The Wrong Type of Football

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola’s rant after his team’s FA Cup Semi-Final win over Chelsea about how unfair it was that his squad of 25 highly trained and extremely well rewarded professional athletes should have to play on Saturday afternoon having already played a game on Wednesday was typical of the Premier League managers’ mindsets.

 

“Unacceptable,” he called it, "I don't understand how we survived," he added, and all the while, up and down the country, non-League footballers, managers, officials, and supporters howled with laughter at a club complaining at playing three games in eight days while many teams below the Football League would look at that schedule as quite benign. Take National League South side Truro City for instance, in the time that Manchester City played those three games, they played four. Between 1^st April and 20^th April, Truro played ten league games; Manchester City played six matches.

 

Pep Guardiola
Picture - Football.ua, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

 

Even more extreme is the schedule faced by Colne FC of the North West Counties League who will play 14 games in April, six more than City will, and Colne are by no means unique. Thanks to postponements, it’s not unusual in non-League football for teams to play almost half of their league fixtures in the last two months of the season, and these are players holding down full-time jobs and driving themselves to away games after a day at work, yet the ones we are supposed to feel sorry for are the Premier League guys whose full-time job is playing football and whose every whim is indulged.

 

The fact that Guardiola’s complaint was about playing an FA Cup tie was significant. The FA Cup used to be the jewel in the crown of English football but it has become debased and devalued over the years; to be blunt, it’s an inconvenience for Premier League clubs. The demands of the vastly over inflated Champions League make FA Cup replays an inconvenience, especially since Uefa’s demand mean that they can’t be played on Champions League dates, hence their abolition from the Fifth Round onwards during the 2018-19 season.

 

This week, The FA announced that from next season there would be no replays in the FA Cup from the First Round onwards, a sop to the Premier League clubs (although since they don’t enter until the Third Round, replays in the First and Second Round are an irrelevance to them). Other than their proposal in 2014 to introduce B teams into the Football League, I don’t think that any announcement made by The FA has met with so much opposition and outrage.

 

At this point I have to say that despite many years of believing that FA Cup replays must be preserved at pretty much any cost, I’m beginning to become a little less vehement about that. It is in the first four rounds of the competition proper that replays have value; non-League or teams from the Football League’s bottom two divisions getting draws against higher level opposition and setting up money spinning replays have always part of the competition’s attraction, but in the competition’s early and later stages, the arguments for their retention are more difficult to sustain.

 

As we know, from the Third Round on, arranging replays can be difficult because of European football getting in the way, but in the qualifying rounds is there really much magic in a Preliminary Round replay between two Step 5 teams? This season for instance, Buckhurst Hill and Brantham Athletic met in the Extra-Preliminary Round. The first game, at Buckhurst Hill, attracted just 88 people and the replay drew in only 58 spectators. Gate receipts would not have covered the match officials’ fees and with it being 70 miles between the clubs’ respective grounds, travelling costs and the like would have resulted in both clubs losing money.

 

Brantham Athletic v Buckhurst Hill FA Cup Replay – Picture: Brantham Athletic

 

Phil Annets – the man behind the FA Cup Factfile Twitter account – has said, “Everyone talks about FA Cup replays being important for financial reasons and that's been the case for a small number of clubs, but the real reason replays are needed is for competition integrity. Replays give clubs disadvantaged by being drawn away a chance to take game to their ground.” While that’s an understandable point – and Cray Valley PM and Horsham, who earned replays against Charlton  Athletic and Barnsley respectively this season would undoubtedly agree -  a one off game could actually give lower league or non-League sides a better chance of progressing. Charlton won their replay at Cray Valley 6-1 while Horsham were beaten 3-0 by Barnsley (Barnsley were subsequently found to have fielded an ineligible player and Horsham were reinstated), but had those first games gone to penalties the playing field would have been levelled; there’s no reason why an Isthmian League side shouldn’t be able to beat a League One team in a shoot-out, even if they couldn’t over 90 minutes.

 

There have been angry suggestions that Football League and non-League clubs should boycott next season’s FA Cup, but that isn’t going to happen. Despite my increasing ambivalence towards FA Cup replays, what I do object to in The FA’s announcement – and many of the clubs that have issued statements expressing anger at replays being done away with seem to hold a similar view – is that a competition with more than 700 entrants is having its terms dictated by a tiny number of clubs, the 20 Premier League clubs, who largely view the FA Cup as an inconvenience.

 

The fact that the abolition of FA Cup replays from the First Round onwards is proposed from next season is no doubt driven by the increase in the number of entries in what we might now call the Not The Champions League next season when instead of 32 clubs in the group stage, there will be 36 in a rejigged league stage. Instead of it taking 13 games to win this bloated competition, it will take 15, at which point it’s worth remembering that for a Premier League team to win the FA Cup they need play only seven games.

 

When managers like Guardiola, or Jurgen Klopp, or Eric Ten Hag, complain about their teams having to play too many games, it is always the potential FA Cup replays that vex them, and I say ‘potential’ because Manchester City have had only 10 FA Cup replays this century, Manchester United have had 9, and Liverpool have had 12, so not exactly an onerous schedule.

