Edinburgh City v Irvine Meadow in the Scottish Cup today.
And, it seems, a City debut for Russell Latapy.
A remarkable signing. A union, fittingly, sealed in an Edinburgh nightclub.
Follow @scotfootblog for updates from the game.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Hearts: Community Stadium, Civil Strife
"Hearts are to work with City of Edinburgh Council to look into the feasibility of a community stadium, the football club have revealed." (BBC Sport)
And the alarm bells start ringing.
Yes, I'm a Hibs fan.
And many Hibs fans will recoil at the very suggestion - and at this stage a suggestion is all it is - that the City of Edinburgh Council should get involved in a Hearts stadium scheme.
But that's not the motivation for my concern.
There are obvious benefits to Hearts leaving Tynecastle. It would end a chapter of Scottish football history - Hibs have plenty of bad memories and a few good ones to remind us of trips across the city - but it seems clear that the old ground is now too restricted for development.
If a move was to make Hearts stronger then it would be up to the rest of us to try and match them.
It might also ease whatever financial pressures continue to swirl around Gorgie. There would have to be - in the sensible execution of local government - questions asked if the council was to play a role in soothing those maroon economic ills.
That should probably not detain us right now. I'm certainly not a Hibs fan who sees any direct benefit in financial catastrophe befalling our nearest rivals.
The very idea of a community stadium should appeal to my politics and my ideas of a healthy civic life.
For a good few years I was of the opinion that Hibs and the local authority should have worked together on the redevelopment of Easter Road in tandem with the redevelopment of Meadowbank.
I now think I was wrong. And I worry that any joint moves by Hearts and the council would be folly on a grand scale.
A football stadium can - perhaps should - be a community hub. But that doesn't mean council funds should be appropriated. I'm convinced that source of funding would fail, especially in a city of Edinburgh's size.
Maybe my views have been tainted by reading Dave Zirin's Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love.
The book is a Zirin polemic and one that features the worrying American trend of sports franchise owners turning the hunt for public money to build new "ball parks" into an Olympian pursuit. (For UK reference see the grappling over the London 2012 stadium).
But he does tell us that the idea of council funds being used to lift Hearts from Gorgie and dropping them elsewhere in Edinburgh - inevitably and unimaginatively pitched as an exercise in regeneration - would likely fail.
Researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Alberta looked at thirty years of evidence and "failed to discover a single example of a sports franchise jump-starting the local economy."
Not that Hearts would be a franchise dropped from a great height. But location would be everything.
Even more so with a "community" stadium that would necessarily have to act as a multi-sport and leisure hub for the whole city. Where would it be? What facilities would be lost elsewhere? Would people travel? Or would participants - young, old, serious, just-for-fun-ers - be lost to sport?
As an Edinburgh resident, as a council tax payer, I'd want answers to those questions.
But that wouldn't be my biggest concern.
Edinburgh has a council that is morally bankrupt, teetering on the financial brink, possibly criminally corrupt and too often indulgent of incompetence.
What confidence should anybody - Hearts, Hibs or football hater - have in that council to make the right decisions on the location or construction of a football stadium?
I'm not sure how many people in Edinburgh would accept that these councillors or their officials have either the moral authority or the basic ability to make those decisions.
We have a right to expect better. We also have a right, I'm afraid, to expect that the council won't build a stadium - for Hearts, for Hibs, for the Scottish Rugby Union - at the same time as they're handing out compulsory redundancies.
It would take a hell of a business plan - complete with every social contingency for every area of the city that might feel knock on effects - to convince me that this partnership could work.
Anything else would feel like a stab in the dark. Mr Romanov has always struck me as a man appreciative of the legend of Hannibal. White elephants are probably not his thing.
Hearts would be advised to ca' canny.
Jump into bed with just anyone and they might suddenly find that Scotland's monkeys wear many a different disguise.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
And the alarm bells start ringing.
Yes, I'm a Hibs fan.
And many Hibs fans will recoil at the very suggestion - and at this stage a suggestion is all it is - that the City of Edinburgh Council should get involved in a Hearts stadium scheme.
But that's not the motivation for my concern.
There are obvious benefits to Hearts leaving Tynecastle. It would end a chapter of Scottish football history - Hibs have plenty of bad memories and a few good ones to remind us of trips across the city - but it seems clear that the old ground is now too restricted for development.
If a move was to make Hearts stronger then it would be up to the rest of us to try and match them.
It might also ease whatever financial pressures continue to swirl around Gorgie. There would have to be - in the sensible execution of local government - questions asked if the council was to play a role in soothing those maroon economic ills.
That should probably not detain us right now. I'm certainly not a Hibs fan who sees any direct benefit in financial catastrophe befalling our nearest rivals.
The very idea of a community stadium should appeal to my politics and my ideas of a healthy civic life.
For a good few years I was of the opinion that Hibs and the local authority should have worked together on the redevelopment of Easter Road in tandem with the redevelopment of Meadowbank.
I now think I was wrong. And I worry that any joint moves by Hearts and the council would be folly on a grand scale.
A football stadium can - perhaps should - be a community hub. But that doesn't mean council funds should be appropriated. I'm convinced that source of funding would fail, especially in a city of Edinburgh's size.
Maybe my views have been tainted by reading Dave Zirin's Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love.
The book is a Zirin polemic and one that features the worrying American trend of sports franchise owners turning the hunt for public money to build new "ball parks" into an Olympian pursuit. (For UK reference see the grappling over the London 2012 stadium).
But he does tell us that the idea of council funds being used to lift Hearts from Gorgie and dropping them elsewhere in Edinburgh - inevitably and unimaginatively pitched as an exercise in regeneration - would likely fail.
Researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Alberta looked at thirty years of evidence and "failed to discover a single example of a sports franchise jump-starting the local economy."
Not that Hearts would be a franchise dropped from a great height. But location would be everything.
Even more so with a "community" stadium that would necessarily have to act as a multi-sport and leisure hub for the whole city. Where would it be? What facilities would be lost elsewhere? Would people travel? Or would participants - young, old, serious, just-for-fun-ers - be lost to sport?
As an Edinburgh resident, as a council tax payer, I'd want answers to those questions.
But that wouldn't be my biggest concern.
Edinburgh has a council that is morally bankrupt, teetering on the financial brink, possibly criminally corrupt and too often indulgent of incompetence.
What confidence should anybody - Hearts, Hibs or football hater - have in that council to make the right decisions on the location or construction of a football stadium?
I'm not sure how many people in Edinburgh would accept that these councillors or their officials have either the moral authority or the basic ability to make those decisions.
We have a right to expect better. We also have a right, I'm afraid, to expect that the council won't build a stadium - for Hearts, for Hibs, for the Scottish Rugby Union - at the same time as they're handing out compulsory redundancies.
It would take a hell of a business plan - complete with every social contingency for every area of the city that might feel knock on effects - to convince me that this partnership could work.
Anything else would feel like a stab in the dark. Mr Romanov has always struck me as a man appreciative of the legend of Hannibal. White elephants are probably not his thing.
Hearts would be advised to ca' canny.
Jump into bed with just anyone and they might suddenly find that Scotland's monkeys wear many a different disguise.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
Hibs: Rod Petrie Counts The Cost
"Verily I say unto you, no prophet is accepted in his own country."
There's different levels of prophecy. My meandering mumblings on the accounts of Hibernian Football Club wouldn't have made Luke pick up his quill.
