Everybody's Free

I'm calling this a devil's advocate piece, because essentially, I agree with Rio Ferdinand not wearing the T-shirt.  Perhaps not wearing it without consulting with your manager who's just been on the TV telling the world everyone will be wearing the T-shirt, is not the greatest idea, but let's at least agree his gesture was a good one.

However, having seen the ridiculous reactions of a certain portion of Twitter users slagging off Sir Alex or coming up with conspiracy theories about how it's all engineered to get rid of Rio, I think we need to have a bit of a reality check.  It's almost become one of those ridiculous things were idiots start talking about their human right to [insert the most ridiculous and trivial thing you can think of here].  It's a campaign worthy of the Daily Mail.

Look at this:

Players’ union chairman Clarke Carlisle is ready to back Ferdinand.

He said: “We will monitor the situation and make sure Rio Ferdinand’s rights are not undermined.

“Everyone has a right to free speech — just like you can’t coerce anyone into shaking hands, you can’t make somebody wear a T-shirt — although I do personally believe that joining in with the campaign is the best way forward.”

And this from a footballer.  Isn't the very essence of football about forcing people to wear shirts?  On the pitch we'd probably be within our rights to say, "Rio, put your shirt on, we're a team, we need to recognise each other quickly, that's why we all wear the same shirt and they all wear the same, but different to ours, shirt.  Just get on with it."

And I seem to remember pretty much the same group of people who are supporting Rio's rights are the same group of people calling for Chelsea/England to suspend John Terry because he's representing them and thus his behaviour, especially for actions done in their shirt, should bear a responsibility to them and their image is reflected in him.

That's different though, they say... (it isn't).

There's another post waiting to be written on Sir Alex as Freud's Primal Father, this isn't the place to go into too much detail, but the father is considered omnipresent, all powerful.  The sons rise and kill him and they are free, but they must live with the guilt.  We should worry about this if any of the ridiculous criticisms lots of fans like to make of him finally have their desired effect.

And one last thing, I've barely seen this mentioned on Twitter because it doesn't fit the popular narrative.  In contrast to the unsourced piece in The Sun yesterday claiming Rio would be fined £220,000 which was everywhere yesterday.  This piece suggests the issue might have been put to rest:

Sir Alex Ferguson moved to avoid a breakdown in his relationship with Rio Ferdinand yesterday by holding talks in which he accepted that the defender will not apologise for refusing to wear a Kick It Out T-shirt.

The two met after Ferdinand had arrived for a training session yesterday, when the United manager explained that it was the lack of advance notice from the player of his intention to boycott the anti-racism campaign – in contravention of Ferguson's orders – which had angered him. The 33-year-old has apologised to Ferguson for that but has not voiced any contrition for the act itself.

The outcome of the meeting, at the club's Carrington training ground yesterday morning, allows both men to save face and appears to have taken some of the sting out of the issue ... Ferdinand will be severely indignant if he finds himself fined two weeks' wages – £220,000 – by Ferguson when plenty of Premier League players have been given freedom of choice in the matter by their managers.

A fine seems unlikely

Foreign Language

It's not so much that Michael Owen joins in the ridiculous "It's them damn foreigners who brought the dirty diving to our shores" chorus.  Yesterday I had a go at that silly attitude, but finished by suggesting it may be a bit forgiveable coming from the mouth of an older generation whose mindset is stuck in the past.  So it's disappointing that someone like Michael Owen would repeat such a line, but even more disappointing is that all the papers just let him get away with it.
In any other line of work saying, "bloody foreigners coming over here with their dirty tricks," would be frowned upon and openly criticised by any right-thinking person, but apparently footballers can say it and it's taken as a serious point.

"You can trace all diving in the Premier League to one small tribe in Italy, before then, in the midst of time, football was a joyful game, played in the same spirit as they still have in that wonderful utopia they call Rugby, people slapping each other on the back, patting bottoms, shaking the hands of their opponents when they score, 'good goal sir,' and at the end of the game going out for tea and scones with all the crowd.  The referee was more of a watcher, just a fan who got lucky and a close up view of the action. In this Italian tribe though, they played dirty, they had no respect for the opponent or the referee and tried anything they could to win, even downright simulation.  Then, one day, there was a flood or a drought or a plague or something and they were forced from their lands, and they spread all over the place, some stayed in Italy, others went out across Europe, some even found their way to South America.  Wherever they went they played football and cheated and infected everyone they played football with.  Football's innocence was shattered, it would never be the same again, except in good ol' Blighty, which held out until the 21st century until someone discovered the Channel Tunnel..."

So all the papers report it as some sort of interesting debate, instead of the silly xenophobic rubbish it is. The Guardian jut ignore it, concentrating on the more trivial line, Owen admitting he sometimes goes down a bit easy.  Which, to paraphrase Owen himself on Twitter, "no shit Sherlock."

And in case anyone was wondering, over 64% of Premier League footballers are foreign, so can we quickly escalate this debate into the "bloody foreigners, stealing all our footballers jobs..."

I Dive

At first I found it a little strange that The FA haven't put a "no diving" clause into their new "Code of Conduct." With all the publicity about diving at the moment it would have seemed a good way to signal an attempt to eradicate it, or at least show that it won't be tolerated.

