Not Worthy Of A Thread

[Doctor Zaius]

@HasHeskeyScored

 

Was looking at Heskeys scoring record the other day; 151 goals in 696 games, 7 goals in 62 apps for England.

[SEMTEX]

I'll give that a follow like. Fairly certain it won't pollute my feed.

[Beren]

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story/_/id/1130341/hubbard:-michael-owen's-lack-of-hunger-means-end-of-career-is-near?cc=5739

 

Fatality.

 

Another cracking article, denigrating John Terry this time - fast becoming my favourite football journalist.

 

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story/_/id/1134326/norm-hubbard:-time-for-john-terry-to-step-out-of-chelsea-spotlight?cc=5739

 

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story/_/id/1139229/norman-hubbard:-bargains-to-be-found-on-foreign-shores?cc=5739

 

Not laying into anyone this time, but another simple but well written/researched piece.

[54]

Despite the inevitable shitness the ITV coverage would bring, would not mind seeing some live PL football on Freeview like...

 

They'll introduce a pay per view channel

I have Skysports and ESPN on free-view.

[Dr Colossus]

Ever think that if you won a massive stash on Euromillions or something, you'd use the money to sign players for NUFC?

 

From Colin "Kazim-Kazim" Kazim-Richards' Wikipedia page.

 

Bury

Kazim-Richards began his professional career at Bury, after joining the club at the age of 15 and progressing through the club's youth team and centre of excellence. He broke into the first team in the 2004–2005 season, and his performances caught the attention of larger clubs.

 

Brighton & Hove Albion

At the age of 18, he was signed on a three-year contract by Brighton & Hove Albion for £250,000. The contract was signed after a fan of the club, Aaron Berry, won the sum for the club in a competition run by Coca-Cola which, in turn, led to Kazim-Richards being dubbed the "Coca-Cola Kid".

[alexf]

Didnt Coke have a thing going where it was "win a new player for your team" or something like that? Would make more sense than the guy just buying them a player of his own free will

[MW]

it was indeed

[Village Idiot]

Oops, it was actually three days ago. Still...

 

Makes me think, is he linked with a move somewhere? In a sadistic way I'd love to see him display his, urm, talents for a PL outfit.

[Greg]

Anybody know about this new book? Due out at the end of the month, The Footballer Who Could Fly by Duncan Hamilton.

 

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51kChU6TCbL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

 

'Without football,we were strangers under the same roof. With it, we were father and son.'

 

 

Inspired by his father's devotion to Newcastle United and the heroes of yesteryear, such as Jackie Milburn, Bobby Charlton and Duncan Edwards, Hamilton recreates a distant, bygone age and charts the progress of post-war British football to the present day. From the hardscrabble 1940s and the 'never-had-it-so-good' 50s, right through to how the dowdy-looking First Division of the 80s transformed itself into the slick, money-driven Premiership that is so familiar to us today. Hamilton writes about the some of its most sublime players, from George Best to Lionel Messi, and some of its most respected managers, from Bill Shankly to Sir Alex Ferguson.

 

But at the heart of The Footballer Who Could Fly, is Hamilton's exploration of the bond between father and son through the Beautiful Game, and how football became the only live connection between two people who, apart from their love of it, were wholly different from one another.

 

From the two-time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year comes a personal and affecting story that beautifully captures one of the most important three-way relationships in a man's life. Father and son and football.

 

Whenever I think of my father, I always see him first beside the Tyne bridge. His face comes back to me with photographic clarity. He is caught in the cathedral light of a late September morning, the lattice-work architecture of the bridge rising behind him. I remember everything about this long ago hour. I remember summer had long since left Newcastle. I remember my father was wearing his brown herringbone coat. I remember his shoes had a high-shine lacquer. I remember his hair shone too. It was Brylcreemed and combed back. I remember the short bristles of his pencil moustache and the crinkly spread of crow's feet around his eyes, the effort of thinking narrowing them into slits.

 

This day returns to me so vividly because it is among the most pivotal of my early life. It is 1973 and I am almost 15. I am shy and I stammer so badly that the pronunciation of the simplest words is an appalling trial. Conversation is often impossible for me. I am obsessed with books and newspapers; I am only fluent on the silent page.

