The football team I've taken against

I hold no great malice for any football club. When people say they "hate" a particular club I'm always a bit puzzled. Hate? Really?

As an Everton fan I have had some, but fairly infrequent, opportunities to indulge in schadenfreude when Liverpool lose. But my feelings about Liverpool are very conflicted. When Liverpool aren't doing well and friends expect me to be relishing the situation I take little succour and have been known to say that you could put a wooden stake through their hearts but they'd still rise again.

Indeed, I had tended to the traditional old time Merseyside pact of "if we can't win it, I hope you do" as one old Liverpool fan said to me in the street immediately after our famous F A Cup win against them in 1967*.  I was pleased with Liverpool's European successes either side of 1980, for example, simply wanting a British team to win. Things wore a bit thin with Liverpool's run of trophies in the 80s and the bad feeling that seemed to arise between the fans of the two clubs because of a daft misunderstanding that Everton fans hadn't respected a Hillsborough silence in the 1990s, when Liverpool hadn't actually being holding such silences up to then and hadn't told anyone else they were going to do it.

So, when challenged long ago by Mrs H that "you always wanted us to win if you can't" I would respond on the lines of "when Everton have won 5 European Cups I'll be happy for Liverpool to win again". Perhaps peak schadenfreude was reached on a long family car journey one evening in 1989. Rarely can a moment of radio football commentary been celebrated more exhuberantly by someone holding a steering wheel than when Michael Thomas scored the late winner at Anfield that gave Arsenal the division one championship rather than Liverpool in 1989, partly because I'd been predicting it for the whole journey. (Mrs H and my younger son weren't at all happy with my behaviour and I don't think it was anything to do with safety). And I found it very funny and often remarked on the fact that Liverpool had never won the Premier League until their 28th attempt in 2019. But I thought they thoroughly deserved to win it then and I'm not happy that Manchester City have won it four times in five seasons, as it risks making the Premier League as boring as the Scottish Premier League. So I'm cheering on Arsenal this year.

While I'm conflicted about Liverpool, regular readers will know I have a bit of a down on City as a I harbour a grudge from the scariest in-ground football hooliganism I ever experienced, which was at Maine Road in 1971. But I do admire and respect Manchester City; the way they've gone about organising their club and what they have achieved. This respect was strengthened when I happened on a book in the library of the cruise ship we were on in January:

I picked it up intending only to surprise Mrs H, as she knows my feelings about City. But, having read a page somewhere at random in the middle I couldn't put it down. The book's authors are two Spanish journalists who were embedded with the club over a three year period from 2016 and had access to most of the senior management team. I knew a bit about the ex-Barca chaps, businessman Ferran Soriano, who has been CEO at City since 2012 and ex-Spanish international Txiki Begiristain, who was Director of Football at Barca for 7 years until 2010 and has been in the same role at City since 2012, arriving just a couple of months after Soriano. Guardiola brought very few people with him to City (one was a nutritionist) though obviously he already knew Soriano and Begiristain at the top. The prolonged consistency of approach and decision making they have been able to apply has produced huge rewards and I have only total admiration for what they've done. 

There are so many striking stories in the book about the people in the City backroom team. For example, the kit men decided they had to try super hard to impress Guardiola in his first training session so were running around retrieving balls and helping to facilitate the session, something they would not normally have done. Guardiola came over and said "I love this energy!" So they've just had to keep doing it - and thinking about what else they can do to impress him. Including staging an entertainment show for the squad to stop them getting bored when they stayed in the south at a hotel between mid week and weekend matches. It seems Guardiola can inspire people just by who he is as much as anything he actually does.

Of course, I still don't want City to win, but the comparison with Everton's scattergun approach over the last 10 years is stark: in 2012/13 Everton finished 6th and went on to finish 5th the next season, a long way from their current predicament. At that point City were only three years into their about to be 14 year run of always finishing in the top 5 (indeed always in the top 3 apart from one fourth and that first top 5 Premier League place in 2009/10).

However, now there is another team that, while I don't hate them, I'd prefer to do badly: Chelsea. I've never had much of a problem with Chelsea before this season. Oh,I was envious of their success under Abramovich of course and thought his tendency to sack managers was a bit odd but, because of the club's consistent approach at board level, it worked for them. And it wasn't the club's fault - or their fans - that the government enforced its sale.

The reason I've taken against Chelsea is because of the government's plans for a football regulator. Eh? Let me explain.