It's also easier - especially in this world of Scottish football - to herald the arrival of bad news than to proclaim the happy-clappy joys we yearn for.
So there's little pleasure in being right. But I was. About Hibs. Horribly so.
Negative? Yep, that was me. More doom laden than Private Frazer? Hands up.
Hibs, you see, were the paragons of financial virtue that ducked the SPL trend.
Our football often went a bit wobbbly. But we had seven years of profit and a board that knew what they were doing with their prudence, their training centre, their new East Stand.
"But," I said, "the football's become so bad, the sell-on value of the players dissipated so much, the attendances dropped so alarmingly, the thudding march of apathy so insistent, that our economic excellence is under threat."
Too miserable. That was me.
Yet here we are. Hibs, the footballing spinster neighbour who lives a frugal life before leaving the local cat and dog home a million pounds, have posted losses of £900,000 for the financial year.
That news has been delivered slowly. The board, the Iron Chancellors of Easter Road, have sat on bad tidings.
But financial statements must be released, AGMs must be held.
Wait, hold your breath, hope.
But if no good news comes you'll have to deliver the bad tidings eventually.
Big earners have gone, money has been snaffled for Sol Bamba and Anthony Stokes, innocent people have been made redundant, fans have been asked to pay prices they can ill afford.
And still:
£900,000 lost. All but 70 percent of turnover spent on wages.
Worth it?
Never a club to hide when financial successes are there to be hailed, Hibs' official website is the only place you'll find comment now.
Rod Petrie:
"In the current difficult economic conditions ['Always said Fred Goodwin was a Jambo'] every household faces pressure on its domestic budget and on discretionary expenditure. This, in turn, has an adverse effect on the Club's finances.
"Of course we are very mindful of the obvious fact that the lack of success on the field had a direct bearing on the level of turnover. The sporting outcomes for the Season were not what any of us would have wished. The team exited two competitions before the change in management ['This remains the fault of John Hughes'] and suffered the disappointment of an exit from the third competition in early January before new Manager Colin Calderwood was able to refresh the squad ['Poor Colin, defenceless little lamb'].
The board and Mr Petrie are blameless. They've always given the impression that we should tolerate their footballing stumbles and simply embrace their financial prowess. The finances have faltered. So it's time to blame other people.
Even if we're to read between the lines as Mr Petrie wants us to - if we're to accept John Hughes caused a football club to stumble on to a fault line - who was it that gave him the job?
Mr Petrie, if he cared, might realise that shirking responsibility doesn't appease supporters.
What next?
Colin Calderwood remains, looking for all the world like a dispirited accountant who's got lost on the commute home to Swindon. And remain he must.
How can he be sacked? What questions would the removal of Calderwood raise about the merry band of (handsomely) remunerated board members?
Did they not stubbornly refuse to countenance his departure in the summer when compensation offers were tabled?
They blame John Hughes. But they stand by Colin Calderwood. Stand by his 24 percent win rate.
Stand by a performance against Motherwell last weekend that pointed less to a manager turning the corner and more to a manager losing a torturous game of snakes and ladders. And losing it badly.
A Rod for their own backs?
A managerial change, we're told, contributed to this bout of financial pain.
A roll of the dice: cut your losses and admit you got the Calderwood call wrong? Or risk ever decreasing crowds and an increase in the apathy that's emptying the stands and muting the boos that greet a manager who can't inspire a team that hardly seems to care?
This board has been flung a shovel.
And they've dug and they've dug and they've dug.
I hope I'm wrong. But I can't see Calderwood turning this season on it's head.
That might not mean relegation but it means uncomfortable times.
Sack him and the board prove themselves footballing incompetents.
Keep him and the disconnect between club and supporter grows ever deeper.
You can choose either option and next year's financial results will still turn out even worse.
A rock and a hard place. A situation of entirely their own making.
Duck and take cover.
Because there's always one prediction that's safe to make: whatever happens next it won't be Rod Petrie's fault.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
There's different levels of prophecy. My meandering mumblings on the accounts of Hibernian Football Club wouldn't have made Luke pick up his quill.
It's also easier - especially in this world of Scottish football - to herald the arrival of bad news than to proclaim the happy-clappy joys we yearn for.
So there's little pleasure in being right. But I was. About Hibs. Horribly so.
Negative? Yep, that was me. More doom laden than Private Frazer? Hands up.
Hibs, you see, were the paragons of financial virtue that ducked the SPL trend.
Our football often went a bit wobbbly. But we had seven years of profit and a board that knew what they were doing with their prudence, their training centre, their new East Stand.
"But," I said, "the football's become so bad, the sell-on value of the players dissipated so much, the attendances dropped so alarmingly, the thudding march of apathy so insistent, that our economic excellence is under threat."
Too miserable. That was me.
Yet here we are. Hibs, the footballing spinster neighbour who lives a frugal life before leaving the local cat and dog home a million pounds, have posted losses of £900,000 for the financial year.
That news has been delivered slowly. The board, the Iron Chancellors of Easter Road, have sat on bad tidings.
But financial statements must be released, AGMs must be held.
Wait, hold your breath, hope.
But if no good news comes you'll have to deliver the bad tidings eventually.
Big earners have gone, money has been snaffled for Sol Bamba and Anthony Stokes, innocent people have been made redundant, fans have been asked to pay prices they can ill afford.
And still:
- Loss for the year of £0.9m
- Staff Costs remained static at £4.8m - representing a ratio of 69% to Turnover
- Turnover reduced by £0.1m to £7m
- Operating Costs were £3.4m
- Net Asset position reduced to £14.4m
- Net Debt of £5.9m, positive Cash Balance of £2m
£900,000 lost. All but 70 percent of turnover spent on wages.
Worth it?
Never a club to hide when financial successes are there to be hailed, Hibs' official website is the only place you'll find comment now.
Rod Petrie:
"In the current difficult economic conditions ['Always said Fred Goodwin was a Jambo'] every household faces pressure on its domestic budget and on discretionary expenditure. This, in turn, has an adverse effect on the Club's finances.
"Of course we are very mindful of the obvious fact that the lack of success on the field had a direct bearing on the level of turnover. The sporting outcomes for the Season were not what any of us would have wished. The team exited two competitions before the change in management ['This remains the fault of John Hughes'] and suffered the disappointment of an exit from the third competition in early January before new Manager Colin Calderwood was able to refresh the squad ['Poor Colin, defenceless little lamb'].
The board and Mr Petrie are blameless. They've always given the impression that we should tolerate their footballing stumbles and simply embrace their financial prowess. The finances have faltered. So it's time to blame other people.
Even if we're to read between the lines as Mr Petrie wants us to - if we're to accept John Hughes caused a football club to stumble on to a fault line - who was it that gave him the job?
Mr Petrie, if he cared, might realise that shirking responsibility doesn't appease supporters.
What next?
Colin Calderwood remains, looking for all the world like a dispirited accountant who's got lost on the commute home to Swindon. And remain he must.
How can he be sacked? What questions would the removal of Calderwood raise about the merry band of (handsomely) remunerated board members?
Did they not stubbornly refuse to countenance his departure in the summer when compensation offers were tabled?
They blame John Hughes. But they stand by Colin Calderwood. Stand by his 24 percent win rate.