 

I perplexed my father because I was so unlike him. He couldn't comprehend my need for books. I was not what he expected. He believed I'd become his mirror image: stout and brawny, adept at physical lifting and with a head for mental arithmetic. He saw no point in "made-up novels" or poetry. The towers of books in my bedroom flummoxed him. Which is why I know one thing unequivocally. Without football we'd have had nothing to say to each other.

 

The winter to come will be memorably chaotic and lit by candlelight. It will be scarred by strikes and social unrest, inflation at 8.4%, recession and shortages. At the end of it, Newcastle United – the team my father and I support – will reach the final of the FA Cup for the first time in almost 20 years.

 

But for me nothing will dominate these convulsing months more than standing on the quayside. We are here because my maternal grandfather is dead. My father is dealing with the mundane bureaucracy of death. I am dealing with the realisation that death devours all things lovely, and also the marks it leaves: injustice, anger, confusion and a visceral, howling grief.

 

I had never conceived of life without my grandfather. He was my idol and I was his blue-eyed boy – the grandson who loved what he loved: cricket, football, boxing, walking and reading; and who loved him above any and all of them. My grandfather had callused, bucket-like hands and didn't so much breathe as wheeze. He was also deaf and wore a hearing aid in his left ear.

 

He and I made the oddest couple. I was the boy who couldn't speak. He was the old man who couldn't hear. We found friendship and profound understanding in our companionable silences, which were disturbed only by the slow turn of a page and the chime of the clock on the sideboard. With each book, our bond became stronger.

 

My grandfather was peculiarly different from the rest of the family: he supported Sunderland. His allegiance to the Wear rather than the Tyne began as a schoolboy crush. When it hardened, in 1908–09, Newcastle were indisputably the league's dominant force.

 

Counted among his red letter days was the 1937 FA Cup final. He went to Wembley by train and in the heave and sway of the crowd, he yelled so much he lost his voice as Sunderland, a goal behind at half time, won 3-1 in front of George VI.

 

He recalled the beery homecoming afterwards. "There were Sunderland fans who were drunk for a week after winning that Cup," he said, preparing me for the punchline. "And there were Newcastle fans who were drunk for two weeks just because Sunderland had won it." The word "two" was delivered with such emphasis that I saw a battalion of exclamation marks chasing after it.

 

In my naivety I supposed the bliss of my grandfather's company would never end. He had survived the first world war, returning from it devastated and mute out of respect for the dead. He had survived the death of his first wife in childbirth to later marry the woman who became my grandmother. He had survived the Great Depression and another war. He had survived half a century underground – tunnelling, burrowing and hacking coal. I thought he was indestructible.

 

Only four months earlier, on an afternoon when soft rain smudged the front window of his council house, he'd risen time and again from his square leather chair beside the fireside. Hands aloft or flailing in the air with a clenched fist, he could not believe what he was seeing on his ancient television. His Sunderland were winning the FA Cup again. This was the mid-table, 50–1 against Sunderland of the second division. At the whistle, after Sunderland had beaten a skilled and ruthless Leeds United, my grandfather sagged back into his chair, as though he'd run every yard. On the bottom of the screen the score in white letters. Leeds 0, Sunderland 1.

 

The following morning he read the newspapers to make certain that he hadn't been tricked. "It's true," he said, as if the rest of us doubted it, "We won the Cup."

 

I put together a scrapbook for him of every cutting I could find and slid a copy of the match programme inside it. He went through the cuttings from front to back and then from back to front. He treated the scrapbook as though it was as precious as the Cup itself. Returning to Newcastle for his funeral that day, I knew the gift was about to be returned to me as part of his inheritance.

 

On the journey by train from Nottingham, where we lived, I thought about my grandfather and his child-like joy at Sunderland's Cup win. I took solace from the fact he'd seen it; that this little piece of history hadn't been denied him. At the station I recognised nothing and no one. Another train was about to pull out for Nottingham, and I wanted to climb on to it and be gone. For if I left I wouldn't have to accept that my grandfather was dead.

 

I felt as though my heart had left my chest and lodged in my throat. I sat down on my case and wept. But there was no relief in my tears. My father kept his distance from me, as if not wanting to trespass. He registered the tangled knot of grief turning slowly inside me and agonised over it; but, as if unsure about how to demonstrate his understanding, he was unable to speak to me about it.

