The Three R's

Households in the UK throw away 7.3million tonnes of food every year, according to figures from The Food Foundation.[1] That would be scandalous even if the same report did not then go on to state that there are 8.4million people living in UK households who reported having insufficient food in 2014. Add to these figures the amount of perfectly edible food grown and harvested by farmers but rejected by supermarkets on aesthetic grounds (knobbly carrots, misshapen parsnips, and the like) and it is clear that something is wrong.

These vegetables failed to win the supermarket beauty contest and were discarded. Picture: BBC

We used to think of The Three R's as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now, they are just as commonly reduce, reuse, and recycle, and when it comes to reducing waste, we are implored to buy and use less. If we are throwing out over seven million tonnes of food each year, then plainly that message is not getting through. Clearly, one reason we throw out so much food is that we buy more than we can eat and any time I am in a supermarket I see shoppers with trolleys piled high with food that I doubt will all get consumed, but the supermarkets do little to discourage food waste. There are the multibuy offer and the Buy One, Get One Free (BOGOF) deals, which encourage consumers to buy more than they need or can use on the spurious premise that they are getting a bargain.

And it isn't getting any better. ASDA have provoked much criticism recently following their decision to remove loose fruit and vegetables from some of their stores, meaning that if a customer wants to buy carrots, they will have to buy a 500gram bag rather than one of two of them loose, if that is all they want. ASDA's rationale for this was, "After analysing customer buying habits we decided to trial removing some loose produce items from our stores where our research showed customers preferred buying in packs." Whether that is true or not - and it may be that customers prefer to buy packs either because they are too lazy to bag up some loose fruit and veg, or the bagged product is all that is available - it does not help reduce waste, nor does it help the customer who only wants one carrot, or one apple.

ASDA's decision to discontinue selling loose vegetables provoked an inevitable backlash on social media.

 

All of that additional, superfluous packaging is one of the reasons why we have four wheelie bins by our back door, not just the single dustbin that my parents had years ago. I will accept that a lot of what we throw away gets recycled, although that still does not address the fact that a lot of what we recycle we did not need in the first place. Buy any sort of domestic item,  be it a sofa or a dishwasher, a nest of tables or an oven, and it all comes swathed in layers and layers of polystyrene, bubble wrap, cardboard and paper. It didn't used to be like this.

Annoyingly, there is so much that we buy that is disposable that cannot be recycled. Coffee cups, soft drinks bottles and tubes of crisps are just three items that have been in the news because of the issues with recycling. Take-away coffee cups are notorious, because while many people will put them in the recycling, they are not recyclable - and we throw away 2.5billion every year, or 5,000 every minute, if you prefer. Our take-away cups might be made from card, but they are fused with polyethylene, a material that cannot be removed at a recycling plant. And it isn't even as if the cups are made from recycled material, the design requires them to be made from virgin paper pulp. What makes matters worse is that some coffee shops - an example would be one of my local Starbucks - now serve all drinks, whether you consume them in-store or not, in take-away cups, presumably to cut down on their washing up.

Meanwhile, Lucozade bottles cannot be recycled as the bottle is covered in a polymer shrink wrap, and Pringles cartons are made from cardboard but have a metal lining, metal base, foil and paper strip and plastic lid. As Simon Ellin, chief executive of trade body the Recycling Association, said  "What idiot designed this in terms of recyclability?" Empty Pringles cartons can be reused in many innovative ways, for storage in particular, so better reuse than attempting to recycle, I think.

Recycling is not as straight-forward as one would hope even when an item is supposedly 100% recyclable anyway. We all will have experience the recycling instructions on food containers in particular that may mean the cardboard sleeve goes in the recycling but other bits of the packaging don't, and some people have fallen foul of local council restrictions when they move from an area where an item is recyclable to an area where it isn't. Yoghurt pots are a particular culprit, apparently, being recyclable in some boroughs, but not in others. When it comes to things like batteries, print cartridges and light bulbs - especially the new style, low-energy bulbs - then you can neither through them out in the general waste, nor put them in the recycling. Which is where I had a bit of a problem last week.

Neither cheap nor easy to dispose of, low energy bulbs are widely disliked.

