Quotes

Alan Irvine says: “We haven’t been 2-0 up on many occasions this season and it was looking as though we may be able to add to it when we had some good breakaway opportunities in the 2nd half.”

Stevie Watson says: “Brian’s won a good header and I had no option really, other than to have a pop. If I’m being truthful, I probably didn’t expect to catch it quite so well but I was delighted to see it sail over the keeper. I was pleased with the second one too, even though it was a lot easier. I caught it well."

Sausage says: "The Rad can't finish to save his life."

Jogger says: "He's scored more than you."

APOCALYPSE NOTLOB AND THE IRRITABILITY FACTOR
By
Mickey Blue Eyes.

Winter still begrudges Spring. It must be time for a midweek away match at sulky notloB, heart of darkness in deepest Lancashire.

Normally I relish the prospect of a footy match and the opportunity to ramble anarchistically through one of these occasional match reports. But for some reason I found myself less than happy at this one. I ransacked my rationale for the irritability factor.

At least it started with a smile. The reverse spelling of that proper noun still strikes my funny bone like a lump hammer. I know the terrible dangers of generalisation, though I have to say the wrong spelling somehow seems more appropriate than the true one. I was in that kind of mood. Dark satanic mills have fled into history but sometimes you still associate the place with……………well, let’s be honest, dark satanic mills full of defeated, bent back Lowry figures. Luddites. Wakes Week. Flat caps and whippets. EE bah goom. Clogs. Caseballs with laces. Nathaniel Lofthouse. Even Fred Dibnah. It must be Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD) because virtually all of the mills etc. vanished many decades ago. So forgive me if you detect an undercurrent of barely restrained hysteria. It is the time of year. That and the image of John Cleese in a plastic mac buttoned at the throat.

I really must desist from using these regional stereotypes. After all, contemporary Britain is a sophisticated country is it not? Well, isn’t it? How else to explain the decline in numbers of cockney pearly kings and queens? A reduction in cannibalism in what’s left of rural areas of Kent? Surely even the Geordies have stopped eating their young? Isn’t it true the wellied Welsh no longer molest reluctant sheep at a vertical cliff face? That Lahndan mortgagees are once again staring negative equity in the face? That Yorkshire natives have developed human warmth? Have not the Jocks abandoned attempts to murder every innocent English man, woman and child? Even the Irish seriously consider sobriety and elimination of the poisoned muck called Guinness. No, these tired stereotypes simply won’t do. We must look for other targets.

Maybe it would be more appropriate to aim for those opaque one-dimensional churls who have problems with player nicknames bandied around by fans. After all, genuine laughter must come hard to them when they have a soft boiled egg for a brain and the humour of a turnip. You wonder how Lowry would have depicted that kind of mindset. Probably he’d have them bent over, head between their knees, staring into their own rectal canal. In which case maybe it would be better portrayed by Andy Warhol, perhaps even Hieronymus Bosch.

Anyway.

It isn’t far to notloB’s remote and characterless new ground in Horwich but at times it seems like an upriver mission to kill Colonel Kurtz. It isn’t a place you relish visiting. It’s like New Brighton circa 1985 or antiseptic Southport at any time. You expect their club song to be delivered by Kate Bush squealing, “Heathcliiiiiiiiiiiiffe!!!” or something by Tiny Tim playing bad harmonics on a leaking accordion. The Reebok stadium is, well, horrible actually. Furthermore, too many of their fans resemble the sight and sound of Michael Jackson on a bad hair day. Shit, there I go again. Stop it.

Just as nobody ever got poor by underestimating the dim wits, scatty selfishness, lousy taste and mean-spirit of the suburban middle class everywhere so you could never do enough to destroy the aesthetic reputation of the notloB property development. Consider it a service to human culture of any kind. You wouldn’t wish the place on the desperate poor of Bangladesh though doubtless they’d bite your arm off if you offered to transfer it thereto. I mean nothing impersonal when I say those responsible should be made to live there while it gets bulldozed.

