The Reading Way

Every football club has a way of doing things in a distinct style that is very specific to their club; many claim they do things with class, Liverpool, Arsenal and Man United to name three though class is certainly not something that can be associated with big clubs these days, particularly the way these three intimidate referees, moan in post match interviews and general disrespect for both their opponents and the game itself. Even Barcelona, "mes que un club" and all that, are hardly beacons of all things sporting with play acting being one accusation that sticks.

Coming back from that tangent, where was I? Ah, yes, football clubs have an ingrained style of doing things. Man United, in the Premier League era at least, have a certain panache, on the field at least, when they are playing well, often with dazzling wingplay. Arsenal, under Wenger, have their unique passing style that, when it works, is undoubtedly the easiest style on the eye in English football. Chelsea, in the Abramovich era at least, often ground out results through steel and resolve, with honourable exceptions coming from the early Mourinho era.

These are all general observations from afar. The fans of these clubs will often have their own opinions after seeing their team play so often, particularly with lower league teams who don't get the same media coverage as the top teams. They know what supporting their club is really like.

For example, Reading often get given the tag of playing good football under Alan Pardew/ Steve Coppell/ Brendan Rodgers/ Brian McDermott and being a 'well-run' club with a good Chairman who supports the club financially but does not make them dependant on his cash. From a personal point of view, slight bollocks. Our football is nothing special, at times it is enthralling stuff full of passing and clever players on the wing (think Salako, Little, Kebe etc.) but at other times it has an element of hoofball to it, in keeping with the general standard of football in the second tier. The club is relatively well run with the Chairman putting his hand in his pocket when the club needs it.

But for me, the 'Reading way' is putting their fans through the wringer when it comes to the end of the season. For example, in the 15 seasons I've been supporting Reading, on 11 of those occasions, there has been something to play for on the final day of the season, whether it be the possibility of securing promotion, a play off place, a spot in the UEFA cup, setting a Football League record for points in a season (not quite so important) or avoiding relegation. There has very rarely been an occasion when there has not been something riding on the last game of a Reading season.

Furthermore, success or failure is never completed the easy way, aside from the truly exceptional championship winning year of 2005/06, heartbreak or heat attacks have been the order of the day. Promotion in 2001/02 only followed after a truly terrifying run (in context of course) of nine draws in the last ten games, blowing a huge points lead over Brentford in the process, culminating in a last day trip to Griffin Park where only a late Jamie Cureton goal secured a place in the then Nationwide Division One.

The season before that, after finishing third in Division Two with a team scoring goals for fun, a play off-semi final win against Wigan beckoned. A victory which only came about through a late, late Nicky Forster goal secured a final against Walsall which we contrived to lose only after a clearance from Barry Hunter rebounded off the head of a prone Tony Rougier in to the net from a full 15 yards. What followed on the motorway home, surrounded by coaches full of Walsall fans, still opens up wounds these days.

Relegation from the Premier League in 2007/08? Confirmed despite a 4-0 win at Derby, who promptly celebrated as if they had won the League, Cup and Britain's Got Talent all in one.

2004/05 and 2008/09 saw terrific starts to the season, only for the club's form to come down like the proverbial Christmas decorations in the New Year, leading to the bummiest of bum fights between us and West Ham for the final play off place in 2005 (which they won, both the play off spot and the final itself) and the Andre-Bikey 'inspired' collapse in the play off semis against Burnley in 2009.

So if you want to know the real Reading way, it's knocking a good ten years off your life expectancy through coronaries and infections from bitten fingernails. Which is why my hopes for our play off campaign this season are as high as a straight-edge Catholic priest. As they say, it's the hope that gets you, not the disappointment.

The Managerial Boogieman

Aura in sport performance is a funny old thing. It is rare. It has to be built over time (but how it’s lost is another matter). It comes from the sheer identity a team or person forges for themselves in sport, not the absolute certainty that they will win, but the style in which they will achieve victory. For example, in my era, sportspeople or teams with said aura would be the Australian cricket team, Roger Federer, Michael Schumacher and the developing aura of Usain Bolt. All winners down to the core, all with their own distinct image; remorseless, graceful, ruthless and likeable in that respective order.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes in sport management, aura is a completely different thing. It is different as a manager or a coach does not have the ability to hit the winning run or pass the chequered flag; the vast majority of the job is done before and after the proceedings on the pitch/track/court/track. It is about fostering a winning mentality and spreading it to every corner of the team you manage, in whatever sport. It is about creating a persona that transmits itself to the minds of not only your team, who take strength from it, but to your opponents’ minds who are weakened by it. It is about being an equally good psychologist and strategist. It is about having almost a mythical, otherworldly status about you.

