3G or not 3G?

Back in 1970, Terry Venables co-wrote (with Gordon Williams), a novel about a fictional football team competing in the equally fictitious British Cup, entitled “They Used To Play On Grass”, so titled because in the time the story was set, grass pitches had largely been replaced by artificial surfaces. In 1981 and then managed by Venables, Queens Park Rangers, in an example of life imitating art, installed an Omniturf pitch. They were followed by Luton Town, Oldham Athletic and Preston North End who similarly installed artificial surfaces. The plastic pitch at QPR’s Loftus Road ground lasted until 1988, Preston North End eventually reverted to grass in 1994 after eight years of watching the ball bounce thirty feet in the air and treating countless players for friction burns.

In his excellent book, The Smell of Football, Mick Rathbone recalls his time as a player at Preston and of playing on the plastic, writing that “Sometimes, before a game in winter, they would sprinkle a salt solution onto the surface to prevent it from freezing. This was an astonishing breakthrough for medicine as you could slide-tackle, get a friction burn and have it cleaned all at the same time.” He also remembers having to peel the sheets off his burns the morning after a match; not a ringing endorsement of the surfaces available at that time.

Plastic at Preston North End's Deepdale home.

The bounce and the incidence of carpet burns were without doubt the two major defects in early artificial surfaces. I saw QPR entertain Orient on the Loftus Road plastic and spent an inordinate amount of time with my head tilted at an unusual angle as the ball pinged off the pitch and into the upper atmosphere. That game was also remarkable for a spectacular graze suffered by Orient defender Nigel Gray after an ill-advised sliding tackle.

The technology available to develop artificial surfaces in the eighties and nineties frankly was not good enough, hence the decision of QPR etc to revert to grass. An FA ban on the introduction of new artificial pitches in 1988 meant that their days were numbered anyway. Nowadays the technology has improved to the state that artificial surfaces are much more like grass. I was watching a clip on You Tube of a game from Scandinavia some time ago and it was several minutes before it dawned on me that the pitch was not grass.

Aspmyra, Norway: home of the football club FK Bodø/Glimt photo Lars Røed Hansen

In Scotland, Airdrie, Annan, Stenhousemuir, Montrose, Alloa, Stranraer, East Fife and Clyde all have artificial pitches and in England there are a number of clubs in non-League football who have installed such pitches, most notably being Maidstone United, promoted from Ryman Division One South to the Ryman Premier Division at the end of last season. Now Essex club Harlow Town have installed a 3G pitch. Considering that the grass surface at Barrows Farm was one of the best in the division, one could ask why they would do so and I suppose that the answer would be that a 3G surface almost guarantees no postponements and can be used virtually 24/7, giving the club a significant new income stream as the pitch can be hired out without risk of it being damaged.

The past disadvantages of plastic caused by quality appear to have been addressed; the limitations now are based on how far up the football pyramid in England a club can progress and still use an artificial surface. These types of pitches have been sanctioned for use in the FA Cup, but only in the qualifying rounds and similar restrictions exist as to how far up the pyramid a club can be promoted and still retain their artificial pitch. Maidstone and Harlow will doubtless be looking at how the administrators view matters in the near future. I do find it strange however, that artificial surfaces in Russia have been used for World Cup qualifying and Champions League games and are used in Switzerland and Italy, yet in England these surfaces are limited to the game below the Football League. As ever, the wheels of change grind exceedingly slow.

Saracens RFC have installed a 3G surface at Allianz Park recently and this suggests that the technology behind these pitches has improved exponentially in recent years. Rugby is at first sight, a  game far less suited to such a surface than association football.

Until a few days ago I would have said that I would prefer to see football played on grass, but this  prejudice was based purely on the one game I watched played on plastic and my one (painful) experience of playing on it. On that occasion I received some lovely friction burns from wrist to elbow on both arms (I was playing in goal) and due to my lack of inches, was in constant fear of the ball bouncing embarrassingly over my head. Fortunately this did not happen; I just found other ways of embarrassing myself, viz the shot that I confidently expected to go wide but which instead crept narrowly inside the post. My only consolation was that it was struck by probably the best player on the pitch; "He bent that really well; I had no chance," I explained afterwards.

