Birmingham Post - Sport Blog

A sporting treasure trove - or maybe not

2008-07-15T16:23:16Z

Regular readers will be aware that The Birmingham Post is moving home in a few weeks, from Colmore Circus in the city centre where we have lived since the early-1960s, to our smart new headquarters at Fort Dunlop.
Wearing one of my other hats, the implications of that move have been taking up large parts of my life for several months but it has fallen to others to start getting out the skips and cardboard boxes in preparation for the move.
To that end, we've regularly been receiving emails from She Who Must Be Obeyed, asking that we start clearing out cupboards and cabinets, emptying shelves and throwing away stuff we don't need or want.

I will get around to it one day, probably the day before the bulldozers move in, but the problem with journalists in general and sports journalists in particular is that we are hoarders of information.
We tell ourselves that we will need that reference book one day, in the event that we need that particular piece of information; of course, we never do, but that's not the point.
Consequently, let me take you on a tour of the six workstations which make up the hub of the Post sports desk.
On my desk, to the left of the two screens I need to produce the newspaper and this blog are, from left to right and excluding the non-sports reference books: Behind the Back Page, The Adventures of a Sports Writer by Christopher Davies; the Non-League Football Directory 2008; Power, Corruption and Pies, a selection of the best writing from When Saturday Comes, as well as The Half-Decent Football Book, another volume of the best of WSC.
To the right of my screens are Non-League Football Tables 1889-2005 and its' companion Football League Tables 1888-2005; Last Man Standing, the story of hurling goalkeepers by Christy O'Connor; Formula One Racing for Dummies; Football's Greatest Characters by Geoff Tibballs; More of Baxter vs the Bookies, a collection of racing stories by Roy Granville and The Art of Bookmaking by Malcolm Boyle.
If I look further to my left, I see Outcasts (The Lands That FIFA Forgot); the last eight editions of the Rothmans Football Yearbook; biographies of Doug Ellis, Ron Atkinson and Alan Shearer and my colleague Lisa Smith's prized collection of Aston Villa reference books........and we haven't even started rummaging through drawers.
Of the books on my desk, I have read those by Messrs Granville and Boyle and I recommend both, as well as Granville's first collection of Baxter stories - but what of the others?
Apart from the fact that my wife is Irish (albeit via Dawlish Road in Selly Oak) and I once visited Croke Park in Dublin, why am I keeping a book about hurling goalkeepers?; I don't like Formula One and I will never get the time to read Tibballs' tome, even if it does contain stories about the likes of Victor Kasule, son of a Ugandan father and Scottish mother who was disciplined by three different football clubs in three months, from Albion Rovers to Shrewsbury Town.
And who ever thought of writing Outcasts, a book about international football associations who aren't members of Fifa?
The answer, of course, is the glorious irrelevance of sport; to those of us who care, it is endlessly interesting, but ultimately irrelevant - why else would you author some of the books mentioned above?
As I write, another book crashes on to my desk. King of the Peds, by P S Marshall is the history of long-distance professional race-walking in the 1870s and 1880s, something of which I had absolutely no knowledge until ten seconds ago.
It is 750 pages long, I shall never read it, I shall probably never look at it after tonight but I won't be throwing it out; at least not until we've moved to Fort Dunlop.

PS - Please do not, under any circumstances, bring this blog to the attention of Mrs Warrillow. I may want to take some of these books home at some stage and I've been trying since 1990 to persuade her that bookcases are furniture - so far, I have not succeeded.

Pre Season Post Mortem

2008-07-09T10:52:54Z

It's that time of year again. Wimbledon is over, the rain continues unabated and the strawberries rot on the plant in the downpour. Ah the British summer.

Except, of course, the twice weekly two-hour long heat waves that miraculously appear between 7-9pm every Tuesday and Thursday when most over-weight, unfit rugby enthusiasts are embroiled in what is widely known as pre-season training.

It should really be called pre-season draining for there is no other way to describe the sensations associated with the unwelcome return to physical exercise. My personal favourite is the giddy feeling associated with rising vomit and overheating heads that feel as though they are going to explode. The puke usually wins.

Amidst all this widespread misery, however, there are a few individuals who have never been happier. They are the suppressed sadists, frustrated personal trainers and wannabe sergeant majors of the world or - as they are otherwise known, the conditioning coaches.

Like most self respecting torturers they spend a considerable amount of time devising their strategies. They begin with a starting point of effect - 'Make the buggers sick' - and construct the cause around it. Here are my five of my least favourite pre-season routines.

I can't claim to have met all the mal-adjusted psychopaths in the sport so perhaps you'd like to add your own.

1. Shuttle Runs (AKA Beep, bleep or yoyo test)
Nothing too creative about this one. Stand under one set of goalposts and run to the 22 and back, halfway and back, opposition 22 and back and other goaline...and back. It's the 'and back' that kills.
An absolute necessity is to jog the shorter distances and sprint two lengths of the pitch. As your body shouts 'Slower!' or 'Stop!' the coach screams 'Faster!' or 'Once more!'. End result? Anything between giddiness and total blackout, usually accompanied with severe retching.

2. Having a (Medicine) Ball
Just to add a bit of variety - who wants to run up and down a pitch all night? - the clever coach will get his men sprinting round it. The clinically insane amongst their number order their victims to do it with a medicine ball.
If resources are tight and the only sort of medicine available at your club comes from optics behind the bar, fear not. Simply replace the missing apparatus with an even heavier team-mate who must be given a piggy back every step of the way.
Some coaches are even worse and prefer to kill two squad members at once by doing the same activity but using a fireman's lift - without a cricket box. Try carrying anything after 300 metres on someone's shoulders.

3. Wrestling
Without doubt this is the worst pre-season discipline I have ever done. It involves putting one hand at the back of your partner's neck and the other on his shoulder. The idea is to thrown said partner off his feet whilst all the time preventing him doing the same to you.
Sounds like competitive cuddling? Try it. I have never encountered a more tiring and physically demanding exercise in my life. After about two minutes you're happy to be thrown just for the lie down.
At least that's what I told Adam Caves, Moseley's current hooker, when he rag-dolled me from one sideline to the next.
No shame there, I hear you say, he's a professional front row player whose stock in trade is upper body strength. Indeed so but he was 18 at the time.