For my money, only one current manager or coach or team director in sport can lay claim to that type of aura. Personally, I would discount coaches in individual sports as so much of the talent comes from the player, the coach is a polisher. Innovators in Formula 1 such as Ross Brawn have fine technical minds and wonderful skills when it comes to building winning machines, but perhaps lack man management of talent. No contemporary cricket coach can be considered (though Andy Flower looks like a possibility for the future) as cricket is a separate entity in that so much rests on the role of a captain in the sport. No team dominates rugby (union or league) enough to have a coach lauded as a genius, besides, I don’t follow rugby to the extent to be able to comment with enough knowledge.

Which leaves football and its long lineage of managers with aura going back through Shankly, Busby, Clough, Paisley to name but four in the English game. Personally, the only manager that has the aura is one Jose Mario dos Santos Felix Mourinho. He has the ability to give any team a winning mentality, seemingly in any language and any country, taking Bela Guttman’s advice at not staying at a club for more than three years to heart. If he rocked up at Northampton Town he would probably turn them into winners. He creates a kind of boogieman image for himself where he diverts all attention, from fans or the media or other managers, on to himself, leaving his team to get on with playing the game, almost like a Ferguson-esque siege mentality taken to its extreme. He takes on all-comers and beats them to confirm his authority, as was confirmed at Real Madrid earlier this year.

Unprecedented success is only part of the aura making but Mourinho’s list of achievements is quite incredible, especially for one only a decade into a coaching career. League titles in Portugal, England and Italy, cups in Portugal, England, Italy and Spain, two Champions Leagues, the incredible 150 match unbeaten home record (stretching across nine years and four clubs) and countless manager of the year awards. Probably the one thing lacking on his CV is building a club in the same Wenger as and rebuilding teams in the long term that Ferguson has.

Other managers are up there such as Ferguson or Wenger or Guardiola or Hiddink as they are all winners too but each has their own respective weakness. Wenger? Too flawed with regard to his obsession with youth and failure to recognise his team’s flaws, second to none as a club builder though. Ferguson? All the success in the world, master of rebuilding teams but lacks the otherworldy-ness of Mourinho (perhaps he lacks the mystique as he is not foreign to be honest). Guardiola? Enviously successful but works in an environment that he knows and is his comfort zone. Hiddink? World traveller with success in most countries though more focused on national teams than day-to-day work at club level.

For me, Mourinho is one of the few people in the world, not just in sport, who has an aura to him, as if he doesn’t belong to this world, when I see him talking on TV and I reckon I genuinely would go a bit weak at the knees if I saw him in the flesh. He is the managerial boogieman with the mystical aura.

United@ 9pm Sunday- BBC2- 9 out of 10

Sport holds a position like no other cultural entity in the Western world as it is, at the very same time, the most important and least important activity ever to be conceived. The cynics point out that it is a trivial, banal pursuit, played by usually hugely overpaid ‘stars’ which subjugates and distracts the lower classes in the great class struggle (copyright the Extreme Left). The sportlovers say that is sport has the quality to bring people and communities together in a way nothing else can. They are both absolutely right; a lovely paradox.

Unite comes down on the side of the sport romantics, albeit at a time when sport was less corrupted by money and much simpler to love. The drama centres around Manchester United and the Munich Air Crash in February 1958 and the effect the tragedy had on the city of Manchester, the narrative being told through the eyes of a young Bobby Charlton at the start of his career and the assistant manager of United; Jimmy Murphy, a man history should certainly not forget. The story follows the rise of the Busby Babes in the middle of the 1950s, the tragic accident that tore the team (and nearly the club apart) on the frozen runway at Munich Airport and the miraculous rebuilding of the club in the aftermath of the accident to reach the 1958 FA cup final.