 

Looked at logically, if the elite Premier League clubs are concerned about fixture congestion then the target for their objections should be the Champions League, but apparently a hypothetical FA Cup replay that might involve a 100 mile round trip once every few seasons is considered more taxing than travelling a couple of thousand miles several times a season for European cup games. How about increasing the number of teams in the Champions League to 64, but make it a straight knock-out with no group stage; it would take only 11 games to win the competition, freeing up some midweek dates to reinstate FA Cup replays

 

And there is the rub; the problem isn’t too much football, but rather the wrong type of football. The Champions League is more lucrative than the FA Cup, and the bottom line is, well the bottom line on the balance sheet.

Addendum 2nd May 2024:

Since I published this blog, the Premier League and the National League have announced a new competition for 2024-25 involving 16 clubs from the National League and 16 Premier League Under 21 teams, hence the National League's willingness to give up on FA Cup replays in the First and Second Rounds. In addition, the Premier League have once again floated the 39th Game idea - an additional fixture in the Premier League programme - to be played in the USA. Further proof - if we ever needed it - that there aren't too many games, just the wrong type.

There’s Only One F In Romford and We’re Going To Wemberlee!

At around five o’clock in the afternoon, on Saturday 6^th April, my Fitbit bleeped at me. My heart rate was apparently 131bpm and the device couldn’t detect me being active. Frankly I’m surprised it was only 131bpm because I was watching my team taking part in a penalty shoot-out with a place at Wembley Stadium in the Final of the Isuzu FA Vase at stake!

After eleven penalties apiece, the score was 9-9. Lincoln United’s Matthew Cotton – who had scored from the spot a week before in the First Leg of the Semi-Final, but who had had his first kick in the shoot-out saved by Romford keeper Jake Anderson – missed the target to hand Boro the advantage. Up stepped Jamie Hursit, who had come on as a substitute just minutes from the end and had scored his first spot-kick in the shoot-out. Hursit scored and for the first and possibly only time in my lifetime, Romford would be playing in the final of a national competition at the national stadium.

Jamie Hursit tucks away the winning penalty at Lincoln.

When I started watching Romford, back in the 1960s, their chances of playing in a Wembley final were zero. As a non-League team, there was absolutely no chance of getting there in the FA Cup, and as they were a semi-professional club, the FA Amateur Cup – in which Romford had played at Wembley in the first final there in 1949 – wasn’t open to them. Even after The FA abolished amateur status in 1974, replacing the Amateur Cup with the FA Trophy and the FA Vase, the best that Romford had done was in 1996-97 when the last sixteen of the FA Vase had been reached.

 

How did we get here? Well, last season Romford made it to the 4^th Round of the FA Vase before being gored by the Jersey Bulls in St Helier, but reward for that was an exemption from the first three rounds in this season’s competition, which started with a fairly low key 2^nd Round game at home to Crawley Green. The Spartan South Midlands League side were despatched 2-0 with the first goal after just 52 seconds from Michael Turner and another just 12 minutes later (a Kris Newby penalty), although Boro keeper Jake Anderson did have to save a late penalty to preserve his clean sheet.

Michael Turner (number 6) heads Boro's first goal against Crawley Green

Next to come to Boro’s new home at Rookery Hill (more on that later), were Mildenhall Town, second in their league and with a miserly defence according to their statistics. They went home beaten 3-0 – Ash Siddik, Hassan Nalbant, and Bradley Mott scoring Romford’s goals.

Action from the game against Mildenhall Town

Stanway Pegasus – who play one league below Boro at Step 6 in the Thurlow Nunn League Division One North – were next and Boro’s margin of victory should have been much more than 2-1 as numerous chances were created but not converted. A combination of narrowly off-target shots and good saves by Stanway keeper Sam Felgate restricted Boro to a two goal lead, and when Pegasus pulled one back eighteen minutes from the end, it meant for a nervy finish in which both teams were reduced to ten men. Finlay Dorrell and Charlie Morris (with a penalty that Pegasus vehemently contested long after the game had ended) scored the Boro goals.

Finlay Dorrell nets Boro's first goal against Stanway Pegasus

 

The draw for the Fifth Round pitted Romford against Hilltop of the Combined Counties League and immediately the draw was made it became clear that this wasn’t going to be an easy game to arrange, let alone play. Hilltop share at Hillingdon Borough, who were at home on the date of the Fifth Round. The rules of the competition state, “If for any reason a tie is unable to be played on the ground of the first drawn Club on a Saturday, the tie must be played on either the day before, i.e. on Friday, or the day after, i.e. on Sunday on the ground of the first drawn Club.” Hilltop announced that the game would be played at Uxbridge’s ground on the Sunday but after some wrangling, it was moved to Cobham FC’s ground and switched back to the Saturday. After conceding an early goal, Romford equalised through Ash Siddik just before half-time and two second half Charlie Morris goals clinched a 3-1 win to take Boro into the Quarter-Finals and a trip to North Greenford United, uncharted territory in every respect.

