My friend Henry is writing his Ph.D. on the poet CH (Charles Hubert) (!) Sisson. He was born in Bristol on the 22nd of April 1914, and the Telegraph's obituary from 2003 describes him as "the son of a watch and clock repairer who later became an optician." His roots were, as Sisson himself put it, in "innumerable generations of farmers" and he grew up in Eastville, notable for being for much of the twentieth century the home of my football team, Bristol Rovers.
The Eastville Stadium -- near the giant gas works that gave Rovers their nickname "The Gas" and their fans that of "Gasheads" -- was demolished in 1998 after a decade out of use to make way for an Ikea superstore. Sisson's house itself, if not entirely demolished, was certainly adapted. He notes in his autobiography (On The Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography) that his childhood home "is now the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop".
Eastville was where my mum and her brothers and her dad first watched Rovers. We've also since been to the Ikea. I don't know if Sisson's house still stands, no longer his house nor the Supporter's Club Shop, which has moved, along with the team itself, to the Memorial Stadium in Horfield.
What I like to imagine, though, is my mum walking past Sisson's house on the way to a game, maybe with her dad who was roughly the same generation as Sisson (and from a roughly similar background). Sisson, at that time, was presumably in the middle (or late-middle) of the writing career that Henry is now studying. In passing Sisson's house -- or the Supporter's Club Shop -- my mum marked out a connection fifty years in advance of my meeting Henry in Glasgow in 2009.
Showing posts with label football. Show all posts
Showing posts with label football. Show all posts
17.10.10
10.7.10
Football Stuff and Kate Zambreno Writing Brilliantly Again
Round-up:
Great K-Punk articles on football:
"Postcolonial melancholy and all that" - "The FA has gone from being a quasi-Feudalistic shambles to being a neoliberal shambles. Same English malaise, different systems. Once a crumbling repository of old English power (members of the Admiralty used to sit on committees), it is now the kind of business ontology-oriented body of which Adam Crozier was the CEO. (Crozier's dismal passage through English institutions like the FA and the Royal Mail tells its own story about life in neoliberal England.) Like English culture in general, the FA has passed from dithering cronyism to post-Fordist short-termism. Neither mode provides much appetite for planning or strategy. Reading Zone Styx's account of Germany's reconstruction after their 2001 defeat by England, one is astonished by the clear contrast with the situation in England. There is in English football no infrastructure capable of implementing a long-term strategy in the way that Germany has. Löw is not a lone aunt sally in the way that England managers are; he is the figurehead of an institutionally-defined strategy and one reason that Germany have had a consistent level of success in international football is institutional memory, something that England conspicuously lack (what they have instead is a kind of bad hauntology)."
and "Football/capitalist realism/utopia" - "If the brave new world wouldn't arrive for the working class, it did arrive for Clough personally. Instead of being at the vanguard of a newly assertive working class, Clough's period of greatest success coincided with the ebb tide of postwar proletarian collectivism. Clough was sometimes sneered at as a ‘champagne socialist’ because he saw no contradiction between being a leftist and achieving success. Like many born poor, Clough was never able to fully believe that he had finally vanquished poverty from his life - hence, all those TV appearances, ghosted columns and the bung-rumours."
and Kate Zambreno writing brilliantly, again: "What would Foucault say. Yes. Foucault. On Lebron James. "
Great K-Punk articles on football:
"Postcolonial melancholy and all that" - "The FA has gone from being a quasi-Feudalistic shambles to being a neoliberal shambles. Same English malaise, different systems. Once a crumbling repository of old English power (members of the Admiralty used to sit on committees), it is now the kind of business ontology-oriented body of which Adam Crozier was the CEO. (Crozier's dismal passage through English institutions like the FA and the Royal Mail tells its own story about life in neoliberal England.) Like English culture in general, the FA has passed from dithering cronyism to post-Fordist short-termism. Neither mode provides much appetite for planning or strategy. Reading Zone Styx's account of Germany's reconstruction after their 2001 defeat by England, one is astonished by the clear contrast with the situation in England. There is in English football no infrastructure capable of implementing a long-term strategy in the way that Germany has. Löw is not a lone aunt sally in the way that England managers are; he is the figurehead of an institutionally-defined strategy and one reason that Germany have had a consistent level of success in international football is institutional memory, something that England conspicuously lack (what they have instead is a kind of bad hauntology)."
and "Football/capitalist realism/utopia" - "If the brave new world wouldn't arrive for the working class, it did arrive for Clough personally. Instead of being at the vanguard of a newly assertive working class, Clough's period of greatest success coincided with the ebb tide of postwar proletarian collectivism. Clough was sometimes sneered at as a ‘champagne socialist’ because he saw no contradiction between being a leftist and achieving success. Like many born poor, Clough was never able to fully believe that he had finally vanquished poverty from his life - hence, all those TV appearances, ghosted columns and the bung-rumours."
and Kate Zambreno writing brilliantly, again: "What would Foucault say. Yes. Foucault. On Lebron James. "
21.6.10
The Player-Manager Balance
What I was saying in that last post about the position of managers in modern football is touched on slightly by Richard Williams in today's Guardian:
"It is their [the players'] game, after all. Nowadays we tend to exalt the top managers – the Fergusons, Mourinhos and Wengers – above those who actually play the game, for the simple media-driven reason that they are not only more rounded characters but the only ones in a position to say anything provocative or even interesting, providing newspapers and broadcasters with the running narrative of a football season."
