“Some fava beans and a nice chianti for Mr. Suarez”

I could not quite believe what I was seeing when I watched Match of the Day last weekend and saw Luis Suarez take a bite out of Branislav Ivanovic; no doubt I wasn’t the only one who watched it in total amazement. It appeared to me that Suarez was trying to provoke his opponent into a foul that would earn Liverpool a penalty; they were 2-1 down at the time. As it happens, Ivanovic wrestled Suarez to the ground, which was a pretty mild reaction all things considered, but the referee awarded Liverpool only a corner. Obviously he knew something had gone on, but equally obviously had missed the Hannibal Lecter impression.

Luis Suarez

Hannibal Lecter

So Suarez stayed on the pitch and went on to score Liverpool’s equalizer, leaving Chelsea somewhat peeved at the injustice of it all. Suarez has form in the arm biting stakes, having also done so while playing in Holland. Put this together with his deliberate handball when playing for Uruguay that denied Ghana a certain goal in the 2010 World Cup plus his reputation for simulation and it’s easy to see why he will never win any popularity contests.

It has been suggested that Suarez has anger management issues. In the case of his bite on Ivanovic I wouldn’t say that it was done out of anger; anger usually spurs an uncontrolled reaction, the retaliatory kick or punch. Suarez’s bite looked to me to be the pre-meditated action of a man whose team were losing and who was trying, as I said, to win a penalty.

There is an argument that what Suarez did was not as bad as the knee high or over the top tackle that can potentially end an opponent’s career. Perhaps so, but these types of tackles are less likely to be premeditated, rather they may result from miscalculation or bad timing (not all of them, granted but many). The player who deliberately, maliciously goes over the top deserves as much opprobrium as does Suarez for his bite, but the slightly warped British sense of values and fair play sometimes overlooks these types of incidents as part and parcel of the game. I suppose that the reason for this is that as a nation we have an ethos of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Tackling is a legitimate part of football and the tackle that ends up as a leg breaker is often excused as a genuine but over enthusiastic attempt to get the ball, but biting can’t be seen in any way as being accidental or a miscalculation.

Again, the British culture of fair play is able to accept (up to a point) what we may call honest fouls, for example the rugby style tackle on the forward who is clean through and the retaliatory punch thrown (usually off target) by the forward. Whilst nowadays both of these offences would result in dismissal, back when I started watching football they would have resulted in no more than a stern lecture from the referee; times change! What the British sports fan finds less acceptable is the sly or underhand antics that Suarez’s bite typified.

This was the case even back in the 1960’s and 1970’s when the English game was somewhat more robust than it is now. Players like Norman Hunter and Ron Harris, with their respective sobriquets of “Bites yer legs” (not literally) and Chopper were examples of forceful defenders who thought nothing of giving opposing forwards a kick now and again, these were the days of course before the tackle from behind was outlawed. Forwards like Denis Law and Francis Lee were no shrinking violets either and were quite capable of giving as good as they got. But for all that Hunter and Harris were considered hard men, the antics of other players, and I’m particularly thinking of the 1970’s Leeds United team here, were not accepted by fans due to their being perceived as sly and devious.

Quite rightly the tackle from behind is now a forgotten part of the game but sadly the genuine art of tackling seems to have disappeared too. The block tackle and the sliding tackle, skills (yes, skills) that were a fundamental part of the full back’s armoury have now almost vanished. In part this is due to a lack of tolerance on the part of referees, but it is also due in some measure to the fact that there seem now to be so few players who can execute these tackles properly. Of course it doesn’t help that many forwards hit the deck squealing and screaming as though they had been stabbed rather than on the receiving end of a hard but vigorous challenge.

Annoyingly, the foul that appears to have become endemic in the game at its highest levels occurs at corners, where players hold, wrestle and generally manhandle each other. It really is tiresome and in my view needs addressing by the game’s law makers. Perhaps if a referee awarded a penalty each time it happened, rather than taking the safe option and letting it go, or worse penalising the victim, it might get stamped out. It might result in half a dozen penalties in a game, but it might also dissuade some of the more frequent practitioners from continuing with these antics.