4. Hill Running
Sprinting on the flat is all very well but to be truly nasty one needs an incline. The steeper and longer the better.
Donkey's Hollow leading to Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham is a perfect example, for those of you who don't know it crampons and ropes are optional, but any vertigo-inducing bank will do as long as the grass is knee high.
This discipline is best repeated in three sets of ten repetitions or until you've lost your scrum half in the undergrowth.

5. Beach Rugby
Tired of all this sprint training? Forgotten what a ball looks like? Time to get back to the sport we love.
In an effort to recreate the leg sapping, mud-wallowing conditions of deepest December those clubs fortunate enough to be by the coast spend the evening by the seaside.
Sounds like a doss doesn't it? Strolling around playing a bit of touch with your mates. That won't do. It's got to be full pace and full contact and makes lineout jumping in the sand pretty interesting.
Best done within eyeshot of a promenade pub whose signs blink teasingly. The game finishes when the tide laps around the 6ft 8ins lock's waist or aforementioned scrum half can no longer be seen.
It is absolutely compulsory that each player consumes a genuine sand-wich.

A ticket to ride

2008-07-07T17:48:22Z

Sir Richard Branson, or more likely his acolytes in the West Midlands who surely read The Post, should probably look away now.
I've mentioned previously that this exalted position occasionally gets me into sporting events for free.
Wimbledon is not one of them. The Post gets one prized seat in the All-England Club press centre and I'd far prefer that it goes to one of our hard-working reporters.

Thus it was that, having taken our chance in the annual lottery for Centre Court seats, been allocated two for ladies semi-finals day and subsequently written cheques for a total of £216 for tickets and train travel, Mrs W and I set off from Tamworth station last Thursday morning.
Remind me again how this country thinks it has the public transport infrastructure to host the 2012 Olympic Games, or the 2018 football World Cup?
After a relatively painless 80-minute journey during which our reserved seats were already occupied and our tickets were not checked (keep that thought in mind....), we arrived at Euston at 10.42am.
Regular visitors to The Championships will know that the nearest station to the All-England Club is not Wimbledon but Southfields, two stops up the District Line and reached from Euston via Victoria.
Except that on this sunny Thursday morning, with upwards of 30,000 people heading for SW 19, there was an electrical fault on the District Line and no service - at all.
Harassed London Underground staff were directing passengers to the overground service via Waterloo to Wimbledon, a detour we made in the company of two middle-aged American ladies and an Australian gentleman. Heaven knows what they thought.
We arrived at Wimbledon station to find ourselves in the midst of a scrum of several hundred people standing at the front of the station, patiently queuing for the shuttle bus service to the All-England Club.
The queue was being marshalled by the sort of cheery Cockney who I have to confess brings out the worst in me ('move along now please, fill the gaps, ladies and gents, fill the gaps') and it took the better part of 35 minutes before we boarded a bus - I still suspect we could have walked it more quickly and saved ourselves £7.
Having then been stuck in a queue of buses negotiating their way around the one-way system in Wimbledon town centre, we sat down on Centre Court at 12.59pm, just as Venus Williams and Elena Dementieva stepped on court.
The afternoon's tennis, in one of the best sporting theatres I have ever seen, was splendid, the Williams sisters asserting their superiority before rain brought an end to our afternoon just before 5.30pm.
As we had to get back to Euston for the 7.46pm train home, we could not afford to wait for play to resume and our journey back across London (on the now-repaired Underground, but still taking 90 minutes) was carried out on crowded rush-hour trains but in bright sunshine.
Which is when this story really starts.
Picture the scene. it's 7.34pm on the busy concourse of Euston station, 12 minutes before our train leaves.
Me: Can I just check the tickets to see what coach our seat reservations are in ?
Mrs W: What tickets?
Me: The train tickets.
Mrs W: I haven't got the train tickets, you have.
Me: But you always have the train tickets when we go on long journeys because you don't trust me to keep them safe.
Mrs W: No, I haven't got the train tickets, I've got your wallet. The train tickets were separate.
Me: So where are they?
Mrs W: How do I know?
Me: Oh dear (or something like that).
Long pause.
Me: They weren't in that plastic bag we threw in a rubbish bin by Court Two, were they? I thought it was empty.
Mrs W: Oh dear (or something like that). I think they were.
Me: Oh dear (or something like that).
So what do we do? The tickets are bought and paid for, the money has been deducted off my credit card but we have no proof. A standard single ticket bought on the day costs £38. There is one more train from Euston to Tamworth tonight. It leaves at 10.05pm, two-and-a-half hours away.
Me: (making a mental note to go to Confession on Saturday): We could always risk it and be honest if the conductor asks us. After all, it's not like we haven't paid.
Mrs W (who, being a rush-hour commuter, has a pathological dislike of train conductors): Oh, go on, then.
So we did. And do you know, dear reader? Despite promising a full ticket check when we left Euston, the conductor did not put in an appearance in our carriage in the middle of the train at any time during the 100-mile, 80-minute journey.
Suffice it to say, a bottle of wine accompanied our evening meal when we got home.
I must stress that no laws were broken here. We weren't fare-dodging, the tickets were bought and paid for, Sir Richard and Co have their money.
But if Messrs Nadal and Federer think they were stressed on Sunday evening, I reckon we know how they feel.

Waiting for action

2008-07-04T11:11:57Z

There's been so little going on lately it has been difficult to find much to write about, so apologies for my lack of waffling over the last week or so.

Seb Larsson and James McFadden continue to be talked about in connection with transfers elsewhere, which would pretty much complete the sale of all of our best players (as I'm assuming that Kapo will be on his way in the near future).

So much for the Board's protestations that they would be keeping the team together. Cynical? Moi?