As a journalist perhaps he places too much emphasis on the media side of the game. I don't think managers are exalted because they say interesting things in the media, because, quite frankly, they don't. Mourinho's "Special One" comment was six years ago now. Last year, when Mourinho won the Champions League again with Inter Milan, he was notably quieter. No, I think managers are exalted not because they say interesting things so much as they just say something. Players are kept away from the media more, and managers have far more license to pontificate. Theirs, after all, is a game of words and thought; they are not actually playing. When they talk to the media or write their programme notes, they are doing their job. Talking to the media is part of that. For the players, it's something slightly different.
This effect of the massive media attention football gets, combined with the rise of sports psychology and greater understanding of the mental side of sport - all sport - I think is the reason managers are scrutinised as much as players are. I've always been suspicious of the school of thought that says "at the end of the day, it's the players' fault", because they go out there, most often, to execute a game-plan conceived primarily by the manager. It is the manager's job to look at his players, look at the opposition, and construct a game-plan that he thinks his players can do with respect to the other team. The England players' reaction to the awful game on Friday reveals this, I think. Their criticisms of Capello - at least the ones that have trickled out through the media - revolve around them having to carry out a plan they feel was the wrong one. It is very notable that once on the pitch they didn't try to change the plan. They gamely carried on, probably aware it wasn't working, but both powerless and ignorant to change it.
Players look to their manager to direct things, and for the most part they follow the plan, especially on the pitch. Off the pitch, as we're seeing, it's a different story. To say it's the players fault, then, disconnects fundamentally the relationship between the manager and the players during the 90 minutes of the game. Far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that the players are on the pitch and the manager not. What needs to be looked at is the operational relationship between the two. What is the balance of power there? A good manager constructs a solid game plan which is all the more solid for building in the flexibility to change it if it's not working. Managers are lucky if they have intelligent players they can entrust with understanding the plan, realising if it's not working and changing it. For the first few years of his time at Liverpool, for instance, this was very much Rafael Benitez's relationship with Xabi Alonso, who was often described as Benitez's "eyes and ears on the pitch".
The real problem, I think, with England at the moment, is that Capello has never had this relationship with any of the players, and so cannot create it now, even if he wanted to, which is doubtful, given his authoritarian stance. That balance between the off-pitch manager and the on-pitch players has been knocked off-kilter, and they are all scrabbling around in the grey area it's created.
"It is their [the players'] game, after all. Nowadays we tend to exalt the top managers – the Fergusons, Mourinhos and Wengers – above those who actually play the game, for the simple media-driven reason that they are not only more rounded characters but the only ones in a position to say anything provocative or even interesting, providing newspapers and broadcasters with the running narrative of a football season."
As a journalist perhaps he places too much emphasis on the media side of the game. I don't think managers are exalted because they say interesting things in the media, because, quite frankly, they don't. Mourinho's "Special One" comment was six years ago now. Last year, when Mourinho won the Champions League again with Inter Milan, he was notably quieter. No, I think managers are exalted not because they say interesting things so much as they just say something. Players are kept away from the media more, and managers have far more license to pontificate. Theirs, after all, is a game of words and thought; they are not actually playing. When they talk to the media or write their programme notes, they are doing their job. Talking to the media is part of that. For the players, it's something slightly different.
This effect of the massive media attention football gets, combined with the rise of sports psychology and greater understanding of the mental side of sport - all sport - I think is the reason managers are scrutinised as much as players are. I've always been suspicious of the school of thought that says "at the end of the day, it's the players' fault", because they go out there, most often, to execute a game-plan conceived primarily by the manager. It is the manager's job to look at his players, look at the opposition, and construct a game-plan that he thinks his players can do with respect to the other team. The England players' reaction to the awful game on Friday reveals this, I think. Their criticisms of Capello - at least the ones that have trickled out through the media - revolve around them having to carry out a plan they feel was the wrong one. It is very notable that once on the pitch they didn't try to change the plan. They gamely carried on, probably aware it wasn't working, but both powerless and ignorant to change it.
Players look to their manager to direct things, and for the most part they follow the plan, especially on the pitch. Off the pitch, as we're seeing, it's a different story. To say it's the players fault, then, disconnects fundamentally the relationship between the manager and the players during the 90 minutes of the game. Far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that the players are on the pitch and the manager not. What needs to be looked at is the operational relationship between the two. What is the balance of power there? A good manager constructs a solid game plan which is all the more solid for building in the flexibility to change it if it's not working. Managers are lucky if they have intelligent players they can entrust with understanding the plan, realising if it's not working and changing it. For the first few years of his time at Liverpool, for instance, this was very much Rafael Benitez's relationship with Xabi Alonso, who was often described as Benitez's "eyes and ears on the pitch".
