Surplus To Requirements

The Football Association's Strategic Plan, covering 2011-15, states that one of the FA's goals is to  "protect and build The FA Cup’s reputation as the greatest domestic cup competition in the world," yet the game's governing body are currently debating whether to implement changes to the competition that do quite the opposite. The FA are negotiating with a tiny proportion of the FA Cup's entrants to make alterations that would radically change the nature of the competition and damage its character and iconic nature. It may be clichéd, but just as the giantkilling is such a huge attraction of the FA Cup, so is earning a replay against all odds. Replacing multiple replays with penalties if necessary in the second game made sense, even for traditionalists, removing replays altogether is a step too far. I cannot see how turning the FA Cup into a midweek competition, when Champions League and Europa League dates already congest those days during the latter half of the season for Premier League sides, helps.

Multiple replays (it took six games to separate Oxford City and Alvechurch in 1971) are a thing of the past. Picture: Oxford Mail.

This season 736 teams entered the FA Cup, the views of 716 of those are being put to one side while the FA debate with the twenty Premier League sides how they can make the FA Cup less of a burden for them. While the current format is likely to remain in place until the TV deal with the BBC expires in 2019, thereafter there is a very real prospect that the competition may see replays abolished and ties played in midweek rather than at weekends. The reasoning behind the change is to alleviate the fixture congestion that is perceived as a barrier to English teams succeeding in European competitions and detrimental to the success of the national team. That seems a somewhat disingenuous point of view. You cannot put England's lack of success at World Cup and Euro Finals tournaments down to West Bromwich Albion having to go to Peterborough United in an FA Cup Fourth Round Replay this season and quite how Manchester United's failure to qualify for the knock out stages of the Champions League can be laid at the door of a competition that they didn't enter until after their elimination from the bloated successor to the European Cup is beyond me.

The FA's Strategic Plan states that they will "protect and build the FA Cup's reputation."

Of England's Champions League entrants last season, only two required FA Cup replays and one of those sides, Liverpool, had already failed to qualify for the Champions League knock-out stage by the time they needed an extra game to get past Bolton Wanderers. Meanwhile in Spain and Italy the domestic cup competitions are played over two legs in every round. Barcelona won the Champions League despite playing 60 games in all competitions (Lionel Messi played in 56 of them) while Chelsea played 54 games in all competitions  (none of which were FA Cup replays) and not one player started more than 38 of those games.  Barcelona won La Liga, the Champions League and their domestic cup competition, the Copa del Rey in which they played nine games, one more than is necessary for a Premier League team to play to win the FA Cup. It is difficult to ascribe Chelsea's failure to win the Champions League to the two FA Cup ties they played last season (neither of which were replays).

If we are looking for reasons for England's failure then perhaps the surfeit of overseas players in the Premier League might be a better place to start. If we consider English teams failing in Europe then perhaps a more important factor might be the strength of their opponents, but never forget that English teams have won the European Cup/Champions League on twelve occasions, second only to Spanish sides, and eight English teams have taken part in the last eleven finals. Not, I would argue, a poor record and certainly one which would unlikely to be improved by abolishing FA Cup replays. Premier League teams routinely field teams in the FA Cup made up of second string and youth team players anyway (a policy that rather undermines their assertion that the FA Cup is detrimental to English teams progress in Europe), but it remains an iconic competition that is definitely now more highly regarded by clubs below the Championship than it is by the top forty four clubs in English football.

Romford play St Margaretsbury in last season's FA Cup, a competition that remains hugely important to non-League teams. 

Returning to the FA's Strategic Plan, the organisation set great store in their being able to deliver their goals by "Listening to football fans." Not, presumably on the occasion of the FA Cup tie between Exeter City and Liverpool, switched to a Friday night for television and resulting in Liverpool supporters finding that the last train home departed Exeter before kick-off. The complaints of the travelling Liverpool fans was brushed aside by broadcasters on the basis that it was  " no different to their visits to Swansea on a Monday night in the Premier League and a Wednesday trip to Southampton in the League Cup, both of which they have done in the last 12 months." So that's all right then, having been thoroughly inconvenienced twice, by the third time they ought to be used to it. Liverpool rewarded their travelling fans by fielding a woefully under strength side that required a replay to despatch their lower league opponents. Not that this would have made any difference to their Europa League aspirations as they fielded an equally weakened team in the replay.