Whilst starting off slowly, this is essential to the overall plot. By showing the emergence of the legendary Babes, through their togetherness as a team and their connection with the people of the city they live in, this adds to the effect of the disaster later on. We see the antics of Charlton, Duncan Edwards and all of the other magnificent young footballers Murphy assembled as they destroy other football teams with boyish smiles on their faces, their post-match evenings out at dancehalls (where Charlton is too shy to ask a girl to dance with him; something of a contrast to the exploits of today’s brand of Manchester United footballer) and the charmingly quaint fact that many of the Babes all live together with a landlady.

As the deep connections between the young team and the city becomes more and more established; one knows the ending of the story will be a heartbreaker but the impact is nonetheless just as hard hitting. The expertly directed and produced scene of the crash is wonderfully put together with a fantastic, eerie, maudlin soundtrack as the clock ticks towards the time of the disaster.

The real stand out performance is David Tennant as Jimmy Murphy, providing the full set of emotions from the inspirational, dressing room orator at the beginning of the emergence of the Busby Babes, to the stiff upper lip in front of the survivors of the crash at a Munich hospital, to his emotional breakdown in the stairwell of said hospital, through to his pride and love for the rag-tag team of survivors, amateurs and loaned professionals he puts together for the last part of the season.

For football bores (much like myself) there are certain annoyances at historical inaccuracies such as the airbrushing out of other important members of the Babes such as Tommy Taylor and Roger Byrne (though for the purposes of a 90 minute TV drama this is understandable), the portrayal of Matt Busby as a slightly cold, aloof from the training pitch Scot (though this may have been dramatic licence to build up the importance of Murphy more) and the rather big mistake that Manchester United played Sheffield Wednesday, not Fulham, in the Cup final (though this may…no, that one can’t be explained).

Despite the inaccuracies, this is a wonderful, loving tribute to the exploits of extraordinary men such as Murphy, Charlton, Harry Greig (the United keeper who ignored advice and went back into the fractured hull of the plane to look for survivors), Matt Bubsy (who was twice read the Last Rites before returning to manage United) and others who were involved in one of the tragic events that helped make sport so important to society.

Ruling out new financial regulations

Never in the politics of the governance of football has there been a time when rank hypocrisy has been in evidence. Ok, apart from differing punishments for Torquay and Herford compared to West Ham (regarding Carlos Tevez) for essentially the same crime. And allowing a very rich man with a below par human rights record taking over a club, whilst talking of the Fit and Proper Persons Test. And probably a few other cases too, at least.

Another example has emerged this week regarding Birmingham City and the murky world of football finances. Under new Premier League and FA regulations that were put in place following the fiasco that was the Portsmouth affair, clubs have to undertake external, independent audits of their finances, to be submitted to the Premier League.

By the 1^st March each year, clubs must submit the details of these audits, with notes required from the auditors about possible problems and by the 31^st March, clubs must also submit "future financial information" to highlight any possible funding and stability problems for football clubs in the short-term future. Should a club become a cause for concern, the Premier League can impose sanctions such as a ban on player contracts being improved or extended, the enforced sale of players or a withholding of a licence to play in UEFA competitions, such as the case of Portsmouth in this year's Europa League.

This is where Birmingham City comes in, due to winning the Carling Cup this season. The audits submitted to the Premier League for the club's accounts stated, despite a small profit being made, doubts about the club and its parent company (Birmingham International Holdings) as a "going concern", with the Premier League seeking more information about the ownership structure at the club and the recent share activity.

The holding company released under-written shares (shares that are guaranteed to sell and raise money) back in March which raised £6.8 million and another share release aimed at raising capital occurred recently, which were not underwritten and so not guaranteed to sell. These have so far failed to raise the £17.3 million aimed for and an extension has been made on the offer until May.

However, Carson Yeung, who completed his takeover of the club in 2009, has recently bought a further 8.66% of the shares of the holding company (from an unidentifiable third party due to the company being registered in the Cayman Islands) to take his total to 24.91%. Yeung provided assurances to the Premier League last year about club's financial stability.