Stand by a performance against Motherwell last weekend that pointed less to a manager turning the corner and more to a manager losing a torturous game of snakes and ladders. And losing it badly.
A Rod for their own backs?
A managerial change, we're told, contributed to this bout of financial pain.
A roll of the dice: cut your losses and admit you got the Calderwood call wrong? Or risk ever decreasing crowds and an increase in the apathy that's emptying the stands and muting the boos that greet a manager who can't inspire a team that hardly seems to care?
This board has been flung a shovel.
And they've dug and they've dug and they've dug.
I hope I'm wrong. But I can't see Calderwood turning this season on it's head.
That might not mean relegation but it means uncomfortable times.
Sack him and the board prove themselves footballing incompetents.
Keep him and the disconnect between club and supporter grows ever deeper.
You can choose either option and next year's financial results will still turn out even worse.
A rock and a hard place. A situation of entirely their own making.
Duck and take cover.
Because there's always one prediction that's safe to make: whatever happens next it won't be Rod Petrie's fault.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Blogathon: Alzheimer Scotland
Both the charities I'm fundraising for are close to my heart. One of them, Alzheimer Scotland, I've chosen for particularly personal reasons.
To see dementia take hold of someone you love is horrific.
To see loving, engaged, active, funny, understanding, generous people gradually robbed of their vitality, their spark, their ability to function is heartbreaking.
To see the anguish of relatives who have to come to terms with this decline in loved ones while wrestling with the myriad issues surrounding care is agonising.
There are two losses. There is death, funerals and mourning. Before that there is the loss of the person you knew, the loss of the chance to talk, share, laugh and cry with people who had always been there for you.
Families across Scotland face this trial everyday.
And this remains an illness without a cure.
Here's some information:
- Dementia is an illness which affects the brain, causing a progressive loss of mental powers.
- It is the fourth biggest killer for women in Scotland and the ninth for men.
- Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementias are the most common forms of the illness, but there are many other conditions which can also cause dementia.
- Between 58,000 and 65,000 Scots have dementia and this number is increasing as people live longer.
- By 2031, more than 100,000 people in Scotland will have dementia.
- Almost everyone knows someone who is affected - it may be a relative, friend, neighbour or workmate who has the illness or who is caring for someone.
- People with dementia gradually lose their memory and their understanding. They become confused and often frustrated as they cannot do things they used to do. Bit by bit, they become less able to look after themselves and have to rely on others to help. Eventually, even dressing, eating or going to the toilet may become impossible without help.
Alzheimer Scotland provide invaluable support to both sufferers and carers:
- Provide practical services such as day care and home support, helping people with dementia retain their skills for as long as possible and giving carers a break from caring
- Run support groups for carers and people recently diagnosed with dementia
- Speak out for the rights and concerns of people with dementia and their carers
- Support groups of people with dementia and carers to speak out for themselves
This is a common illness. But sufferers and their loved ones often feel alone. Alzheimer Scotland offers reassurance, understanding and advice.
I'm proud to be helping that work in a small, small way.
There are also footballing reasons for my choice of Alzheimer Scotland.
One of the most moving accounts of dementia that I've read recently is in Tony Smith's account of the last years of his dad Gordon.
That's Gordon Smith of Hibs, Hearts and Dundee. The record breaking superstar of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. This illness doesn't respect genius, it cuts down even our sporting giants.
And Alzheimer Scotland is involved in a unique partnership with the Scottish Football Museum.
Their Football Reminiscence Project brings volunteers together with football fans with dementia. The volunteers talk fitba' with the fans and stimulate memories using our frustrating, beguiling game.
Just another example, amid all the nonsense that goes on, of how football does have a real power to achieve great things.
www.alzscot.org
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
#fitbablether
Saturday, October 15, 2011
SPL: Saturday Superstore
Six SPL games on a Saturday afternoon? A fixture list that makes me feel dizzy. The past is an unfamiliar place and all that.
A full house. A lunchtime kick off in Ayrshire is the only nod to modernity, the joker in the pack reminding us that we're so totally not, like, living in the last century or something.
How we've missed the SPL, longed for it's tender embrace to soothe the pain of another aborted Scottish mission.
Spain attempted to smother us to death with their passing on Tuesday night. They kept the ball without a Scottish foot, knee, head, hand or bahookie intervening for the first two minutes of the match.
Then Christophe Berra booted it into the stand. It was at once comfortingly familiar, reassuringly defiant, inspiringly Scottish and a depressing articulation of our limitations.
All of which, for reasons that Dr Steven Pinker might be able to explain, put me in mind of the SPL.
We start today in Kilmarnock, where the men are men. Except when they're swinging their handbags at Kirk Broadfoot.
The visitors are Celtic. They might, or might not, be on the verge of signing James McFadden. I'm very far from being an expert but I don't look at Celtic's major weaknesses this season and see McFadden as a provider of bespoke solutions.
Celtic, of course, are ten points behind Rangers and but a lowly third in the league. I don't think its outrageous to suggest that being third in a two horse race is far removed from being considered a position of strength. Long way to go though.
Kenny Shiels reckons he'd rather play entertaining football than finish a few places higher in the league. A romanticism that many of us can sympathise with. Of course it sounds like a bloody stupid thing to say if you end up bottom of the league.
Not that Kilmarnock are bottom of the league. But they've lost their last three games and are only two points ahead of current SPL dunces Inverness. Romanticism is fine. Bismarck would quote Shakespeare, could appreciate Byron. But he could also dish out some realpolitik when the occasion demanded. Will Kenny Shiels be able to do the same?
I wouldn't be surprised if Kilmarnock beat Celtic today. It's the sort of thing that tortured aesthetes enduring a bad run pull off. Just like the French rugby team.
I wouldn't be surprised. But I'll not back it. Away win.
It's approaching 25 years since Alex Ferguson left the fortress he'd built in Scotland's north east to create a dynasty in England's north west.
It's 24 years since Jim McLean took Dundee United to the UEFA Cup final.
Whither the New Firm?
Answering that question might require a book. More practically they're at Pittodrie today.
Aberdeen have been something of an SPL crisis club this season. Actually they so often push themselves to the front of the "crisis club" queue that one suspects a perverse pleasure titillates Pittodrie when soul searching, hand wringing and abusing the manager are called for.
They've actually only lost one out of their last four. While it looked at one stage that Paul McCartney would get married more often than Aberdeen scored this season, they spanked Dunfermline in a scintillating (probably) four goal display of attacking intent (possibly) last time out.
And they're only a point behind Dundee United. All of which might leave Craig Brown channelling Jim Callaghan (another chap of mature vintage who took over when a younger man had been turned into a trembling wreck by the pressures of the job) and asking: "Crisis, what crisis?"
(Actually Sunny Jim didn't say that. He said: "I don't think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos." And, in all honesty, Aberdeen didn't look capable of causing chaos or even mild panic earlier in the season.)
In common with much of the league Dundee United have been hamstrung by inconsistency so far. Four draws, three home defeats. The upshot is ten points from ten games.
Thankfully Peter Houston saw a blueprint for revival in Alicante on Tuesday. The tangerine tiki-taka revolution starts now.
Actually it probably doesn't. United remain a capable team who aren't quite clicking often enough.
I'd still have backed them to win this one a couple of weeks ago. Not now. Home win.
Paulo Sergio, cardiganed guardian of Tynecastle, was spluttering something about referees and lie detector tests this week.
