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joeyt

by joeyt
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Neil

Neil

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He was held up as a hell-raiser, the archetypal bad boy, but Fernando Ricksen will also be remembered as one of Scottish football's greatest competitors. Ricksen was a Dutchman whose traits were more typical of a British player, an energetic and committed figure who liked nothing more than the rough and tumble of the Scottish Premier League. It was an environment suited to his all-action style. Particularly those ancient derby matches with Glasgow foes Celtic.

 

The ghastly news that he is fighting Motor Neurone Disease is difficult to comprehend for a figure who was defined by his energy. Football is such a short career, but at only 37, Ricksen should have been looking forward to his life proper with wife Veronica and their daughter Isabella. Instead, a tragic turn of events has charted a different course.

 

Ricksen was part of Rangers around the turn of the millennium when Ibrox Stadium truly was an exciting place to play football, arguably the most enticing in the United Kingdom.

 

Before television millions turned countries like Scotland almost into feeder nations for bigger, wealthier leagues, Rangers revelled in their ability to compete with England's Premier League. And other blue-chip countries.

 

History shows ill-advised spending finally caught up with the former Rangers owner David Murray in the form of the well-publicised lurch into administration and liquidation, but he also liked a sense of theatre, encouraging a certain frisson in the Scottish game that has not been witnessed since the downsizing exercise to deal with fiscal realities began around nine years ago.

 

One remembers chatting to various agents after the 1998 World Cup finals in France when Advocaat seemed to spend money like a drunken sailor. Rangers managed to recruit some of the very best on the continent.

 

Fresh from helping the Netherlands reach the last four of France 98, Arthur Numan was recruited from PSV Eindhoven. He was arguably the best left-back in Europe at the time.

 

Ronald de Boer decided to commit to Advocaat's side when departing Barcelona in 2000 rather than opt for Manchester United. Ronald told me he always preferred the prospect of playing at Ibrox.

 

Ricksen was signed from AZ Alkmaar for £3.75m in 1999. That may sound like a princely sum, but no club in Scotland would consider such an outlay some 14 years on.

 

Ricksen was perhaps not as classy a full-back as Numan, but his commitment and pride in personal performance was only too obvious during six years under Advocaat and Alex McLeish, particularly in helping the club carry off the domestic treble in 2003 against a Celtic side who had reached the UEFA Cup final in the same season.

 

Boorish behaviour off the park eventually led to his demise at Rangers when McLeish's successor Paul Le Guen deemed his conduct unacceptable after he was drunk on a club trip to South Africa. He rejoined Advocaat at Zenit Saint Petersburg on loan. He playing during their run to a 2-0 win over Rangers in the 2008 UEFA Cup final without facing the club in Manchester where he made his name.

 

Drink driving, drugs, alcohol abuse, breach of the peace and assault painted Ricksen as a temperamental but fiery figure with problems. There were a lot of issues going away on from the football park that were not conducive to the career of a professional footballer, but it all seems so immaterial when such a young life has been laid on the line.

 

There was also a large helping of colourful character in the Ricksen system as he recovered from being substituted after only 20-odd minutes of a mauling by the Celtic winger Bobby Petta at Celtic Park in 2000. Rangers avenged a 6-2 defeat by walloping Celtic 5-1 in their next outing.

 

Ricksen progressed to enjoy a gilded spell at Ibrox snaring two Scottish Premier League titles, two Scottish Cups and three League Cups amid over 180 appearance for Rangers including year expeditions in the Champions League and UEFA Cup. A dozen caps representing the Netherlands hinted at his versatility. He was a figure comfortable operating in defence and midfield.

 

Filling in as Rangers captain on several occasions, he was Scotland's player of the year alongside John Hartson at the end of a 2005 season that saw him help Rangers win the League and League Cup.

 

"The award means a lot because it's voted by your fellow professionals - and to share it with a player of Fernando's quality means an awful lot to me," said Hartson.

 

It is astonishing to think that in the eight ensuing years, Hartson has fought brain cancer and Ricksen now faces this dreadful situation.

 

The former Celtic midfielder Stilian Petrov was a figure who came across Ricksen in their jousts in the Old Firm match. He yesterday aired his sympathy as his ongoing struggles with the after effects of leukaemia treatment continue.

 

Ricksen's plight continues to provide protruding evidence that making plans are futile. We are all just toys in the hand of fate. We should all include this swashbuckling player in our thoughts and prayers in his fight against this debilitating illness. And hope fate finds a way to shed light at the end of what must feel like a very dark tunnel.

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Tiresias

Tiresias

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http://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2013/nov/01/sky-bt-sport-rupert-murdoch

 

It was the 30-year anniversary last week of Sky TV's first UK satellite broadcast, a date that somehow passed largely unmarked, no doubt due in part to a widespread perception of Rupert Murdoch and his corporation as some sort of low-browed, profiteering, amoral, sociopathic corporate mega-parasite. This does seem a little graceless in the circumstances. Fair is only fair and sometimes you just have to take your hat off all the same. With this in mind this page may as well be the first to say it out loud. Happy low-browed, profiteering, amoral, sociopathic corporate mega-parasite 30th anniversary!