There is no doubt that Premier League clubs are losing interest in the FA Cup, as Manchester City showed last weekend at Chelsea. Using the excuse of a midweek trip to Kiev in the Champions League,  they fielded a team containing six teenagers and five debutants. Winning the FA Cup used to be an end in itself, now it is not much more than a route into the rightly much maligned Europa League and while Arsenal picked up £3.3 million for winning the FA Cup last season, this was a pittance compared with the €36.38 million (£28.38 million) they accrued for reaching the last sixteen of the Champions League. Financially Premier League clubs do not need the FA Cup. Tinkering with the prize pot for the FA Cup would make no difference to the big clubs and would probably result in reduced prize money for the earlier rounds where clubs below the Football League really need the money.

The top clubs in Europe have been discussing changes to the format of the Champions League and Europa League, and while they deny it, rumour has it that they want to strengthen the stranglehold the tops clubs have by denying a place to even the champions of countries like Scotland and in effect creating a European League. A permanent place in the Champions League for clubs like Arsenal, Chelsea and the Manchester clubs might make even the Premier League a secondary consideration. A Champions League place for the FA Cup winners might be sufficient incentive for clubs to start taking the competition seriously, but if guaranteed or wild card places in the Champions League for the top clubs unable to qualify on merit become a reality (as has been mooted by Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu) then the interest Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool et al show in the FA Cup is likely to wane still further.

With the prospect of FA Cup replays being abolished and the competition possibly being shunted into midweek, with Premier League clubs taking less interest in the competition and the views of supporters being ignored, can the day be far off when the oldest knock out competition in football is deemed surplus to requirements?

A Midland Odyssey - Part Six - The Midas Touch

It is difficult now to remember what for many people work was like before personal computers became ubiquitous, but less than twenty years ago many people went through their working day without having to use one. Oh yes, dumb terminals had been part of our working lives for many years, the famed Burroughs TC500, the Nixdorf terminal, and for me, having moved into international banking, IBM terminals to access payment and the wholesale banking systems. Having spent some time on admin I'd also been exposed to early incarnations of Windows, but working on  the queries team in Multicurrency Payments Department (MPD) and sharing one PC between thirteen of us (used fitfully to log stats and produce the odd letter), paper still ruled supreme.

Nixdorf terminal

The "green screen" 

MPD comprised three sections[1]. Ref 18, Sterling Payments (payments in GBP within the UK and incoming from overseas), Ref 24, Currency Disposals (payments in any currency within the UK and from overseas) and Ref 52, Outward Payments (payments in any currency, including GBP, going overseas) - which was where I worked. Everything was done on paper in Ref 52. Payment instructions came in from branches on Telegraphic Transfer or Mail Transfer forms, payments from other banks arrived by SWIFT [2]or telex and were printed and re-input manually and all queries involved writing out vouchers or SWIFT messages which were then entered into the relevant systems by a separate team. On average we must have had four or five hundred live files on the go (and thousands that were closed), all represented by paper, at various stages in the process of being prepared, worked on or waiting to be filed. Finding one you wanted among these could be a very time consuming and frustrating process (a phone call from a branch or customer asking for the current state of play on a particular query could often result in a protracted search, often fruitless). A solution was needed and so in 1996 (ish, I'm a bit hazy on dates this far on) The Midas Project was conceived.

Midas (it's not an acronym, just a name) was a project comprising IT staff and people from the business, some who became involved in the build and some, like me, who acted as subject matter experts and testers. Initially I joined the team on a six month secondment; somehow I never really went back to MPD and at some time during the following six years I ended up as full time member of the team.  It was a completely different world from the one I was used to. Gone were the daily deadlines (hourly even) and instead there were deadlines of weeks or even months to complete certain tasks. It was exciting, rewarding, stressful and baffling at times and one thing I learned was that you had to be flexible, especially over working hours. Early mornings, late nights, weekend working and all nighters came with the territory, especially in the run up to a software release or during contingency testing.