At the moment I do not have a lot of confidence in next season, or rather, my confidence is rather selective. I maintain that Alex McLeish was a decent choice for us and I think he can make Blues play better football. But (there's always at least one, isn't there?) what I don't have is confidence in are the people at the top.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like people to be honest and keep their promises. I don't like being told what someone feels is what I want to hear. I suspect that makes me similar to a lot of our fans.

After we got relegated, there was an immense amount of anger and it's a long, long time since there has been on-pitch demonstrations at St Andrew's. I think in general, Blues fans are pretty tolerant; we don't routinely bite the (proverbial) hand that feeds us and we have put up with a lot of ups and downs over the years (mostly downs, I have to say).

In the few days following, we had copious assurances that the Board would do "everything in their power" to keep the team together, although it did not take the mental powers of Einstein to work out that some selling would be inevitable in order to buy.

In all, there have been nine exits so far and only Lee Carsley as an incomer. I saw in the press a couple of days ago that McLeish is expecting signings in the next seven to fourteen days, which will at least leave him a little time before the start of the new season.

While I can understand that we cannot force our better players to stay, other teams seem to have better luck persuading people than we do; Jeremy Peace seemed to have far less issue with it the last time West Brom were relegated a couple of years ago. What can he say that we can't? Do we somehow not try hard enough?

If we are to attain David Gold's rather extravagant prediction that we will be promoted as Champions next season, we have to keep the likes of Larsson and McFadden - and in addition to that, acquire a few more players of the right quality to win us the right proportion of the 46 games we have in front of us.

And while I think about it, has someone at St Andrew's binned the "young and hungry" policy? All the players we are being actively linked with are the wrong side of 30. Kevin Phillips is the latest person to be mentioned and it seems quite probable he will be joining us. Natural goalscorer he may be, but he is also now fairly prone to injury and we already know from bitter experience that injured strikers are a complete liability.

I agree that we need a mixture of youth and experience, but we cannot try to get promoted with a bunch of old-timers or we will start to look like Hull City, who with their combined octagenarian front line must be wondering how on earth they are going to cope next season.

What we are seeing at the moment is an awful lot of not much happening and a lot of rumours that our "crown jewels" are still not safe. While I realise that the rumour mill is a place of conjecture, there is often a fair smattering of truth wrapped up in it too.

I'm hoping, really hoping that we can get some transfer deals tied up in the very near future. Pre-season training has already started and the more time McLeish has to assess the team before our first game, the better.

I think we need some real reassurance from events to give us hope that we are not going to be drowned in words.

What have scientists ever done for us sports fans?

2008-06-30T20:52:00Z

There is no doubt technology has advanced our lives. The very fact that I am sat here, bashing my thoughts into a laptop which will soon upload my musings to a live webpage is testament to that fact.
A few years ago there simply wasn't any such thing as an on-line Blog and a few years before that if someone had mentioned the word laptop you would have thought it was something you used to eat your dinner off in front of the TV.
However, there is one aspect of my life that hasn't been enhanced by technology and that is my love of sport, in its purest form. My tolerance for technological invention in the sporting arena stops at the development of 24-hour day satellite sports channels. In every other way, technological enhancement has diminished my love of watching sport.
Take football, the game I grew up loving and am now lucky enough to watch for a living. How has technology enhanced the game? I can't think of one thing.
Perhaps it is that devotion to nostalgia that I used to bemoan in my own father but now equally embrace, but wasn't football coverage better a decade ago?

Games played overseas felt like they were a million miles away because of the crackly commentary and the eccentric action replays. Games played in places like Poland and Russia seemed almost exotic as a result. In today's digital age the sound is flawless as if the game is being played down the road, we have HD TV so you can see every bead of sweat, and we have 'super slow mo', the ability to slow the replay down to such detail that it takes 15 minutes to play back 30 seconds of action. But what is the point? It just means we get to see in even more clarity, time and time again, that when a player goes down writhing in agony as if he has been struck by lightning that he hasn't actually been touched. The vast majority of the time we could tell he is 'simulating' at normal speed. The play acting is so poor and obvious it makes the cast of Hollyoaks look like Denzil Washington. The only way super slow-motion is worth anything is if FIFA use the evidence to dish out yellow cards to all divers on review, that might stop the international football matches being reduced to irritating farce.
And what about technology on the pitch? How has that enhanced football? Take the invention of the 'bladed' stud, the scourge of every Sunday league footballer. Every professional player today seems to wear them yet they are sliding around as if they are playing on ice. Haven't they figured it out? If they are less than reliable on the pristine professional pitches, they are a nightmare at grass roots level and are actually quite dangerous. I have laughed as players run out on a wet December Sunday morning in their new £120 pair of blades because I know that within five minutes they are going to be clogged with mud and about as much use as a pair of slippers.
Of course it all started with Predators, that incredible invention of former Liverpool midfielder Craig Johnson. That layer of ribbed rubber on top of your boots was supposed turn you from a parks pitch also-ran into a world beater. You were supposed to be able to bend it like Beckham, but instead I still sliced it like Phil Neville. It was supposed to be revolutionary stuff, but what top player wears Predators now? None! The Sun famously played an April Fools on the nation by having Neil 'Razor' Ruddock modeling the new predator head band, which he said would allow him to head the ball ten yards further and with more accuracy. It was obviously a prank but no one really twigged that the joke was on us mugs who paid over the odds for Predators. The bottom line is you can spend all the money on the world on the latest technology but ultimately there is no substitute for technique and practise. When I played for Mile Oak Rovers, there was an old, seasoned center forward at the club who we, being all label-obsessed teenagers, used to laugh at because he wore boots he brought for less than a £10 from a shoe shop, not a sports shop, but I'll tell you what, he was the best player at the club.
The balls aren't much better. When I was a kid, we used to buy those cheap plastic footballs for a quid that moved all over the place when you kicked them because they were so light. They have spent millions developing balls that do exactly the same and are now using them at Euro 2008. Save yourself some money and get one from the pound shop, it will perform exactly the same as the latest Adidas ball.
It isn't just football where technology seems to have ruined the sport. Formula One cars have so much technology they seem to drive themselves these days; the drivers are just ballast, although they do need to look out for the odd red light. Lewis Hamilton, take note.
In tennis, the racquets and balls are so advanced now with the latest NASA technology that Wimbledon is a monotonous bore of successive serves that the human eye can't see. The game was more technical when they had the old wooden racquets. Tennis fans may point out that Hawkeye can now tell you with great accuracy when a ball is in or out, but is that a good thing? Doesn't that add to the boredom? John McEnroe wouldn't be the character he was in the modern game because how do you argue with a machine? Then again, he would have just smashed it to bits with his wooden racquet.
Ultimately, technology is draining the heart and soul out of sports. Sport is played by people, watched by people, talked about by people and, in my case, written about by people. The more technology you add, the less human sport will be and where will that leave us.. playing Playstation!