 

Obviously, that's just a little joke – and not just for legal reasons either as the fact is, like so many popular bogeymen, not least those of the quaveringly aghast political left, Murdoch himself is a more difficult figure to pin down. It might be convenient to dismiss the most significant living Australian as a kind of sulphurous aberration, but the fact is his achievements are both intricately wrought and, when it comes to English football, pretty much undo-able. He remains the founding father of the new world, those satellite dishes that first began appearing like a fungal infection across tower blocks and suburban streets 30 years ago resembling now the open pores, the great yawning liver spots of the impermeable Murdoch-skin stretched across every street, every piece of footballing infrastructure, enclosing an entire sporting industry within an airtight Murdoch membrane.

 

The reason for mentioning this now is not so much the missed anniversary as its coincidence with the first set of financial results for BT Sport, Sky's latest competitor and the first to actively market itself as a chattier, nicer, less frighteningly jackbooted alternative. This is no doubt a smart move on BT's part, who have been promoted as a kind of rebel alliance to Sky's imperial death star, a pop-up farmer's market of a TV channel headed up by Jake Humphrey and his magical striding world of sport.

 

It is a smart piece of timing, helped in recent weeks by the fact Sky seems to have gone slightly mad in some areas of its programming, not so much broadcasting live football on Monday nights as staging a forensic re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination. Jamie Carragher in particular – while obviously very good and very bright – still seems painfully intense on screen, like a man being publicly talked down from a rooftop siege, writhing and sweating and blurting out his grievances, while Gary Neville smiles and nods and edges closer, one hand on his taser.

 

Next to this BT Sport does seem lighter, more conversational, more agreeably Ewok-ish. Yet according to the latest figures it is already struggling, ratings for its live Premier League football worse than those for all the been-and-gone pretenders, worse even than Setanta, with its faded green and yellows, its wobbling sets, its sad-eyed presenters with broken smiles. No doubt this is in part to do with simply growing the business, not to mention poor scheduling, with BT basing its week around the graveyard-shift Saturday lunchtime Premier League game. It is, though, part of a wider narrative.

 

We have, let's face it, been here before. My first job in journalism was on the website of the unlamented ITV Sport Channel, launched on the outer edge of the first internet boom, a time of start-ups and land-grabs, of brave, clueless internet frontiersmen decisively skewering the digital future three times every morning before breakfast.

 

At ITV the big earth-changing gimmick was live, typed text commentary scrolling in a box next to the game. Quite why anybody ever thought this was a brilliant idea still isn't clear, but this is often the way of these things: someone important but clueless has a Big Idea, in this case an idea that saw us towards the end diligently typing live text commentary on matches that were watched, technically, by zero human beings, by no people, an audience so negligible it was in fact indivisible (after a while we got into a habit of simply typing in word for word whatever David Pleat said on co-commentary – "They need to get tighter on the wide players" "West Brom all bunched up in the centre" "The game opening up now").

 

ITV Sport Channel failed for the same reason all these sub-Sky ventures fail, because they are, in effect, simply a pastry frill around the edge of a pie that has already been divvied up. And this is really the point about all this. The appearance of BT Sport – which is in fact not a magical sporting farmer's market, but a gambit in the tactical repositioning of a communications giant – is further evidence of the degree to which English football has turned itself inside out for television. It is now almost entirely a televisual business, success defined not by cups or crowds but by simply remaining on Premier League television for another year. Having an interest in football or supporting a team has become a kind of consumer weakness to be exploited, the equivalent of accidentally smiling at a salesman in a shopping mall and finding yourself slammed up against the window of JD Sports by some hair-gelled predator with a clipboard.

 

It is hard not to wish BT Sport well, if only for the degree of energy expended in its conception. But it is hard also to avoid the feeling Sky Sports welcomes these intrusions, offering as they do the illusion of competition, while also enlarging the TV rights pot and thereby improving the basic product. A flex of the elbow was all it took to stop BT acquiring anything like a dangerous stake. Share prices are up. Audiences are up. And, in the end, all of this simply emphasises the scale of Sky's achievement. It is worth restating in anniversary week, but what has happened here is a very British kind of carve-up, a daring, bloody and irreversible industry transformation by a single interventionist provider.

 

Thirty years on from that first broadcast, and 22 years on from the moment the competition was decisively blown out of the water, we are all still looking out through Rupert's eyes.

 

Think Barney Ronay is one of the best sports writers around imo

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Tiresias

Tiresias

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iplayering 606, fulham fan desperate for Jol to be sacked (fair enough) before houghton so they can win the chase for martin o'neil  :lol: :lol:

 

Now a cringeworthy geordie praising jonas shola and pardew as if they're brilliant  :lol:

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Just a random thought that made me think, 'fuck I'm getting old' a bit. I'd always thought the 1966 World Cup was like ancient history when I was a kid. The 1990 World Cup was my first proper football memory....yet that World Cup was the midpoint between 66 and the one coming up. :undecided:

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jdckelly

jdckelly

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iplayering 606, fulham fan desperate for Jol to be sacked (fair enough) before houghton so they can win the chase for martin o'neil  :lol: :lol:

pity for him Ireland won the race pretty much already......................they can have Keane though!

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