 

He was not immune to emotion; he merely chose not to show it. Even the natural, innocent physical intimacy of parenthood – a hand folded around my hand, a palm resting gently on my back – was territory into which he never strayed. It wasn't in his instinct. We acknowledged our caring and support for one another through gesture rather than words or touch. The prime example of it came as a consequence of my grandfather's death, which is why it stays with me.

 

People are like rivers. To understand them properly you have to find their source, a realisation that in my father's case came too late to be useful to me. This is what I know about the man who everyone called Jim or Jimmy. He worked, aged 12 to 14, in a bakery. From 14 he took the only road open to him. He went into the pit and stayed there. Escape was impossible.

 

In the 1960s he dragged his miner's kit from Newcastle to Nottingham because the seam of the pit in which he worked was exhausted. He said goodbye to Newcastle with the reluctance and resentment of a refugee. Every summer we went back there. For one thing, we could only afford to holiday at my grandfather's home, which was three miles from the coast. For another, my father didn't want to go anywhere else. He wanted the Geordie air in his lungs.

 

He demonstrated faithfulness towards everything Geordie. The first of these was to Newcastle United. Football was at the centre of everything to my father and, like the rest of us, he had his heroes. I was given luminous descriptions of each of them.

 

But the super-hero of these heroes was Jackie Milburn, about whom he spoke with reverential awe. He was "The Greatest of the Very Great".

 

My father never read to me. Instead, he described footballers and the matches he'd seen them play on grounds of which I was then only vaguely aware. He described them clearly and with dramatic effect. I always knew Milburn would figure somewhere.

 

In the early 1950s, Newcastle won three FA Cups, in 1951, 1952 and then 1955. The first win – over Blackpool – had the greatest effect on my father. "The first time is always the best," he'd explain. Milburn scored twice in that game. Afterwards, to prolong the pleasure, my father spent one late summer weekend in the dark of a fleapit cinema, sitting through multiple screenings of The Lavender Hill Mob, simply to see the newsreel of Milburn's goals.

 

This is how I grew up – living in my father's black-and-white world. But the man who created it was a mystery to me; a code I couldn't crack.

 

I still regret that our talks about it never led to back-garden kickabouts. Only in retrospect do I realise that he frequently came home fatigued to the point of collapse. He worked relentlessly because the extra hours made the difference between enduring life and living it to some small degree. Repeated pleadings for him to join me were ignored. He sat in his chair smoking and reading the newspaper. Back then I resented him for it.

 

But I know at last what I failed to recognise then. The mine and a miner's life of back-to-back shifts was no place in which to age gracefully. He was a backyard non-combatant purely because he lacked the vigour and physical strength to become one. He strived to make up for it in other ways. He bought me copies of Goal magazine and Charles Buchan's Football Monthly. He returned home with a once-a-week packet of football stickers, which he propped up on the mantelpiece. And the day after my grandfather's funeral he offered something material to help me forget, however fleetingly, the ache of his loss.

 

I was sitting dejectedly on the sofa when he appeared carrying my limp coat. "We're going into the Toon," he said. "The two of us. I'll buy you a Newcastle shirt. We'll get a badge for it and a number nine to stitch on the back."

 

In my boyhood, a replica kit was neither ubiquitous nor cheap. The inside of the shop was as dark as a cave. The middle-aged man serving us wore a poorly fitting grey suit and had fingers as thin as splinters. He measured us sullenly with his eyes, as if our entrance was a disturbance to him. He found a shirt, held it against my chest and announced it was the right size. The badge, as grand as a council crest, and the poppy red number nine on a rectangle of white cloth came separately. My father reached inside his wallet and produced a £10 note.

 

Saying nothing as he did so, the assistant wrapped everything in brown paper, and then wove a line of coarse string around the parcel. He passed it to my father, who passed it on to me. I looped my fingers under the hard central knot of string and carried the package out of the shop. With my bundle, I looked like a child evacuee during the second world war. "You'll be champion in that," my father said.

 

I asked whether we could watch the boats on the Tyne. My father thought about it, as though calculating the distance to the quay, before telling me: "We'll take the long way."

 

We headed towards the Tyne. It was like descending into a labyrinth. The landscape abruptly flattened out when we reached the quayside. The bridge stood majestically in the middle distance. We'd walked less than 100 yards before my father stopped near a rail and let his gaze meander down the river.