VIVA ESPANA!

2008-06-27T15:10:57Z

You'll recall my assertion three weeks ago that this was the blog that refused to let itself get distracted by Euro 2008?
I didn't believe anyone would come here to read my views on the football while the web is littered with blogs, some funny and some less so, detailing the fans' view of things. Yet finally, with one match to go, I'm going to break my rule - because I can suddenly declare a personal interest.

You see, my father lives in Spain and has done so for the last 12 years. Indeed, my relationship with the country of Fernando Torres, David Villa and Cesc Fabregas goes back a good deal further than that.
Somewhere, hopefully hidden in a suitcase in an attic and never to be seen again, is a picture of an overawed nine-year-old riding through the Spanish countryside aboard a donkey, accompanied by his dad.
Probably in the same attic is a picture of that young lad some four or five years later, perched precariously on a barrier in the stands at Barcelona's Nou Camp Stadium. He's wearing a Barcelona shirt and can still recall the exhilaration at being in what was then the largest sports venue he'd ever set foot in.
I've been dangerously ill with tonsilitis in a car in the southern Spanish desert, watched my mother enjoy one of the last holidays of her life in Spain before she was taken by cancer at the age of 49 and seen the country's joys help rebuild my father's life from that low point 20 years ago.
I've spent a fascinating evening watching the Spanish equivalent of non-league football in Corralejo on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, declined the chance to attend a bullfight in Majorca (my dad went, though) and sat through inspiring church services and glittering weddings without understanding a word, yet still felt uplifted afterwards.
I've lost my wife in the Spanish countryside for what became the longest three hours of my life, ended only when I managed to make myself understood in German to a motorist at a petrol station.
Given all that, perhaps you'll understand why I'll be searching for a replica Spain shirt this weekend.
I'll admit I didn't think Torres and Co would get this far. When my friends and I conducted a straw poll pre-tournament, we all took the cliched view that the Spanish would bottle it, as they always have done.
Only when they edged past Italy in the quarter-finals last weekend did I wonder whether this was their year, but Wednesday's display against Russia surely earned them the support of anyone who likes football played the right way.
One more thing. The last time Spain won a major tournament was 1964 - the year of my birth.
That'll do for me. Viva Espana!

Picture perfect

2008-06-24T14:29:44Z

One of the reasons I love working for one of the handful of broadsheet newspapers remaining in this country is the scope it gives us to display high-quality pictures properly.
Of course, our hard-working band of reporters (a very tight four-piece, not an orchestra) will tell you that it's their words which sell the paper or attract people to the Post's website, but a good picture can really pull the reader into a page - and once pulled in, they are more likely to keep reading.

And you can do that far better in an old-fashioned broadsheet than a tabloid, a compact, any other of the newfangled formats the design gurus are coming up with these days....or the web.
The Sunday national broadsheets, of course, do it better than anyone. For those of us who still love news on dead trees, a big and striking front-page image from a world-class photographer can really take the breath away.
I wouldn't claim The Post is that good but sometimes we really do hit the target and even if I say it myself, our edition this morning (Monday June 23) was as fine as we've done for some time on the picture front.
We're helped by being able to use pictures from national and international events provided by the Press Association, Associated Press and Getty Images. Yet we have some excellent sports photographers on our own staff and what pleased me so much about today's paper is that we were able to showcase their talents properly.
Boxing is, of course, ideal for pictures. All that muscle, blood and sweat is guaranteed to make the reader look twice and I could easily have used any one of the 60-plus images Tim Easthope filed from Saturday night's Amir Khan show at the National Indoor Arena.
Yet the adage that every good picture tells a story is no less true for being a cliche and the shot of Michael Gomez sinking to the floor provided everything a good sports picture should have - colour, momentum (you can almost anticipate the thud of flesh on canvas) and any amount of things to focus on.
There's the relief on Khan's face, plus those ridiculous spangly shorts, as well as the concern on the face of referee John Keane while I even found myself looking at the spectator peering through the ropes - and that was before I had even seen Rob Tanner's report from ringside, or the newspaper of record which agreed with me and chose exactly the same shot.
The Jamie Cox-Billy Smith picture was even better. As one of the lesser fights on the undercard, there probably weren't that many in the audience for the bout but as I worked on this image of Smith's features being rearranged, I could almost hear the theme music from 'Rocky" and the crowd cheering in the background.
Stepping away from our own snappers, Euro 2008 has been enjoyable as much for the quality of the photography as the standard of football and the lack of pointless booze-fuelled English jingoism.
Spain v Italy on Sunday was arguably the poorest game of the tournament but AP photographer Frank Augstein's picture of a scramble in the Italian penalty area (also used by the newspaper with a mind of its own, by the way), cannot have failed to lift the spirits.
Finally, there was the Twenty20 Cup cricket match at Edgbaston. You don't have to be a fan of the genre to appreciate that pyjamas, white balls and red stumps make for great pictures on a sunkissed day, so it wasn't hard to find a front-page image to enhance George Dobell's words. But a big 'thank you' to Warwickshire bowler Ian Salisbury for his exuberant celebration and an even bigger one to Post snapper Sam Bagnall for capturing the moment.
This isn't quite a plea to those of you who only read The Post on the web to try the print version, but it's definitely the best way to appreciate the talents of an unheralded group of men and women without whom this job would be a lot less fun and fulfilling.