The case of for Birmingham City is indeed a bit hazy as any audit that express doubt over a company's ability to function in the future needs to be taken seriously, but here's the rub. Bigger clubs in the Premier League should have far bigger question marks over their financial future but the auditors there do not seem to have raised these concerns.

For example, whilst clubs such as Manchester City and Chelsea can cite the whereabouts of their capital, foreign mega-rich owners, this causes problems for the future long-term financial stability of said clubs. If these owners decided to pack up and leave, the resulting loss of income would lead to an inability to pay costs at a club and place the existence of the club at risk. But, these clubs are also the ones which raise most income for the Premier League as they are the biggest worldwide brands in football and thus push up income from TV rights and give the Premier League more clout in Europe by doing well in UEFA competitions, so it would be damaging to them to enforce regulations that combat overreliance on foreign owners.

The new financial regulations of the Premier League should be applauded as they ensure that the ownership of clubs is a little bit more clearer and where investment in clubs comes from. However, it would also appear they only cover a very specific area of the financial affairs of football clubs, their ownership, and not the overdependence clubs have on rich sugar daddies that may very well go spectacularly wrong when the football boom ends.

That said, this blogger can't see Birmingham City being denied a place in the Europe League this season as some compromise will be found to save the PR face of the Premier League or the club's owners will find some accounting way around the regulations.

This post also appeared at http://www.footballfriendsonline.com/blogs/

This is Britain @7pm Tuesday- BBC2- 8 out of 10

This is England was a 2006 critically-acclaimed film that examined the skinhead subculture and the adoption of black reggae and ska music by white nationalists in the 1980s and the division it caused in the skinhead movement. Similarly, This Is Britain examines the splits in British culture that is caused by the recent 2011 census; placing ethnicity, religion and nationality under the microscope. Granted, there are differences in the examination processes of each broadcast, the latter has less fat-headed, talented white child actors and no examples of someone being kicked to death in a small living room.

The show, hosted by everyone’s favourite journalist (not the biggest compliment in the world that one) Andrew Marr, seeks to explore the social, economic and political situation in Britain today, through asking questions about how the people of Britain see themselves.

It starts out a bit like celebrity, genealogy road-trip hour, also known as Who Do You Think You Are?, where Marr goes to the National Census Database (something like that, I’m tired and wasn’t paying attention, bugger off) and looks at his ancestors on the first ever census in 1801. With Andrew Marr striding around looking thoughtful, the show almost descends into your atypical documentary.

Thankfully, it steers clear of this when Marr is placed in his glass warehouse base where he does some pieces to camera whilst awesome CGI graphics going on around him (think like a primary colour version of The Matrix and you are on the right lines). From here on in, Census experts are sent out to roam around Britain, looking thoughtful in bars and football stadiums and Glasgow.

If you are a stats junkie/ nerd like me, this is a glorious programme because there is lots statistic porn such as facts like: that 90% of divorces are initiated by women, the average age of first time home-buyers is 40, the highest rate of gun crime is in the countryside and there is a 40 year gap in average life expectancy Glasgow between parts of the Glasgow, a phenomenon found nowhere else in the Western world.

The show also addresses interesting sociological quirks brought up by the last census which are examined and pondered over before we are given a frankly all too sensible answer. These questions include “why are there significantly less young men in Britain than young women?”  and “Why do the largest number of remarriages occur in the South West?” and more.

Even if stats and sociology isn’t your thing, you can always laugh at the treasure trove of marvellously un-PC archaic phrases and words found on old censuses (censusi?) such as the 1901 census having a column asking about disabilities asking if a member of one’s family is “deaf/dumb/imbecile or feeble-minded”. Or, failing that, you can laugh at a terminally obese Glaswegian man in a chip shop. But don’t watch it for that, watch it for the interesting subject matter which is examined in a thought provoking manner.

Six games left to go and it’s all to play for

About six weeks ago or so I typed these words on this blog;

“Well, it's not going to happen. It just isn't. There is no chance of Reading making the play-offs this year as we have drawn way too many games when a win was what was needed and, as has been proven against the top sides, we just aren't quite good enough.”