I'd never argue that Scottish football doesn't have a need for a Gorgie-based cross between Val Doonican and Andy Sipowicz. But right now it might prove a distraction as he tries to put right Hearts' unfortunate away record.
Strange that the manager has had such a convincing run at Tynecastle but seemed powerless to right whatever it is that's gone wrong on the road.
Today's trip to a plummeting Dunfermline might be the best place to start. On the other hand, of course, a plummeting Dunfermline might see Hearts, encumbered as they are with wretched travel sickness, as the perfect way to stop plummeting.
That's the thing about football. One man's succour is, well, it's also another man's succour. Maybe.
Dunfermline beat Dundee United 1-0 on 20th August. Since then they've lost five games and drawn one. They've conceded 19 goals in six games. They've been beaten by East Fife. And they've shipped four goals without reply to Aberdeen.
That's an unfortunate run that could quickly become a disatrous run. Finally a day trip Hearts can look forward to. Away win.
Although Rangers brought Hibs recent low key revival to an end at Ibrox, Colin Calderwood could at least take heart - medical experts assure me he must have one - from a performance that had both a certain cohesion and carried something of an attacking threat.
The manager has endured worse times at Easter Road. The SFA let off both Graeme Stack for an alleged elbow on Kyle Lafferty and Garry O'Connor for an alleged dive against St Johstone.
This has been taken in some quarters to be proof of the incompetence of the SFA's new disciplinary procedures and/or a symptom of the ongoing anti-Rangers agenda at Hampden. Seriously.
I didn't think the Stack footage was damningly conclusive enough. I felt O'Connor was balletic under contact that he seemed to engineer himself. Even video evidence is all about opinion.
But one man's allegation of not being up to the disciplinary job is another man's barely credible conspiracy theory and still another man's good news. So you won't find Colin Calderwood complaining. If Stack has been inspired by his repreive to remember how to get his body shape right and hold on to the ball then that will be ever sweller.
Hibs face Motherwell today, currently the gooseberries at the top end of the SPL. Quietly impressive this Stuart McCall led Motherwell team.
And second in the league with almost a quarter of the season gone. Who would have bet on that?
I've actually got high hopes that this might be a good game. A scoring draw. I await crushing disappointment.
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. They all laughed at Ally McCoist when he said the job was sound.
Where are our modern day George Gershwins to turn the story of McCoist the manager into song?
Nine points clear at the top, ten points ahead of Celtic, an Old Firm game won. Two European exits and a league cup defeat aside, Ally can be rather happy at the moment.
He made signings in the summer - if not the megabucks deals that were rumoured by some at Ibrox - that have let an ageing team evolve. And they look at home in the league, at times impressive, at times just grinding it out and getting there.
Mind you, McCoist has always been a lucky one. He even got to Patsy Kensit before she got that trout pout.
Not everything in the garden is rosy. Financial clouds continue to gather. But McCoist is doing what was asked of him. He can do no more. Not that it's over yet, not by a long way.
Danny Lennon is another manager who might like to thumb his nose at the doubters. He believed in his project, believed in it as he looked in his players eyes and asked them to be men. Believed in it as he took stock of the mistakes of his first season and reshaped his squad.
Could it be that a young manager given time and backing has found the confidence to flourish. That would be refreshingly unlike the SPL.
Of course it's all relative. St Mirren are in sixth place and as close to fifth place as they are to bottom. Such are the glories of the SPL middle order.
But Lennon can point to progress. And probably does. Using a wallchart on the dressing room wall.
I'll still back the home win today though.
One of the teams that St Mirren are chasing are St Johnstone. A lesson in how to run a football club on a budget. In letting the manager get on with things. In placing a premium on sensible progression rather than projectile vomiting money in an ultimately futile attempt to buy the limited success that Scotland offers.
It also seems that Derek McInnes won't be trading in Perth for Bristol City. That's good news. I'm not kept awake at night by the managerial machinations of either St Johnstone or Bristol City.
But I like McInnes and I want good Scottish managers to stay in Scotland for as long as possible.
And Bristol City? Championship strugglers? The money might be better. But really? There would be something not quite right about it. Maybe not up there with Morecambe and Wise leaving BBC1 for ITV. But at least the same as The Only Way Is Essex moving from ITV2 to Channel 5.
I've written before about Terry Butcher being a manager who found the platform he needed at Inverness. And it turns out he's as capable of being as crap up north as he is anywhere else.
Unfair, unfair. Lost a lot of players, reshaped, refashioned, needs time. But they do seem to be struggling a bit.
It's obviously considered a temporary blip: he's signed a contract to stay on until 2014. There has to be a degree of faith involved in putting that offer on the table.
They also won last time out against St Mirren, proving that there's always points on offer as the SPL's lower reaches (six points seperate fourth and twelfth right now) scrap it out.
But it could be another tricky one for Terry's men today. A contentious win for Hibs - with a cameo by Margot Fonteyn O'Connor - is St Johntone's only league defeat since 13 August.
That makes this a home win for me.
That's it then. A Saturday superstore, a soccer smorgasbord, a scintillating SPL shindig.
Enjoy.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
A full house. A lunchtime kick off in Ayrshire is the only nod to modernity, the joker in the pack reminding us that we're so totally not, like, living in the last century or something.
How we've missed the SPL, longed for it's tender embrace to soothe the pain of another aborted Scottish mission.
Spain attempted to smother us to death with their passing on Tuesday night. They kept the ball without a Scottish foot, knee, head, hand or bahookie intervening for the first two minutes of the match.
Then Christophe Berra booted it into the stand. It was at once comfortingly familiar, reassuringly defiant, inspiringly Scottish and a depressing articulation of our limitations.
All of which, for reasons that Dr Steven Pinker might be able to explain, put me in mind of the SPL.
We start today in Kilmarnock, where the men are men. Except when they're swinging their handbags at Kirk Broadfoot.
The visitors are Celtic. They might, or might not, be on the verge of signing James McFadden. I'm very far from being an expert but I don't look at Celtic's major weaknesses this season and see McFadden as a provider of bespoke solutions.
Celtic, of course, are ten points behind Rangers and but a lowly third in the league. I don't think its outrageous to suggest that being third in a two horse race is far removed from being considered a position of strength. Long way to go though.
Kenny Shiels reckons he'd rather play entertaining football than finish a few places higher in the league. A romanticism that many of us can sympathise with. Of course it sounds like a bloody stupid thing to say if you end up bottom of the league.
Not that Kilmarnock are bottom of the league. But they've lost their last three games and are only two points ahead of current SPL dunces Inverness. Romanticism is fine. Bismarck would quote Shakespeare, could appreciate Byron. But he could also dish out some realpolitik when the occasion demanded. Will Kenny Shiels be able to do the same?
I wouldn't be surprised if Kilmarnock beat Celtic today. It's the sort of thing that tortured aesthetes enduring a bad run pull off. Just like the French rugby team.
I wouldn't be surprised. But I'll not back it. Away win.
It's approaching 25 years since Alex Ferguson left the fortress he'd built in Scotland's north east to create a dynasty in England's north west.
It's 24 years since Jim McLean took Dundee United to the UEFA Cup final.
Whither the New Firm?
Answering that question might require a book. More practically they're at Pittodrie today.
Aberdeen have been something of an SPL crisis club this season. Actually they so often push themselves to the front of the "crisis club" queue that one suspects a perverse pleasure titillates Pittodrie when soul searching, hand wringing and abusing the manager are called for.