Long Black Clouds hang over England Tour

2008-06-23T10:41:12Z

There have been some pretty harsh things written about the England players and management during the tour to New Zealand, described in various national newspapers as disastrous, calamitous and disgraceful - in some cases all three.
I will leave the off-field shenanigans to those who know more about the circumstances of the alleged incident. My only comment is that it will be sad if through a combination of the cult of celebrity and their own inability to deal with the attendant fame, rugby players go the same way as footballers and become front page fodder.
On the field England were beaten twice - and soundly. The concession of nine tries and very little idea about how to attack the All Blacks is a pretty damning indictment of the current coaching regime.

It's all very well 'building from the back' as it were but if a side has done that, there is no way they should be leaking scores off first phase. Dummy runners are not a new phenomenon and international midfields should be well able to cope yet Daniel Carter was given the freedom of Christchurch last Saturday.
Because all they have talked about is defence, England were holed below the water line from the outset.
As a result their work with ball in hand has been laughably poor. Only one of the four tries they scored in the series - Tom Varndell's consolation effort in the Second Test, could be described as coming from anything other than scraps.
They spent most of that match launching up and unders at one of the most dangerous threequarter lines in world rugby in which Leon Macdonald suggested he could be the best full back in the world.
The logic is remarkable. Expend huge amounts of time and energy trying to get the ball, then kick it straight back to your opponent in the hope they drop it.
In an attacking sense all we had to be thankful for was the odd moment or two of individual flair. Did we really need to go to the far end of the earth to find out Mathew Tait is a good broken field runner and that Topsy Ojo can return an interception.
As a result the centre pairing of Jamie Noon - played out of position mind, and Mike Tindall looked exactly what it was. Creatively moribund plodders. It's time to put Tindall at inside and go with James Simpson Daniel at 13. Tindall does not have the pace to play outside but he does have the physicality and experience to steady a creaking ship.
The one positive was the back row. Tom Rees looked surprisingly authentic as a nose to the ground international openside. James Haskell was about the only Englishman who beat his opposite number and Luke Narraway showed good poise and athleticism under extreme pressure. These three should be persevered with and indulged the odd bad game.
The same cannot be said of the coaches. Rob Andrew was thrust into the foreground by the sacking of Brian Ashton and he clearly didn't have time or the mandate to stamp his mark on the side.
That effectively left the team run by Mike Ford - the hapless defence coach and John Wells, whose rugby philosophies were developed in the conservative, forward oriented days of mid 90s Welford Road.
Andrew will cede stewardship of the team to Martin Johnson on July 1 and what the new manager must do is pick a set of coaches with whom he wants to work, not be made to operate with those under contract.
If that means bringing back Brian Ashton as an attack coach, retaining Wells or even returning to Dave Alred as kicking mentor, then that's what must be done. Johnson must be allowed to pick his own staff in the way he will pick his own team. Anything less and yet another year goes slipping by.

Grounds for concern

2008-06-17T14:46:55Z

Having managed to work Bob Dylan into a cricket piece here a couple of weeks ago, let's maintain the sport and music motif, shall we? And let's talk about rugby grounds.
I spent last weekend in Wales and the West Country, watching the peerless Bruce Springsteen in Cardiff on Saturday night (quite wonderful, thank you; an uninterrupted three-hour set and a five-track encore comprising Jungleland, Thunder Road, Born to Run, Rosalita and American Land more than made up for the great man arriving on stage 45 minutes late).
The concert was held at the Millennium Stadium, somewhere I've only previously seen from outside but which is a remarkable piece of work.

Situated just two streets back from Cardiff's main city centre thoroughfare (rather like having Villa Park in Corporation Street), it has been rebuilt in the last decade and having been a lovable but ramshackle thing for most of my lifetime, now screams modernity.
It's more of a bowl than I expected meaning that, even at the ends of the pitch, you're not too far away from the action. Unlike the new Wembley, it has a retractable roof that actually shields both the pitch and the front few rows of spectators from rain while the toilets appeared serviceable, clean and adequate for the needs of a 70,000 crowd.
There were no queues at the turnstiles thirty minutes before the show was due to start, while we were out of the ground and into the Bacchanalian nightmare which is Cardiff at close to midnight in less than ten minutes.
Most remarkably, though, it was only when we were leaving the stadium that we realised what the authorities had done to protect the pitch from the rigours of 30,000-plus pairs of dancing feet, several huge speaker stacks and an enormous mixing desk - they'd ripped it up.
A layer of what looked like concrete covered the hallowed ground where Gareth Edwards scored that try and presumably the stadium authorities will have some fresh new turf in place for the start of the rugby season.
It's a wonderful stadium and regeneration has presumably done wonders for the finances of the Welsh Rugby Union who will, no doubt, have pocketed a healthy cut of the proceeds of Saturday's spectacular.
Which brings me to part two of these musings because my wife and I were staying with friends in Bath, where an agonised debate is underway about the future of the local rugby club's Recreation Ground stadium.
Situated even closer to the middle of Bath than is the case in Cardiff, its' 10,500 capacity with a temporary stand doesn't cut it in the 21st century professional rugby world.
Yet it's one of the iconic venues of the English game and two years ago, when the local newspaper began a petition to 'Keep Rugby at the Rec', 20,000 people signed up.
For that reason, the club would like to stay and redevelop the site into a 20,000-seater stadium but talks with the stadium's board of trustees and the Charity Commission (the land has charitable status) are not progressing with any haste and in the past week, club officials have admitted considering other options.
These, which they say are a last resort, include greenfield sites up to five miles from Bath and a groundshare with Swindon Town, an idea which I'm told is akin to Moseley proposing a move to Coventry.
While this has been going on, Bath have seen the likes of Olly Barkley and Steve Borthwick sign for other clubs, citing frustration at the club's limited growth potential.
So while Bath make the most of their limited revenue-raising options, clubs with bigger and better grounds or groundshare deals with football clubs get more money, on and off the field, attract better players and the gap grows accordingly.
As one contributor to the debate told me: "It is more than slightly possible that once a nice new stadium is built, Bath will be relegated anyway."
Bath relegated? The thought is already there and it is, of course, an inevitable part of professional sport.
But something inside me doesn't like the idea that, through no fault of their own, one of the great names of English rugby could be strangled like this. Michael Blair, former rugby correspondent of this parish and one of the men who inspired me to want to work for this newspaper, would certainly agree.
And it's certainly a cautionary tale for Worcester Warriors and a string of ambitious National League One clubs.