 

Charlie Morris (partly hidden) scores against Hilltop

A week before the North Greenford game, Boro were dealt a body blow when two players – leading scorer Hassan Nalbant and defender Junior Luke – were sent off in a 2-0 league win at Barking resulting in their being suspended for the Quarter Final. Add a suspension for influential midfield player Kris Newby, and preparations were by no means ideal. As it turned out, a virtuoso performance from defender Darren Phillips, thrust into an attacking role, helped Boro to a 1-0 win thanks to a goal by Remi Sutton.

Darren Phillips celebrates the Quarter-Final Win

 After the game every Romford supporter was wearing a soppy grin and using the word ‘surreal’ a lot. Talk inevitably turned to who we would draw in the Semi-Final: Our Essex Senior League rivals Great Wakering Rovers? Bookies favourites Worcester City? Lincoln United were the name drawn out after Romford’s and on a thankfully warm and dry Saturday at the end of March, a season’s best crowd of 561 turned up at Rookery Hill for the First Leg.

 
Rookery Hill has only been Boro’s home since November 2023 when the club took over the lease from East Thurrock United, who had sadly folded in August 2023. A home of the club’s own and the income from bar and catering that was missing in the groundshares the club has had over the years was certainly a benefit, but the game itself started in horrendous fashion. Within ten minutes, Romford had had a player sent off and conceded a goal to a penalty; hardly ideal. A second half goal from Finlay Dorrell drew Boro level only for Lincoln to score again right at the death, but in time added on Boro equalised through Ash Siddik: 2-2 going into the Second Leg.

Ash Siddik receives his team-mates' congratulations after his equalising goal against Lincoln

 
The sun shone for the second game and Romford dominated proceedings - especially in the second half despite playing into a strong wind - carving out some decent chances but being thwarted by the Lincoln goalkeeper on a number of occasions. It ended goal-less, and the penalty shoot-out seemed to favour Lincoln, who had already won seven shoot-outs including four in their Vase run.

 
Which is where we started, as wonderfully, incredibly, Boro won the shoot-out (thank God for the Hursits, we said afterwards as they had scored three of Boro’s ten penalties) but despite objectively knowing that we were going to Wembley, did we actually believe it? No, of course not, and even now it’s hard to accept.

 
Naturally, Lincoln were mightily disappointed, but it says a lot for the character of their players, officials, and supporters that they were gracious in defeat. The two Semi-Final ties were a brilliant showcase for non-League football, two cracking games played in good spirits, two sets of fans mingling, chatting, and drinking together.
 
The other Semi-Final took an extra week to settle as the game at Worcester City was postponed, but after a penalty shoot-out of their own, Great Wakering Rovers made it through. The last time an Essex Senior League team reached Wembley was 1984 and it’s only the fifth time in 50 years that two teams from the same league have contested the Final.
 
Unusually, considering how tense I can sometimes get before even the most routine of league games or mundane cup ties, I have been preternaturally calm throughout this cup run. At no point have I gone to a game expecting anything other than a Romford victory. Okay, it’s easier to feel that way when your team are winning more often than not, which Romford have this season, but even so, it has been remarkably out of character for me. How calm I’ll be when I see Romford step out onto the Wembley turf on Saturday, 11^th May, remains to be seen.

 

Some useful links:

Romford FC website: https://www.romfordfc.com/

Romford FC Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/RomfordFC

The FA – FA Vase page: https://www.thefa.com/competitions/fa-vase

Non-League Finals Ticket Sales: https://www.wembleystadium.com/events/2024/Non-League-Finals-Day-2024

 

 

 

The Green Ink Brigade

In September 2022, Nigel Smith, landlord of The Fleece Inn in Bretforton, Worcestershire, held a ‘Nigel Night’ in an attempt to revive the fortunes of his name, which is in danger of dying out. Data from the Office of National Statistics revealed that no babies were given the name Nigel in 2016 or 2020, and Nigel Smith’s gathering attracted 372 other Nigels, some of whom had travelled from as far as the USA, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua.

Had Nigel Smith chosen to refuse to serve any of the Nigels, or deny them entry to his pub, he would have been perfectly within his rights to do so. A licensee has the right to refuse entry to whomever they wish, so long as the reason is not unlawful, for instance refusal cannot be on the grounds of sex, race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or belief.

In much the same way, banks have always had the right to close a customer’s account, although like our publican, they should not do so for reasons that would constitute unlawful discrimination. Infringing the terms and conditions of the account is legitimate reason - failing to maintain a minimum balance, or deposit an agreed minimum amount per month, for example - or because of suspected fraudulent activity or money laundering. In those latter instances the bank would not be able to cite those as reasons for the account closure to the customer on the grounds of ‘tipping off.’

The issue of banks closing customers’ accounts has become hot news following Coutts & Co’s decision to close the accounts of former MEP and UKIP leader, Nigel Farage. The reasons for the bank closing Farage’s accounts, and the rights and wrongs of that, have been done to death elsewhere; it strikes me as probable that Coutts were looking for a reason to end the relationship, and found one when he paid off his mortgage, regardless of what happened subsequently.