Midas Team cartoon, courtesy of Mus Huseyin

To build a computer system that could replicate the manual processes in place at the time the first requirement was to define the existing processes. This meant mapping out somewhere in the region of twenty query types[3] then designing workflows requiring users answering a series of questions and generating messages or accounting entries or payments based on the answers. Generating SWIFT messages to other banks systemically was relatively straightforward; creating accounting or payments not so. Initially the best we could do was generate more paper that had to be input into the appropriate systems; generating entries and payments directly to those systems was something that came along many years later. Naturally we had to have a query type for those that didn't readily fit into the usual pigeon holes; we called it Miscellaneous (original, eh?) and it had no workflow attached, it had to be worked in what we called "free format." This resulted in a conversation with a department manager which sort of foresaw the move towards proceduralising everything and devaluing common sense, expertise and experience. " How," I was asked, “does the user know how to resolve these queries?” I replied that they had to use their experience and judgement. “Oh dear,” came the response, “we can’t have that.” The movement towards procedures and guidelines outweighing experience and expertise had started.

I'm middle, right in this one.

While we now take for granted the PC, the mouse, copy and paste and toggling between windows, for the average query clerk in MPD in 1997 (the year Midas went live), these were a mystery. Believe it or not, courses had to be run to teach people about "point and click" and navigating on screen menus, and for some this came far from naturally. When it came to teaching the department's staff how to use the system we had built I was in for a shock as our manager dispensed with the services of the two people originally tasked with planning and delivering the training and asked me and my colleague Fakhra Brisby to take it over less than a week before the first session. We cobbled something together and it seemed to go down quite well, although how much of it was of any use and how much sank in, I'm not sure.

Midas went live in October 1997 and it is safe to say there were some issues at first. It was a complete culture shock for everyone; inevitably most people hated it. Some bits of it worked better than others and some coding changes and software releases were necessary to address some of the problems. Probably the best thing you could say about it was that it was no longer possible for files to go missing. But considering our lack of experience or a benchmark to measure ourselves by, it went rather better than we actually thought at the time, so much so that Midas was still going strong when I left the bank in 2012 (and as far as I know, still is), resisting attempts to replace it with anything else. The fact that it is now nearly twenty years old and runs on software ten years older says something creditable about it I suppose.

Working on Midas was one of the most satisfying things I did in HSBC, helped to no small degree by working with some great people, like Gavin Warner, Paul Mills, Steve Tucker, Steve Giles, Gary Cook, Mus Huseyin, the late Ron D'Castro and Raj Soni, to name but a handful of them (if I carry on this will be like an Oscar acceptance speech).

If you now spend your working day in front of a computer you take it for granted, but just think, a little over twenty years ago you would have been working in an office where copy probably required carbon paper and paste had something to do with glue.

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[1] Technically I suppose there was a fourth, Ref 62, Drafts, but somehow they were on the periphery.

[2] SWIFT - Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication see, www.swift.com

[3] Typical queries included Beneficiary Claims Non-Receipt, Unable to Apply Credit, Unable to Apply Debit, Amendment (of payment).

The Chinese Way

When Wayne Rooney retires from professional football it is unlikely that he will be writing any letters to the great and the good begging for work or money. Yet one of his predecessors in an England shirt was reduced to that as recently as 1970 when Tommy Lawton wrote to Chelsea director and film star Richard Attenborough, asking for a loan or a job. Lawton[1], whose career saw him score 231 goals while playing for Everton, Chelsea and Arsenal among others and who scored 22 goals in 23 England games, was by then trying to make ends meet in the furniture trade. When Lawton retired in 1956, the maximum wage for a professional footballer was fixed at £15 and it was not until 1961 that the ceiling, by then £20, was abolished. Too late for Lawton and a whole generation of top class players who extended their careers after they were no longer able to play at the highest level by signing for Southern League clubs like Romford who at various times were able to field such famous names as Ted Ditchburn, Trevor Ford and Malcolm Allison.