Muamba - and a glimpse at next season

2008-06-17T13:17:39Z

It's been rather quiet at Birmingham City for the last week or so, other than some fairly standard "closed season" press releases, but it's been apparent from some of Alex McLeish's comments that he would have to sell in order to buy.

The two names most mentioned in the press have been Kapo and Muamba and it was not surprising that Wigan have been linked with both of them. However, Gary Megson stepped up first with an offer for Fabrice Muamba and he has now left for life in the Premier League.

Muamba joined us as one of the "Arsenal trio" for our last season in the Championship. His determined, unshirking style won the hearts of the supporters and he became a very popular player, winning the Young Player of the Year award at the end of the last promotion campaign.

He certainly seemed to enjoy playing for Blues and was never seen without a smile on his face. If what has already been written about him is to be believed, he is quite a remarkable young man who has survived considerable adversity and for that, he deserves to enjoy some success.

Now he has left, the debate will rage as to whether this was a wise sale or not and from the comments I have read on the messageboards already, fans seem quite equally divided about this. Will he be another AJ, one we will rue in future? Or did he have limitations that will limit his development as a professional?

His stamina and application seem not to be in doubt; he is one of those athletic youngsters who seem to be able to run limitlessly in pursuit of the cause and his ability to get the ball from the opposition is excellent. However, his distribution is nowhere near as solid and it could be argued that a player of his age (20) should already be a much better passer of the ball if he is truly going to be outstanding.

He's not a Fabregas and never will be; Arsene Wenger had clearly seen that when he agreed to sell him to us, so maybe he had already decided that Muamba did not have what it takes to succeed at the highest level.

However, Wenger's astute move was to insist on a sell-on clause, so in reality we are not going to make a huge profit from moving him on to Bolton. Alex McLeish has already stated that he is looking for a replacement and I guess that we will know more about his intentions when the next signing arrives at St Andrew's over the summer.

I don't expect Muamba to be the last of our players to be sold and I won't be surprised at all if Kapo leaves in the near future. For me, he is a player who is an expensive luxury at our level and we would be much better served by trying to hold on to Larsson and McFadden. At the same time though, I am a bit concerned that the current squad movements are giving them the wrong message about next season.

David Gold has already said (rashly or otherwise) that he expects Blues to be promoted as Champions. if we do not have a good enough team, that could become the proverbial albatross around his neck (Ancient Mariner, anyone?). We shall see....

The fixture list was published on Monday and that is a real leveller for any team that has been relegated.

You scan eagerly through the list, looking for the season's treats, to find Barnsley, Blackpool and Burnley; oh dear. We start with the Blades, finish with the Royals and there are an awful lot of games in between. This year, there is no fixture on New Year's Day and we are away to Ipswich on Boxing Day. That's not going to make for an entertaining festive season, sadly.

In the Championship, the fixture list is relentless and I can understand why McLeish is already saying that he needs a sizeable squad to get through it.

I will be watching the transfer news with interest.

A Farcical Finish

2008-06-12T11:17:49Z

If I ever possessed the desire, or indeed the intellect, to become a lawyer I would base my specialism on the old Barber's Maxim that suggests no matter what happens to the economy people will still need their hair cutting.

The same principle applies to rugby union and litigation. As long as there's an oval ball and H-shaped posts they'll be some club or player that needs a brief. My children would never go hungry.

And so it proves again this year. While the climax to the National One season came several weeks ago the standings have still not been finalised. The players have packed up their kitbags and gone on holiday but the suits are fighting with the vigour one would expect from a relegation threatened team defending its goal-line.

Two West Midlands clubs are at the heart of the action. The fates of Pertemps Bees and Coventry hang in the balance. The blood, sweat and tears shed over the course of eight months and 30 games is rendered insignificant when compared to the cases argued by the club's hired legal guns.

Bees' situation centres around the disputed outcome of a match with Cornish Pirates that happened nearly six months ago.

Russell Earnshaw's men lost that match but feel the result was compromised by the fact five minutes were played with uncontested scrums because of Pirates' inability to field adequate front row replacements.

A couple of weeks after the event First Division Rugby docked Pirates three of the four match points their 27-23 victory earned.

Bees appealed to FDR but had their case thrown out. They took their argument to the Rugby Football Union who agreed FDR had not gone through due process.

FDR looked again recently and decided they did not have the power to make a final decision so Bees have gone back to the governing body and are waiting for a definitive verdict. June 23 is the favoured date.

If only British tennis players could keep rallies up for as long it'd be them and not Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer we'd all be talking about.

If you think that's convoluted ponder the Coventry situation. They were seemingly sailing along serenely - if you can serenely go through three head coaches, until they were placed into administration unable to satisfy creditors.

Phoenix like they rose from the ashes and continued without missing a beat - apparently unscathed by and free from around £700,000 of debt.

But the RFU are looking at the situation now and are making the club jump through all manner of hoops to prove they have a viable future. The talk of punishment by relegation, probably rugby club gossip, will not go away.

The upshot of both cases is that we have not just two clubs uncertain of which division they will be in next season - but several.

If Bees are awarded the win it will be Sedgley Park and not them who drop into National Two. If Coventry are sent tumbling down clubs like Nuneaton are hopeful of a stay of execution. What a mess it all is.

Exactly who is to blame is not clear. FDR did not serve the game well by failing to give the Bees matter proper attention in the first place.

The RFU initially accepted Coventry's move into administration only to decide later they needed a closer look.