To return to Suarez, Liverpool have fined him and the Football Association have banned him for ten games. When Suarez, then playing for Ajax, bit PSV Eindhoven player Otman Bakkal he was hit with a seven game ban so the length of the FA's ban does not appear disproportionate. 

On this occasion he should be grateful he bit the apparently mild mannered Ivanovic rather than someone like Ron Harris because rather than contemplating the length of his ban, he would in all probability be wondering when he would be released from hospital.

Shirking from Home

Working at home is a skivers charter, isn’t it? Well, no not really, it depends on both the organisations that allow it and the attitude of those who work from home. There is a prevalent state of mind among those who don’t work from home that those who do are not putting in a full shift, but in my experience that is not the case. For  instance my wife works from home regularly and I know from observing her that not only does she use the time she would otherwise be commuting to work, she regularly  puts in a ten hour stint in front of the PC when working at home.

Working from home has become more prevalent in recent years, and the concept tends to polarise opinions. Naturally there are some jobs that do not lend themselves to home working, so when we talk of people working from home we are normally talking of those who would otherwise be working in offices, and among office workers there are some divisions about the effectiveness of home working.

Some people are opposed to home working on principle and in my experience these people’s prejudices are based on their conception of how effective other people are when they work at home, so the merits of home working have a certain dependency on who is doing the talking, the home worker or the worker who remains tied to the office. For those who work at home and do so enthusiastically, the benefits include the lack of commute, the freedom from interruptions and the ability to concentrate solely on the task at hand; the flexibility to start work early, finish late and adapt work around their domestic commitments. To those who remain chained to their office desk, these virtues may be seen as opportunities for the home worker to be less productive, less proactive and more reactive, doing only the bare minimum of what is required of them.

There is no black or white answer; sometimes home working is at least as effective as working in the office; sometimes even more so but on other occasions there is no substitute for being in the office. Having worked from home on occasions, I know that how effective I was really depended on what tasks I had to perform on a given day. Some days I could be really effective working at home, for instance if it was appraisal time and I had to write reviews of my directs, or if I had to produce some sort of document then it really didn’t matter whether I was in the office or at home. On days when there was less structure, I might become purely reactive, just responding to emails and therefore somewhat less productive. In the job I did, one particular piece of software was not available to me at home as I didn’t have a laptop supplied by my employers and instead relied on connecting through Citrix [1]on my home PC. The software in question was a thick client and not having the software installed on my home computer I was unable to use the GUI[2] and instead had to connect via CICS[3], or the “green screens” as many of you will know them. This had the effect of making life slightly more difficult in working at home than in the office.

Being in the office facilitates collaboration; face to face meetings can be more effective than conference calls and informal chats at the coffee machine have a habit of throwing up solutions to problems but are not possible if workers are not co-located. On that subject, virtual teams, whereby members of the same team may be located in different offices or different countries and time zones are another matter and one which I cannot honestly say that I favour, but that subject I may well return to at a later date.

Whatever work you do at home, there are a few key imperatives to ensure that the home worker is as effective as it can be.

Firstly, environment. Sitting in the lounge, on the sofa, with a laptop balanced on your knees is not ideal in any way, well not for working. A laptop on the kitchen or dining room table is a step up, but ideally home workers ought to strive for an area of their home that is as business like as possible. I’m in the fortunate position of having a small study with a phone, PC, printer and an office chair and this always made me feel more businesslike and focussed when I worked at home.

Secondly, family. Because you are at home, there can be a tendency for family members to forget that your primary purpose is to work for your employer, not for them! The home worker needs to be able to refuse requests to run errands for their family to the detriment of their paid employment.

Thirdly, distractions. I have to admit that when I worked at home my major distraction was tea, and I would drink cup after cup to the point where I was spending almost as much time in the kitchen making tea as anywhere else. In my defence, I would say that I usually worked longer hours and took a shorter lunch break when I worked at home than I did in the office, so I don’t think that the time I spent with the kettle rather and the PC was that detrimental. The home worker needs to guard against the five minutes spent browsing non-work websites or reading a book, that turns into an hour (or two).