Tommy Lawton during his Arsenal days. Picture: Arsenal FC

While Malcolm Allison went into coaching and television, many retired players of his era, most in fact, had to find work outside the game. Ditchburn ran a successful sports shop in Romford and many of his contemporaries went into various other careers, becoming publicans or salesmen and the like. Common among them was the necessity to find paid employment after their playing days were over and while top players are now often sought after for jobs in the media, a lot do not have the pressing need to find a well paid job to maintain their lifestyles. And if today's top players ever feel the need to increase their earnings while they are still playing, there are always clubs somewhere in the world, sometimes in unlikely places, willing to give them another payday. At one time it was Italian clubs who represented the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Spain has always been another country where untold riches could be had by the top players and of course with sponsorship and Sky TV money the English Premier League has in recent years been a big draw for world class players. But now there is a new kid on the block, an unlikely one perhaps, but one which is attracting some big names and paying big money for them, and that is China.

Romford FC 1961 featuring Ted Ditchburn, Trevor Ford and Malcolm Allison.

Football the Chinese way has seen Chinese Super League side Jiangsu Suning pay a record £38 million for Alex Teixeira (who preferred them over Liverpool when he left Shaktar Dontetsk) and  Guangzhou Evergrande have signed Atletico Madrid’s Jackson Martinez for £31million, while former Lille and Arsenal forward Gervinho recently joined Hebei China Fortune from Roma for £13.7m. Ex Chelsea and Newcastle forward Demba Ba signed for Shanghai Shenhua for £9 million from Besiktas and Chelsea offloaded Ramires to Jiangsu Suning for £25 million. Apart from the players, Chinese clubs have also been able to attract top managers like Luiz Felipe Scolari (Guangzhou Evergrande) and Sven-Goran Eriksson (Shanghai SIPG). So while the Chinese economy may have hit the buffers in recent months there still seems to be plenty of money sloshing about, in football anyway. Take Hebei China Fortune, for instance. Formed only five years ago, they have been able to splash out £13 million on Gervinho and have also paid big money for the Brazilian, Edu thanks to their backing from real estate developers China Fortune Land Development, a company worth US$12.7 billion.

Alex Teixeira. Picture: Evening Standard

So why, with all that apparent wealth in Chinese football, did Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announce a £3 million grant to grassroots football in the country last September? I confess that the story passed me by at the time, but it has gained more publicity since the recent transfer window saw Chinese clubs start waving their cheque books. Back in September, Osborne said "Grassroots football plays an instrumental role in UK life, and it is brilliant to be able to spread that to China. This fantastic scheme which will bring new opportunities to young people across China will also help bring increased awareness and investment into the UK football sector." Osborne is right; grassroots football is important in the UK, so rather than invest £3 million in the game in country five thousand miles away and where the game is already apparently very wealthy, why not invest the money here?

And if Chinese clubs can spend up to £38 million on a single player, can they not invest their own money in their domestic grassroots game? Meanwhile in England, grassroots football has seen player numbers fall, clubs disband, facilities and pitches fall into disrepair or be closed down and non-League clubs hit recently by appalling weather which resulted in non-League clubs  Ramsbottom United and Tadcaster Albion being flooded out of their grounds. Yes, there is money invested in grassroots football by the Football Association, last August they announced plans to spend £260 million in the next four years on what FA chief executive Martin Glenn said at the time would target "facilities, coaching, participation and developing the football workforce." To put that figure into perspective, Premier League clubs spent £859.25 million on transfers in the summer and a further £185 million in January.

Tadcaster Albion's flooded ground. Picture: Andy Charlesworth.