As I said, 3G pitches are becoming increasingly prevalent in non-League football and on Tuesday I had the opportunity to see for myself as Romford visited Harlow Town for a Ryman League fixture. The first thing that you notice is that really, from the sidelines, there doesn't appear to be much difference between the 3G surface and a normal, grass pitch except that the green of the "grass" is more vivid and more consistent and that the white lines stand out so much more.  The only other thing that looks any different are the corner flags, which are help in metal stands rather than being embedded in the ground.  The bounce, which was one thing that potentially may have been an issue, is much more natural and normal than on the old pitches, a la QPR; no evidence of players being surprised by a ball bouncing over their heads in this game (well, no more than on any other pitch).

The 3G pitch at Harlow Town's ground.

If there is one thing that differentiates the 3G pitch, it really is in the ball's momentum. You get the impression that a side footed pass, struck with average pace, would run from one touchline to the other without stopping if no one got in the way: whereas grass will retard the ball's progress eventually, there is definitely less friction on a 3G pitch. As a result the pass ahead or one side of a player has to weighted perfectly to avoid the ball running away from the target. A good first touch and "soft" feet are important; overall the surface favours the skilled player, as you might expect.

A question many people will be asking is, does a 3G pitch give the home team an unfair advantage? Heybridge Swifts manager Mark Hawkes seems to think so; in advance of his side's FA Cup tie at Harlow on Saturday he has expressed disappointment at the advantage that he feels the pitch gives the home side. After Tuesday's game I'm not sure I would agree; yes the pitch is different, but given the wide variety of quality of playing surfaces in non-League football, I'm sure that 3G is preferable to a rutted, muddy, uneven grass pitch.

3G is, in my view, the way forward: I can see more and more clubs switching to this surface in the future, and certainly for new stadium builds the case for 3G is stronger than for grass. The interesting test of 3G will be the day that a club playing on 3G reaches the point where promotion to the Football League is a possibility, or indeed the day an existing Football League club proposes installing an artificial surface; and that day will come, sooner or later. Despite the natural aversion to change, one day the artificial surface must become more widely accepted now that the technology has advanced so much from the days when QPR, Luton Town etc were using it.

Probably the biggest compliment that I can pay to the surface is that after the initial novelty had worn off, it was easy to forget that the game I saw on Tuesday wasn't being played on grass. The more commonplace these surfaces become, the less fuss anyone will make about them.

I cannot resist closing without a quote attributed to, among others, gridiron footballer Joe Namath. When asked whether he preferred grass or Astroturf, Namath replied that he didn’t know as he had never smoked Astroturf! The more observant among you may recall this being recycled as joke in an episode of Only Fools And Horses.

This piece is adapted from an article that I wrote for the Romford v. Waltham Abbey match programme in August 2013.

Lost in a Good Book

Ever since I learned to read I have rarely been without a book on the go. At an early age I was an avid reader of Enid Blyton’s  Famous Five stories; in my early teens I consumed a large proportion of Agatha Christie’s work before moving on to Alistair MacLean and then the somewhat racier James Bond novels of Ian Fleming; well they seemed racy at the time!

The sight of this cover takes me back to when I was a teenager.

 At some point I started to read science fiction; HG Wells, Larry Niven, Christopher Priest and Philip K Dick in particular. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said are works that I regularly return to re-read, along with non sci-fi books like Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, and The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. When the dice so dictate I return to Luke Rhiehart’s The Dice Man. Periodically I become fixated by a particular genre; I once read nothing but courtroom dramas for a year or so, but eventually gave up as I rather overdosed on them.

On occasions I veer into the weird; Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy for instance, which I really must revisit soon, and books like The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist, which was probably the first steampunk novel that I read. Steampunk is an interesting genre that seems to have grown hugely in popularity in recent years, although there is a wide divergence in quality and a certain amount of bandwagon jumping on the part of some writers.

