The first in a series of newspaper reviews, Backpage Breakdown will look at selected pieces of sports writing from the weekend’s broadsheets.
How many times have you heard it before: “Abramovich will be celebrating tonight!”; “That’s put a smile on Roman’s face!”; “Even the owner is dancing a jig!”
It is not what is said that troubles me, however; it is what is not said. You see, I am not sure I have heard a commentator offer a word about where the money that has funded the 11-year binge at Stamford Bridge came from. I have rarely heard pundits, who are happy to talk ad nauseum about Chelsea’s transfer dealings, relate that Abramovich’s billions were gained in an episode described as “the largest single heist in corporate history”. This is not just an elephant in the room; it is a festering pile of manure.
Syed addresses the taboo subject of the source of Chelsea Football Club’s success – that the money bankrolling it was corruptly gained. He notes the alarming indifference of football pundits, commentators and columnists towards the dealings Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich orchestrates behind the scenes, as well the moral hypocrisy of some Blues fans in ‘football’s fantasy land’ who ‘watch football to switch off from the real life’. Syed is attempting to break the ‘deafening silence’ by criticising those who hold that ‘the idea that football is subject to a different set of rules to everything else.’ To this end, he succeeds. Should more write about this issue, it might eventually spell the end of Chelsea’s financed dominance.
It goes back to last season when Brede Hangeland, then the Fulham captain, was diagnosed with a slight thigh injury and the club’s doctor, Stephen Lewis, with more than a decade of working in elite sport, put together a recovery programme to try to get him fit for the weekend. Except Magath thought he knew better. There was another way to treat the problem, he said. So he sent the kit-man to the Tesco in New Malden, a short drive along the A3 from Fulham’s training ground, to buy a large block of cheese.
Hangeland was then told to perch on the end of a massage table and spend the afternoon in that position with a slab of cheese carefully positioned on the sore spot. The cheese, according to Magath, would have soothing effects.
Felix Magath was removed from the managerial position at Fulham FC last Thursday following less than eight months in charge, a period during which the club was relegated from the Premier League and sank to the bottom of the Championship after seven games without a win. Daniel Taylor caught wind of the peculiarities with which Magath (dubbed ‘Quälix – a mix of Felix and the verb quälen (to torture)’), including this dairy remedy for a muscle strain. Along with rumours of exhausting training methods including , players were often played out of position, like ‘Dan Burn, a 6ft 6in centre-half, at right-back in the 4-1 defeat against Stoke City last season’, and there was no clear starting XI going into the first game of the season. Magath’s coaching CV boasts two Bundesliga titles, but Taylor talks also about the eagerness of players to leave his squad because of his apparent medieval methods. Owner Shahid Khan was left little choice but to satisfy the majority of fans by sacking Magath and appointing (as caretaker) former Fulham player and U21 coach Kit Symons in search of that elusive first win and ascent up the table.
Brian Clough: Pat Murphy’s memories of a unique character – Pat Murphy, BBC (20/9/2014)
“Come and see my coaching certificates – they’re called the European Cup and league championships,” he once said.
Above all, Cloughie was respected by his players. For three decades after he left Derby in 1973, he was a regular presence at the old players’ association functions, delighting in telling anecdotes and enquiring after the various families. Cloughie was a better listener and conversationalist than his egotistical image would suggest.
It was 10 years last Saturday since the passing of one of the biggest football characters of the modern game, Brian Clough. A managerial career which spanned almost 30 years years saw him win the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest after coaching Derby County to a divisional championship. But it is not only the results he achieved on the pitch that popularised him among the Forest faithful. As Murphy writes, his personal attributes humanised him in front of his players and his man-management was unsurpassed. To this day, he is known as arguably the greatest football manager ever. Look through any books or web pages about footballing quotes and you are almost guaranteed to come across one of Clough’s sporting aphorisms. Derby Road, a vessel running through the student community in Lenton, has been named in his honour as ‘Brian Clough Way’. You can also find a statue immortalising him in East Midlands folklore just off Market Square in Nottingham city centre. R.I.P.
John Mastrini