In comparison with the FA's £260 million grant and with the news that the Premier League will invest “at least £1billion” of its £5.1billion television revenue for 2016-17 to 2018-19 on grass-roots football and the like, the £3 million that Osborne is giving to China is small beer and perhaps it is churlish to begrudge it, given Osborne's justification of the spend, that it is "just one example of the ways we can work together with China to benefit both our nations." Except of course that the aim of increasing Chinese awareness of football in the UK inevitably means awareness of the Premier League and is going to be of very little benefit to any part of the game outside the top flight. As far as I can see, neither Ramsbottom United nor Tadcaster Albion received any financial help from the football bodies nor the government in putting right the storm damage to their grounds and one has to question exactly how effectively these large sums of money are being spent sometimes.

The Football Association's investment is scarcely new money anyway; they already spend £50 million on grassroots football annually with very little evidence of tangible benefit given the fact that it continues to decline. Unless at some point in the next few years there is feedback provided on how the FA's £260 million and the Premier League's £1 billion has been spent, with proof that these funds have resulted in clear and sustainable benefits, and confirmation that the £3 million lobbed in China's direction has been of benefit to the English game I am somewhat cynical as to how effectively these monies are being spent. Money flowing from China into English football is only likely to benefit the very top clubs anyway, as the purchase of a 13% stake in Manchester City by China Media Capital Holdings (CMC) and Citic Capital at a cost of US$400 million tends to prove. Certainly I cannot see Chinese entrepreneurs and companies queuing to help Ramsbottom United and Tadcaster Albion repair their flooded grounds.

This is where money is needed...

...this is where it goes. Picture: Manchester City FC.

Given the hand to mouth existence of many clubs outside the top flight of English football, it won't be ex-players like Tommy Lawton writing begging letters in future, more likely it will be clubs; perhaps they should start mugging up on their Mandarin.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Lawton

Lies, Damned Lies...and Photoshop

They say the camera cannot lie. Regardless whether or not this was originally meant literally or has always been laced with irony, now more than ever it is clearly a falsehood, never more so than with the almost ubiquitous use of Photoshop. We have become used to seeing magazines, movie posters and billboards featuring film stars, models and celebrities whose images have been Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives and these sort of images seem to take up a significant portion of our Facebook News Feed too.

The picture on the left won a photography competition run by Nikon, but was subsequently shown to be an example of Photoshopping. Picture: Facebook.

There is one that has been doing the rounds for a while and which popped up again recently that purports to show a CCTV camera outside a house where George Orwell once lived. Oh, the irony, the post proclaims, a surveillance camera outside the one time home of an author whose most famous work features the all seeing eye of Big Brother. Being somewhat sceptical about the nature of this, I reverse Googled it[1], and guess what? Yes, the house pops up on Google (it's on the Portobello Road in Notting Hill) but if you look at Street View, there is no CCTV camera. There may be some CCTV cameras in the area, but the nearest is apparently about 200 yards away.

This picture has been doing the rounds on Facebook. 

Same house, sans CCTV camera courtesy of Google Street View.

Apart from the blatant Photoshopping of images to introduce imaginary CCTV cameras, another fairly common sight on Facebook is the picture with a caption making some outrageous claim, like the one below.

Not quite the whole truth...

Again, a quick check searching on Google for the image reveals that this incident has been somewhat exaggerated. The school, in Maldon, Essex, did indeed prohibit the pupil wearing the wristband, but solely because it violated the school's dress code, which says that children "are not allowed to wear jewellery, and that includes wristbands, for health and safety reasons because they could get caught." Whether you agree with that or think it is "health and safety gone mad" is a completely different matter from the fact that they did not ban it being worn in case it offended Muslims.

Similarly, the story that Tesco refused to serve a soldier in uniform for fear of offending Muslim customers is another hoax.

...anything but the truth.

Tesco were sufficiently concerned to issue a denial, pointing out that they don't even have a store in Oak Street, London. In actual fact, if you check your A-Z or Google Maps, you will find that in the whole of London there is only one road called Oak Street, it's in Romford and there is no Tesco there.

