainty that at least 5% of all professional football players in the world are queer? Not necessarily, say some sports psychologists like Kenneth Bamm. Research shows that a good athlete is always a good athlete, by which I mean that in England a good footballer is, more often than not, also rather good at cricket and rugby; in India, a good cricketer tends to also make a fine player of badminton, squash and tennis; in the U.S., because professional athletes tend to be drafted out of college systems, athletes tend to really excel at American football and baseball. The incidence in Indian sports of professional players excelling in both team and individual sports seems to be an Asian anomaly. Team sports, in the West at least, it is easy to posit, because of Convergence Theory, tend to reject anyone who isn't a Team Player. Therefore, cultural forces push most gay athletes to become practitioners of sports which are more individualized like squash, tennis, diving, Greco-Roman wrestling and boxing (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/67101-acceptance-of-gay-athletes-increasing). Therefore, it's absolutely impossible to know how many gay footballers are out there because they are literally forced to live like terrorists in sleeper cells.

Why is this? After all, according to the most current survey of male and female sports fans carried out in 2005 by Sports Illustrated magazine, 86% of the people interviewed felt that it was okay for openly gay athletes to participate in individual and team sports, even if they were open about their sexuality. Yet 63% of the same corespondents strongly felt that it would hurt an athlete's career if they were openly gay. At the same time, over 90% of the people interviewed felt "far more accepting of lesbians in sport than gay men." (sportsillustrated.cnn. com/2005/magazine/04/12/survey.expanded/index.html). Ambiguous answers from an ambivalent public.

What are you supposed to make of it if you are a gay male? The one English footballer known to have come out of the closet, Justin Fashanu was so vilified by the cruel Brit press that he went into exile in the United States. Shortly thereafter, accused of rape by a gay teenager, Fashanu returned home to face a relentless tsunami of abuse. Nobody could possibly have been surprised when he hanged himself. And again I ask: What are you supposed to make of it if you are a gay male professional footballer?

Additionally, there is the fact of celebrity. Footballers play as a team, but the most skillful and the best looking are now celebrity superstars. To be a skillful pretty boy, like David Beckham or Theo Walcott, means you get the keys to the kingdom of celebrity. Footballers in England, Spain and Italy exist in the pantheon of the publicly beloved. They are coequal to movie stars and pop singers. Football may have once been a working class sport and is certainly still played by hungry youth whelped on council estates, but most working class people can no longer afford a seat at Old Trafford or the Emirates. and so scrimp and save to watch games on their satellite dishes. Football is just another entertainment now, up there on the glass teat for your entertainment just like WWF Wrestling, movies and soap operas. As such, footballers are now part of what is called a WAG Culture. Footballers are expected to date actresses, models and rappers, and then appear as a guest on The Ali G Show.

Chelsea's star left back Ashley Cole is a fine example of this madness. Everybody seems to waste a lot of time and energy discussing whether he's gay, bisexual or what. As of today , should you Google his name, the first citation comes up: "Ashley Cole IS in the Gay Orgy Sex Tape" blares out at you. If you own a voyeuristic nature, you can easily get connected to a tacky, grainy video that may or may not show someone who may or may not looks a lot like Ashley Cole groping and French-kissing another male in a room where a lot of people are having sex. (http//www.248a.m.com/mark/sports/ashley-cole-is-in-the-gay-orgy-sex-t666666666666). Consequently, when two lowbrow British newspapers,The Star and The News of the World reported that Cole was gay, he sued them for slander and libel, winning financial compensation and a printed apology ("Tabloid Apology Over Cole Story" BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/uk_news/5114228-stu). At the same time, standup comedians, bloggers and cable radio soccer talk show hosts here in the U.S. constantly, relentlessly harp on poor pretty Ashley's private life and the true status of his relationship with his model wife, Cheryl.

At the same time, ordinary citizens, some of whom may be gay activists trying to 'out' celebrities and others who simply wish to cause mischief constantly keep posting the video in question on the likes of You Tube, MySpace and Facebook. When they are taken down, someone else puts them back up. And at the end of the day, when the ultra-hypocritical reactionary press sticks its oar in., it's to criticize footballers for not being ‘role models ("Ashley Cole Sues Over Gay Report" The Independent:: March 3, 2006. http:// license.icopyright.ne/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=MjAONTIwOQ%3D).

Finally, to close, let's talk about Sol Campbell. He's past his best now, but in 2001, when he left the club he had grown up with, Tottenham Hotspur, for their North West London rivals, Arsenal, Sol Campbell was easily the best Centre Back in the world. Built like a Greek statue, Campbell was fast, brilliant and ruthless. There had long been rumors that Sol was gay and he had always vehemently denied them. Spurs fans who felt understandably angry and betrayed when he left them for their local rivals began to sing songs about Sol with some of the vilest, most nasty racist lyrics I've ever heard ("Spurs in the Dock Over Abuse of SolCampbell" by Jeremy Wilson. The Daily Telegraph, Oct.4, 2008http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sp[ort/
football/leagues/premierleague/tottenham/3131818/spurs-in-the-dock-over-abuse-of-sol-campbell-Football.html)

He's big!
He's black!
He takes it up the crack.
Sol Campbell!
Sol Campbell!

Fortunately, Arsenal fans were loud, too, and the message tended to get drowned out at Highbury unless you were seated close to the Spurs' bloc. Years later, though, now that Sol plays for Portsmouth, whose fans are relatively docile and quiet, the racist homophobia is clearly there for everybody to hear. Consider this lovely little ditty, set to the melody of 'Lord of the Dance.'

Sol, Sol, wherever you may be,
You're on the verge of lunacy.
And we don't give a fuck,
if you're hanging from a tree,
You Judas cunt with HIV.

Sticks and stones, you may say. It's a free country bla! bla! bla! But consider, if you please, Sol's older brother, John. His story another young man who was taking the same class as him at the University of East London. This young man, a proud Spurs fan named Mark Goldstein, kept singing those songs, both in and out of class and asking John Campbell if he too was queer like his little brother. One day something snapped in John Campbell. He attacked Mr. Goldstein, breaking his jaw, smashing most of his teeth and kicking him unconscious. The victim was so badly injured that he had to have two metal plates inserted into his head to hold the fractured jaw together and forced to spend months drinking liquified food through a straw. The judge was not sympathetic to John Campbell. He was jailed for one year. Campbell's barrister, Patrick Moran, had this to say: "My client has brought shame on his family and most ironically to his younger brother whose reputation he fought to protect."("Sol Campbell's Brother Jailed
For Attack Over Gay Rumour" The Guardian: June 4, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
2005/jun/04/gayrights.football)