They've actually only lost one out of their last four. While it looked at one stage that Paul McCartney would get married more often than Aberdeen scored this season, they spanked Dunfermline in a scintillating (probably) four goal display of attacking intent (possibly) last time out.
And they're only a point behind Dundee United. All of which might leave Craig Brown channelling Jim Callaghan (another chap of mature vintage who took over when a younger man had been turned into a trembling wreck by the pressures of the job) and asking: "Crisis, what crisis?"
(Actually Sunny Jim didn't say that. He said: "I don't think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos." And, in all honesty, Aberdeen didn't look capable of causing chaos or even mild panic earlier in the season.)
In common with much of the league Dundee United have been hamstrung by inconsistency so far. Four draws, three home defeats. The upshot is ten points from ten games.
Thankfully Peter Houston saw a blueprint for revival in Alicante on Tuesday. The tangerine tiki-taka revolution starts now.
Actually it probably doesn't. United remain a capable team who aren't quite clicking often enough.
I'd still have backed them to win this one a couple of weeks ago. Not now. Home win.
Paulo Sergio, cardiganed guardian of Tynecastle, was spluttering something about referees and lie detector tests this week.
I'd never argue that Scottish football doesn't have a need for a Gorgie-based cross between Val Doonican and Andy Sipowicz. But right now it might prove a distraction as he tries to put right Hearts' unfortunate away record.
Strange that the manager has had such a convincing run at Tynecastle but seemed powerless to right whatever it is that's gone wrong on the road.
Today's trip to a plummeting Dunfermline might be the best place to start. On the other hand, of course, a plummeting Dunfermline might see Hearts, encumbered as they are with wretched travel sickness, as the perfect way to stop plummeting.
That's the thing about football. One man's succour is, well, it's also another man's succour. Maybe.
Dunfermline beat Dundee United 1-0 on 20th August. Since then they've lost five games and drawn one. They've conceded 19 goals in six games. They've been beaten by East Fife. And they've shipped four goals without reply to Aberdeen.
That's an unfortunate run that could quickly become a disatrous run. Finally a day trip Hearts can look forward to. Away win.
Although Rangers brought Hibs recent low key revival to an end at Ibrox, Colin Calderwood could at least take heart - medical experts assure me he must have one - from a performance that had both a certain cohesion and carried something of an attacking threat.
The manager has endured worse times at Easter Road. The SFA let off both Graeme Stack for an alleged elbow on Kyle Lafferty and Garry O'Connor for an alleged dive against St Johstone.
This has been taken in some quarters to be proof of the incompetence of the SFA's new disciplinary procedures and/or a symptom of the ongoing anti-Rangers agenda at Hampden. Seriously.
I didn't think the Stack footage was damningly conclusive enough. I felt O'Connor was balletic under contact that he seemed to engineer himself. Even video evidence is all about opinion.
But one man's allegation of not being up to the disciplinary job is another man's barely credible conspiracy theory and still another man's good news. So you won't find Colin Calderwood complaining. If Stack has been inspired by his repreive to remember how to get his body shape right and hold on to the ball then that will be ever sweller.
Hibs face Motherwell today, currently the gooseberries at the top end of the SPL. Quietly impressive this Stuart McCall led Motherwell team.
And second in the league with almost a quarter of the season gone. Who would have bet on that?
I've actually got high hopes that this might be a good game. A scoring draw. I await crushing disappointment.
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. They all laughed at Ally McCoist when he said the job was sound.
Where are our modern day George Gershwins to turn the story of McCoist the manager into song?
Nine points clear at the top, ten points ahead of Celtic, an Old Firm game won. Two European exits and a league cup defeat aside, Ally can be rather happy at the moment.
He made signings in the summer - if not the megabucks deals that were rumoured by some at Ibrox - that have let an ageing team evolve. And they look at home in the league, at times impressive, at times just grinding it out and getting there.
Mind you, McCoist has always been a lucky one. He even got to Patsy Kensit before she got that trout pout.
Not everything in the garden is rosy. Financial clouds continue to gather. But McCoist is doing what was asked of him. He can do no more. Not that it's over yet, not by a long way.
Danny Lennon is another manager who might like to thumb his nose at the doubters. He believed in his project, believed in it as he looked in his players eyes and asked them to be men. Believed in it as he took stock of the mistakes of his first season and reshaped his squad.
Could it be that a young manager given time and backing has found the confidence to flourish. That would be refreshingly unlike the SPL.
Of course it's all relative. St Mirren are in sixth place and as close to fifth place as they are to bottom. Such are the glories of the SPL middle order.
But Lennon can point to progress. And probably does. Using a wallchart on the dressing room wall.
I'll still back the home win today though.
One of the teams that St Mirren are chasing are St Johnstone. A lesson in how to run a football club on a budget. In letting the manager get on with things. In placing a premium on sensible progression rather than projectile vomiting money in an ultimately futile attempt to buy the limited success that Scotland offers.
It also seems that Derek McInnes won't be trading in Perth for Bristol City. That's good news. I'm not kept awake at night by the managerial machinations of either St Johnstone or Bristol City.
But I like McInnes and I want good Scottish managers to stay in Scotland for as long as possible.
And Bristol City? Championship strugglers? The money might be better. But really? There would be something not quite right about it. Maybe not up there with Morecambe and Wise leaving BBC1 for ITV. But at least the same as The Only Way Is Essex moving from ITV2 to Channel 5.
I've written before about Terry Butcher being a manager who found the platform he needed at Inverness. And it turns out he's as capable of being as crap up north as he is anywhere else.
Unfair, unfair. Lost a lot of players, reshaped, refashioned, needs time. But they do seem to be struggling a bit.
It's obviously considered a temporary blip: he's signed a contract to stay on until 2014. There has to be a degree of faith involved in putting that offer on the table.
They also won last time out against St Mirren, proving that there's always points on offer as the SPL's lower reaches (six points seperate fourth and twelfth right now) scrap it out.
But it could be another tricky one for Terry's men today. A contentious win for Hibs - with a cameo by Margot Fonteyn O'Connor - is St Johntone's only league defeat since 13 August.
That makes this a home win for me.
That's it then. A Saturday superstore, a soccer smorgasbord, a scintillating SPL shindig.
Enjoy.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
Blogathon: The Homeless World Cup
One of the organisations I'll be fundraising for is the Homeless World Cup.
Here's why:
There are one billion homeless people in the world today.
That figure is so big as to be almost incomprehensible.
Football, through the Homeless World Cup, is playing its part in solving that problem.
The Homeless World Cup is an annual international football tournament.
It gives homeless people the chance to rebuild their lives by providing them with a focus, a motivation and a stability that they have lacked.
Over 70 percent of the players go on to change their lives. They might come off drugs or alcohol, find jobs, find homes, get an education, reunite with their families.
Some even find careers in professional or semi-professional football.
But the Homeless World Cup is about more than just the annual tournament. It is a unique, pioneering social enterprise which exists to end homelessness. It uses football to energise homeless people to change their own lives.
There is now a network of grass roots projects in over 70 countries around the world.
Those projects support over 50,000 people. Giving hope, changing lives.
Football is universally recognised, simple to organise, inclusive of different ages, men and women, all abilities.
Sometimes it doesn't know how to use that power. It can be bloated and greedy.