At present I am reading (and enjoying immensely), A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon, who is probably better known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Unusually, I am reading the paperback version (which my younger daughter bought some time ago, but has not yet read). I say unusually because nowadays I, like so many other people, read books on the Kindle. When e-readers first came along I was sorely tempted to buy one but prevaricated because although the combination of a new gadget and books was enormously appealing, I felt that the comfort of a physical book and the satisfaction of visiting a bookshop, of choosing a book, buying it and bringing it home, the sense of anticipation and the actually reading of it would outweigh the novelty of the e-reader.

Kindle, probably the most well known and popular of the e-readers.

Then in 2010 when we went on holiday, I dragged half a dozen paperbacks along, which took up a large proportion of my luggage space and took me perilously close to going over the airline’s weight allowance. Val offered to buy me a Kindle for Christmas or my birthday, yet still I vacillated. On the one hand I desired the new technology, but on the other I would miss the visits to bookshops and the joy of holding and reading an actual book. Eventually I succumbed and the next time I went on holiday I took the Kindle, read nine books and did not need to worry about the weight or space that they took up.

As e-readers increase in popularity, this sort of sight will become rarer,

There is a view that the e-reader signals the death knell of the bookshop, but frankly the number of bookshops on the High Street seemed to be contracting anyway and perversely the growth in popularity of the e-reader has in some ways invigorated readership and, by extension, the bookshop; it certainly seems to have energised the public into reading more. Book sellers like Waterstone’s have embraced the e-reader and of necessity changed their business model and sales tactics accordingly, although however much the e-book market grows there will always be demand for physical books for cookbooks, textbooks and the coffee table book. 

The e-readers on the market have benefited readers and writers in many ways. A lot of the classics can be had for nothing or for a few pennies on your e-reader while you would pay the full price for the paperback. A Tale of Two Cities costs £5.75 in paperback on Amazon, yet is free on the Kindle. There are vast numbers of books for less than a pound for the Kindle, many of which are self-published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing facility. This has enabled many an aspiring writer to enter the market when, in the era before the e-book, they would have struggled to find a publisher. There may be a lot of dross out there but there are also some gems.

Mind you, the dross extends beyond the self-published stuff available, even though it is true that in fiction one man’s meat is another man’s poison. I would suggest that in no other area is this truer than in the classics. There is a lot of snobbery about the classics, and what constitutes a classic anyway? Arbitrarily, having Googled “classic fiction” I ticked off the books that I have read from The Observer’s  list of the best 100 novels of all time[1] and find that I have read only twenty-six of them and some of those I have enjoyed not at all.

For instance The Trial by Franz Kafka is widely regarded as a classic and is highly praised but divides opinion. There are those who regard it as a work of genius; having eventually got round to reading it recently I have some sympathy with the reviewer who said that it is “a tome of existentialist tripe... bleak and pointless.” There are other classics that I sometimes think it is fashionable to like, even though the reader may not have actually enjoyed them, a sort of emperor’s new clothes syndrome[2]. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road for example is very highly respected, but I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Anything by Ernest Hemingway falls into a similar category in my view, leaving me completely cold[3]. There again Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock, published in 1831 and in which a  group of disparate, eccentric characters assemble and basically do no more than have lengthy conversations, is a novel that I thoroughly enjoyed although I’m sure that many people would hate it.

When I studied literature at school I suppose that like many a teenager doing their English “A” level, I became a bit precious and pretentious about books and at one time I considered it almost a sin to leave one unfinished. Another of my foibles was that I was loath to lend (or borrow) a book. Frankly I would rather give a book away (and if necessary, buy another copy) than lend it to someone; borrowing a book was similarly anathema to me[4].  Over the years there have been few books that fall into the unfinished category, but Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and Smallcreep’s Day by Peter Currell Brown I simply could not bring myself to read to the end. I waded through The Lord of The Rings and wished I hadn’t bothered; now, despite a nagging sense of guilt, I am much more likely to give up on a book I am not enjoying.

There are many ways in which a book can be enjoyable; it can be for the style and wit of the writing, the thrill of the story or the enrichment it can bring to the reader but life is too short to read bad books, although my idea of what constitutes a bad book may not be yours and vice versa; each to their own, vive la difference.

