March 2009: edited highlights

In lieu of an interesting new post (I've written 2,000 words of fiction, 500 words for a friend's website, and a long-ish lesson plan today), here's a rustle through the baggage of the Ides:

- The Spirit (n.) Film we saw and were enormously underwhelmed by. Samuel L. Jackson needs to sort it out, but not as much as Frank Miller does. I'm not sure the premise 'ghost flirts with women and Scarlett Johansson dresses up as Eva Braun' should have passed the 'Mr. Weinstein' pitching test.

- Walking (v.) Less of this in March, largely due to increased work commitments. The seasonally-affected Magyars have chinned up in the last week or two, according to my ambulatory researches, but I'm not covering five miles a day any more.

- Bankruptcy (n., abstract) Darlington FC have a month to find a buyer or they will cease to exist. Internet chat suggests that we'll have to pull together and reform as a 'Fans' Club' in the murky depths, where I would be - in all honesty - perfectly content.

- Politics (n.) Ferenc G. is gone but nobody seems to want his job. Corrupt, naive, and arrogant as Gyurcsány might have been, I feel rather sorry for him. When I saw him, he had stopped with his wife and daughter to buy some pre-cinema pic 'n' mix. Sights like this tend to humanise politics. In other 'humanising of politics' news, the godawful Jacqui Smith is all hot and bothered because her Guy Fawkes-a-like husband decided to get, well, hot and bothered on ministerial expenses. My inner schoolboy wants to use the phrase 'wank bank' here, and just has.

- Dream (n.) And a political one, at that. Last night I dreamt that I was crossing a big Budapesti boulevard with Gordon and Sarah Brown, and David and Samantha Cameron were crossing in the other direction.

- Clock change (n.) - 'Time-wasting bastard', more like.

- Badly-written (adj.) - I'm reading sci-fi novelist Brian Aldiss' autobiography at the moment. It's absolutely fascinating if you're interested in the currents of ideas which drove British postwar fiction. It's also terribly composed, and pays no attention to the potential tonal discrepancies between eulogistic descriptions of one's wife and throwaways like 'the water was gonad shrinking'. Full marks for attempts to posit a postwar avant-garde, though, even if this is mucked in with lengthy celebrations of (NO! NO! NO!) Kingsley Amis.

- Well-written (adj.) - I (re-)read Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction earlier this week. I need to write about the appropriation of the Sebaldian voice against Sebald's own arguments about style and kitsch. The decontextualisation of Sebald - only seven years after his death - is infuriating. For now I'll only remark on the wonderful Clive Scott's cautionary reminder, in his obituary for W.G.S., that the infinitely imitable nature of the style of a novel like Austerlitz was/ is a joke that flies in the face of the absolute alignment of form and content that Sebald achieved. For me, Sebald is a Beckett unashamed by the ultimate embededness of style within historical context. There is no superfluous melancholy in The Rings of Saturn; there is nothing whimsical or unearnedly peripatetic about Vertigo. Going back to On the Natural History of Destruction made me ask one or two severe questions of my thesis, I can tell you.

Anyway, that's for another day. I'm off to bed. Xx

Half-arsed, putting off going to work, news digest

HOT!




Ferenc Gyurcsany resigns as Hungarian PM, but not before deploying some ever-so-slightly emotionally manipulative language (he's such a Blairite). Actually, it all seems to be a ploy to prevent President Sólyom calling an early general election, but let's allow the almost completely unmourned (and, lest we forget, multi-millionaire 'socialist') Gyurcsany have his moment of spurious dignity. Here's a quick flashback of his career highlights:

Saudi 'terrorists' (Feri's cracking wheeze about the supposed extracurricular activities of the Saudi national football team.)

A moment of unguarded honesty brings a major European capital to a standstill.

OFF!



On the subject of people who can't be trusted to be left alone with a microphone for five minutes, Chris Moyles is in hot water again/ Chris Moyles has been a dick again/ Chris Moyles is still not funny.

I hate to say it, but I frequently feel as if Moyles is the embodiment of the noughties British zeitgeist.




THE PRESS!




