ninety-minute nationalism

respect to the man in the ice cream van.

owen coyle moving from burnley to bolton struck me as a little odd at the time, but i didn’t pay it much heed. i always liked coyle as a player - despite his scoring a hat trick against caley in a 6-0 annhiliation, a game i still haven’t recovered from - and for his oft reported addiction to irn bru. well spoken, seemingly intelligent, and a young scottish manager. little there to dislike.

but his quote this evening, off the back of his new team’s victory over burnley, set me on edge a little. coyle was chastised as a “judas” by the burnley supporters, and he looked to turn that on it’s head:

“i can’t complain, they wanted to come and vent their anger. but if we’re going to get biblical, then maybe it should be moses, because we led them from the wilderness.”

the man hasn’t painted himself in the best of lights recently. walking out on burnley midway through their first season in the premiership - a campaign that would always be a struggle - after turning down celtic in the close season, instead signing a new four year deal at turf moor, which at the time looked like an act of loyalty. and he might have done better to stay there. tony mowbray’s reward for failing to keep west bromich albion in the premiership was the high octane thrill of managing at celtic park (though recently mr mowbray sounds as if he no longer views it at as a reward). with a bit of patience, loyalty and determination, coyle could have remained a burnley legend, showed a degree of integrity, and in time, moved on to bigger things. as appears his wont.

instead, this saga continues to make him out as a bit of a fool, and it will take a lot of hard work and a reasonable deal of success at bolton to turn that around.

there is something rather comforting about listening to your favourite band

good to get confirmation that american foreign policy over the past decade has drawn it’s inspiration from crusades of old:

i try not to make a habit of visiting the more commercial cinemas, partly because their film coverage doesn’t normally interest me, and partly because they feel rather bereft.

however, today i made an exception, because my brother wanted to see avatar, and i didn’t, so we had to make some kind of compromise on something he’d enjoy and i wouldn’t hate. the sort of thing we’d probably find at the odeon. what we found was ‘the book of eli’, since you ask, and it was quite ridiculous.

the worst bit was easily the trailers beforehand. three films, all containing a ridiculous amount of violence, explosions and one liners - my particular favourite was a bald john travolta smirking “welcome to paris, baby”, with an unbelievably large gun in either paw, before he presumably shot somebody who wasn’t american. one of the other films was called “the crazies”, and of course with a name like that, a remake. how suprising.

i’m not accustomed to having my emotions so manipulated before the main feature, so it took me a few minutes to recover as it started. which made me question why you would watch the whole film when you can just watch the most exciting bits, with added proximity voice overs that kick out a chest-melting amount of bass, the best bits of dialogue without all the boring context, and without the necessity for a schmaltzy ending? i tell you, it’s a lot more fun that way round.

i genuinely don’t know what to do with my saturday afternoons.

but having just enjoyed “a disaffection” by james kelman, especially patrick doyle’s adventure to see yoker play in the junior league, i feel like this might be something i’d like to get into..

my personal choice: choke slam.

quotes like this.

“here in scotland, you have football, you have the pubs, the church and after that comes the family. first is football.”

the excess in wages payed to footballers and managers of football clubs is a problem primarily based the english premiership, and while it is present in a very thin layer at the top of scottish football, it isn’t such an issue here. so i am unsure as to why i care so much about it, but i do.

luiz felipe scolari’s contract termination after seven months of a two year contract cost chelsea £12.6million. a pretty incredible reward for failure. while this did include payments to three members of scolari’s backroom staff, it seems unlikely that this amount of money can be, in any way, justified. the market does not support this kind of behaviour. most premiership clubs are running with debts, seem quite content to do so, and for the moment, are being allowed to by whomever they owe the money to. the slippery slope that portsmouth currently find themselves sliding down is just one result of a culture with an insatiable desire to spend that seems to have been spawned and allowed to run unchecked beyond all proportion in the last twenty years,

i have very little understanding of economics/business/money matters in general, but if pompey, a club in one of the richest leagues in the world, are struggling now, they could well be the equivalent northern rock that preceded the wider problems in the financial sector in this country. if that’s a terrible comparison, forgive me. i understand that joe public is unlikely to turn on an element of the sport and entertainment industry, football is never going to be as vilified as the financial sector, which provide far more enjoyable villains to turn on. but i can’t help feeling that the perpetrators of these unreal levels of salaries, transfer fees and payments being bandied about, which are so out of touch with the vast majority of football’s audience, deserve to be punished. the men on the pitch have never been so removed from those in the stands, and hopefully, surely, it cannot last. it’s frustrating to see small clubs go to the wall, and larger clubs who are behaving in far more obscene and irresponsible manner remain unpunished for it. that has to change.

and you know what inspired this rant? joey barton, god bless him.