Next up on my reading list.

Nonetheless, whether it is George Orwell, or Philip K Dick; Charles Dickens or Jeffrey Archer, whatever you may favour, there is nothing quite as enjoyable as getting lost in a good book.

---

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction Other lists are available!

[2] How many unfinished copies of Salman Rushie’s The Satanic Verses are there do you suppose?

[3] For which, please read pretentious, over-rated twaddle.

[4] Yes, weird I know. If everyone was like me, lending libraries would do no trade at all.

Through the Lens

I have a number of books on local history at home and I frequently find myself flicking through one or other of them, fascinated by the photographs that show Romford and the surrounding areas as they were many years ago. It is interesting to look at pictures of Romford Market Place in 1900 for instance, to see the cattle in their pens, to see the pubs that have long since closed and the shops that were doing business in those days.

The changes that have taken place since these photos were taken are striking; most striking are how rural our town was in those days. The dusty lane with its single car or even a horse and cart is now the ring road; that country inn, outside which sits a drayman’s horse and cart is now a gastropub.

We are lucky that there are as many photographs that survive from the early twentieth century, when photography was generally a much more formal art. Many of the pictures from that time are so carefully and obviously posed; the cameras were bulkier and the preserve of specialists rather than the common man. The act of taking a photograph or being photographed was evidently much more of an occasion in those days.

The Victorian camera did not lend itself to spontaneity in picture taking. 

Even so the number of photographs that are available from one hundred or more years ago is relatively small; future generations of historians are likely to be spoiled for choice given the fact that these days everyone appears to be permanently recording the minutiae of their lives.

The box Brownie camera; a step towards portability.

Even as cameras became a normal part of family life, there were limits. If your family was anything like mine, the camera came out only on high days and holidays. Films were still quite expensive to buy and to have developed. Many were the times when a twenty four exposure roll of film would see us through from Christmas to the end of the summer holidays: the film would then be taken down to Boots the Chemist; a few days later we would collect the developed pictures. There was always a great sense of anticipation; half the time no one could remember exactly what was on the film anyway. We would flick through the pictures, often still none the wiser, “Who took that?”, “Where was that taken?” were questions that frequently were asked as we sorted out the ones worth keeping. Because there were always plenty of pictures that were over-exposed, or where someone’s feet, or head, had been chopped off.

The instantly recognisable Kodak Instamatic.

Then along came digital cameras, which revolutionised the family snapshot. Now it was possible to see what you had taken and to retake the ones which hadn’t come out quite as planned. It was possible to snap away with abandon and only have developed those worth printing. With digital storage media, it isn’t even necessary to print them at all, and I’m sure that there are many people who do not print their photographs.

If digital cameras were a revolution, it was as nothing compared to development of the camera phone. The first mobile phone to have a built-in camera was the Samsung SCH-V200 in 2000. It could take only twenty photos and the resolution was just 0.35-megapixels. Phones with four megapixel cameras are now old hat; Samsung produce a sixteen megapixel camera phone and the Nokia Lumia 1020 has a 41-megapixel camera.

Samsung's SCH-V200

 

The Nokia Lumia 1020: effectively a camera that can make phone calls.

Although few people habitually carry a camera, most people carry their phone most everywhere they go and the fact that these phones are capable of taking such high quality pictures means that it seems that almost no event goes unrecorded. Even in the professional photography business the camera phone is usurping the specialist camera (and cameramen); in the USA, The Chicago Sun-Times publicly sacked photographers and expects its reporters to use their iPhones to take pictures.

The camera phone will never completely supplant the dedicated camera; for example sporting events and state occasions are unlikely ever to be captured as successfully on an iPhone as with a “proper” camera and somehow I doubt that the average bride and groom would be content if their wedding photographer arrived with just his Sony Xperia.

So now we live in an age when it is rare to go anywhere, whether it is a sporting event or a show; a concert or just a trip to the local park, without seeing someone snapping away on their phone. I hold my hands up, I do it as often as the next man, but now I should inject a word of two of caution.