On Monday of last week (15th May) I took some batteries and light bulbs to recycle at my local Tesco store at the multi-purpose recycling unit. The batteries went straight through the unit and rolled out onto the floor. The same happened with the light bulbs, which of course smashed. Apart from the obvious hazard presented by shards of broken glass, there is also the small matter of the various substances such as mercury, lead, cadmium or sodium these bulbs contain and which are potentially hazardous and damaging to the environment. I went to Customer Services and reported it: I was told that it would be dealt with. Two days later I went back to Tesco, and being curious, checked to see if the debris had been cleared - it hadn't so I reported it again. Come Friday, when I next went to the store, it still had not been cleared up, so I reported it again. Nor had it been cleared up on the next day, by when I had given up on the in-store Customer Services, and reported it online, which proved effective, even if it was over a week after I first reported the matter in the shop before the batteries and broken bulbs had been removed.

Under the recycling bin, something nasty stirred.

I read somewhere - typically, I cannot now remember where - that when asked, more people claim to conscientiously recycle than actually do, and when there are complicated Do's and Don'ts about what can and cannot be recycled, when there are obstacles placed in our way, or - as I found at Tesco - when the recycling experience is frustrating - people are discouraged from doing so.

But should we do all we can to Reuse, Recycle and Reduce? Unequivocally yes, even -or perhaps especially - if it takes a bit of effort to do so.

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[1] See http://foodfoundation.org.uk/too-poor-to-eat-8-4-million-struggling-to-afford-to-eat-in-the-uk/

An Unlikely Hat-trick

On the face of it, my Father would have struck many people as being a typical Labour voter. For most of his life, he lived in council houses or flats. He had a series of insecure, not very well paid jobs, and for many years he had to scrimp, save, and make do just to make ends meet. He would have been a prime candidate to be labelled one of the JAM's (just about managing), as six million families in Britain on middle to low incomes have now been dubbed, and he certainly would have been one of the "many, not the few," at whom the Labour Party have aimed their manifesto for the upcoming election.  Yet despite that, he usually voted Conservative. And he did so because he said that he was generally better off under the Tories than under a Labour government.

Jeremy Corbyn launches Labour's manifesto.

                                                                                                                                                
After last year's EU referendum, Leave voters in general - and the older ones in particular - were dubbed stubborn, selfish, or just plain stupid, for having voted the way they did, for not considering future generations, who, said the Remain enthusiasts, had the most to lose from Brexit. The implication was that for some people, altruism ought to be the main driver in determining where to put your cross on the ballot paper. But altruism doesn't pay the rent or put food on the table - it is difficult to selflessly vote for 'jam tomorrow' - particularly a tomorrow you aren't going to see - when you already lack bread on which to put this hypothetical jam. (Enough! Stop torturing that poor metaphor! - Ed.)

So, if he were still alive, would my Dad vote Labour this year? From a cursory glance at the key election pledges in the party's manifesto, there are some things he probably would have admired. Guaranteeing the so-called 'triple lock' on pensions, increasing the minimum wage, doing away with zero-hours contracts, abolishing tuition fees, increased funding for the NHS, building one million new homes, recruiting ten thousand more police officers - all measures against which it would be churlish to argue. The creation of the NHS was one of this country's greatest achievements, and preserving it remains critical to the well-being of this nation, but while the Labour party maintain that the NHS is not safe in Tory hands, the Labour party have not always covered themselves in glory in their management of it either. Tony Blair's famed 1997 claim that there were "24 hours to save the NHS" clearly did not work out too well, and it's no use solely blaming the Tories for the current state of the NHS considering that Labour were in power for the majority of the period since.

Tony Blair's efforts to save the NHS were not entirely well received.

And who would argue against the idea of ten-thousand extra policemen? Not me, for one. As long as Diane Abbott is nowhere near the implementation of such a plan - especially the budgeting. Abbott's cringe-making radio appearance in which she 'misspoke' and initially claimed that the cost of such an increase in police numbers would be £30 per head, per year, has been matched by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell being unable to quote the figure for the national deficit and Shadow Education spokeswoman Angela Rayner unable to say how many primary school pupils would benefit from Labour's proposed reduction in class sizes. It bodes ill that three potential cabinet ministers in a possible Labour administration are so poorly briefed on their specialist subjects.

John McDonnell's inexact grasp of the size of the national deficit would fill few with any confidence about his suitability to be Chancellor.