What is interesting, is what has happened after Nigel Farage went public with the news of Coutts & Co’s withdrawal of his banking facilities.

Firstly, there’s the idea that as soon as anyone errs, or does something that the popular press and Twitterati don’t like, then they should be sacked. In the last year or so there have been calls for teachers, junior doctors, nurses, railway workers, and workers in a score of other professions to be sacked for exercising their right to withdraw their labour in pursuit of pay claims, or – in the case of civil servants – simply being perceived to not be working hard enough. In the Farage farrago, there have been calls for not only Nat West CEO Dame Alison Rose to resign – which she has done (correctly, what with the customer confidentiality she breached by discussing Farage’s relationship with Coutts with a BBC journalist being sacrosanct) - but for the whole board to go. This whole ‘sack the lot of them’ culture has gone way too far.

Secondly, there’s the idea that the Nat West board should be sacked is justifiable because about 40% of the Nat West Group (of which Coutts & Co are part), is owned by the taxpayer. Weirdly, there’s also glee on the part of the same group of people that the Farage affair has wiped £600 million off Nat West's share price: It’s a strange shareholder that relishes the price of their holdings plummeting. That share price tumbling was good news for hedge fund Marshall Wace though, as they made a significant sum shorting Nat West shares. By random coincidence, Marshall Wace’s co-founder Sir Paul Marshall jointly owns GB News, the TV station that employs Nigel Farage. Small world, isn’t it?

While Dame Alison Rose was indiscreet in talking to the BBC about Farage, he published the full details of the document that Coutts & Co provided him with after he made a subject access request. What has been interesting has been some of the comments in the media - mainstream and social - about the document, which exposes a trend that has been increasingly noticeable - especially on Twitter - in recent years, and that is of the uninformed expert. 

Whether it is Brexit, covid, climate change, immigration (especially so-called illegal immigration), and now banking, it is astonishing how many people are vociferous in denying the views of people whose day jobs are working in those fields and are instead enthusiastic in promoting alternative views that have little or no facts to back them up. Emboldened by having a platform that allows gibberish to be disseminated to a wide audience, these people have become ‘expert’ in the last few years in trade deals, geopolitics, epidemiology, climate science, and now banking, all on the basis of ‘research’ that consists largely of bouncing around echo chambers watching weird YouTube videos and reading niche websites. When they start spouting nonsense about a subject you know something about, it casts much doubt on their pronouncements on other topics.

The Coutts document that Nigel Farage gave to the Daily Mail, which appeared in print and on their website, accepts that Farage has been 'professional' in his relations with the bank. Having learned during my thirty odd years working in banking however that it is unwise to put anything in a note on a customer’s file that you would not want read out in a court of law, one wonders if this was perhaps erring on the side of discretion over accuracy. Of course, I know nothing of Mr Farage’s conduct when dealing with his bank, but his public persona suggests that he might have been a customer with quite exacting standards.

Everyone should be entitled to expect their bank to behave professionally when dealing with them, but in my experience, some customers have unrealistic expectations. During my time in banking, particularly in branch banking, there were certain customers whose name being mentioned would provoke groans from members of staff who habitually had to deal with them. 

These customers would be the sort to march in without an appointment and demand immediate access to their safe custody items, then loudly complain if made to wait more than a few minutes. There were customers who would unreasonably demand huge amounts of information within unrealistic time frames – “I need a complete breakdown of all the interest earned on my deposit account between 1974 and 1992, and I need it in fifteen minutes” – and would not take no for an answer. And that’s before you start to consider the customers who would make requests for things to be done that were either impossible, contrary to the bank’s regulations, or even illegal. Some customers would think it perfectly acceptable to arrive five minutes before closing time and tie staff up with protracted but not urgent transactions.

Finally, there were The Green Ink Brigade. These customers would write long rambling letters in green biro on numbered pages torn from duplicate books, the sort used with carbon paper. Letters that would continue, spider like, up one margin and down the other once the bottom of the page was reached, and which were almost indecipherable to read and incomprehensible of purpose.

There are many legitimate reasons why banks can close a customer’s account; writing letters to them in green ink should be one of them. I wonder if Mr Farage owns a green biro?

 

Azura - Under A Clear Blue Sky

A couple of years ago, Val and I were lucky enough to go on the shakedown cruise of P&O’s then newest ship, Iona. For the uninitiated, shakedowns are short cruises to test the functionality of the vessel with a full complement of passengers, although the passengers are usually all staff, ex-staff, and their family and friends.

It has to be said that Iona’s shakedown was not trouble-free, but to a degree, that’s the point of a shakedown, identifying areas that need fixing. In Iona’s case, the online restaurant booking function didn’t work, and some of the staff in the restaurants and elsewhere looked a little bewildered. Our two-day trip took us from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, Poole Harbour, and back again (we didn’t go ashore at either location), and I rather suspect that some of the teething problems we experienced had not been ironed out before the ship’s maiden voyage just a few days later.