My memory of last season’s fixture was that the policing was every bit as ugly and soulless as the new buildings. No, I wasn’t looking forward to the visit at all. I wanted to get in, watch the match, and get the hell away as soon as transport could take me to the warmth of home and hearth. Paradoxically, the notloB club itself is fine. So is, for example, Sam Allardyce. So are most of their fans. It is the attachments which make you wonder what the fuck you’re doing there.

Attached accoutrements have all the joy of a corrupt Texas oil company considering abolition of the (US welfare state for the rich) oil depletion allowance, or instigating a war in (say) oil-rich Iraq, or stealing an election to put an empty-head no-mark in the White House, or bribing their employees with “business trips” to Rome or Paris or a useless back-slapping “conference.” In other words, you deserve what you get really. Why be surprised? Until a neighbourhood near miss like Enron happens. Up to that point they’ll make all the miserable immoral excuses they can and ally it to smugness, white picket fences, whingeing about taxes and reproducing right wing economics cant. You wonder how these dead brains cauterise their humanity and live with it. But that’s their problem. The rest of us deal with reality. So, tragically, will Iraqi families. So why can’t friendly bombs and cruise missiles fall on the notloB development instead?

Then it came to me like a bolt from the blue. The reason for my irritation was: The Yank Super Bowl! Somehow I had allowed myself to be inveigled into watching this pile of coagulated poo into the early hours of Monday morning. No wonder I was pissed off. For it needs to be said completely without equivocation that Yank grid-iron (anybody who calls it “football” should be committed post haste to Broadmoor) is the biggest load of utter bollocks even the Yanks have managed to assemble in one place. You watch the unfolding farce with a sense of rising horror. You are as dully hypnotised as a rabbit facing a cobra.

It isn’t a sports spectacle. It is a pre-arranged street fight by hugely overweight men wearing motor bike helmets, hysterically tight shiny kecks and Zulu face make-up. Some of them even carry a window cleaner’s cloth. The ball, and it’s oval anyway, is secondary. Players are attacked willy-nilly by other players for no immediately apparent reason. Some of the players are so fat they must have a body mass of, and I fucking kid you not, at least 38. Obesity levels start at 30. (Body mass = weight divided by height squared). A maul looks like an untidy squadron of belly flopping whales, huge floppy arses akimbo, kecks crotches comically a-droop. Dozens of coaches and substitutes swarm the touchline. The coaches are fitted with CBs and microphones capable of reaching Ice Station Zebra; they carry clipboards containing the latest New York Times crossword. Substitutes come and go according to the rigidity of their all too visible cod pieces.

Events on the field are “controlled” by a hundred referees wearing 1930s chain gang shirts and Waffen SS peaked caps. The referees address the crowd through a FBI COINTELPRO wire connected to the public address system. This is necessary because the rules are manifestly incomprehensible. Nobody has the slightest clue what’s going on, not even the referees. When they gather for a discussion it’s like a conference of deck chairs. How the lawyers stay out of it is anybody’s guess.

In truth the only things worth looking at were the gorgeous girly troupes known as cheer leaders. Amidst all the overblown phoney claptrap they certainly cheered this viewer. And the cheeriness increased when the TV director tried to get his travelling camera shots either (a) inside their scanty tops, or (b) inside their skimpy tight shorts. I was on the director’s side but he failed me miserably.

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough (and believe me, friends, it was BAAAD) there was a Yank TV commentary and studio comments by a Lahndan based group of toe-curling Yankophile pundits. It was spattered with shouted esoteric inanities like, “Yeah, that’s typical of the history-making Cnute Rockne University Moose Heads and their schmutz double barrelled one-time play through the tight end flying off their dee-fence into the off-ence and then rolling it thru a Winchester 75 franchise in overtime, if I got my Bill of Rights right, Jake. Right? Right THERE? Yeah. Hahahaha!” An obligatory Yank was wheeled out in the Lahndan studio to explain matters further. Eventually he disappeared up his own tight end while throwing more phonetic damp squibs. There was a surfeit of wild, sweaty faced gestures at a huge replay screen.