But it can also be a force for good, it can help bring about social change.
The Homeless World Cup is doing that every day, across the world.
By supporting the blogathon - by donating, by getting involved on Twitter or simply by spreading the word - you can help do a tiny little bit to support this fantastic organisation.
Football can't help end homelessness?
We might think that.
But a group of homeless guys from across Scotland probably didn't believe that they'd become world champions.
When we put our minds to it football really can change the world.
www.homelessworldcup.org
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
#fitbablether
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Book Review - There's Only One Sauzee: When Le God Graced Easter Road
It’s almost ten years since Franck Sauzée left Easter Road, a turbulent 69 days of management bringing a passionate Leith love affair to an end.
Yet he’s still revered by the green and white hordes (not all, but a hefty number). Gone but ever more cherished.
Why?
Over the course of Ted Brack’s account of the Sauzée era many observers – teammates, his former manager, Hibs legends and ordinary fans – try to get the bottom of what it was in the relationship between the veteran and the faithful that convinced so many supporters that there was indeed only “one Sauzée.”
A quote from Jonathan Swift, born in Hibernia if not a Hibee, is tucked away on page 53. It seems apt:
“Whoever excels in what we prize appears a hero in our eyes.”
I consider myself a pragmatic realist as a supporter. But even I can never quite shrug off a certain romanticism.
Sauzée embodied what Hibs would like to be and what they once might have been. For supporters of my age, raised in the utilitarian Alex Miller era, he was unlike anyone we’d seen before, playing the game the way we were told Hibs were supposed to play the game.
For older generations he was a throwback, the skillful maestro they thought they’d never see again.
So the fans embraced him and he embraced the fans and that, of course, only made the fans love him even more.
That Sauzée would come to Hibs in the First Division shocked many. I’m not sure it should have. He was winding down and was out of favour at Montpelier. Edinburgh, if you have a certain affluence, is a nice place to live and Hibs were then in a position to pay a more than comfortable wage.
Even a celebrated European Cup winner might have been easily persuaded that there are worse ways to prepare for retirement.
The bigger coup was capturing Russell Latapy at around the same time. Latapy was then aged 29, in theory approaching his peak, and was coveted in England.
“The boy Latapy? Aye, a good little player,” was Bobby Robson’s response to McLeish’s inquiry about the midfielder's calibre. That signing, eventually based on a trial match at Brechin, was remarkable, a genuine moment of McLeish audacity.
Yet as much as Latapy was appreciated and often thrilled the supporters, it was Sauzée the fans were drawn to.
It was Sauzée, more often than not strolling through games, who seemed to embody Hibs as they stormed back to the SPL, consolidated their position in the top flight, finished third in the league, reached a Scottish Cup final and came close to knocking AEK Athens out of the UEFA Cup in one of Easter Road’s great European nights.
It was Sauzée who ran the length of the pitch towards the away fans after scoring at Tynecastle, who lost his teeth scoring in an Easter Road derby, who danced a jig of delight when Hibs touched the heights in hammering Hearts 6-2. It was Sauzée who Hearts couldn’t beat.
If you were explaining to a footballer how to become a legend at Easter Road you’d give them a copy of Brack’s book - which fairly jogs along in recounting the highs and even highers of Sauzée's playing career - and tell them to follow the Sauzée masterplan.
His importance and influence was huge. Alex McLeish built a good team at Hibs. But his reliance on Sauzée was almost total.
Jonathan Swift might provide a theme: Sauzée was Gulliver in Lilliput, his teammates often looked more than the sum of their parts when this giant walked among them and were left diminished when he wasn’t there.
He was even adept at putting out fires when the Lilliputians around him made the occasional mistake or when the manager made the odd tactical error.
McLeish hovers over this book. He was the visionary who, we’re told, had an encyclopeadic knowledge of the European game and a subscription to World Soccer magazine. The man with the contacts and gumption to gift Scottish football Sauzée and Latapy.
The author accepts that at face value - McLeish provides a foreword paying tribute to both Sauzée and Hibs - but I’m not so sure.
Bryan Gunn, Justin Skinner, Grant Brebner, Paul Holsgrove, Klaus Dietrich, Peter Guggi, Barry Prenderville, Derek Anderson, Derek Collin, Tom Smith, Alex Marinkov, Nick Colgan, Ian Westwater, Dirk Lehman, Matthias Jack, Paul Lovering, Stuart Lovell, Martin McIntosh, Earl Jean, John O’Neil, Paul Fenwick. Gary Smith, Didier Agathe, Ulrik Laursen, David Zitelli, Lyndon Andrews, Freddy Arpinon, Marc Libbra, Tony Caig, Derek Townsley, Alen Orman, Allan Smart, Ulises de la Cruz, Eduardo Hurtado, Mixu Paatelainen, Craig Brewster, Paco Luna.
Those are just some of the players that McLeish welcomed to Easter Road. You’ll recognise a few of the names, you might have forgotten many of the others. This was a manager enjoying a Bosman rule orgy.
Even the capture of Sauzée seems might have been borne more from a desire to land a marquee name than an immediate recognition of what this ageing midfielder could offer a team that had already enjoyed 11 straight wins in the First Division.
Philippe Albert and Emil Kostadinov were also apparently pursued in the hunt to sign the big reputation that would put the seal on what was, by the time Sauzée arrived, already looking like a comfortable return to the top flight. By that reckoning we could argue that McLeish got lucky that it was Sauzée he ended up with.
Why does that matter? Is all this not just the bitter ramblings of a Hibs fan still smarting at Mcleish’s departure for Rangers?
Not entirely. It’s important because reading this book is an inexorable journey to those horrible 69 days, to the misery of a league cup semi final against Ayr United and the pain of seeing Sauzée sacked.
Reading Brack's account of the McLeish years it’s easy to see how Hibs peaked around the time of that 6-2 win over Hearts, how Sauzée’s absences became more frequent and more detrimental as age caught up with him.
And how Alex McLeish struggled to cope. A club record on de la Cruz? The Ecuadorian companion piece that was Hurtado? Derek Townsley?
McLeish had mislaid his mojo before he travelled along the M8.
That left Sauzée to take over a diminished team that had lost, in Sauzée himself, its most important asset. The team that had shone, for a few almost perfect months, as brightly as any Hibs side of recent vintage had been dismantled and McLeish couldn’t recapture the magic.
That was the legacy Sauzée had to wrestle with in those 69 days. The board could have insisted he recruit a more experienced assistant than Donald Park. They didn’t. They could have insisted he retained the option of playing himself. They didn’t.
There were financial constraints that Alex McLeish wouldn’t have recognised.
When McLeish confided to the board that he doubted he had the players to win the First Division they countenanced him turning that season into a Cecil B DeMille production, complete with a cast of thousands.
Sauzée's role was as the tortured foreigner in a kitchen sink drama. A club newly worried about the housekeeping budget wasn’t going to give this novice the chance to buy himself out of a disaster.
Not that he wasn’t well rewarded for his three years as player and manager. His sole demand was apparently that no player at the club be paid more than him. He had an awareness of his own value that hints at a thoroughly modern footballer lurking below the gentlemanly, elder statesman surface. The board, which has evolved somewhat since then, acquiesced.
Brack argues that the eventual sacking of Sauzée, this modern day Easter Road hero, could even be seen as a brave move.