I’ll take my humble pie with cream please. Since publishing those words, Reading have gone on a run of seven wins out of eight (the one defeat coming at Manchester City in the FA Cup) and a six match winning run in the league, scoring 17 goals in said league games. At the time of writing, Reading were six points off the play-off places, having played the same number or more games than all of the teams around us and were on a run of one win in eight games. You can see why I was so pessimistic, right?

However, that run of games included fixtures against five of the top 12. With the combination of confidence gained from another Cup run (like last year) our form has improved immeasurably, so much so that we are the most in form team in Europe, joint with Barcelona, incidentally the first time these two teams have been mentioned in the same breath without a negative word also present in the sentence. Reading now sit 5^th in the league, six points clear of the 7^th placed team Milwall, with an outside chance of an automatic promotion spot.

So what has changed? From the look of it, not an awful lot. The starting XI has been largely consistent, as consistent as a team that can confidently flip between 4-4-2 and 4-5-1 can be, with injuries to a large swathe of players including Federici, Griffin, Cummings, Mills, Pearce, and Hunt, among others, being dealt with admirably. It is a credit to the squad how well we have coped with our injuries and arguably our first XI is as good as out second XI these days.

The run of six consecutive wins has hardly been achieved against inferior quality opposition either; the cliché that there is no easy game in football rings most true in the Championship. These wins have come against Middlesbrough (in a relegation battle at the time), Ipswich (outside chance of play-offs at time of fixture), Barnsley (never an easy place to go to), Portsmouth and Preston (two of the other form teams in the league) and Nottingham Forest (one defeat at home in 18 months before Saturday).

Perhaps what has pushed us comes back to the strength of the squad and the spirit imbued by Brian McDermott and his coaching team. The ability of consummate professionals like Brynjar Gunarsson to play out of position at right back so well for so long, the commitment of men like Brian Howard and Zurab Khizanishvili to be on the fringes of the squad to come in and make their mark and the talent of emerging youngsters like Alex McCarthy and Shaun Cummings to stake a claim for regular first team starters. The fact that so many players have come out and said how much they enjoy being at Reading and enjoy coming into work everyday (Khizanishvili, Tabb, Leigertwood for example) is a real testament to the skill of McDermott as a man-manager and is very key to our recent good habit of converting draws into wins, though the old Archibald quote regarding team spirit may well still be in evidence as none of the mentioned players were saying the same thing back in February.

However, I still have the feeling in the back of my mind of waiting for us to be found out. I feel that there is something there for teams to exploit whether it be our slightly slow defence, our reliance on Long, McAnuff and Kebe for creativity or our batch of talented but inexperienced goalkeepers, but as of yet, no teams have really successfully done this, as only eight defeats all season will testify to. Perhaps this is a year in the Championship where the teams that will get promoted are the ones which can hide their deficiencies best and for the longest, or most important, period of games, as even the leaders, QPR, showed on Saturday, every team in this league can be torn apart.

Looking forward to the next six games, the combination of our scorching-hot form and relatively easy run-in, we should have a play-off place secured as three wins from games against Scunthorpe (A), Leicester (H), Leeds (A), Sheffield United (H), Coventry (A) and Derby (H) will more than likely see us home. Five of those games are quite conceivably winnable but the prospect of an automatic promotion spot is completely off this blogger’s radar as the nagging doubt of being not quite good enough remains, though more humble pie will be happily consumed all the way to May 7^th should it actually happen.

Sky, BBC and Football League

It was announced last week that Sky Sports submitted a bid for the rights to broadcast 75 live Football League matches and the Carling Cup for three years from the 2012-13 season. No other broadcaster submitted a bid, it is believed. Thus, Sky Sports won a little bit more of English football’s soul.

The current deal, with the BBC, raises £88 million-a-year for the Football League, whilst the new live games deal is a full £23 million less than this, leaving a gaping hole in the finances for the League. Although a terrestrial TV highlights package is still up for grabs and is expected to raise a seven-figure sum.

Admittedly, the Beeb’s coverage of The Football League has so far been limited to ten games year live (nearly ALWAYS featuring the team that is top of the Championship or the South Wales derby) and a strikingly-mediocre Saturday night highlights package broadcast in the no-man’s land of after Match of the Day and before drunk revellers come home. Oh, and something called ‘Late Kick-Off’ on a Monday night.