I don't believe the government has any justification for imposing an "independent" regulator onto football. No other sport has such a regulator. They say it's to ensure clubs are sustainable, but football is the most successful sport in the country. Yes, Bury and Macclesfeld have gone under in recent years but out of 92 Premier and EFL clubs that's a low failure rate: these were the first Football League (or former Football League) clubs to go bust since Rushden and Diamonds in 2011 and Chester in 2010. Before that there was Maidstone and Aldershot in 1992.

Businesses have to be allowed to take risk and fail (my own club, Everton, might be on its way into that spiral). The silly people behind the football regulator concept, like Tracey Crouch MP, say clubs will have to provide a business plan showing sustainability. If they don't they won't be allowed to compete (er - won't that make them go bust?) Just how the army of hired second guessers, sorry accountants, paid for at football's expense, will decide whether such plans are sustainable we have yet to be advised. Will they make Man City assume they don't qualify for the Champions League in setting their budget?  Will they make Liverpool and Arsenal assume that, but not City or Newcastle, because of the deeper pockets of their owners? (Wait for the uproar). If they did how would that help competition in the Premier League? One thing you can be sure of is that they'll make it practically impossible for clubs outside the current elite to gatecrash the party. Which is exactly what financial fair play has always been designed to do.

I also believe that the cases brought by the Premier League against City and Everton are entirely driven by the wish to show the government that they can keep their own house in order. The order that they think the government thinks they should keep that is.

When we get a regulator, prospective club owners will have to be deemed suitable by the regulator. But the Premier League already have a fit and proper persons test, so will the regulator take a different view of bids from folk like the Saudi owners of Newcastle United and the Qatari bid for Manchester United? No, I heard Crouch say on the radio, in the only sensible thing I've heard come out of her mouth. It's not for football, she said, to set different standards for who to do business with than the government, who trade freely with those countries. (I might argue that, to preserve competition, sovereign wealth funds should be excluded, but I don't know how you'd sensibly draw that line. Maybe total spend limits that apply to all clubs).

And my reason for taking against Chelsea? Simply that, as the government forced the sale of Chelsea and the new owners were selected by agents appointed by the government it would be hilarious - and demonstrate the futility of having a regulator - if the new owner, Todd Boehly, proved unsuitable. Which he is showing every sign of doing. It's not just that Chelsea are doing badly. The following snippet has only appeared on social media so is unverified, but I rather hope it's true:

"Todd Boehly has a reputation as a clueless yank. The Chelsea owner once asked his manager to field 12 players in a rare 4-4-3 formation.

But when it comes to the business side, he's got it all worked out... right?

In a recent meeting with some agents, the American was asked how he planned to recoup his £500mil** shopping spree. Boehly assured them he could easily afford to spunk the cash because Chelsea qualify automatically for the Champions League each year, earning millions in TV money.

After an awkward silence, one agent explained that Chelsea did not qualify automatically, and were unlikely to make it next season as they are currently 10th in the league. "That's nonsense! We're in it every year," Boehly chuckled, before excusing himself from the meeting.

After consulting his team, he returned a few minutes later and admitted he'd got it wrong. Whoops.

The "£500 mil" grew to nearer £600 million eventually spent on transfer fees in his first two transfer windows. In the January window the £323m Chelsea spent on 8 players was more than the combined total of all the clubs in the top leagues of Spain, Germany and Italy. Chelsea will attempt to avoid a financial fair play crunch by amortising that spend over unusually long player contracts - eight and a half years for Mikhailo Mudryk was reported.**

We know how this usually goes when a club signs a player at high wages on a very long contract who then underperforms (as Mudryk has so far). The player sits out his time on the bench, counting his money, like Mesut Özil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang at Arsenal (the latter again, hilariously, at Chelsea now). He becomes a distraction to the squad. The club try to loan him out but no-one else will pay the exorbitant wages unless the owning club pays a hefty chunk of every pay cheque. Eventually the contract runs out. But eight and a half years? Crazy.

So Chelsea have problems being stored up if they aren't successful. I had sympathy with Graham Potter, a promising English manager at last given a chance with a current elite club. What exactly he was meant to do with an excessively large but very unbalanced squad wasn't clear. It must have been a bit like playing scrabble and being told you can have 10 letters but they all turn out to be vowels.