If your Facebook News Feed is anything like mine, I've no doubt you also come across stories from time to time warning of scams, carjackings, frauds and other nefarious goings on. You probably saw the story that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was giving away millions of dollars to random Facebook users. This one was perhaps too big for anyone to swallow and it was quickly debunked, but other stories, stories that have more credence but which are essentially untrue, spread through social media with incredible speed and spread; here are a few I have seen recently.

There's the one about the rat urine for a start. The story alleges that a family (unnamed) on a picnic (location not disclosed) fell ill after drinking from soft drink cans contaminated when rodents urinated on the lids and that one of them died from Leptospirosis, a potentially fatal illness contracted by exposure to the urine of diseased animals. This story began circulating in 1998 and while it is probably prudent to give a soft drinks can a clean before drinking directly from it, there is no evidence that the events described in the story have ever happened.

Likewise there is the tale of a lady being approached by a man in a shopping centre car park and being asked if they would like to sample some perfume, perfume which turns out to be some substance that induces immediate unconsciousness resulting in the victim being robbed. Now this story dates back to 1999, when a woman in Alabama claims to have been the victim of a robbery that was perpetrated in this manner. Toxicology tests on the victim found no trace of any drugs and there are no credible reports of people being robbed in this manner. Outside the pages of fiction it is unlikely that an airborne drug, in the outdoors, could immediately incapacitate someone, well not without similarly incapacitating the person delivering it..unless they were wearing a gas mask, which might provoke some suspicion on the part of the victim, don't you think?

Then there is the story of the woman who is driving along when she is pulled over by what she initially assumes is an unmarked police car. Concerned that this may be a carjacking, the woman attempts to call the police using her mobile phone, but has no signal. Quickly, she dials 112 and is connected to the police, who rapidly surround her and the other car; the man in the unmarked car, the story alleges, is a convicted rapist. This story has been debunked by Dorset police (the incident described was supposed to have happened in Dorset)[2] and while it is true that calling 112 (or 999) from your mobile will connect to any available network if your provider's network is not available, if there are no networks available at all, then there's no way of making the call.

Some stories do have a grain of truth, however. But even these suggest that a single incident, that may have happened many years ago, is still occurring regularly. Take the tale of the courier and the unexpected gift. This states that the victim receives a phone call from a courier company telling them that a package is being delivered for which they have to sign. Shortly afterwards a courier arrives with a basket of flowers and a bottle of wine, but because alcohol is involved and the courier must prove delivery to an adult of legal drinking age, a small credit card payment is required. The courier produces a Chip and Pin device, takes a nominal payment and hey presto, the victim's card is cloned and their bank account emptied. This actually happened to a number of people in Sydney, Australia in 2008 and subsequently a man named David Hennessey was charged with stealing A$30,000 from various local residents. Since then no similar events have been reported but the story continues to circulate, with various other Australian cities, together with cities in Canada and Asia being named as locations for comparable frauds, so while the warning may have had some validity eight years ago, its continued repetition makes it outdated and redundant.

Finally, there's the tale of Dorval, a suburb of Montreal, where in 2015, the mayor is supposed to have refused to remove pork from the menu in school cafeterias despite demands from Muslim parents to do so. This is just a subtly altered version of a similar story set in Belgium that is equally untrue. The city of Dorval denied such claims on their website and the mayor of the town of Ath in Belgium was moved to make a similar denial  when the story about his town began circulating in 2013. Neither mayor ever received any such requests to remove pork from school canteen menus.

From www.ville.dorval.qc.ca

Apart from the obvious harm and distress that urban myths like these spread when they get shared and start to become widely believed, they can be also like the boy who cried wolf, and real warnings may be dismissed. Sometimes it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction, after all so much information on the internet gets plagiarised and checking for the veracity of a story can be tricky; just because two apparently independent websites report the same story doesn't make it true. Too often one site may publish a story based on false information on another site without enough checking taking place.

They say that the only thing you should believe in a newspaper is the date, and that you should check that first. Same goes for the internet.

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[1] If you've not done this, right click on the image and click "Search Google for image."

[2] http://www.dorset.police.uk/default.aspx?page=1417