Sky’s coverage was always more professional, albeit hopelessly overhyped but that’s beside the point for two reasons.

Firstly, it means that the only remaining live English football on terrestrial TV will be the FA Cup on ITV which is a great shame for football. The original deal was pretty poor for the BBC anyway as £88 million for 11 games a season (10 Football League and the Carling Cup final) was not worth pursuing and in a time of budget restructuring at the Corporation, a similar deal was never going to be on the cards. Furthermore, the Football League is not in a position to play hardball due to its own need for cash.

Secondly, the £23 million loss is going to have a large impact on clubs in the Football League, many of whom operate on a shoe string budget as it is. Though in no way comparable to the collapse if ITV Digital in 2002 where the Football League lost £80 million overnight, the squeeze will be felt throughout the League.

However, it is testament to the Football League’s ongoing regulation of finances, particularly at Leagues 1 and 2 level, that the new shortfall in TV rights can be more easily managed. The Football League estimates that 82% of player contracts in the league will have expired by the time the new deal comes into place, meaning clubs have more room to manoeuvre within their budgets.

One imagines it would be too much to ask of the Premier League if they could afford to spend a pittance of their own TV rights deal on helping out the Football League. Perhaps by backtracking on their ridiculous extended parachute payments plan, which encourages excessive spending by clubs whilst in the Premier League and perpetuates the idea that the Premier League is only for a select few clubs by giving them a huge financial advantage over their rivals whilst in the Championship.

The parachute payment money could be spread out across the Football League pyramid instead, though one would be pissing in the wind for a considerable amount of time until that happened.

In other news, a couple of weeks ago, this blog asked would you ever, under any circumstances, sue your club, in relation to the case of a Reading fan and a Gylfi Sigurdsson shirt.

Well, ask and the North East shall deliver! A case even more outrageous came out on Thursday courtesy of Niall Quinn, Dijibril Cisse and Sunderland where one of Cisse’s shots in training knocked a fan out who is now in the process of suing the club, according to Quinn.

It is because of people like this why you can see signs at football stadiums now saying “Beware low-flying footballs”, as some sort of disclaimer to protect itself from money-grabbing ‘fans’.

Seriously, getting hit by a stray ball is an occupational hazard of the football fan, like drunk people being sick in your cab if you are a taxi driver or having to perform sins of the flesh if you want to be one of Charlie Sheen’s goddesses.

In my time supporting Reading, I have been hit or come close to being hit by shots from Sammy Igoe and James Harper (among others), which may well explain the quality of this week’s blog post.

To the civil courts!

This post also appeared at footballfriendsonline.com/blogs/

Civilisation: Is the West history? @ 8pm, Sundays- Channel 4- 7 out of 10

On TV these days, historians fall in to two distinct groups. On the one side, we have the all-action historian (well, as all-action as you can get with a PhD) who demonstrate history by doing stuff that people in the past would have done, like chiselling primitive Stone Age weapons or running for miles at night time in forests in army gear or riding a horse in full battle armour or shooting a Catholic in the face with a musket or stealing people's land and giving them influenza in return and so on. These are the Dan Snows and Neil Olivers of this world, trying to impress the viewer with their manliness and ability to do what people in the past did, albeit in a sterilised environment. These are generally the younger historians on the block.

On the other side, there are the historians who demonstrate history by telling you stuff whilst stood looking thoughtful, or walking silently towards the camera, in a location that is somehow linked to the subject on which the historian is talking about. These historians have a strong sense of conviction and booming rhetoric and will hope to make you think that what they are saying is true, not their opinion, through sheer force of will. These are generally the older historians, such as Simon Schama and David Starkey.

Professor Niall Ferguson sits somewhere in between as he is young enough to do the action historian role (he even takes the replicating our ancestors bit into real life to; by having sex with many different women http://tinyurl.com/39c6vwj *warning*, link contains traces of Daily Mail) but he also does the rhetoric part rather well, as his new series Civilisation: Is the West History? shows.

The series revolves around Ferguson's theory that the reason why the West dominated the world for 500 years or so from the 1500s to now is due to their six 'killer apps' and now that the rest of the world can 'download' these 'apps', is this the end of Western superiority? Aside from the patronising and frankly embarrassing semantic field, the theory is an interesting one.