Capping energy bills - first proposed by then Labour leader Ed Miliband at the last election - gets another airing, and is such a universally popular scheme that the Tories seem likely to appropriate it for their own manifesto. Capping energy bills is clearly easier if the energy providers are brought back into public ownership, as Labour propose doing with the creation of at least one publicly owned energy company in every region of the UK. But - and this is a question that surfaces time and again when looking at Labour's pledges - where is the money coming from?

The money would, it seems, come chiefly from increasing tax - 'tax and spend' being a way of life with Labour - and so we see proposals to increase income tax to 45p for anyone earning over £80,000 and 50p for those whose incomes exceed £123,000. Presumably, anyone on £123,000 would be deemed wealthy enough to afford such an increase, although oddly enough Jeremy Corbyn (annual salary £137,000) claimed, in an ITV interview, that he is not wealthy. Further income would be generated by a levy on what Labour call 'excessive' salaries - 2.5% on earnings over £330,000 and 5% on those over £500,000. And then there is the proposed 20:1 limit on the gap between the lowest and highest paid workers in companies given Government contracts.[1] In fairness, if that does come to pass, one hopes that a Labour administration would lead by example and immediately implement this policy in national and local government, and in all nationalised industries.

Meanwhile, Labour propose that corporation tax be increased to 26%, predicting a £19.4billion increase in revenue, and that further revenue would be generated from giving HMRC extra powers to chase individuals and corporations who avoid tax, a measure which all of us who have no choice but to pay our fair whack through PAYE would applaud.

There are, however a few problems. Whatever latter day equivalent of a fag packet that Labour's income and expenditure calculations were scrawled on is as likely to be as reliable as those of previous administrations, that is to say, the result of much guesswork and over-optimism. It might be fully costed, but can it be fully funded? Time will tell (well, it might depending on the outcome of 8th June), but their pledge to renationalise the railways as existing franchises expire (probably just as well we voted for Brexit, as this would be so much more difficult if we remained in the EU) and bring energy and water companies into public ownership would be hideously expensive. Those of us who remember the nationalised railways, which were chronically underfunded, inefficient, and beset with labour-relation issues, would suggest that the belief that renationalisation would be an improvement is a triumph of hope over experience. Labour's proposed strengthening of trade union power also suggests a return to the days when industrial action on the railways was often more regular than the trains themselves.

A common sight for commuters on strike-hit Southern Rail. Coming to a station near you soon, in the event of a Labour victory on 8th June.

The further left in the Labour party you go - to the point where people can only see the Conservatives as 'the nasty party,' and cannot utter the word 'Tory' without the suffix, 'scum' - this manifesto is presumably being greeted with great enthusiasm. For the more moderate, comparisons with Michael Foot's 1983 election manifesto - dubbed 'the longest suicide note in history' - abound.[2]  For anyone to the right of Labour, it does nothing to stop perpetuating the belief that Labour policy is driven by spite and envy, that raising standards for the underprivileged must always be accompanied by penalising the well off - as Gore Vidal said, " It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

New hope? No hope!

Many people will see the Labour manifesto as proof that come June 8th, Theresa May will be returned to power and with a significantly increased majority. But as Brexit and Trump have proved, the polls are not to be trusted. A Corbyn victory would complete an unlikely - but not impossible - hat-trick. I still don't think that my Dad would vote Labour, though.

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[1] Charles Woodburn, chief executive of BAE systems, who have many government contracts, has a basic salary of £875,000 - with bonuses etc, his pay is said to be in the region of £3million per annum. To comply with Labour's proposal, the minimum salary within BAE would need to be £150,000, or else Mr Woodburn would need to take a pay cut of around £2.5million based on the current average UK annual salary of  £27,600

[2] Interestingly, apart from calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher personal taxation for the rich, , abolition of the House of Lords, and the re-nationalisation of recently privatised industries like British Telecom, British Aerospace, and the British Shipbuilders Corporation, the 1983 Labour manifesto also called for withdrawal from the EU, or European Economic Community (EEC) as it was then known.

A Good Hate

Once upon a time the morning commute - by train, or bus, or by tube - would be full of people reading newspapers. There might be the odd rebel gazing out of the window, or reading a book, or perhaps updating their diary, but everyone else was reading a newspaper. And normally, the full range of newspapers was represented - from The Times to the Daily Express; from the Daily Telegraph to The Sun, and with the occasional Financial Times thrown in for some colour.