Everton and Manchester City have been charged with breaching the Premier League's fair play rules. Those cases will run for quite a while but three years down the line it's quite possible that Chelsea will join them and also Nottingham Forest, presuming they stay in the Premier League that is. (Forest have signed 29 players this season. A Premier League squad is limited to 25 so they had to loan out 4 in January that they'd only signed in August). 

It will take another couple of seasons before these clubs breach the league's rolling three year maximum loss but breach it they surely must if they carry on as they have been doing. So it will take a few years but I'm expecting that Chelsea will show graphically just how daft the regulator concept is. 

The government forced club's sale, the government's agents selected the successful bid and no doubt ran it past someone close to the Sports Minister to sound out whether they were comfortable. And it looks like they chose - a clueless dickhead.

The Premier League is the greatest club competition in any sport anywhere in the world. The Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, has praised the Premier League for its financial success and said it is being demonised by critics who claim it is damaging competition with Europe’s other leagues. He went on to say the Premier League’s success was not achieved by accident. "By adopting an audacious approach based on a vision, a strategy and a lot of hard work, its leaders and clubs developed a remarkable model founded on sporting merit and a highly egalitarian distribution of wealth, one of the most egalitarian systems in the world. Rather than a model to be destroyed, this is a model that should be followed". He also said the threat of a European Super League remained a “present danger” and described the owners of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus as “cartels above meritocracy and democracy” for their leading roles in the plot.

A regulator for English football will not improve competition if it insists on enforcing so called financial fair play rules designed to inhibit investment, maintain the status quo at the top and hasten the arrival, in practice or de facto, of the Super League the government has said it wants to avoid.

That should all be left up to football. The government is supposed to have more important things to do. 

Don't count on my vote, chums, if your only "successes" come the election are Brexit and the creation of a football regulator. 

* Everton 1 Liverpool 0, 11 March 1967. This was the match famous for being shown live on huge closed circuit TV screens at Anfield, with 110,000 people in the two grounds. I'll write a post about that match one day. I expect the "old" Liverpool fan who spoke to me would have been several times my age then but probably much younger than I am now

** https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11668/12788237/explained-how-chelsea-have-avoided-financial-fair-play-sanctions-despite-january-transfer-spending-spree

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/apr/05/uefa-aleksander-ceferin-premier-league-european-super-league-juventus-real-madrid-barcelona#:~:text=The%20Uefa%20president%2C%20Aleksander%20Ceferin,competition%20with%20Europe's%20other%20leagues.

The Todd Boehly story is on twitter at https://twitter.com/UpshotTowers/status/1626922023288033280?lang=en. The Upshot describes itself as an email newsletter which pulls back the curtain on your favourite sports and dives into all the stuff BBC and Sky "wouldn’t touch with a bargepole".

The blackbirds are singing, the blackthorn's out and so are the magnolias

Walking with Mrs H a few evenings ago the birdsong at dusk was almost loud enough to make me take my hearing aids out. Several male blackbirds in fairly close proximity were going at it big time. I assumed they were competing to impress potential mates, though I've since read they don't like the impending dark. Roosting time can make one call nervously, starting off a host of others, like dogs in kennels. Come to think of it, their calls were a bit more urgent and anxious sounding than their lyrically musical daytime song. Unlike Paul McCartney's blackbird, they don't go on to sing at the dead of night, although street lights can confuse them. They sing during the breeding season from March to about July: after that they've got more important things to do.

I've written before that blackbirds are my favourite birds, mainly because of their melodic and variable song from which individuals can be identified, sometimes by the characteristic way they end. At our last house one had developed a song ending that sounded just like a telephone ringing, which caused us to run into the house for a phantom phone call on a number of occasions until we realised. We listened out for it several years in a row until one spring there was no telephone ring coming from the bird's favourite vantage point - a neighbour's chimney - and we hoped our cat wasn't responsible. One of the websites below confirms their ability to mimic:

"There is no doubt that the Blackbird is one of Britain’s finest songsters. Each phrase is a discrete production, with a significant pause from the last, and no phrase is immediately repeated (making it very different to the Song Thrush’s song.) Listen carefully and you might notice that each phrase begins with glorious contralto fluty notes, but ends much less tunefully, with a squeak or chuckle.These endings vary enormously, and allow for a dash of mimicry, not always of another bird, but even bells or human voices. Each individual male Blackbird (the females don’t sing) has a repertoire of at least 100 song-phrases."