After a bit of thought though it occurred to me that obviously there wasn't any real need to, because, as everyone knows, English people don't dive. Can you really imagine Steven Gerrard [and yes, I could here have named many an English player, including some Man Utd ones but it works so much better with Stevie G because the whole blinkered "honest English players" view upholds him as the great bulldog type English spirit, no nonsense, no fancy foreign nonsense, whereas the truth is he is very good at diving, you could probably say he's a natural, he could teach Suarez a thing or two about diving, because whatever anyone says, Suarez is an awful diver, that's why he's always getting flak for it, if he was any good, he'd get caught less, like Stevie G] throwing himself to the floor in an attempt to gain an advantage?

Every major tournament we go and we have high expectations and the moral high ground and every major tournament we come home having been cheated out of victory, not outplayed, never outplayed, cheated out of our rightful place at football's pinnacle.  We all saw for ourselves how the Spanish went from being also-rans to World and European champions - not by becoming better at football, developing a great passing team and technically gifted players, but by becoming more cunning and devious, put simply, they became better at cheating.

All of this poses the question, "But aren't you English therefore just a little bit stupid, why stay on your clean but trophyless high horse, when you could be down here competing with us?  And frankly, you've had us foreigners in your country for a decade or so now, and you've let us play football, and yet none of our cheating ways has infected your own players, who still play the game as it was intended, in the spirit of little children in the park and Luis Suarez."

We like to stay isolated from these foreign influences, it's been the same throughout history, never let any outside influences into our culture.  You can even see it in the fact that our footballers hate going to play overseas, it's not through lack of offers, but we see the cheating that goes on over there (literally every game of football is just people falling over holding their faces in acres of space) and we say "no."

(Another way of reading Sir Alex's comments on foreign players (except Nani) diving is to do the wonderful paper trick of reading too deeply into everything he says.  So for instance if he congratulates van Persie on having a good game and looking sharp you read that as a criticism of Rooney for having a bad game.  So, here's his quote:

"We have known for quite a few years there are plenty of players diving and, you have to say, particularly foreign players," said Ferguson.

But the 70-year-old Scot insisted: "Nani is not the type to dive. He has never been that type of player."

First thing we could do is just assume that he is actually slagging off Nani, because that's another trick the papers like to pull - everything is a sign that Sir Alex no longer likes Nani and wants rid.  When he says "he's not that type of player," he really means he is.  Or we could just read that as him saying that he wants Nani to stop being that type of player, so if he says he isn't he'll have to stop.

Or we could probably just read the whole thing as one of the dangers of having a manager whose getting on and is pretty old-school and whose opinions on foreign players, presumably set in the days when they were all considered a bit fancy with all their flair and their fancy hairs and the like, are just too deep-set to change and best ignored, although it comes to something when anyone takes such nonsense seriously.

Pay The Price

Further to the post I wrote on Monday about Alan Pardew's selective use of the word "unsavoury," here he is defending Wonga:

"I listened to the owner and their customer satisfaction levels are higher than any other bank or lending facility"

Not content with simply saying, "I run the football side of things, ask me questions on that, not the money," he throws his full support behind the new sponsors.  No wonder he's been given an 8 year contract as Mike Ashley's puppet manager.

After a brief, pushed for time Google, here's a few quotes from one article I found:

research from Which? in May found that one in five of payday borrowers had not been able to pay back their loan on time - at which point exceptionally high interest rates can kick in - while a third of people said they had experienced greater financial problems as a result of taking out a payday loan

I'm sure they're satisfied customers.  Here's some more who are likely to be satisfied:

In May, the OFT warned Wonga to improve its debt collection practices after complaints it was effectively trying to frighten people who did not pay up on time.

What's the definition of "unsavoury" again Alan? 

Slap Them Up

In the middle of this piece, headlined - "Really Violent Player! Pardew calls for probe into Van Persie 'elbow' on Toon star Cabaye" - there's this line:

His indiscretion should not detract from the performance manager Sir Alex Ferguson called United’s best of the season.

Yet it self-evidently has.  And managers calling for players to be banned retrospectively is pretty unsavoury:

"He's looked at Yohan and he's elbowed him," said Alan Pardew, Newcastle's manager. "I think that needs to be looked at, if I'm honest.

"There's a bit of history between those two players and I don't know whether he's got caught up in that but it was a little bit unsavoury.

"At the time I didn't see it [the elbow] but I thought Yohan wouldn't have gone down if Van Persie hadn't done something. But I've obviously seen the replay now and it looks as if Van Persie's looked at him and put the elbow in. But that's for the FA to decide on, not me."

Yes it is.  And I've seen the replay too Alan and it looks like your player went down like Suarez at barely a glance from van Persie, and if you want unsavoury look at some of your player's lunging tackles and also your owner taking money off Wonga:

Whereas Pardew wants his team to pass and move with dash and daring, Mike Ashley, Newcastle's owner, possesses a rare capacity to court unpopularity in pursuit of financial benefit. Accordingly Tyneside woke to reports that Wonga, the payday loans company often criticised for its interest rates, was in advanced negotiations with Newcastle over a shirt and, possibly, stadium sponsorship deal.

To say the prospect did not go down well with fans would be an understatement. Indeed, judging from the initial reaction, the debate about the club's wider social responsibilities versus a potential £8m a year for player investment seemed as one-sided as the opening stages of Manchester United's visit.

And for the record I think Tony Pulis calling for a ban on Suarez is just as bad. Letting Suarez's cheating speak for itself would have been much more eloquent.

Goal

Van Persie's first vs Cluj



And his second