While Covid precautions were still very much uppermost in most people’s minds when we did the shakedown – without a negative Lateral Flow Test no one was getting on board Iona in August 2021, and washing hands was compulsory before entering restaurants - they had largely been consigned to history by the time we boarded Azura last week for a seven-night cruise through the Mediterranean and Adriatic.

While Iona is the largest cruise ship I’ve been on (184,000 tons and 5,200 passengers), Azura is no lightweight, coming in at 116,000 tons and carrying 3,100 passengers. Despite its size, and the fact that it was full for the cruise we were on, Azura has a remarkably intimate feel, and although it is now thirteen years old, the amenities are as luxurious as you could wish for.

Azura as we boarded in Valletta

Our cruise started in Valletta. We flew to Malta from Gatwick, having originally been able only to book the cruise with flights from Birmingham; fortunately, London flights became available a week before we sailed. Landing at 6pm and embarking the ship at 7pm left no time to see Malta, and the same was true of the journey home. After dinner in the Meridian Restaurant, it was time to unpack some of the contents of my suitcase more vulnerable to creasing (suit and shirts mainly) and take a relatively early night.

From Malta, a day at sea and an opportunity to acclimatise to the ship and find our way around before docking at Taranto in Italy. Throughout the holiday, the weather was nicer than the forecast had suggested before we left England, but Taranto was a little overcast, but pleasant enough. There’s an old town and a not so old town, separated by a bridge; the old town is more picturesque and we had a lovely gelato there, but on the whole, it isn’t the sort of place I’d go out of my way to revisit.

Taranto

Italy I’ve been to before, but never yet Greece, so landing in Corfu Town on the Sunday was somewhere new. Val was quite keen to find a beach for a swim, but the weather wasn’t entirely in our favour and the nearest sandy beach was probably too much of a hike to reach comfortably, so we contented ourselves with a wander round town where – it being Sunday – the churches were busy, as were the cafes, but only the smaller shops were open. After a lovely lunch overlooking the sea, we strolled back to the ship rather than get the shuttle bus.

Corfu

Entertainment on board ships these days is a lot more professional and varied than it once was, and on Sunday evening we watched some live music from The Bluejays, whose speciality is 1950s and 1960s rock and roll. Not especially my favourite genre, it has to be said, but I like nothing more than seeing a live band who can play well, and The Bluejays were certainly that. So much so that we saw them again a couple of nights later, when their setlist was quite different and still excellent, even if the lead guitarist was hampered by a broken string. I’d thoroughly recommend The Bluejays if you like 1950s/60s rock ‘n’ roll. Actually, I’d recommend them even if you don’t.

Food on board was plentiful and delicious, as it always is on cruises, and Azura has a variety of restaurants. We opted for the buffet for breakfast and lunch, or just grabbed a slice or two of pizza from the poolside, but ate in the Meridian or Peninsular Restaurants in the evenings. The menus are always varied, with choices for adventurous dinners and more conservative ones alike.

Our third port was Split. Croatia’s tourism industry has had to recover from both the war of the 1990s, and covid in more recent years. In 1990, tourist arrivals stood at 8.4 million, but fell to 2 million a year later when war broke out. They have now recovered to the extent that 18.9 million tourists arrived in 2022. The TV series Game of Thrones, much of which was filmed in Split, has had a beneficial impact on tourism, and a large number of visitors to our last port of call, Dubrovnik, were there to take in the sights they had seen on screen.

In Split we opted for a tour to the Krka National Park in Lozovac, which is about an hour’s drive from the port. Unseasonally heavy rains that had affected parts of Croatia in the week or so leading up to our arrival had led to parts of the park being closed right up until the day we visited. The waterfalls are magnificent (okay, perhaps not on a par with Niagara or Victoria, but impressive enough), and for a change from walking round town, the tour was worth the effort (and the money: Shore excursions can be expensive, but this was actually quite reasonable).

Krka National Park

Our final port of call was Dubrovnik. It was the hottest day of the holiday and under a clear blue sky we wandered the walled city, famous as a location for Game of Thrones - in particular, Cersei Lannister's Walk of Shame - packed with tourists, including those from both Azura and a Viking Cruise lines ship that was also docked there. We had a lovely walk around town, a pit-stop at a pavement café, a delicious ice cream, and then back to the ship.

Dubrovnik

One day at sea cruising back to Malta, during which I walked about seven miles round prom deck, and then it was off to the airport to fly home. Getting to the gate at Valletta’s airport proved to be a bit of a bun fight with passengers from two cruise ships descending on the terminal, the queues at passport control were long and slow moving.

In complete contrast, I cannot ever recall as quick an experience after landing at Gatwick as this one. No queues at the e-Passport gates, which – for once – recognised Val’s passport, and we were back in the car and away from the airport in nearly record time.

Cruising has long since lost its image of being expensive and elitist and is now as affordable as any other type of holiday and a generally informal, although it is nice to have the opportunity to dress up a bit on the formal nights. 

This cruise and this ship were perhaps the best I’ve been on and make me keen to do it again.

 

The Three Hardest Words

It’s the morning of Saturday 6^th May 2023, the coronation of King Charles III takes place today, but even before the first guests had arrived at Westminster Abbey, the police were confiscating placards from anti-royalist protesters, some of whom were arrested.