From the organisation’s point of view, having their staff work at home saves on various overheads, allows “hot-desking” and enables their personnel to work flexibly. On the face of it, it is a win-win situation for the organisation and their staff, but as with all things, trends and fashions change and the tide may even now being changing to an anti-home working point of view. In February 2013, Yahoo! announced that it was banning staff from remote working, giving as reasons such things as improved communication from working side by side, that speed and quality are often sacrificed with home working and that some interactions and experiences are only possible in the office. Far from a voice in the wilderness, their fellow search engine giants, Google, when asked how many of their people work from home, replied “as few as possible.”

With so many organisations now setting themselves up to encourage home working by reducing office floor space, introducing hot desking and positively encouraging their people to work from home, are Yahoo! and Google out of step or, having pioneered home working, have they been the first to discover that it is not the panacea that many thought? Probably they have found that with many things, home working should not be seen as a mutually exclusive option to regular office work, but complements it when required. Certainly organisations need contingency, for example if bad weather makes commuting difficult then the ability of staff to work from home provides a perfect alternative but as a rule, home working may not after all be the magic potion that it might have thought to have been originally.

Mind you, with many organisations changing course with all the speed of a fully laden oil tanker, it may be many years before some reverse the trend. So if you are reading this while working from home, why not check out my previous blogs while you have the chance; before too long you may be back in the office!

---

[1] Citrix is an American multinational software company founded in 1989 that provides server and desktop virtualization, networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies.

[2] Graphical User Interface.

[3] Customer Information Control System – IBM transaction processing software.

Cheap Flights! Cheap Flights!

Budget airlines, particularly Ryanair, come in for some significant flak from the media, the public and the like, largely on the grounds that their so called “cheap” flights can turn out to be anything but cheap once the extras are added on. Other criticisms that are laid at these airline’s doors are that their customer service can be less than helpful; that they are not customer friendly and that can appear to be running their business purely for their own benefit and not for that of their passengers. That last criticism I find somewhat specious; they aren’t running their business exclusively for the benefit of their customers, their principle concern is turning a profit for their shareholders. It amazes me that some people seem to believe that budget airlines should be philanthropic organisations, at the beck and call of their customers and treating them in the way that the transatlantic carriers do.

Budget airlines are like train companies and ferry companies. You get on in one city and off in another; if you want anything en route you pay for it, if you don’t like the way they do things then you should seek an alternative means of transport. It almost seems as there is some perverse law of customer satisfaction where budget airlines are concerned, whereby contentment is in inverse proportion to price, regardless of quality.

Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive is no shrinking violet and has been quoted as saying some things that have ruffled plenty of feathers among the media and his client base. He has been scathing of his customers who have had to pay additional sums of money having infringed one of Ryanair’s many rules. Failing to print boarding cards at home or having oversized or overweight hand luggage are popular failings among Ryanair’s client base.

Ryanair are very easy to knock, but personally I don’t have a problem with them. I can’t speak for other budget airlines as apart from Go (who merged with EasyJet in 2003) I haven’t flown with any of them. Ryanair are very much “what you see is what you get” but, in order not to be struck by swingeing extra costs, consumers really need to open their eyes.

The major criticism levelled at budget airlines is that the eventual cost of the flight can be significantly greater than the advertised price. The adverts that read “London to Barcelona, from £1!” may sound good but they are in fact too good to be true because there was only every a very limited number of seats on one flight available at that price and they have already been sold. But seriously people, that is what advertising is for; it lures you in with undreamt of riches or bargains, then makes you pay more than you intended because the idea has taken such a grip on you that you want the product regardless of price. It isn’t just the airlines that do this, everyone who advertises does.

The complaints that are made about being charged because you didn’t print your own boarding card or you luggage was too large or too heavy are in some ways laughable. Did you not read the terms and conditions? If you didn’t, haven’t you heard on TV, or read in the papers about these sorts of things? Really, too many people are too careless of their responsibilities and complain that it isn’t fair when they get charged, when they have only themselves to blame. If you don’t like it, travel with another carrier.