It occurred to me a week or so ago, while my family and I were at The Sea Life Centre on London’s South Bank, that almost without exception, all of the visitors were taking pictures of the fish, the sharks, the penguins and the turtles. Few of them seemed actually to be looking directly at the fish themselves; it was almost as though they were so absorbed with taking pictures that they could not spare the time nor attention to be able to do anything as mundane as actually look at what was in the tanks and would be content to wait until they got home to experience their visit second hand, through the pictures they had taken. It would be sad if we ended up living our lives through the screen on our mobile phones instead of experiencing it firsthand. I am not saying that we should stop taking pictures; just that we should remember that photos should be to enhance our memories, not to supplant them.

My second concern is that although we take so many more photographs most people probably print very few of them. Two hundred thousand photographs are uploaded to Facebook every minute; yes, 200,000 which is 17,280,000,000 per day! According to Yahoo! 880 BILLION photos will be taken in 2014 so no way would I advocate that every single one of them gets printed (where would we put them for a start). BUT the greater proportion of photos that get taken that are stored only in digital media, the fewer that are likely to be available to future generations.

There are a number of reasons for this. For those who store their pictures in the cloud, how secure is it? Could you end up suspended from your account and unable ever again to access your photos and other data? It has happened to people, so yes it could happen to you (or me). Cloud service providers are, just like any other company, as likely to go out of business as any other. It is not beyond the realms of possibility either that one of these companies could fall victim of some cyber attack that compromises their data, or should I say your data.

Those who shun the cloud and store their precious photos on their hard-drives cannot afford to be smug either. Hard drives fail (mine did a few years ago, leaving everything irretrievable – fortunately my photos were backed up).

And then there are people who do neither of these things and merely keep their pictures on their phones. Lose or damage that phone, upgrade it or have it stolen without backing up those photos and poof! they are gone.

Perhaps you have uploaded your pictures to Facebook, or Instagram. That’s OK isn’t it? Maybe, but will photos uploaded there be available to future generations? Maybe, but maybe not.

Keeping copies on DVD, CD-ROM or a memory stick must be foolproof, surely? Yes, in the same way as those files you stored on a three and half inch floppy disk all those ago years are. Yes, they are safe, but have you got anything on which you can read them?

One day, when your cloud service provider has gone belly up and there is nothing on which to read that CD-ROM and nowhere to plug in that memory stick, those pictures that you have printed will be so valuable. So here is a plea to all of you snapping away merrily on your phone cameras; on behalf of future generations, please print your favourite pictures and store them somewhere safe. 

The Magic of The Cup

The FA Cup Final has often been called the centrepiece of the English football calendar, even if it may have lost a little of its lustre in recent years, but the magic of The Cup (and that is how most of us refer to it, the FA element its title being somewhat superfluous) is just as much in the competition’s early rounds as it is in the Final.

Contrary to what certain sections of the media might have one believe, the Cup doesn’t start in January with the Third Round. It doesn’t even start in November with the First Round; it starts in August with the Extra Preliminary Round. This year 737 teams entered the competition. By the end of August over three hundred of those teams had been eliminated and considering that for those that remain only the Premier League and Championship sides, who of course don’t even enter until the Third Round, can realistically harbour any ambitions of winning the Cup, you might reasonably ask why any club would even bother entering a competition that they had exactly zero chance of winning. The reason is the glory and the glamour that the Cup exudes even in its early rounds. Clubs who ply their trade in Step Five (that’s five promotions below the Football League) can dream of progressing far enough to play one of their more illustrious rivals and of the publicity that they will attract for doing so. These days there is prize money as well; £1,500 for a win in the Extra Preliminary Round, £1,925 in the Preliminary Round and so on: a club progressing from the Extra Preliminary Round to the First Round Proper would win over thirty thousand pounds, a significant sum of money for clubs at that level.

As significant an amount of cash as that may be for the clubs competing at this stage, on the weekend of the FA Cup Preliminary Round the FA were paying £308,000 to the one hundred and sixty winning teams while Gareth Bale moved from Spurs to Real Madrid for £85 million. Eighty five million pounds is five and half times the total £15.1 million prize money on offer for the whole of the FA Cup competition this season!