Now, you may say, “Quite right too,” and believe that nothing should spoil the occasion of Charles’s coronation. You may hold similar views about the actions of Just Stop Oil, or Extinction Rebellion.

Police remove placards from anti-royalist protesters.

You may fully support the recently introduced Public Order Act that gives the police greater powers to deal with protests, including the offense of ‘locking on’ whereby a person commits an offense if they attach themselves to another person, an object, or land. Or if they merely go equipped to do so, by which we the act means carrying objects for such a purpose. How do you feel about arresting people for merely being in possession of such things as super glue or a padlock?

Even if you do support such legislation, doesn’t a little part of you feel uneasy that in what we continue to call a free country, our rights are being eroded, little by little? You may say that it’s only extremists, the ant-monarchists and the climate change fanatics, that is to say, those you don’t support, who are being targeted, and that they deserve everything they get. But one day there may be something that you feel strongly about, that gets you up in arms, but about which you cannot lawfully protest about. The right to protest isn’t just being taken away from people you don’t support or approve of.

Just yesterday, the results of local council elections that had taken place in many parts of England on Thursday were announced, but almost overshadowing the results – in which the Conservatives took a battering, losing over 1,000 councillors and the control of 48 councils – were the stories of voters being turned away from polling stations for want of valid photo ID, this being the first time that such ID had been required in England.

Is the requirement to provide photo ID to be able to vote a sensible precaution to avoid fraud at polling stations, or is it voter suppression?

Personation - ‘assuming the identity of another (person) in order to deceive' – at polling stations is very rare indeed, and there were just seven allegations of personation at local elections in England, Scotland and Wales, elections to the Northern Ireland assembly, a series of mayoral elections in England and six Commons by-elections during 2022, none of which resulted in any police action, yet it is estimated that up to two million people lack an acceptable form of photo ID and applications for the government’s free Voter Authority Certificate ran to just 85,000 ahead of the local elections.

The requirement to show photo ID at polling stations is clearly a solution in search of a problem, and one exacerbated by the inconsistency in the types of ID that have been deemed acceptable. 

Proponents of the scheme point to the fact that most of Europe, and even Northern Ireland, requires voters to produce ID, and that the Labour Party – who have largely opposed the scheme – require members to show membership cards to participate in party meetings. This argument spectacularly misses the point. Apart from Denmark, Iceland, and Ireland, all European Economic Area (EEA) member states issue national identity cards, and Labour Party members are provided with a card when joining the party. 

I get the argument that successful instances of personation may not be known, but it is likely to be very small indeed, so assuming that this nut of miniscule proportions requires a sledgehammer to smash it, it would surely have been appropriate for the government to write to everyone on the Electoral Register personally to make them aware of this most fundamental change to the manner in which our democracy works and ensure that everyone who needs one has a Voter Authority Certificate but apparently not.

The publicity surrounding events of this week at polling stations, with many people turned away, and some apparently challenged even though they had valid ID (allegedly the likeness of holder’s photos on passports and driving licences was questioned in some places), should mean that come the next General Election the number of people unable to vote for want of correct documentation will be significantly lower, perhaps as low as the number of cases of personation at the last one in 2019 (33 allegations, 1 conviction, 1 caution).

Voted ID wasn’t required seven years ago, at the EU referendum, and despite various attempts at getting Brexit done after Leave won the vote, we seem to have achieved very little that is positive. A recent Savanta survey for The Independent shows that two-thirds of Britons now support a referendum on rejoining, and of course in the years since 2016, many thousands of teenagers, too young to vote then but who were more likely be supportive of the UK being inside the EU, have joined the electoral register.

Even many of Brexit’s staunchest supporters are unhappy because the version of Brexit that we have is not what they wanted, although on the basis that the ballot paper merely asked whether voters wanted to Remain or Leave, any form of Brexit must be what the public voted for as no details of our ongoing relationship with Europe were specified on the paper.

"Leave the European Union." Seven years on we are still arguing what that actually entails.

Where views on a subject are firmly entrenched it is often pointless arguing about them in person, and even more futile arguing on social media, and especially with strangers. There are some subjects like Brexit, or climate change, that are so complex or diverse that few people have an all-encompassing view, but there may be one area in which they are well read. This results in arguments being all about the pros and cons of two individual’s wildly different areas of expertise, areas in which they have no common ground. In such instances, no one gives way.

Paul Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement categorises various types of argument into a pyramid as shown below:

 

And the reason that the hierarchy can be thought of as a pyramid is that the higher up one goes, the rarer that type of argument becomes.

It used to be said that the hardest three words for a man to utter were “I love you,” but since providing a counter argument or refuting the central point of a particular case rarely cuts any ice with those who with entrenched views on a particular matter, it’s more accurate to say that the hardest three words are “I was wrong.”