I didn’t think that at the time and I don’t think it now. St Johnstone were relegated that season with 21 points. It’s unlikely they would have been able to catch a Sauzée led Hibs even given the trauma of his first two months in charge.
That he was replaced by Bobby Williamson was an act of cowardice, the final victory of the earnestly dull Roundheads. It's true that Williamson gave a talented group of Hibs youngster their chance, sowing the seeds for Tony Mowbray's success.
But the board denied the chance to prove that he could do the same, do it with more inspiration and flair than Williamson was capable of.
From Sauzée to Williamson. It wasn’t the most subtle way to end an era.
Given much of what’s followed for Hibs, the days when Sauzée was in his pomp have taken on an almost dreamlike quality.
And at times he was so good, so nonchalant, so intelligent (“gymnastics of the mind” he told Simon Pia), so unusually Continental and yet so obviously at home that it could be breathtaking. There were moments when he almost seemed to be turning Chick Young’s radio reports into the awestruck ramblings of a smitten Hibs fan.
Those memories make it seem masochistic to linger on how it ended rather than how it once was.
Sadly the book’s missing ingredient makes the parting of the ways impossible to ignore. There is no Franck Sauzée in these pages, he dominates the book by his absence.
His exile from the People’s Republic of Leith now seems complete and permanent. He didn’t object to the publication of this book but nor did he did he give it his blessing. He simply ignored it, as he has done with many requests from the Hibs community in recent years.
Hibs imported an ageing, handsomely rewarded star and bucked the trend of such signings. They got a player who lived, breathed and bled for the cause.
Then they lost him. Apparently forever.
That causes the book to list, if not aimlessly, then a bit uncomfortably. The adulation from the fans inspired Sauzée and, at a time of his career when he was good enough and old enough to coast, gave him the impetus to become a star all over again. He reciprocated with what seemed, unless we can add damn fine acting skills to his list of accomplishments, like a genuine love for the fans and an appreciation of what he found at Easter Road.
It was a brief but perfect circle that gave Hibs the vigour to bounce out of a tumultous decade and grasp a new millennium with both hands.
There's a fine tale to tell here, but it becomes slightly anaemic without both sides of the story, an enjoyable scrapbook but not the book that a passionate love affair or even an aristocratic French marvel deserves.
A reminder, perhaps, that you should always be careful how you treat your heroes.
There's Only One Sauzee: When Le God Graced Easter Road by Ted Brack, Black and White Publishing.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
Yet he’s still revered by the green and white hordes (not all, but a hefty number). Gone but ever more cherished.
Why?
A quote from Jonathan Swift, born in Hibernia if not a Hibee, is tucked away on page 53. It seems apt:
“Whoever excels in what we prize appears a hero in our eyes.”
I consider myself a pragmatic realist as a supporter. But even I can never quite shrug off a certain romanticism.
Sauzée embodied what Hibs would like to be and what they once might have been. For supporters of my age, raised in the utilitarian Alex Miller era, he was unlike anyone we’d seen before, playing the game the way we were told Hibs were supposed to play the game.
For older generations he was a throwback, the skillful maestro they thought they’d never see again.
So the fans embraced him and he embraced the fans and that, of course, only made the fans love him even more.
That Sauzée would come to Hibs in the First Division shocked many. I’m not sure it should have. He was winding down and was out of favour at Montpelier. Edinburgh, if you have a certain affluence, is a nice place to live and Hibs were then in a position to pay a more than comfortable wage.
Even a celebrated European Cup winner might have been easily persuaded that there are worse ways to prepare for retirement.
The bigger coup was capturing Russell Latapy at around the same time. Latapy was then aged 29, in theory approaching his peak, and was coveted in England.
“The boy Latapy? Aye, a good little player,” was Bobby Robson’s response to McLeish’s inquiry about the midfielder's calibre. That signing, eventually based on a trial match at Brechin, was remarkable, a genuine moment of McLeish audacity.
Yet as much as Latapy was appreciated and often thrilled the supporters, it was Sauzée the fans were drawn to.
It was Sauzée, more often than not strolling through games, who seemed to embody Hibs as they stormed back to the SPL, consolidated their position in the top flight, finished third in the league, reached a Scottish Cup final and came close to knocking AEK Athens out of the UEFA Cup in one of Easter Road’s great European nights.
It was Sauzée who ran the length of the pitch towards the away fans after scoring at Tynecastle, who lost his teeth scoring in an Easter Road derby, who danced a jig of delight when Hibs touched the heights in hammering Hearts 6-2. It was Sauzée who Hearts couldn’t beat.
If you were explaining to a footballer how to become a legend at Easter Road you’d give them a copy of Brack’s book - which fairly jogs along in recounting the highs and even highers of Sauzée's playing career - and tell them to follow the Sauzée masterplan.
His importance and influence was huge. Alex McLeish built a good team at Hibs. But his reliance on Sauzée was almost total.
Jonathan Swift might provide a theme: Sauzée was Gulliver in Lilliput, his teammates often looked more than the sum of their parts when this giant walked among them and were left diminished when he wasn’t there.
He was even adept at putting out fires when the Lilliputians around him made the occasional mistake or when the manager made the odd tactical error.
McLeish hovers over this book. He was the visionary who, we’re told, had an encyclopeadic knowledge of the European game and a subscription to World Soccer magazine. The man with the contacts and gumption to gift Scottish football Sauzée and Latapy.
The author accepts that at face value - McLeish provides a foreword paying tribute to both Sauzée and Hibs - but I’m not so sure.
Bryan Gunn, Justin Skinner, Grant Brebner, Paul Holsgrove, Klaus Dietrich, Peter Guggi, Barry Prenderville, Derek Anderson, Derek Collin, Tom Smith, Alex Marinkov, Nick Colgan, Ian Westwater, Dirk Lehman, Matthias Jack, Paul Lovering, Stuart Lovell, Martin McIntosh, Earl Jean, John O’Neil, Paul Fenwick. Gary Smith, Didier Agathe, Ulrik Laursen, David Zitelli, Lyndon Andrews, Freddy Arpinon, Marc Libbra, Tony Caig, Derek Townsley, Alen Orman, Allan Smart, Ulises de la Cruz, Eduardo Hurtado, Mixu Paatelainen, Craig Brewster, Paco Luna.
Those are just some of the players that McLeish welcomed to Easter Road. You’ll recognise a few of the names, you might have forgotten many of the others. This was a manager enjoying a Bosman rule orgy.
Even the capture of Sauzée seems might have been borne more from a desire to land a marquee name than an immediate recognition of what this ageing midfielder could offer a team that had already enjoyed 11 straight wins in the First Division.
Philippe Albert and Emil Kostadinov were also apparently pursued in the hunt to sign the big reputation that would put the seal on what was, by the time Sauzée arrived, already looking like a comfortable return to the top flight. By that reckoning we could argue that McLeish got lucky that it was Sauzée he ended up with.
Why does that matter? Is all this not just the bitter ramblings of a Hibs fan still smarting at Mcleish’s departure for Rangers?
Not entirely. It’s important because reading this book is an inexorable journey to those horrible 69 days, to the misery of a league cup semi final against Ayr United and the pain of seeing Sauzée sacked.
Reading Brack's account of the McLeish years it’s easy to see how Hibs peaked around the time of that 6-2 win over Hearts, how Sauzée’s absences became more frequent and more detrimental as age caught up with him.