Every year, when the draw for the Cup is made, I along with thousands of other fans of non-League clubs, hope for a tie that is interesting and winnable. An away trip somewhere different from the teams you normally face against a team you really ought to beat is an ideal, and because the draws for the first three rounds are all made at the same time, fans will be charting their potential progress. This year my team, Romford, were drawn to visit Hadleigh United of the the Thurlow Nunn Eastern Counties League, which is a Step Five league that feeds the Ryman League. This was a trip to a team one step below Romford’s, from a league that traditionally produces teams that are tough to beat and whom Romford have frequently found difficult opponents in the past, so not a game to be taken for granted but one which presented the realistic opportunity to reach the next round.

Hadleigh United's ground, flanked by trees.

Hadleigh being the best part of sixty miles away, this game offered the relative novelty of a coach to take players and supporters to the game. At Romford’s level coaches are a luxury; few teams will use coaches for journeys of less than a couple of hours. Apart from those who travelled by coach, a number of Boro fans travelled independently, swelling the crowd to 151.

A few grounds that Boro have visited by such means in recent years have not been ideally suited to accommodating a coach, with approach roads needing to be navigated carefully, and Hadleigh United’s ground proved to be no exception, with the town itself comprising narrow streets and tight turns, with the road into the ground little wider than the coach itself. The ground itself is fairly typical of many at this level. A limited amount of standing accommodation in front of a neat, modern bar and changing room complex (the bar is for many clubs at this level a major source of income) and a small seating stand opposite. Neat and tidy though the ground is, there are a number of improvements that would be required to meet ground grading standards were the club to achieve promotion from Step Five.

Romford supporters enjoying some pre-match refreshment...

...some enjoy it more obviously than others!

With the requirement this season that Ryman League teams log line ups, goal scorers and the like online, the lack of a 3G signal at the ground was a concern: fortunately a friendly home official helped me log into their wi-fi. One of the appeals of the non-League game is the friendliness and hospitability of clubs and officials; there is rivalry of course, but no one ever forgets that everyone involved in the game at this level is doing it because they enjoy it, because they want to contribute to their clubs and certainly not for the money! The non-League game being what it is, we also had the chance to meet up with the father of a former player, who had moved to Hadleigh to run a pub which he had invited us to visit before the game; sadly time did not allow.

And so to the game and while one of the appealing factors of the Cup is its habit of throwing banana skins in the path of teams from a higher level than their opponents, thankfully for Boro this was a day on which pretty much everything went according to plan on the pitch.

The pre-match "Respect" handshake.

As might have been expected, Hadleigh United tried to impose themselves on the match in the early stages and Romford’s defence was the harder worked of the two, but unlike in years past when Boro have played teams from Hadleigh’s neck of the woods, the home team found it difficult to create many clear cut chances. A shot wide of each post and one over the bar were the best they could muster, with Boro ‘keeper, Atu Ngoy having to make only one save of note. 

First half chances were at a premium.

Meanwhile at the other end, Romford were finding chances had to come by, but when they did create a clear one, two minutes before the break, they took it with Lewis Francis converting a Kurt Smith pass with the outside of his foot.

Romford celebrate the opening goal from Lewis Francis.

Five minutes after the interval Boro doubled their lead; Robbie Norris’s shot took a wicked deflection to beat the home ‘keeper. A third goal from the head of Tom Richardson and a scrambled effort from the same player put the result beyond doubt; Abs Seymour’s strike for the fifth was the icing on the cake.

Tom Richardson is congratulated on his second goal of the game.

So for once it was a comfortable passage in the Cup and the post match refreshments and journey home were all the sweeter for it, along with the prospect of a cheque for nineteen hundred pounds of course! Next up for Boro in the Cup is an away tie against Grays Athletic.

Boro skipper Paul Clayton after a very satisfactory 90 minutes.

 One league up from Boro, Grays will be favourites for that match but they, like Romford, will remember the day in 1994 (when the gulf between the two clubs was much greater) and Romford surprised everyone by winning by the odd goal in seven. A repeat next week would be very nice; the fact that we may dream of it is part of the magic of the Cup.