 

"You like the shirt?" he asked, almost tentatively and without looking at me. I nodded and gave a wan smile in return as he finally turned his head. Then he said, as if addressing an audience. "In the 20s and 30s they used to sail the football ship from here. I saw a photograph of it once. They went from Tyne to Thames – all along the North Sea coast – in time for the FA Cup finals at Wembley. There were thousands of people – standing where we're standing now – just to see the ship.

 

"Newcastle were made to win Cups," he continued. "We were the Cup team. The FA may as well have given it us for keeps. We thought we'd never have to hand it back. But then you know what I'm going to say next, don't you …"

 

My father glanced across at me and I nodded at him again. He was talking about Jackie Milburn. "Well, you've heard all the tales," he said, half-sighing as though reluctant to retell them, but waiting for me to signal my permission for a repeat performance.

 

For the third time I nodded. "Wembley, 1951, Newcastle v Blackpool and Stanley Matthews," he began, eyes far brighter and his hands conducting his words. "Milburn has the ball. He's suddenly in the clear … the Blackpool back line is chasing after him … " The retelling of my father's favourite story led to another, and another, and he only stopped when a tug of chill wind sent skeins of cloud across the diluted sun, blotting it out entirely. "We should be heading back," he said.

 

Most moments pass through us, like light through glass, before vanishing. They leave nothing traceable behind. This was different. Not because of what was said – the stories were as familiar to me as my reflection – but because of the effort my father put into each one; and what the sum of them explicitly meant. I was aware that his evocation of a life now past was done to avoid talking about the present. But there was something more to it. My father knew I was not just closer to my grandfather than to him. He was aware that I loved him more too. And so, on that strip of Tyneside quay, he was beginning to address that fact, as if making up for time lost and preparing for time to come.

 

For him, football was the safe and neutral territory and he made me feel better because we were occupying it together, intimately. Even in the confusion of growing up, I understood this much. I knew him as an intensely private and taciturn man, who revealed almost nothing of his deeper self – at least not to me.

 

Early on, he accepted that he could neither refashion his life nor reinvent himself. He wasn't satisfied with what he had, but he never attempted to grab for something more in case he wound up owning even less. There would be occasions in the future – and a lot of them too – when my father would frustrate or infuriate me because of his reticence, his detachment and what I perceived as his apparent lack of tenderness towards me. But, whenever I was in danger of mistaking it for ambivalence, I'd remember that football shirt and the efforts he made on the quayside. And I think of it whenever I hear anyone say, dismissively, that football doesn't matter; or that football is just a game; or even "Well, it's only football."

 

No, it isn't. Not for me. It bound us together when nothing else could. Without football, we were strangers under a shared roof. With it, we were father and son.

 

The Footballer Who Could Fly by Duncan Hamilton is published by Century, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, including free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

 

The bit about getting his Newcastle shirt. 

[Fugazi]

http://footballbits.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/wpid-Dunfermline-players-appear-to-mock-homeless-woman.jpg

 

2 Dunfermline players being kernts...

[gbandit]

Wow, humans never cease to disappoint

[jdckelly]

Damien Duff retires from international football

[Hanshithispantz]

Why would you do that?

 

(The Dumfemline players, not Damien Duff)

[SEMTEX]

They're scotch man, they've got nothing.

[Fugazi]

Hmmm, their story is that they were laughing at the fact she had a dog and a ferret...

[Dinho lad]

who're they?

[gbandit]

Gary Gardner would have been looking to push on this season and make an impact for Villa. Out for 8-9 months with anterior cruciate damage, real shame for the lad. He's looked bright and direct whenever I've seen him

[MW]

anyone got a link to our fa cup final song "bringing the pride back home"?

[BlueStar]

http://www.offthepost.info/wp-content/uploads/Aston-Villa-mascot-Darkie.jpg

 

[LRD]

Can you imagine if the mascot was Liverpool's? 

 

[Guest BooBoo]

anyone got a link to our fa cup final song "bringing the pride back home"?

 

Written by Sting, sang by a tragic Michael Bolton lookalike.

[jdckelly]

Coventry sack Andy Thorn after 3 games where he hasn't lost once (or won but anyway)

daft utterly daft

[Incognito]

 

 

One of my mates reckons they could get Redknapp. :lol:

[alexf]

didnt he slag off the club loads when they went down?

[LFEE]

Coventry sack Andy Thorn after 3 games where he hasn't lost once (or won but anyway)

daft utterly daft

 

Bizarre... He seemed to be pulling them together slowly and like you say unbeaten after 3...