And you could tell who was who, and their social standing, by the newspaper they read, as was so eloquently put by the (fictional) PM, Jim Hacker in a 1986 episode of Yes, Prime Minister:

"Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."[1]

Today your average tube or train carriage, or bus, is filled with commuters tapping at lap-top keyboards, listening to their iPods, or scrolling through social media feeds on their mobile phones, and of those who are reading newspapers, the majority will be reading a free-sheet like Metro or The Evening Standard. Newspaper sales have declined significantly in Britain, as this graph shows:

A factor in the decline in newspaper readership has inevitably been the explosive growth of the internet, and mobile internet usage, with the younger generation embracing that technology at the expense of reading newspapers. When I started work and began commuting, people of my age read newspapers much more than they seem to now. I have no doubt that school teachers still implore their students to read 'a quality newspaper' (by which they generally mean The Times or Daily Telegraph) just as much as they did when I was young, but I bet that very few do. To be fair, many of us didn't when I was at school, we mostly read whatever our parents read, which in my case was The Daily Mirror. These days, with newspaper readership in such decline, many teenagers quite likely rarely see a paper at home, let alone read one.

Britain's most popular newspapers in print, with twelve and ten million monthly readers respectively, are The Sun and the Daily Mail. Contrarily, this country's two most unpopular newspapers - by which I mean the papers held in the lowest esteem - are The Sun and the Daily Mail. The Sun, detested  on Merseyside since its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, has made itself even more unpopular with the piece written by Kelvin McKenzie about Ross Barkley and has found itself banned by both Liverpool and Everton football clubs. The disapproval in which the newspaper is held resulted in the then Labour leader Ed Miliband having to apologise for having his picture taken with a copy of a special edition that the paper produced in 2014 to mark England's World Cup campaign. Now whatever one may think of The Sun, it remains a legitimate part of the mainstream media and for a politician to have felt he had to apologise for any sort of association with it is remarkable, especially when one considers its position as the top selling printed paper. As many people have remarked, it is extraordinary how well The Sun sells considering that no one will admit to reading it.

A lot of people are not prepared to admit to reading the Daily Mail, either - well, not unless they want some abuse lobbed in their direction - despite its huge readership. According to a YouGov poll, it is thought of as bigoted, right-wing (needing to point this out is a bit like having to describe water as being wet), biased, nasty, and misleading by its detractors. Meanwhile, its supporters think it is in touch with ordinary people, interesting, informative, and prepared to stand up for ordinary people. It is suggestive that 'ordinary people' get two mentions among the paper's positive points, and one wonders whether these ordinary people find that the Mail reflects their own views or whether it leads and guides them. I suspect that for many people, the Mail's position merely validates their own. Again, it is remarkable how many people, who claim they never read the Mail, are able to quote chapter and verse on what it has written, which they subsequently find so offensive.

Reality TV stars and WAGS -
the staple of The Sidebar of Shame

The Daily Mail sells in the region of 1.4million copies per day, and when one factors in the received wisdom that says that the average number of readers of a printed paper is six, that's over six million readers per day, or nearly ten percent of the population. But where the Mail really scores is in its online readership, with dailymail.co.uk getting over ten million visits per day, and receiving 240million visitors globally each month, including 80million in the US. And, in case you had not seen it, the most renowned - or perhaps, notorious - element of the website is The Sidebar Of Shame. The Sidebar Of Shame, the right-hand graphical element of the site, contains literally hundreds of thumbnails of celebrities (the majority of whom you will never have heard of) in various states of dress, undress, and distress, accompanied by text of such inanity that it makes your brain hurt.

The Mail's website cannot, with the 1,200+ stories it publishes each day, exercise the same editorial control that is possible in a printed paper, hence the cavalier attitude to grammar that sometimes prevails. The apparent reliance on spellcheckers and predictive text often result in completely inappropriate words appearing. My favourite was where something 'spread like wildlife,' instead of 'like wildfire.' Hilarious, as MailOnline itself might describe it.