The Emergency At 3

This coming Sunday, 23^rd April, is St George’s Day *. It’s also the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth (and death. What perfect symmetry it is to die on your birthday). The London Marathon is taking place, as is the FA Cup Semi-Final between Brighton & Hove Albion and Manchester United, and at 3pm, a UK-wide test of an emergency alert system will make every mobile phone that is switched on (even if in silent mode) sound an alarm and vibrate.

Perhaps you haven’t heard about it and are going to get the surprise of your life on Sunday when your phone (and the phones of everyone in the vicinity) suddenly starts emitting a repeated siren that only goes away when acknowledged.[1] You may be aware that it’s going to happen but will still be taken by surprise because you lose track of the time, or perhaps you won’t get the alert because  you’ve turned the notification off or intend turning your phone off to avoid being interrupted.

Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a party political broadcast monologue on GB News that I caught on Twitter, that government should not be indulging in this type of thing, and confesses that he has disabled the notifications on his phone, which is even more surprising than the news that he has a phone capable of receiving such alerts in the first place.

Sunday will be a test, but the government website, www.gov.uk/alerts, suggests that real alerts will be issued for reasons such as severe floods, fires, and extreme weather. They don’t mention impending obliteration by incoming nuclear ballistic missiles, but that may be another reason, although quite what one should do in such circumstances would appear to be limited. One imagines that an alert would advise people to seek shelter, although places where one could do so effectively strike me as limited at best.  

Let’s hope we never get to find out, or even experience a false alarm of that sort, which was what happened to unfortunate Hawaiians in 2018 when a missile alert message was sent out in error and the agency responsible for it spent 40 minutes trying to work out how to retract it.

There are some people who would have us believe that the alert system is a means of government instilling a sense of permanent fear in the general population. Contrarily, these same people offer the view that such a system will end up being ignored. The alert system is, in some people’s minds, another method of controlling and cowing the populace, in much the same way as things such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and 15 Minute Cities are and how covid lockdowns were used to soften us up to accept climate change/net zero lockdowns, with impositions such as restricting the number of new items of clothing we can buy in a year, limiting the use of private cars, and the number of flights we are allowed to take. I’m sure that’s the plot from an episode of Black Mirror.

The reports that contain many of the ideas that lead people to believe that governments and elite conspirators want to control our every move usually stem from some theoretical,  utopian view (or dystopian, depending on your position) of the future produced by a group of academics. On Twitter, these pie in the sky ideas are being presented as though they are established policy, just waiting to be implemented. 

 

These ideas come from a report, The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World, released by Arup, C40 Cities and the University of Leeds. It’s not government policy, although some people would have us believe it is, or soon will be.

If anyone is keeping us in constant fear, it’s the media and various influential social media contributors, as much - if not more so - than governments.

We also hear – frequently, and alarmingly – about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), and how their introduction will result in cash being abolished and how our spending will be controlled by government who will, through mechanisms like social credit scoring, be able to limit what we are allowed to spend our money on. Along with this, and relying on a 2016 essay by Danish Politician Ida Auken, originally titled, "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better,” there is a belief that the World Economic Forum will, within the next seven years, collaborate with governments to create systems of control that will end up with everyone but the elite being little more than indentured slaves.

Some targets – banning the sale of petrol and hybrid cars by 2030, making homeowners replace worn out gas boilers with heat pumps – have become part of government policy, but the deadlines are unlikely to be met and may recede into the distance and never be met at all since governments are notoriously unrealistic when it comes to targets and equally useless in meeting them.

We are frequently warned that government wants to surveil and control us. Such were the cautions when the NHS Covid app and digital covid passports were introduced. The app was demised recently and the digital passports have fallen into disuse (not that they were ever widely required in my experience). Frankly anyone with a mobile phone voluntarily gave permission to Apple or Google (or both) to keep them under surveillance long ago (just look at your timeline in Google Maps), while your bank knows exactly where you spend every penny, and Tesco’s Clubcard knows about your spending habits in their stores (that’s exactly why it was designed and built in the first place. The discounts and vouchers are just sweeteners to keep you handing over your data).

You could argue that the Covid app’s demise and the abandonment of the covid passports prove that government has no real desire to control us. Alternatively, perhaps they were just the warm up before the main event, merely there to test the water and ensure that when the time comes for the real deal to be inflicted on us, we will be softened up and ready to comply. Frankly, a lot of these supposed control mechanisms suggest a lot more interest in our lives on the part of government than I believe they actually have, and – if they really wanted to implement them - a far greater degree of competence than they have exhibited in the past (and in this regard I include governments from both sides of the political divide). It’s that lack of competence that reassures me that whatever is suggested, and whether the government intend implementing any of the policies that have been mentioned, it will be a complete fiasco anyway. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”

On Sunday, at 3pm I hope to be out of the house somewhere that’s busy to observe the public’s reaction when the government alert system causes their phones to suddenly burst into life, apparently spontaneously. In reality, I’ll probably have forgotten all about it and be taken completely by surprise, although it would not surprise me one bit if, when three o’clock comes, my phone, primed and ready for the alert, remains stubbornly silent.