The 'apps' that Ferguson cites are competition, science, the property owing democracy, modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work ethic with each 'app' (I'll stop saying it soon, I promise) being covered in its own episode, with each 'app' being linked to another civilisation which the West gained superiority over, for example, competition allowed the West to advance ahead of China, science ahead of Islam and so on. The theory is very convincing although shoehorning the 'apps' into six categories does seem to simplify the idea too far, as each episode tends to head off on another important tangent at times, such as the episode on medicine focused on the Scramble for Africa which also was only possible through the growth of mechanised transport, a point Ferguson concedes.

Ferguson's style of delivering his message is, at the same time, convincing and unconvincing. He displays his research well through showing off documents from centuries ago in places such as Turkey, the USA and Senegal to show examples of the decline of science in Muslim countries or the birth of property in America but, at times, neglects to tell us the source of some of the information and facts he comes out with.

His ability to bring alternative arguments to historical debates is outstanding, such as his partial justification of colonialism, particularly of West Africa by the French, by showing the benefits it bought the colony, such as the right to French citizenship and healthcare. His general emotional detachment from everything is something of a wonder too, as he casually sits next to a pile of bones from a German concentration camp in Namibia

Whilst history programmes should not be aesthetically pleasing, it does help and the production values for this series are rather high with powerful imagery from the past juxtaposed with contemporary filming of key locations and building, plus the obligatory shot of the presenter staring thoughtfully out of a train window.

Overall, Is the West history? is a well put together, thoughtful programme that is perhaps out of place on a Sunday evening that might now get some more viewers with Dancing on Ice finished as I'm sure the target market of the respective shows are largely the same.

Mixing sport, politics and religion; tales from Bosnia, Poland and Ukraine

One of the great truisms in life, never observed obviously because everyone likes a challenge, is that religion and politics do not mix, proven time and time again throughout history. When you chuck sport into this mix, the chances of the outcome being positive are so slim it disappears when it turns side on.

On Friday, we were given a glimpse of this truth in action when FIFA and UEFA suspended Bosnia-Herzegovina from all world football due to the complex structure of the Bosnian football federation (the NSBIH). The federation has a rotating presidency (like the political structure of the country) whereby the post is shared by a Muslim (or a Bosniak, depending on what source you read), a Croatian and a Serbian but FIFA insisted that the NSBIH would have to fall into line with all other FIFA members’ federations systems by the end of March or face the consequences.

FIFA had taken a lenient stance on the situation due to Bosnia’s complex, unique and fraught past between the different ethnic groups in the Balkans as a whole but felt that enough time was given to make the change.

At a meeting of the NSBIH, 28 out the 53 representatives voted against the motion, largely because Bosnian Serbs opposed the single-president plan due to fear of jeopardising their autonomy. Thus, FIFA have banned Bosnia, who currently sit 4^th in their Euro 2012 qualifying group, from all future international competition until a solution is found. Bosnia has also lost its membership rights with both FIFA and UEFA as a result of this.

Safet Susic, Bosnia’s national team’s manager, has lashed out at the ruling saying: "We can only hope that UEFA and FIFA will show some level of understanding for our political situation and come up with a feasible model because, quite frankly, I don't see another way,” adding that; "These people are incapable of running the NFSBIH properly, although this situation is partly a result of political orders because Bosnia is an ethnically divided country where a dysfunctional system has now caught up with football.”

In the past, FIFA has installed an emergency committee to run a federation for 12 months, as they have in El Salvador, Kuwait, Senegal and Samoa but this is a completely different situation to those countries due to historical and political context.

If football, and indeed sport, is seen to be a great unifying force for humanity one-size-fits-all rules and regulations imposed upon Football Associations by the governing bodies does not help disseminate this image.

Evidence would suggest the rotating presidency has not hindered the growth of football in Bosnia. A fluid 4-level system of league football is in place and has been established since 2001. The UEFA club coefficient for Bosnia for the 2010-11 season is 29th (just behind Norway and Sweden) and on the rise. The national team sit 4^th in their group, a point behind Belarus and Albania and five behind leaders France with a game in hand. A talented group of players such as Edin Dzeko, Miralem Pjanic, Asmir Begovic, Sejad Salihovic and many more are making their mark on European leagues.