And, carrying on the theme of zeitgeist-embodying loudmouths, The Damned United, Tom Hooper's adaptation of David Peace's novelisation of Brian Clough's scarcely believable 44 days in charge of Dirty Leeds (made more dirty by their being Moyles's team of choice) is out this weekend. The BBC's Pat Murphy interviews Martin O'Neill, manager of Aston Villa and former Clough underling, about it here. O'Neill is, as ever, an eloquent interviewee (he studied law at Queen's University prior to joining Forest, and is an avid amateur criminologist in his spare time), and I was surprised by the uncanny resemblance of his diction - close, spare, precise - to my dad's.

Ferencváros - Newcastle, 1996

I remember the hype around this game really distinctly, for some reason. I also remember absolutely despising Newcastle at the time and really, really wanting Fradi to win. All the attention before the game focused on the home team's prodigiously talented young midfielder Krisztián Lisztes, who some pundits were painting as the great new hope for Hungarian football. Sadly, Lisztes's career has been dogged by a series of injuries and, while he's won plenty of trophies in the Bundesliga with VFB Stuttgart and Werder Bremen, there seems to be a sense that he might have become a real star. As is sometimes the case, the Czechs ended up with publicity at the expense of the Hungarians, and the most famous midfielder to come out of Central Europe in the mid-1990s was the great Pavel Nedvěd, who is still going strong at 36 for Juventus.

A few things came out of this video for me. Firstly, the extent to which Hungarian football has declined over the last decade. When FTC's name came out of the hat as Newcastle's draw, they were genuinely considered a threat to Shearer et al's chance of progressing. Nowadays, Huungarian sides are looked upon as soft touches: when Zalaegerszeg-based ZTE sneaked a 1-0 first leg victory against Manchester United in a 2002 Champions League qualifier (before being thumped 5-0 in the return at Old Trafford) it was considered an upset of almost implausible magnitude. The result was so unusual that, according to some of my (non-football-loving, female) students, Béla Koplárovics, scorer of the winning goal in Zalaegerszeg, attained overnight fame throughout the country.

Secondly, of course, is the decline of Newcastle over a similar period. Given some of the players they've fielded since the unpleasant sacking of Bobby Robson in 2004 (not to mention some of those that Robson himself chose to deploy) it's probably surprising that they've lasted this long without being relegated. This year, their number might well be up, and my guess is that it's only the plight of semi-local rivals Middlesborough, the subject of internet rumours regarding imminent administration (rumours, I'd best stress, on the internet), that's acting as any kind of comfort for them at the moment. Just seeing the short clip above brought back memories of how good that Albert - Lee - Ginola (left on the bench that night in Budapest) - Ferdinand - Shearer side could be. Srnicek's early error, however, is an augury of how the next thirteen years were to turn out.

Thirdly, there's a lovely moment in the video where Rob Lee sees a slightly-scuffed shot hit the post and then trickle teasingly along the line before the Fradi goalkeeper comes to his senses and jumps on it. Various Newcastle forwards raise their hands as if they're about to begin celebrating, but as soon as the referee signals 'no goal' they're back to business. There's no John Terry-esque referee-harrassing here. Have we really got this bad this quickly?

Szabadság: Pt. I

As one gets closer to the Danube, the intersections of streets and boulevards in Districts VII and VIII will suddenly provide a long view, across the river to the Gellért Hill, where the snow has not yet melted. Invariably, our line of sight is interrupted by the Szabadság (Liberty) Monument at the southern end of the hilltop, an allegorical figure who flings her arms open back over towards Pest and working-class District IX, Ferencváros.

If the IXth sounds familiar to the British ear, it is almost certainly because of the football team of the same name who play there, their stadium a few miles down Üllői út plausibly the object of Liberty's gaze. 'Fradi', as they are popularly known, were a famous name on the European scene until the mid-1990s, and most recently made English headlines when drawn to play Millwall in a UEFA cup tie in 2004, thus allowing two of Europe's most unreconstructed sets of supporters the opportunity for an unfriendly get-together. Fradi won the tie, but were soon to experience domestic ignominy for the first time, being relegated to the second tier for financial irregularities in 2006. Because of a promotion bottleneck - only one team from each of the 'B' Liga's regional sections is allowed to go up - they have yet to return to the top flight, and their generally conservative fans have hinted darkly at a conspiracy on the part of the Socialist (read: high-taxing modernisers with a paradoxical faith in Thatcherite deregulation) MSP government of Ferenc Gyurcsány.