There have also been grumbles from passengers who have been landed at an airport thirty, forty or fifty miles from their expected destination. Again, these people have only themselves to blame. Having booked a flight and having seen the name of the airport at the other end, the first thing most sensible people do is plan their journey to their ultimate destination. Instead the people who grumble about Ryanair complain that they have been “stranded” miles from their hotel. On that basis, shouldn’t these same people complain that Ryanair use airports too far from their own home and that when they arrive back in the UK, they are stranded miles from where they live?

In flight catering exercises a lot of people too. Ryanair charge for everything, tea, coffee, water, and snacks; if it can be consumed they charge for it. Everyone knows this, so why do people still complain? I’ve never heard of anyone on a train journey from Manchester to London complain that they had to pay for a cup of tea and a sandwich, so why should a flight be any different, especially when the flight is a two hour hop from London to Palma for instance?

Additional costs to use the toilets and the steps to board and disembark the plane are as yet works of fiction. Should they ever be introduced I’m sure the airline will advertise them, so passengers should not be taken by surprise; they will however complain about them.

British Caledonian Airways had a slogan, “We never forget you have a choice” and customers of today’s budget airlines would do well to remember this. You have a choice; if you don’t like the product that the airline is offering, use one of their competitors.

Having flown Ryanair recently, from Stansted to Murcia I have to say that the majority of passengers on these two flights were pretty much accepting of the way the airline works as most were getting a flight at a bargain price. I did hear a few grumbles as we boarded the flight out of Stansted about the boarding process itself and I have to say that if you haven’t paid the premium for priority boarding and therefore reserved your seats, the boarding process is a bit of a bun fight, but that is a minor cross to bear. It may be a shock the first time, but thereafter you just have to sharpen your elbows and get to the head of the line.

The budget airlines have shrunk Europe and we should be grateful to them for that. A long weekend in Spain, or Portugal, Poland or the Czech Republic is now as easy to arrange and probably cheaper than a similar weekend away to another city in the UK. With booking hotel rooms on the internet easy too, there is no obstacle to getting home from work on a Friday, booking a trip to the continent and flying out the next morning. That is something that you couldn’t have done twenty years ago.

By the by, I’ve had some internet problems in the last week; if I’d had those problems the week before and not been able to print my own boarding cards, the tone of this piece may have been slightly different! It would not, however have been the airline’s problem and if I had any complaint, it would not have been with them.

And finally, a song from the brilliant Fascinating Aida; you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. I reckon that it would even raise a smile from Michael O’Leary!

If you are unable to view the video, please click here or use this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HPyl2tOaKxM

Romford 1 Manchester United 0

On supporting Romford FC.

If you gather a group of men[1] together their conversation will at some point usually turn to sport in general and football in particular. At this juncture it is quite likely that the question of which teams everyone supports comes up, whereupon all the usual suspects are trotted out; Manchester United, Chelsea, West Ham, Arsenal and the like with the occasional Leeds, Crystal Palace or Leyton Orient thrown in. Everyone understands these teams and why people support them, even if they may patronise the Orient supporter a bit, but when I mention who I support the reactions can be varied, because I support Romford FC.

When I explain that Romford ply their trade in the Ryman League Division One North, which is a Step Four league within the non-League pyramid, or more simply, seven promotions away from the Premier League, this often prompts a question along the lines of “No, which proper team do you support?” It is inconceivable to some that anyone should support a team outside the Premier League, although it is gratifying that on some occasions there will be a flicker of recognition among those more knowledgeable of the non-League game.

So why do I support Romford? Well, back in the late sixties, when I first became interested in football I toyed with the idea of following Manchester United, for no other reason than that they were top of the First Division but even at that tender age I wanted to support a team I could go and watch and as Manchester was over two hundred miles from my home I recognised that my chances of seeing them play were limited. So in February 1968 I went to watch The Boro (as Romford are known) for the first time. 

The programme cover for the first Romford match I attended. The artist's impression of the ground in the picture is fairly accurate, if a little idealised.