The political situation in Bosnia is fragile enough as it is with the fledgling state needing stability in all areas of life, not pointless meddling from power-hungry, greedy football bureaucrats, unwilling to loosen the rules to help a society develop and create a sense of pride in their football team.

Meanwhile, an investigation into hate crimes at football matches in Poland and Ukraine, the co-hosts of the 2012 European Championships, has uncovered some worrying trends.

The report, sponsored by UEFA, found nearly 200 serious disturbances in the last 18 months including anti-Semitic chants and banners at football matches, abuse towards black players (including from their own fans) and violent attacks against anti-racism groups.

Of the 133 reported incidents in Poland, 56 were to do with open displays of fascist or racist symbols and banners, 20 “anti-black” incidents and 36 anti-Semitic incidents of chants and banners. Ukrainian football fans were responsible for 62 of the incidents, including violence between neo-Nazi fans and left-ist supporters of Dynamo Kyiv and Arsenal Kyiv respectively.

The report, published today, paints a disappointing picture of the image of fans in the two countries, compounded by violence at last week’s friendly between Poland and Lithuania where 60 fans were detained after clashes with police.

Both the Polish government and UEFA have promised a crackdown on hooliganism, with UEFA’s director of Euro 2012, Martin Kallen, saying that there will be “changes in the next month.”

Despite more than 12 million tickets being requested for the Championships by fans before the deadline on Thursday, this report is not the news the Ukrainian and Polish FAs need right now to soothe fears that the first big football tournament to be held in Eastern Europe will not be marred by violence and racist behaviour.

This post also appeared at www.footballfriendsonline.com/blogs/

For the want of Forty-Two Pounds

Would you ever take your football club to court? What would it take? Injury caused at a football ground caused by the club's negligence? Having your season ticket taken away from you for no reason by the club, leaving you out of pocket? Would you not take them to court at all because they are your club?

Well, a few weeks ago, a club were taken to court by one of their fans because of a football shirt and the matter of 42 of your English pounds. The case revolves around Reading FC, Gylfi Sigurdsson and a 13-year old boy's birthday money.

Basically, the teenager, who lives in Middlesbrough, bought a Reading shirt with 'Sigurdsson' on the back of it with his birthday money before the player was promptly sold to Hoffenheim a few months later.

James McGhee, the teenager's father, asked for a refund from the club and was refused. He then wrote to the club and was again refused. He then lodged a claim in court in Middlesbrough. Reading FC settled out of court, paying £72 to cover legal costs and the refunded value of the shirt, arguing that it was not worth the effort of travelling to Middlesbrough to fight the case.

Mr McGhee stated:  "For anybody else in the same position who feels equally aggrieved, this just shows it is well worth pursuing it. It shows what can be done if you are prepared to fight your corner."

But is it? Is it really? Clearly, the only reason Mr McGhee won his case is because it would be stupid and a waste of money for Reading FC to face him in court, as would the PR problem of refusing to give a teenager his birthday money back.

This has not set any kind of precedent whatsoever, unless fans of the club based in Reading decide to travel up to the North of England, take residence there and then sue the club for the shirt they buy with 'Long' or 'Federici' or whoever it is Reading end selling this forthcoming Summer.

Furthermore, by the age of 13, you should be aware that football is not a sport with a semblance of loyalty from any of the people involved in it. The McGhee's argued that the club indicated Sigurdsson would not be leaving the club but surely every fan knows that football clubs are not honest 100% of the time or indeed 1% of the time.

Even furthermore, when you make an investment in a football shirt with a player's name on the back, you take the chance that said player may not be around for a long period of time and you might be wasting your money.

There is a life lesson about loyalty and the value of a pound here but I suppose if you have the time, money and inclination to take every event that goes against you in life to the law courts, you aren't going to learn footballing life lessons. It would appear this is more of a case of a slightly spoiled child getting their way rather than a genuine sea change in fan-football club customer relations.



This post also appeared at www.footballfriendsonline.com/blogs/