While I hesitate to quibble with a serious bird watcher, female blackbirds definitely do sing: I've watched one doing it (identifiable because of course they are brown not black) and since read on another expert's website that the "fact" they don't sing is a myth. They may not sing as dramatically as a typical male but very much in characteristic blackbird style.

Early last spring I was confused by what sounded like a blackbird bursting into song but only very briefly, then trying again. It also sounded a little bit like a bird imitating a blackbird and not quite getting it right. I then spotted a young blackbird and surmised that it was an adolescent practising, while doubting whether that could really be correct.

But it is: one of the sites below notes that the birds quietly sing to themselves early in the calendar year. This is known as subsong, "a version uttered by both juveniles and adults outside of the breeding season". They go on to say "it may well denote birds with a low sexual impulse". I'll take this as confirming my theory about a junior bird, rather than the bird equivalent of DSD.

Hearing the blackbirds start to sing always gladdens my heart as does the blackthorn coming into bloom as they are harbingers of spring. Strangely, I developed an affection for blackthorn after digging up a substantial blackthorn hedge that was occupying a quarter of the garden of a house we bought over 20 years ago, when I was still young enough to do such things. I'd had a travelling gardener (I think he was literally an Irish Traveller) cut down the hedge at ground level and take away the voluminous waste:

I guessed that the builders had done the same before turfing the garden. Ageing plant tags against the fence showed that the first owners had planted out a border before the hedge reasserted itself. It was large enough to make me doubt whether we could ever make a nice garden of the space, but I resolved that, this time, the roots would just have to come out, which took many hours and a lot of digging. (And, to be fair, use of a digger to get out the largest chunks when we hired a landscaper). I was concerned that the hedge would still regrow, especially since part of it remained on the far side of the fence. But it turns out blackthorn is fairly well behaved, the garden worked and we were also rewarded with the bloom over the top of the fence each spring, both reasons for my fondness for the rather straggly shrub with what can be a fairly bright bloom but often looks rather cream compared with the much showier hawthorn. Here I am looking much younger and sitting in the garden we created:

You can see the remnants of the large hedge behind the fence. I hadn't been able to tell blackthorn from hawthorn until then, but it's quite straightforward. Blackthorn blooms on the bare stems, before the leaves appear, whereas the hawthorn leaves appear first. So if you see a thicket in bloom now with no leaves it will be blackthorn. Like this, photographed a few days ago:

It's quite common to find mixed hedges and thickets with both present. Right now that will appear as patches with bloom and no leaves and patches with leaves and no bloom. Of course, later in the year the difference is obvious: the hawthorn berries are red, while the blackthorn sloes are black with a hint of blue when you look closely. One thing isn't different: you can make gin with either of them. Which I know because last autumn I saw a chap standing for some time at the end of my driveway. I went to inquire if he was lost as there is an adjacent footpath which we sometimes see people staring at in confusion as they realise they're on the wrong path. But it turned out he was picking blackthorn sloes from the bush there. He politely asked if I minded and explained he made gin with them. 

Apparently hawthorn gin is nicer than sloe gin: it's claimed to be sweeter and not as syrupy. You can also make jams or jellies from both haw and blackthorn. Not that I intend to try.

Now we have the magnolias going strong, magnificent at Bodnant gardens currently, with fabulous headstrong aromas. And they're also out at Augusta, with a summer of sport presaged by the Masters golf. So 2023 really is now fully underway.

PS Minutes after finishing this post I read a review of the book Wild Air by James McDonald Lockhart which says that bird song does actually sound louder at night. This is because the sound waves are bent away from the relatively warm air towards the cooling night ground. It also notes that the nightingale population is down 90% in 40 years, skylarks are down 50% in the same period and lapwings probably nearly 90% since 1987. Worrying. Indeed, scary to think how meagre, improverished and degraded our immediate environment may be by the time today's schoolchildren are my age.

Read all about blackbird song at:

https://sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/news/blackbird-bird-song#:~:text=Blackbirds%20sing%20most%20typically%20during,from%20March%20through%20to%20July

https://www.garden-birds.co.uk/birds/blackbird.html

and https://www.birdwatching.co.uk/features/dominic-couzens/blackbird/

If you want to make stuff from hawthorn berries, see https://monicawilde.com/how-to-make-hawthorn-berry-gin-or-tincture/

Or you can make hedgerow jam with a polyglot of sloes and berries: https://hedgecombers.com/sloe-and-blackberry-hedgerow-jam/