The real problem, I think, with England at the moment, is that Capello has never had this relationship with any of the players, and so cannot create it now, even if he wanted to, which is doubtful, given his authoritarian stance. That balance between the off-pitch manager and the on-pitch players has been knocked off-kilter, and they are all scrabbling around in the grey area it's created.
17.6.10
David v Goliath
The Spain result yesterday crystallised something. France drew, England drew, Argentina won narrowly 1-0, Italy drew, Brazil narrowly won 2-1. Of all the favourites, and they weren't even a favourite, only Germany have looked assured. They have surely been the team of the tournament so far, they were pretty amazing the other night.
But this is not necessarily the big teams underperforming, as a lot of people have been saying. Clearly no-one wants to lose their first game and so conservatism wins out over adventure in most cases. And the big players need to feel their way into a tournament like any other. I've read elsewhere that the standardisation of training regimes means that tournaments are unlikely to turn up a real clash of styles and approaches like they used to (did they use to?). An additional, and perhaps unseen, aspect of the globalization of football.
But what I think this shows too is the psychology of football, the tactics, the results of careful and methodic studying of DVDs of the opposition in order to pick their weaknesses and work out their strengths. Studying your opponent is not a new idea, but there seems to me to be an ever-increasing emphasis placed on the psychology of the game, and thus the role of the manager. José Mourinho is talked about in such glowing terms because of his tactical masterclasses (see Inter's win over Barcelona in last season's Champions League), whilst managers like Marcello Lippi, Fabio Capello and Guus Hiddink are prized so much because of their adept readings of the game. You see evidence of this emphasis when you look at the managers of so-called "lesser teams" - Ottmar Hitzfeld is managing Switzerland. He's one of the very small group of managers to have won the Champions League with 2 different clubs. Sven-Goran Eriksson is managing the Ivory Coast. I know Sven's not the best manager ever, but time was when smaller countries would find much smaller profile managers. You have Carlos Alberto Parreira managing South Africa and if Russia were in the World Cup, they would be managed by Guus Hiddink.
Teams are going out with very carefully plotted game-plans. North Korea executed theirs almost to perfection, Switzerland certainly did. They are drilled on these again and again and the test of the players is how much they can stick to it once they're in the glare of the floodlights and the TV cameras.
But this is not necessarily the big teams underperforming, as a lot of people have been saying. Clearly no-one wants to lose their first game and so conservatism wins out over adventure in most cases. And the big players need to feel their way into a tournament like any other. I've read elsewhere that the standardisation of training regimes means that tournaments are unlikely to turn up a real clash of styles and approaches like they used to (did they use to?). An additional, and perhaps unseen, aspect of the globalization of football.
But what I think this shows too is the psychology of football, the tactics, the results of careful and methodic studying of DVDs of the opposition in order to pick their weaknesses and work out their strengths. Studying your opponent is not a new idea, but there seems to me to be an ever-increasing emphasis placed on the psychology of the game, and thus the role of the manager. José Mourinho is talked about in such glowing terms because of his tactical masterclasses (see Inter's win over Barcelona in last season's Champions League), whilst managers like Marcello Lippi, Fabio Capello and Guus Hiddink are prized so much because of their adept readings of the game. You see evidence of this emphasis when you look at the managers of so-called "lesser teams" - Ottmar Hitzfeld is managing Switzerland. He's one of the very small group of managers to have won the Champions League with 2 different clubs. Sven-Goran Eriksson is managing the Ivory Coast. I know Sven's not the best manager ever, but time was when smaller countries would find much smaller profile managers. You have Carlos Alberto Parreira managing South Africa and if Russia were in the World Cup, they would be managed by Guus Hiddink.
Teams are going out with very carefully plotted game-plans. North Korea executed theirs almost to perfection, Switzerland certainly did. They are drilled on these again and again and the test of the players is how much they can stick to it once they're in the glare of the floodlights and the TV cameras.
Football football football!!!
Football football football! I love the World Cup. I love the games, I love the endless geeky conversations about performances, what Rooney's best position is, whether Spain will choke, how good those North Koreans were, and what I love the most is statistics, statistics, statistics. I could go over them for hours and hours. I like reading every column inch I can find on the things, right down to the design and manufacture of the Jabulani ball (which is rubbish, apparently) and those buzzy things drowning out crowd noise, as well as going over the passing stats, the assist stats, the possession stats, everything.
Now I discover Mark Fisher, aka Kpunk, is blogging the World Cup with a few other distinguished bloggers. This is exactly the sort of writing I want about football. Engaged, knowledgeable, thoughtful. And written by teachers and writers of philosophy, politics and critical theory! Excellent! I recommend it for anyone. Anyone.
Now I discover Mark Fisher, aka Kpunk, is blogging the World Cup with a few other distinguished bloggers. This is exactly the sort of writing I want about football. Engaged, knowledgeable, thoughtful. And written by teachers and writers of philosophy, politics and critical theory! Excellent! I recommend it for anyone. Anyone.
3.5.09
Football and Poetry
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.