Tag Archives: football stories

Safe Standing Petition Needs A Business Plan

Posted on by

A two-way debate about re-introducing standing room at English football grounds has raged since ever since all seater stadiums were introduced, and both sides of have strong, well developed arguments to back them up. However, the unfortunate reality is that much of the debate is rendered invalid by the simple maxim: money talks. Until fans and fans’ groups realise that, no-one is going to listen to what they have to say.

Things don’t change in football without money as a motivation. The 1989 Taylor report is, rightly, associated with increased safety at football grounds in England. The reforms that it introduced – most crucially, all-seater stadiums – have been effective in, bluntly, stopping deaths at football grounds. However, looking more closely at how the Taylor report came about, and in particular who sanctioned it, gives an indication as to why things changed. Fans’ safety, alone, was not enough to make the authorities act. More likely, the prospect of re-branding English football to bring in the custom of a newly affluent middle class, was in the mind of Thatcher’s business-loving government, and future Premier League chairmen, when they decided that safety was finally an important issue. It cannot be a coincidence that the Premier League ‘occured’ just two years after the Taylor report.

Any move back to allowing some standing room, then, as has recently been proposed by the Football Supporters’ Federation, must convince clubs that there is profit in it for them. Because, if safety doesn’t force change, then ‘a better atmosphere at games’ certainly won’t. It’s not about what you want, it’s about what you can afford.

View the Original article

Iain Dowie Struggles With The ‘Away Goals’ Rule (Video)

Posted on by

Despite being paid handsomely (the irony is not lost!) to talk about things, Iain Dowie is a man that cannot actually talk – and, by the looks of things, neither can he think that good about stuff like numbers either.

Schalke whupped Inter 5-2 in Milan last night meaning that, by Dowie’s calculations, the Nerazzurri will need to score ‘seven or something’ in Germany to reverse the thrashing…

Christ! You know you’re in a hole when Paul Merson is correcting your maths.

Video via 101GG.

View the Original article

Who would be a Sunday League referee?

Posted on by

Who would voluntarily choose to be a Sunday League referee?

Meet Mo Awill

Childhood is seemingly the defining factor in what position someone ends up spending the majority of their life playing the beautiful game in. The sprinter on the wing, the disciplinarian in the middle and the big lad will play at the back.

These are formulaic standards that characterize most people’s earliest associations with football. For some people though there is a hole in this and it’s referee shaped.

Apparently not fussed by the glory of participating in the match, those who choose to be referees selflessly blend into the background so that law and order can be maintained in sometimes physically passionate circumstances.

The role of referee is in general a thankless one, just ask Mark Clattenburg. One mistake puts your position in the spotlight and the countless correct and acutely well observed ones are immediately forgotten about. After all if a referee has a good game, it isn’t back page news.

If a player makes a mistake though they’re are able to hide behind the potential successes of their team-mates, but a referee has no such safety, as if he makes a mistake he’s alone, often in a sea of disagreeing fans and players.

Thankfully some people are seemingly gluttons for punishment and are willing to accept these pitfalls and voluntarily choose to oversee games of all levels, but why? Mo Awill is one such person.

He isn’t though a Premier League referee, or even a referee in a professional division, he has the most thankless task in football. He’s a referee in London’s Southern Sunday Football League.

To make matters worse, when I go to see him it’s a bleak and cold winter’s day, pouring down with rain and it’s prematurely dark considering it’s only a little after midday.

Continue reading →

It must be love if you’re happy to play in these conditions

Posted on by

It must be love if you’re happy to play in these conditions. Welcome to the Southern Sunday Football League

Barring the girlfriend of a player, no one was watching the game, the rain was lashing down on a drearily dark afternoon, the pitch was a few glasses of water short of a bog and the goal net was held in place by twigs, which had been used as substitutes for missing pegs.

This isn’t the glamorous football that millions of people have familiarised themselves with on TV thanks to Sky Sports extensive coverage of the game, this is something entirely different. This is Gun Show vs. Sporting Club Balham in the Fourth Division of the Southern Sunday Football League.

There were no comfortable seats from which to watch the game, just a muddy surrounding area and there was no protection from the unrelenting rain. Welcome to Clapham Common and it’s a million miles away from the comfort of the Premier League.

The game itself was dominated by the squelching of the ground underfoot, as players initially struggled to adapt to the swamp like conditions and at times the play resembled a rugby scrum, with players doing their best to hide the colours of their team by covering themselves in mud.

With players often running past the ball as it remained stubbornly in the thick earth the game became a test of endurance and determination, as the teams fought to overcome the English winter weather.

At first glance this could be considered a horrible scenario that no one should put themselves through, but on closer inspection and with the benefit of the same feeling towards the game, I understood that this was a genuine expression of love.

View the Original article

You hungry ref?

Posted on by

“Mmm, tastes like chicken”

Andrea Biondi, who plays (or used to play) for Florence-based amateur side Albereta ’72, has been banned for 20 long months for the paltry crime of trying to force-feed a referee his own whistle.

After being red-carded during Albereta’s recent 2-2 draw with Sancat for verbally abusing the referee, Biondi reportedly grabbed the back of the official’s head and tried to push the whistle into his mouth (sadly, no Youtube footage exists), before continuing to insult and threaten the poor sod as he was forcibly escorted from the field.

Puts Cesc Fabregas, Darren Fletcher et al‘s feeble ref-hounding to shame, no?

Speaking from bitter personal experience, it’s refreshing to know that the kind of psychotic, day-release nutjobs that permeate the amateur game aren’t a solely British phenomenon.

View the Original article


 Powered by Max Banner Ads