Somebody won but I can’t remember who. For all I know it might have been the Jesse Helms Carolina Reactionaries or the Texas Oil Good Ol’ Boy Cattleshagging Militarists or the Wall Street Ivy League Wankers, even the Washington Lobby Bribers. The score was something like 365-221. This appeared to consist of seventy five commercial breaks for ripoff-priced urine-flavoured Yank beer, two field goals, six pension fund scams, thirty mafia hits and one touchdown. The whole thing was so kitsch it was evil. It seems some of the fans thought so too because there were reports of post match disturbances, tear gas shells and rubber bullets in the streets. Christ, no wonder. I aimed a kick or two of my own at the TV set. Normally I reserve that sort of extreme action for an accidental encounter with a soap opera or a game show.

Small suprise I was even more irritable by the time match day rolled around. If the G14 Group have their way that is the way REAL football too will end up. That is, worthless. In which case this is one fan who won’t be giving them money.

Predictably the day dawned as overcast slate grey with freezing gale force winds. Hailstones and horizontal rain sluiced the streets. Naturally I had a site meeting. The weather battered the site accommodation as we discussed ground bearing pressures, delivery schedules, utilities connection fees, unit rates, aesthetic details, programme bar charts and other appallingly boring subjects. I thought about the notloB match and shuddered. Even the site meeting was preferable. But I was committed. I had to go.

Late afternoon I joined The Bus. A few new faces sprinkled among the usual suspects. Ray-o was back from a long “holiday,” as fractious and annoying as ever if you allowed him. I gave him five minutes conversation before indulging a convenient turbo snooze. Everyone else was in good spirits and confident as we set off upriver to kill Colonel Kurtz and/or Sam Allardyce. Out in the dark the rain deluged everything and hit The Bus like a volley of rifle fire; a cross wind did its best to careen us off the motorway. Eventually the Reebok hove into melancholic view, made worse by a slow crocodile of traffic and some locals who looked as though they resent the air they breathe. It’s an odd place alright.

Outside the ground we encountered Paul and Michael. Sadly for them, they had arrived at six o’clock and almost got frozen to death waiting for the gates to open at seven. Nobody told them what time the gates opened, nor is it stated on the tickets. I kept wishing I was somewhere else. It got worse by the minute.

Inside, there was a perfunctory attempt to cheer the situation by the deployment of, wait for it, a girly troupe of cheer leaders around the pitch. A relentlessly cheerful local assaulted the public address system with crap music and worse chat. The cheer leaders were maybe fourteen years of age, skinny, and obviously frozen to the marrow. I thought of the bronzed, svelte beauties at the Yank Super Bowl and immediately felt a twinge of sympathy for their notloB equivalents. The English in winter, a bedraggled shivering lot. The freezing wind whipped over the edge of the stands roof, turned inwards and whirled around the seats. For the umpteenth time you wondered what the fuck you were doing there.

True to form, Moyesy kept our team the same. There’s no gainsaying this method – perform or you make way. No professional worth his salt could complain. More to the point, it recognises team effort. Thus, even if someone is trying to play through a difficult patch they’ll still get a game if results are going our way. Of course there’s a good deal more to it than that but that’s the essence.

Within ten minutes of the kick off notloB should have been three up, all of them relatively decent chances. They missed the lot, a header and two shots. You breathed a sigh of relief because you knew they don’t have the players to keep up that kind of creative ratio, not unless we were going to have a bad hair day. And since we’ve only had one of those – at Chelsea in the League Cup – the chances were slim. Moyesy’s new fitness regime mostly guarantees we won’t roll over, that we’ll always be in with a chance.

Actually, the pattern of the game was generally scrappy even though chances came and went in sufficient quantity to keep us from freezing up. NotloB are a very big team who hustle and barge a lot in midfield and bodies thud to the ground at regular intervals. It was nice to see Gemmo and Li Tie (say it: Lee-Tee-er) didn’t shrink from the fight. In fact Li Tie got singled out for some special treatment and hit the deck more than anyone else. If he can survive that kind of treatment he’ll pull through anything. Meanwhile, Gemmo really put himself about and won lots of fifty-fifties and loose balls. Considering the size and weight of our two this was a praiseworthy effort. It’s a safe bet the two of them will be full of bruises this week. Still, our centre midfield passing isn’t as imaginative as the physical effort.