And how Alex McLeish struggled to cope. A club record on de la Cruz? The Ecuadorian companion piece that was Hurtado? Derek Townsley?
McLeish had mislaid his mojo before he travelled along the M8.
That left Sauzée to take over a diminished team that had lost, in Sauzée himself, its most important asset. The team that had shone, for a few almost perfect months, as brightly as any Hibs side of recent vintage had been dismantled and McLeish couldn’t recapture the magic.
That was the legacy Sauzée had to wrestle with in those 69 days. The board could have insisted he recruit a more experienced assistant than Donald Park. They didn’t. They could have insisted he retained the option of playing himself. They didn’t.
There were financial constraints that Alex McLeish wouldn’t have recognised.
When McLeish confided to the board that he doubted he had the players to win the First Division they countenanced him turning that season into a Cecil B DeMille production, complete with a cast of thousands.
Sauzée's role was as the tortured foreigner in a kitchen sink drama. A club newly worried about the housekeeping budget wasn’t going to give this novice the chance to buy himself out of a disaster.
Not that he wasn’t well rewarded for his three years as player and manager. His sole demand was apparently that no player at the club be paid more than him. He had an awareness of his own value that hints at a thoroughly modern footballer lurking below the gentlemanly, elder statesman surface. The board, which has evolved somewhat since then, acquiesced.
Brack argues that the eventual sacking of Sauzée, this modern day Easter Road hero, could even be seen as a brave move.
I didn’t think that at the time and I don’t think it now. St Johnstone were relegated that season with 21 points. It’s unlikely they would have been able to catch a Sauzée led Hibs even given the trauma of his first two months in charge.
That he was replaced by Bobby Williamson was an act of cowardice, the final victory of the earnestly dull Roundheads. It's true that Williamson gave a talented group of Hibs youngster their chance, sowing the seeds for Tony Mowbray's success.
But the board denied the chance to prove that he could do the same, do it with more inspiration and flair than Williamson was capable of.
From Sauzée to Williamson. It wasn’t the most subtle way to end an era.
Given much of what’s followed for Hibs, the days when Sauzée was in his pomp have taken on an almost dreamlike quality.
And at times he was so good, so nonchalant, so intelligent (“gymnastics of the mind” he told Simon Pia), so unusually Continental and yet so obviously at home that it could be breathtaking. There were moments when he almost seemed to be turning Chick Young’s radio reports into the awestruck ramblings of a smitten Hibs fan.
Those memories make it seem masochistic to linger on how it ended rather than how it once was.
Sadly the book’s missing ingredient makes the parting of the ways impossible to ignore. There is no Franck Sauzée in these pages, he dominates the book by his absence.
His exile from the People’s Republic of Leith now seems complete and permanent. He didn’t object to the publication of this book but nor did he did he give it his blessing. He simply ignored it, as he has done with many requests from the Hibs community in recent years.
Hibs imported an ageing, handsomely rewarded star and bucked the trend of such signings. They got a player who lived, breathed and bled for the cause.
Then they lost him. Apparently forever.
That causes the book to list, if not aimlessly, then a bit uncomfortably. The adulation from the fans inspired Sauzée and, at a time of his career when he was good enough and old enough to coast, gave him the impetus to become a star all over again. He reciprocated with what seemed, unless we can add damn fine acting skills to his list of accomplishments, like a genuine love for the fans and an appreciation of what he found at Easter Road.
It was a brief but perfect circle that gave Hibs the vigour to bounce out of a tumultous decade and grasp a new millennium with both hands.
There's a fine tale to tell here, but it becomes slightly anaemic without both sides of the story, an enjoyable scrapbook but not the book that a passionate love affair or even an aristocratic French marvel deserves.
A reminder, perhaps, that you should always be careful how you treat your heroes.
There's Only One Sauzee: When Le God Graced Easter Road by Ted Brack, Black and White Publishing.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Can Liverpool Lead Celtic and Rangers To TV Riches?
Football's television money will forever turn heads.
The Guardian reports that:
"The deal that shares television's billions equally between Premier League clubs is facing its biggest threat to date after Liverpool announced they would lead a challenge for overseas TV rights to be sold on a club-by-club basis." (www.guardian.co.uk)
A debate, Liverpool's men in suits say, that needs to happen.
For any doubters this is proof that the game's elite hardly saw the recent court ruling on the cross border availability of satellite TV coverage as a Robin Hood-esque win for the downtrodden poor over the nasty rich.
It's no surprise that top English clubs, whose gods are all financial, want to maximise their profits while raising the drawbridge on competition.
Does it mean anything for Scotland?
It could.
I'd be amazed if this issue wasn't being closely tracked in the boardrooms of Ibrox and Celtic Park.
I've written before about Ajax's desire to break free from their league's collective Eredivisie Live TV channel and market their own rights separately.
They argue that the television riches of the modern game's biggest leagues have robbed them of their elite status and only by jettisoning any sense of duty to the rest of the Dutch league can they hope to clamber back to the top table.
Celtic and Rangers will gauge, correctly, that they are the only real overseas draw the SPL have.
They would also fancy being freed from a collective deal at home. They'll know exactly how many viewers they draw to the SPL coverage on Sky and ESPN. Without seeing the figures I'd guess that the average audience of around 160,000 across 60 live games would be much smaller if the Old Firm were removed from the equation.
If the concept of these existing collective deals begins to shatter across Europe Celtic and Rangers will have the precedent they need to agitate for their own breakaway.
The onus on the SPL to get their next television deal right would seem to have become ever more important.
A refreshing wind of opportunity might just have blown through Glasgow.
There's likely to be a storm of foreboding gathering over every other SPL club.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
The Guardian reports that:
"The deal that shares television's billions equally between Premier League clubs is facing its biggest threat to date after Liverpool announced they would lead a challenge for overseas TV rights to be sold on a club-by-club basis." (www.guardian.co.uk)
A debate, Liverpool's men in suits say, that needs to happen.
For any doubters this is proof that the game's elite hardly saw the recent court ruling on the cross border availability of satellite TV coverage as a Robin Hood-esque win for the downtrodden poor over the nasty rich.
It's no surprise that top English clubs, whose gods are all financial, want to maximise their profits while raising the drawbridge on competition.
Does it mean anything for Scotland?
It could.
I'd be amazed if this issue wasn't being closely tracked in the boardrooms of Ibrox and Celtic Park.
I've written before about Ajax's desire to break free from their league's collective Eredivisie Live TV channel and market their own rights separately.
They argue that the television riches of the modern game's biggest leagues have robbed them of their elite status and only by jettisoning any sense of duty to the rest of the Dutch league can they hope to clamber back to the top table.
Celtic and Rangers will gauge, correctly, that they are the only real overseas draw the SPL have.
They would also fancy being freed from a collective deal at home. They'll know exactly how many viewers they draw to the SPL coverage on Sky and ESPN. Without seeing the figures I'd guess that the average audience of around 160,000 across 60 live games would be much smaller if the Old Firm were removed from the equation.
If the concept of these existing collective deals begins to shatter across Europe Celtic and Rangers will have the precedent they need to agitate for their own breakaway.
The onus on the SPL to get their next television deal right would seem to have become ever more important.
A refreshing wind of opportunity might just have blown through Glasgow.
There's likely to be a storm of foreboding gathering over every other SPL club.
Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011
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