I used to be a Daily Mail reader; when I started work I wanted a tabloid sized paper (broadsheets being too inconvenient on buses and trains to my mind), and the Mail was then perhaps not quite as rabid as it is now. And it was worth buying for the columns by Ian Wooldridge and Keith Waterhouse alone;  to my mind they were two of the finest writers to grace the pages of any British newspaper, let alone the Mail. I gave up buying the paper a year or so before I retired because as it's number of pages grew it started to become too large to read, and much of it was uninteresting. Instead, I started picking up the more compact and - in a half-hour train journey - more easily digestible, Metro, which has the added bonus of being free.

The wonderful Ian Wooldridge and Keith Waterhouse

I still buy the Mail, but only on Saturdays and solely for the TV guide in the Weekend magazine supplement (honest!) The paper itself gets flicked through in a cursory manner; little gets read since most of it is features I am uninterested in or opinion pieces - and I'm not short of my own opinions.

Alfred (“Sunny”) Harmsworth, who co-founded the Mail in 1896, said, at around the time of the second Boer War, that, "The British people relish a good hero...and a good hate." In terms of giving the public things to hate in 2017, the Mail is still providing good value for money.

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[1] And of course, the punch line -supplied by his Private Secretary, Bernard Woolley - after Jim Hacker was asked about people who read The Sun, was, "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."

A Tragedy In 46 Parts

This Saturday, the English Football League's regular season comes to an end. For some teams, all is still to play for, for others, their fates are sealed. Whether they win, draw -or in all probability - lose at Blackpool, Leyton Orient are already relegated to the National League following a season that has seen them employ more managers (five) than they have won home games (four).

I started watching Orient back in the late 1970's. Romford, the team I had supported from the age of ten, went bust in 1978, and for many years I was a season ticket holder at Brisbane Road. When Romford reformed in 1992 I had a dilemma, which I solved by watching the two teams alternately. Then, on a fateful night in February 1995, when Orient entertained Blackpool and lost 1-0 on their way to relegation to Division Four, the then manager John Sitton sacked fans' favourite Terry Howard at half-time. It was my last visit to Brisbane Road until last Saturday.

With my fellow O's fans, back in the 1980's - I am second left at the front.

Orient's season has been appalling. Despite a half-way decent start - O's were fourth after winning at Grimsby Town in August - they slipped steadily down the table and were rock bottom by March. A 3-0 defeat at Crewe on 22nd April meant they had lost their League status, and it would be a brave man who would bet on them regaining it in the near future. Off the pitch, their season has been even worse. Aside from appointing six different managers since last September, owner Francesco Becchetti has left players, staff, and suppliers unpaid. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) served the club with a winding-up order (the tax bill has since been settled), while players and staff had to wait weeks for their pay. Other suppliers - such as the printers of the club's programme - remain unpaid, and as result, recent issues - including Saturday's - consisted of just a single sheet folded into sixteen pages.

Circumstances reduced the match programme to a sad affair.

I arrived at Brisbane Road last Saturday to find it surprisingly jolly in the April sunshine. It certainly looked a lot different compared to my last visit. It wasn't all-seater then; what were open terraces behind each goal are now covered stands, and the blocks of flats at the corners of the ground were not there, either. The enclosure where I habitually stood, in front of the East Stand, is now seats for away supporters, so I had a ticket for the West Stand (completely refurbished since my last visit).

Orient defend a corner at the much changed Buckingham Road End.

Considering that this game was the first since relegation had been confirmed, most Orient fans I saw and spoke to seemed remarkably stoical. Perhaps their contempt for the club's owner was over-riding any depression at the loss of League status. The game itself was unremarkable. Having trailed 1-0 at the interval, Orient equalised with a cracker of a goal from their best player, Sandro Semedo, but with twelve minutes remaining, gifted the visitors - Colchester United - a second goal with a piece of stunningly incompetent defending. Two minutes later it was 3-1 and, as they say, game over. Five minutes from time, after a red flare landed in the Orient penalty area, it seemed that it literally was game over, with fans invading the pitch, clearly seeking to force an abandonment. Of course, this being Orient, this was football's most orderly, and polite, albeit slightly surreal, pitch invasion. There were people in wheelchairs and mobility scooters and some of the stewards were kicking a ball about with fans at one end of the ground rather than trying to remove them. When the demonstration ended, it did so in the most bizarre fashion.

Orient supporters take to the pitch to protest against the club's owner.