Throw into cocktail plans to reduce National One to 12 teams and who knows where that leaves us.

Is it too much to ask that laws governing uncontested scrums and administration are laid down before an entire season has been played?

2008-06-09T18:47:42Z

Welcome to the blog that is determined not to get distracted by Euro 2008. Not that I'm disinterested, like my colleague Lisa Smith (as I write, Holland v Italy is sparkling away on the office television and we've already had one eye on the bore that was France v Romania - and anyway, Lisa's fallen victim to the 'if it's not the greatest league in the world, it's irrelevant' school) but because I don't think you've come here to read what I think about it.

So let's talk about horse racing instead. I've been an enthusiast since the age of nine when my late grandmother, an ardent and knowledgeable fan who pored daily over the racing pages of The Sun, placed my first bet.
The occasion was the 1973 Grand National and my 10p rested on the shoulders of Crisp, ridden by the top jumps jockey of the day, Richard Pitman. Anyone who knows anything about racing and many who don't will know that Crisp led until the final 100 yards of the four-and-a-quarter miles, only to be collared at the death in the first chapter of the equine legend that was Red Rum's racing career.
I think I cried and, 35 years later, I am still gripped by a wholly irrational desire to hurl something at the television screen whenever Mr Pitman appears as part of the BBC's racing team - even though I know it wasn't his fault.
And I still can't pick winners, as I explained to my wife after our annual excursion to Uttoxeter's ladies night last week ended in the usual flurry of ripped-up betting slips and vanishing £5 notes.
I managed to get an odds-on favourite turned over and backed a second-place and third-place finisher (all to win, naturally) while my Derby bet last Saturday finished a well-beaten third.
I spent the whole of last winter's National Hunt campaign noting how Denman was improving fast and would surely be a Gold Cup contender; on the day itself, when I was lucky enough to join the throng at Cheltenham, I plunged my hard-earned down the tubes on Kauto Star. And no, I hadn't had my mind changed by Guinness at £3.30 a pint.
It's like that with most racing, as opposed to gambling, fans, I think. We love watching the power and grace of the racehorse in action and we admire the skill and bravery of the 11-stone jockey aboard a beast ten times his weight (I admit to being more of a fan of the jumping game). If we win a bit of money, that's a bonus - it's the sport that counts and we'll never have the wherewithal to make a living out of it.
And it's surprising how many of us there are. Uttoxeter last Thursday attracted its' usual eclectic mix of finely-dressed couples, racing folk in tweeds, hardened punters with a fag in their mouth and a Racing Post under their elbow and brassy blondes from Stoke-on-Trent and Derby wearing far too little, drinking way too much and being transported to and from the course in lurid pink stretch limousines.
Epsom, meanwhile, opened its' doors to an astonishing 140,000 people last Saturday and although some would have been there just for the day out, there's something about horse racing that draws people in where other sports don't.
And that's where this is leading because I've always had Post readers down as racing fans. I've worked here long enough to know that the betting offices around Birmingham's law courts attract their fair share of smart-suited types, while the reader reaction when we occasionally print the wrong racecard, or miss out a racing return, far outweighs anything else.
But given our limited resources in terms of space, there are often questions to be asked about the room devoted to racing in the paper. Given the lack of West Midlands involvement (OK, Seb Sanders was born in Tamworth, but you can count the number of trainers in our area on the fingers of one hand), should we be bothering at all? I know my answer and the fact is that if we didn't have a page or two of racing, something else would have to fill its' place, but discussions like that are what this blog is for.

Euro 2008 is a big turn off

2008-06-09T10:46:08Z

A national survey has revealed that up to 2.5 million Brits are cheering on the Italians in the European 2008 Championships because of the glaring absence of a team from the Home Nations in the competition.
That means that 30 per cent of English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish fans have had to pack away their national flags and replica shirts in favour of donning the colours of an alternative or an adopted team for the summer.
Personally I am 100 per cent sure those statistics are wrong. Certainly the true supporters of the beautiful game will tell you that football fans, like the proverbial leopard, never change their spots.
I mean if you asked any Scotsman who he was supporting at the last World Cup you can guarantee he would say: "Whoever England are playing." Fans just don't switch allegiance to another team or nation either if they share borders - fact.

But the competition is now under way and with it the noteable point that "Britain Hasn't Got Talent" when it comes to a side to represent us in the biggest football tournament after the World Cup.
In fact the only team of Home Nations' stars who seem to have made it to the finals in Austria and Switzerland are the BBC's panel of football pundits where we are all catered for with England's own Alan Shearer being joined by, among others, Scotland's Alan Hansen and Northern Ireland's Villa manager, Martin O'Neill.
The survey claims Italy are the team we all most love to follow with the absence of England and there are a few of my female colleagues in the office who will give you 11 good reasons why.
But while there may be those who admire the Italians' grace and style on the ball or simply fancy their chances because they are the current World Cup holders, I really don't see fans waving Italian flags from the roof tops.
And while waving a flag of St George is, in this world of ridiculous political correctness, still considered at times to suggest you are guilty of jingoistic tendancies, personally I think it is rather sad that we as a nation cannot have something to cheer about.
And so the England bunting will stay in the garage for another year in homes up and down the country and, despite what the survey says, fans will not be reaching for flags of another nation instead.
To suddenly adorn your very English home with Dutch flags or the French tricolore would be like me swapping my Aston Villa car sticker for a Birmingham City one. Unthinkable, unimaginable, downright wrong. It would be like my parents, who grew up in the shadow of Worcestershire's New Road cricket ground suddenly purchasing season tickets at Edgbaston.
Now you might say with a month' long festival of football on our screens night after night we need to grasp something tangible and adopt a tream to make the event worth watching.
I can understand people whose parents hail from Turin wanting to see how the Italians get on with their own side missing in action and I can understand fans being interested in a country because it features players from their chosen Premier League club.
Liverpool fans will no doubt, for example be keeping an eye on Spain because of Torres and Alonso but will Manchester United fans who normally follow England tune in to follow Portugal's progress because of Ronaldo and Nani when the Portuguese in football terms have ruined England's tournament in the past?
Perhaps it is just sour grapes that my team Aston Villa has just one representative in the tournament - Wilfred Bouma who plays for Holland but love Freddie as I do, I still can't really warm to cheering on the Dutch. (Beside the Villa team is predominantly made up of Englishmen - a statistic which usually makes me very proud - well it would if England were in the tournament!)
No England are not in the competition and, while I love watching football, I certainly haven't felt motivated to tune into the Euros 2008 so far.
So there will be no Italian flags hanging from my car aerial, no German bratwurst on the barbecue and no Dutch clog-wearing in my house.
Nor will I be hot-footing it over to the continent as this survey claims three per cent of England fans will do to try and capture some of the atmosphere of the event.
Instead I will have to bide my time until Wimbledon - although there goes another event which lacks any real hopes for our British stars and then await the Olympics - ditto.
Until then I will try and occupy myself , like thousands of other Britains, by making the most of the current good weather. Trouble is English weather - like our football team - is usually a real let-down.