 

[1]  Follow this link to see and hear how the alert will appear on your phone https://youtu.be/MvZM-oCReu8

 *Edit: As St George's Day falls on a Sunday in Eastertide this year, the saint's day is more properly observed on 24th April, not that anyone will take any notice.

“Talk a little, but say a lot.” The Wit and Wisdom of Danny Murphy

Whatever your opinion of the British government’s policy on the Channel crossings by people in small boats might be, and whatever you feel about Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s statement on the subject in early March, or the tweet that it provoked from Gary Lineker that exploded all over social media and the mainstream media, most people will agree that there has never been a period of sports broadcasting in England quite like the one we experienced on the second weekend in March.

Pundits Alan Shearer and Ian Wright declined to appear on Match of The Day after Lineker’s removal, and commentators refused to pick up their microphones. There was no Football Focus (replaced by Bargain Hunt) and instead of Final Score there was The Repair Shop. Match of The Day and Match of The Day 2 were rebadged as Premier League Highlights and featured match action with no commentary or analysis.

The Saturday night highlights package lasted just 20 minutes, but even that modest running time was five minutes longer than the Sunday evening show. Nonetheless, the Saturday programme attracted 2.6 million viewers, half a million more than tuned in the previous week. Did this prove that what the viewers want is a heavily truncated show featuring no commentary or pundits? Or, like rubbernecking motorists peering across the central reservation at the opposite carriageway, were the extra viewers simply voyeurs of the car crash?

Blackpool MP Scott Benton was one who thought that it was the former. Here’s what he tweeted six minutes after the show ended: “Best #MatchOfTheDay episode in years. Had all the goals in No ‘expert’ analysis And finished quicker than usual so I could make the pub for last orders. What’s not to like” (his lack of punctuation). I don’t know how far he lives from his local pub, but getting there, tweeting about it, and beating last orders in six minutes is impressive stuff! (No, I don’t believe he went to the pub).

Football on TV has come a long way from the days when I started watching it. Only a few matches were broadcast live on television back in the 1960s; The FA Cup Final, some England international matches, and European Cup Finals were about the sum total. It seemed that Kenneth Wolstenholme commentated on most of the ones I watched, largely because where there was a choice – both ITV and BBC showed the FA Cup Final in those days – I would choose The Beeb.

Watching footage of games that Wolstenholme covered, the difference in style between him and current commentators is abundantly clear. A particular memory of a Wolstenholme commentary that I have was a match involving Newcastle United. At the start of the game, while describing the kits that the two teams were wearing – especially important to the many viewers watching in black and white – he announced that Newcastle’s black shorts had “the manufacturer’s fiddly bits down the sides.”  The multi-coloured, logo covered shirts with numbers that don’t conform to what he would remember as the players’ positions would boggle his mind were he to see them today.

Kenneth Wolstenholme

Newcastle United in their shorts with the “the manufacturer’s fiddly bits down the sides.”

Events in games seemed sometimes to take Wolstenholme by surprise, and he often greeted goals with a simple, “And it’s a goal!” as though no one could have seen it coming. One of his contemporaries, David Coleman, of course habitually announced goals – especially the first of the game – by simply reciting the score in an emphatic manner.

Commentators today offer a bewildering array of facts and statistics to enhance the match experience for their viewers and listeners. John Motson, who sadly died recently from bowel cancer at the age of 77, may not have been the first match broadcaster to supplement their commentary with statistics about games, players, stadiums, and competitions, but he was the one who made an art of it. Largely, he did it in a way that improved the viewers’ experience; he was a bit like your mate at a game who mentions in passing some esoteric fact about one of the players or some previous match because he’s interested in it, and thinks you might be too. Too many commentators today sound as though they have committed the whole of the Sky Sports Football Yearbook (forever simply the Rothman’s as far as I am concerned) to memory and are hell-bent on reciting it all for the ‘benefit’ of their poor viewers.

The late John Motson in trademark sheepskin coat.

There may be people for whom late Saturday night television is incomplete without a dose of the wit and wisdom of Match of The Day pundit Danny Murphy, but I would be sceptical about that, or any claims that Match of The Day audiences want the amount of punditry that is routinely inflicted on them for that matter. To be fair, I’ve never heard anyone who watches MOTD claim to want more chatter at the expense of the action, but it must be true of some people because everyone’s tastes are different, as the ongoing popularity of Mrs Brown’s Boys proves.

The best football commentators add to the enjoyment of games by bringing to our attention things we might not have seen, or imparting relevant information we might otherwise not have had, not by wittering on endlessly, describing events that we’ve all seen with our own eyes and vainly thinking that they are being insightful, or trying to shoehorn in some alleged witticism or tenuous metaphor that they have written and rehearsed to the point that any illusion of spontaneity has been thoroughly removed. Some commentators have me reaching for the remote control to lower the volume to barely audible. Sam Matterface is one, and I’m not alone apparently, because as soon as ITV announce that the commentary team for a game are Matterface and Lee Dixon, Twitter goes into overdrive with mickey-taking memes.

When Martin Tyler first began commentating, John Motson suggested that he should, “Talk a little, but say a lot.” It was sage advice, and something that many of today’s football commentators would benefit from following.