For some reason both teams made more progress down the right. Gradually we got back into the flow and began to threaten more. New Slimline Stevie is nominally wide right mid but he makes these diagonal runs into the centre which occasionally give us a front three at crucial times. Ally this to The Rad’s pace and you can get some interesting developments in the middle even though we lack height there when SuperKev isn’t playing. And when The Duke gets back………………………………

The Rad had another tremendously hard working game and gave their back four a gruelling time. What a pity he seems to “lose it” with his final pass. As the game wore on we had a lot of movement through the middle which looked really promising until he buggered up when a breakthrough looked imminent. Macca did the biz again and had bad luck with a couple of shots and a diving header which just went wide. He certainly doesn’t look out of place yet.

The defence had a superb night after those early scares. The only one who was partly off-message was Stubbsy, though he tightened up considerably after the first twenty minutes. Davey was back to his magnificent best and Sandro and Unsy had solid games. Wrighty was hardly tested all night.

The game went potty just over the half hour mark. An attack down the inside left channel ended with a short cross into the centre of the D, where Macca dinked a header back and upwards to the right. Stevie had his back to the goal just inside the box, a man stuck to his shirt, and the ball falling away from him. So he hit an overhead volley which looped dramatically over everybody and went home in the only place it could squeeze in, millimetres under the bar on the ‘keeper’s right. At first I thought it had gone over and landed on the back of the net. Cavorting Blue Bellies informed me otherwise.

Five minutes later Stevie got another after one of his diagonal runs into the middle. A move down our left got into the left side box. Nace tried an angled shot which hit a defender and broke loose to a defender, but The Rad came barrelling in and harassed him until it bounced out to Macca. He promptly smacked one in and the ‘keeper parried it out to a waiting Stevie and he couldn’t miss. At least I THINK that’s the way it happened. There were a lot of bodies in there.

Another five minutes on and we should have finished it. The Rad broke away wide right, notloB all over the show, and unmarked Gemmo and a couple of others screaming for the ball in the middle. All it needed was a straightforward pass and it was all over. He hit the ball straight to the only defender. You wanted to strangle him. He did the same thing on two occasions in the second half. How somebody can be so accomplished in everything except the crucial touch is quite beyond my poor comprehension. Whatever, the Rad’s play has made him virtually indispensable.

As the second half wore on we created chances by getting in behind them as they made fitful efforts to attack. For all the huff and puff they didn’t create much of anything and eventually they just faded away as an attacking force. Nace hit one tremendous long range effort which their ‘keeper saved magnificently, Joey (on as sub) missed a reasonable header and we missed another close-in headed chance from a corner when the ball bounced up into the ‘keeper’s chest.

We let one in in a goal mouth scramble in the last minute and that set up our usual jittery closing few minutes of added time. But by this time the ground was startlingly empty of notloBians. They knew, as did we, that really there was only one side in it.

All in all, a good win in quite difficult conditions. And with our players well on the way back from injury and suspension it looks as though we might well consolidate the unlikely position we find ourselves in. Wins at home to Leeds and away to Charlton will give us four in a row. I’m beginning to think anything’s possible with Moyesy.

But there’s always, ALWAYS, fate. It wouldn’t do to push our luck.

In the meantime, for those who have a wider interest in other matters and who care about their lives and the powers which affect it, you are invited to go here:

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

http://www.johnpilger.com/

Time is running out. In the meantime you will have your attention to the war issue deflected onto asylum seekers and immigration by our extreme right-wing owned media. And football. But only if you let it.

Team News

Moyesy has a near full squad to pick from. A straight choice between McBride & Campbell to partner the Rad. Carsley, Osman, Said, & Pembo all pushing for places, but may miss out this time.

Jogger predicts the team: Wright, Pistone, Yobo, Stubbs, Unsworth, Watson, Gravesen, Pembridge, Naysmith, Campbell & Radzinski.