To renew, or not to renew? (that is the question)

2008-06-03T12:43:00Z

Amongst the various bits and pieces of mail that plopped on to my doormat yesterday was a missive from Birmingham City extolling the virtues of renewing my season ticket.

Currently, it's on my dining room table and I am thinking about it. So, it would seem, are a lot of other fans as the renewal rate is the lowest it has been for years.

Clearly, the club have to do something about this if they are to maintain a reasonable fan base for next season.

There seem to be quite a few contributory factors which have led to this rather sorry state of affairs and relegation is only one of them.

Across much of the Premier League (and indeed much of the Championship), gates have been falling slowly but steadily over the past few seasons, with only the Big Four and those lucky few enjoying resurgence who have escaped from the general drift.

Part of this exodus is surely down to the amount of football shown live on TV, or available streamed on the internet (often, admittedly, in rather poor quality). During the season, Sky and Setanta between them show two or three top flight games every weekend, giving football fans plenty of opportunity to watch the big names on a regular basis.

Aggressive marketing of Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal means that their have supporters worldwide, often at the expense of local teams. The jokes about Man Utd supporters having cockney accents are legend, so I won't bother going into them here. Through satellite TV, it is easy to watch these teams without leaving the comfort of your own living room, surely a tempting prospect on a freezing February night.

Another side-effect of the amount of football on TV is the many changes in kickoff times; football used to be 3.00 p.m. on a Saturday and now it seems to be anything but that. At least for us, that will be one of the advantages of being in the Championship next season.

It's easy to watch football on TV, easy to get out of the routine of Saturday afternoons being football and also easy to find other things to spend hard-earned money on.

It's an expensive game to watch week-in, week-out and although following Blues is by no means the most expensive team in the country, it is not the cheapest either and some season tickets at Villa Park cost significantly less than at St Andrew's, despite the reductions that have just been announced.

Paying more for the Championship football than some fans pay to see the Premier League is a very bitter pill to swallow and a major turn-off for quite a few of the fans I talk to regularly. This, added to the awful disappointment of being one point short of survival has been enough for some.

There have also been occasions over the last few years when our fans have been lambasted for not turning up to games; a rather spectacular shot in the foot from David Sullivan who, although perfectly entitled to his own opinion, maybe needs to find a better, more encouraging way of couching the words. We as fans want to feel that our support is appreciated rather than being shouted at for not providing it!

The general uncertainty at the club has also not helped. Things had not been right for a while; there was discontent following the last relegation and a lot of mutterings about how the team was performing latterly under Steve Bruce.

At least the Carson Yeung affair bought that to a head and I still maintain that we are very fortunate to have Alex McLeish, but it's easy to see that the club is still in a state of flux and I will be surprised if we do not have new owners by this time next year.

I'm sure that in a week or two another letter will find its way on to the doormat. I might have made my mind up by then, I might not. As I can't guarantee to get to every single home game next season, it might well be that I am better off buying tickets on the gate, particularly when the special offers start being issued.

As for a seat in the "singing section", maybe I'll deal with that another time....

Farewell to the Flying Finn?

2008-05-30T11:48:52Z

Although at the time of writing, the news hasn't been broken by the club yet, it would appear from the Finnish news and Hannover96's website that Mikael Forssell has signed a three-year contract with them.

If confirmed, this marks the end of Forssell's association of just under five years with Birmingham City. He joined us at the beginning of our second campaign in the Premier League in August 2003 as a loanee from Chelsea.

That season, rather embarrassingly for them, he was their top scorer as he scored seventeen goals in our best showing in the top flight.

Sadly, his time at Birmingham was dogged by a long period of injury and much anxiety for the fans as many of us feared that he would never return to full fitness again. Dispirited by the time it took him to recover, he was a forlorn figure on the pitch during his brief appearances.

I was one of the people who never lost faith in his ability and was pleased that he opted to stay with us during our last Championship season. It was evident over the last 12 months that his sharpness was starting to return, although he had to be nursed carefully back to first-team action. It remains to be seen whether he will ever become a "90-minute" player again who is capable of withstanding a full season.

In truth, we nearly lost Forssell last year as he was on the verge of returning to Germany then, but Alex McLeish's arrival seemed to revitalise his prospects, particularly when he was able to forge a partnership with James McFadden.

He crowned his career in the Premier League in our home demolition of Spurs by scoring his first hat-trick at that level - one for the purist; one from each foot and a header.

He has been a great striker for Blues and was a huge favourite with the fans. In his loan season with us, he was possibly one of the most talented players I have seen with us in recent years. Forssell is a clinical finisher, but the injury problems may have continued to haunt him, particularly in the more rumbustious atmosphere of the Championship.

There is always a time for a player to move on; he has given us some fantastic displays and I hope that he remembers us fondly from time to time, as he was most definitely taken to our hearts. I think I'm glad that he is off to play in the Bundesliga rather than staying in England; at least he won't be able to come back to haunt us in a FA Cup tie next year!

Thanks for the memories, Mikael; I'm sure we will be keeping an eye on you from afar.