An hour after the fans took to the pitch, it was announced that the game was 'cancelled,' an unusual choice of word, since 'abandoned' is the norm, and a further hour later, the players returned to the pitch to see out the final five minutes (plus stoppage time!), to the back-drop of deserted stands. I was comfortably at home by this stage;  I left fifteen minutes into the protest, as I could see no way the game would resume (and although I was wrong on that score, I would not have been able to watch the conclusion even if I had remained).

A key reason for this somewhat unusual state of affairs was, explained the English Football League (EFL), because " it was deemed appropriate that the game needed to be played to a conclusion in order to maintain the integrity of the competition and in respect of Colchester United's position of being able to qualify for the Sky Bet League Two Play-Offs." Integrity - now there is another interesting choice of word. The EFL maintained the integrity of their competition through an act of subterfuge, which resulted in seven or eight minutes of Anschluss football.[1] If the dénouement of a football match ever lacked integrity or dignity, this was it.

The Leyton Orient v Colchester United match ends in bizarre
circumstances. Photo: East London Advertiser.

It seems that the EFL have recently been fairly flexible in their idea of what passes for integrity anyway. After all, this is the organisation that deemed that Leyton Orient's owner, Francesco Becchetti, having passed their Owners and Directors Test (the test that determines whether someone is a 'fit and proper' owner), then had no obligation to run the club properly or competently. To most people, being a fit and proper owner of a club is indivisible from being capable, or willing, to manage it properly. Not to the EFL apparently, who claim that "the test governs the eligibility of who is able to own a club; it does not also ensure that those individuals have the capability to manage it properly."  If that truly is the basis of it, then it is a worthless, pointless, test.

You can tell this man is the Chairman, it says it on his coat. 
His motives are less clear. Photo: Evening Standard.

But there again, the EFL have form for the pointless, and the worthless, having presided over the integrity-free zone called The Checkatrade Trophy. Having declared that an important objective of the competition was to give young, English, academy players the opportunity to gain valuable experience, they promptly fined clubs like Luton Town for fielding too many young, English, academy players. Cynics might conclude that the EFL's disinterest in directly addressing the issues at Leyton Orient may be due to the fact that after Saturday, the club is no longer their responsibility as they will fall into the National League, but what of the Football Association? The silence from Wembley over the goings on at Brisbane Road has been deafening, and while they did issue a six-match stadium ban to Becchetti after he kicked his then assistant manager Andy Hessenthaler,[2] they seem to have no appetite for addressing concerns over the kicking he is giving his football club.

The FA and their apologists might wring their hands and ask, but what can they do? Well, the FA are quick to act when someone tweets something, writes something, or says something that they deem to be 'bringing the game into disrepute,' and frankly what is more disreputable than the seemingly wilful destruction of a football club? How reputable is not paying the wages of players and staff? How reputable was the statement on the club's website in which the owner seemed to throw his toys out of the pram because the supporters did not like him? One presumes from the absence of any statements - even one merely expressing concern - that they are either content or do not care.

Emmanuel Frimpong - then with Arsenal - was fined £6,000 in 2012 for insulting a Spurs fan on Twitter.
Photo: Sky Sports

Much sports journalism throws hyperbole at the mundane; too many minor mishaps are characterised as tragedies. But this season, when more has been written about Leyton Orient than at probably any other time in their history, the word tragedy is entirely apposite. At Blackpool, The O's will play their final League game of the season, a season that truly has been a tragedy in forty-six parts.

While every other club will start planning for next season as soon as the dust settles on this one, the continual upheaval and apparent lack of leadership at Brisbane Road may mean that Orient are grossly underprepared for life in the National League. Stories that have emerged since I started writing this blog suggest that Becchetti has paid off some of the remaining debts, despite which - and I truly hope that I am wrong - I fear that this tragedy is far from complete.

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[1] During the 1982 World Cup in Spain, West Germany played Austria with both sides aware that a win by one or two goals for West Germany would result in both them and Austria qualifying at the expense of Algeria, who had finished their group matches. The game ended 1-0 to West Germany with neither side making any attempt to score any further goals. As a result, FIFA decreed that the concluding games in the group stages should in future kick off simultaneously. Anschluss was the unification of Austria and Nazi Germany in 1938.

[2] See http://www.skysports.com/football/news/11742/10111403/watch-orient-owner-kicks-coach