In 1968 Romford were reigning champions of the Southern League, which was then the competition immediately below the Football League. Sadly there was then no automatic promotion, which instead could only be achieved by being elected by the existing member clubs. Boro regularly attracted crowds of two or three thousand to their ground at Brooklands, a magnificent stadium with a 20,000 capacity, a 2,000 seat main stand, huge banked terracing and imposing floodlight pylons. After my first visit I was hooked.  It wasn’t a conscious decision, in these matters it is like falling in love; your heart rules your head.

Romford FC - Southern League Champions 1966-67

If choosing the team you support is like falling in love then actually supporting them is like a marriage; “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part,” well it certainly has been like that supporting Romford. The investment the club had made in the ground and the players in their attempts to gain Football League status had left them with huge debts and by 1978 the club had disbanded.

If supporting a football club is like a marriage, then this one had run its course.

Fourteen years elapsed, years in which having initially flitted from match to match without any emotional attachment I eventually took to supporting Leyton Orient, before news reached me in the summer of 1992 that plans were afoot to reform Romford FC.

The new club were accepted as members of the Essex Senior League and on 22^nd August 1992 played their first competitive match against East Ham United. It was strange watching the new club for the first time, seeing faces I’d not seen for fourteen years, seeing a team in the famous Gold and Blue again, but just like in 1978 the club had no ground to call their own. An initial groundshare with Hornchurch has been followed over the next twenty years with any number of formal and ad hoc groundshare arrangements. When Romford reformed I still considered myself an Orient supporter as I’d been a season ticket holder for twelve years, but I watched the Boro when I could until eventually the old ties and bonds drew me back into being a full time Romford fan.

There have been ups and downs aplenty in Romford’s history, many more in the last twenty years than can be included here (a full history of the club can be found on the club’s website here ), but briefly the club won the Essex Senior League in 1996 and merged with Collier Row to become (for one season only) Collier Row & Romford. The next season the club won the Isthmian League Second Division, but problems with the Sungate ground at Collier Row eventually led to the ground being closed, the club being suspended by the League and dropping back to the Essex Senior League. Yet Boro bounced back and won the Essex Senior League again in 2009 to return to the Isthmian League (now known as the Ryman League). Additional cause for celebration was the decision by Havering Council to grant the club planning permission for a new ground at Westlands in London Road, Romford. Having planning permission is not the same as being able to build a ground however and Boro still lack the financial wherewithal to even start construction. In these straitened economic times attracting investors is no easy matter and Romford continue to groundshare, having moved from Aveley to Thurrock this season.

Romford management celebrate the Essex Senior League championship in 2009. Left to right: Mark Lord (Assistant Manager), Paul Martin (Manager) and Colin Ewenson (Secretary).

Anyone who has a few hundred thousand tucked away that they don’t know what to do with is invited to contact the club or me as we would be happy to put it to good use!

You may wonder what the attraction of supporting a club like Romford is. Without detracting from the fanaticism that people feel for clubs in the Premier League, supporting a team like the Boro seems to me to be more real, more involving. Romford supporters may be few in number these days but what we lack in that regard we make up for in our loyalty. We regularly take 30-40 to away games (to put that in perspective imagine Manchester United taking 25,000 fans to an away match), and twenty loyal Boro fans made the 250 mile round trip to Wroxham on a freezing cold and snowy Tuesday in February and made up nearly a third of the gate.

A snowy night in Wroxham. Romford (in yellow) take on the home side in February 2013

To me supporting Romford is not just about going to watch the game. It means a lot more to me than that. I see the same loyal friends week in week out, I get to contribute in some small way to the club by arranging the match officials and writing for the programme. It’s also pretty unlikely that supporters of Premier League clubs ever learn the team line up directly from the manager in the bar before a game!

It might have been so much easier if I had stuck with Manchester United when I was ten, or with Leyton Orient after 1992, but on the whole I think that my life would have been much the poorer for not supporting Romford, after all you never forget your first love, do you?

Up The Boro!

---

[1] Ok, so women can be interested in sport too, but it is rarely a primary topic of conversation among them.