Ferencvárosi TC encapsulate, at this moment in time, the problematic nature of the EU at the close of the 00's. Owned by British businessman Kevin McCabe, whose prize football asset is Sheffield United, and managed by ex-Leeds striker Bobby Davison (who uses McCabe's other team as a source of young English loanees), FTC's recent history seems to mirror the opening up of Central and Eastern Europe to Western investment and management philosophy. McCabe's company has big ideas for the club, involving a stadium redevelopment and a medium-term plan to see the boys in zold and fehér playing for big money in the Champions League, another footballing institution which is representative of early 21st century European economic trends. But Fradi have an older symbolic value. Like Chelsea in England, they're a side who have traditionally represented the socially conservative section of the working class, and since 1989 they have been a rallying point for elements of the Hungarian far right.

The Hungarian far right agenda might be summed up according to three key principles. Firstly, it is hostile towards both Jews and Roma, although its phobias are not limited to its principle scapegoats. Secondly, it is irredentist. A popular graphic symbol amongst its members is a map of Hungary - actually, the portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire sublet to Budapest - prior to the Treaty of Trianon. Parts of modern Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, and Ukraine, and most of Slovakia, are incorporated into 'big Hungary'. Thirdly, like the British medium-to-far right, it is adamantly anti-European.

Ferencváros thus find themselves in the curious position of exemplifying the conspicuous mobility of capital in post-2004 Europe and embodying an attitude which might be said to be its antithesis. As hostility towards Gyurcsány and the MSP swells due to Hungary's modishly collapsing economy, one might grasp in the situation a worrying indication of the dominant tendency in European dissent in 2009. The financial crisis - it seems glib to use the word 'present' here - has loosened the cap, never altogether sealed tightly, on the resentments of immoderate conservatism across the continent. A number of commentators, often liberal or leftishly inclined, have predicted a 'hot spring' for Europe this year and for the nations of the 2004 accession in particular. Romania, the Baltic States - one of which, Latvia, has already pegged its currency to the Euro - are seen as likely flashpoints of civil disturbance. Bulgaria is extremely unstable. Demonstrations against Gyurcsány wouldn't be a new thing here, but we can expect more of the same as the year wears on. Western Europe, however, seems just as liable to witness unrest. France we already know about, but Italy, Ireland, and even the usually timid UK seem to be approaching the red part of the thermometer. Greece and Iceland have already reached their internal tipping points.

It's absolutely crucial to note here that what we stand to see is anything but a repeat of '68 or, for the former communist states, '89. In the West, the recent history of civil disturbance offers only France and Greece as examples in which the voice of dissent was (broadly) leftist. The 2006 Dublin riots and a series of particularly nasty, racially-driven outbursts along England's M62 corridor share much in common with the nihilistic outbreaks of joyriding and vandalism that erupted in the likes of Blackbird Leys and Benwell in the early 1990s. In these cases, no progressive political argument was being made. Frustrations that might have been harnessed by the left - bad housing; unemployment; the neglect shown by successive governments to former industrial areas - came out anyway and attached themselves to specific targets within the disaffected community. Does anyone really believe that the 2000 Paulsgrove riots were really about paedophiles? Why did they not take place in, say, Cheltenham? My inclination is that the right are slowly getting the first dibs on resentments that, ideally, might be addressed with an entirely different mode of analysis.

*

As ever, we are hampered by our inability to think ourselves into history. 9/11 remains the cardinal example of this in recent memory: few can honestly say that the attacks prompted anything byt a mixture of objectless anxiety (a vague, 1939-esque premonition that Things Would Never Be The Same Again), and a childlike faith that a benevolent agency would act as the invisible hand of stability. Eight years later, we're still twiddling the same abacus. History is elsewhere, a set of past tenses which were eventually recuperated as the just-about-inhabitable present. Teaching a humanities subject at a university can provide a salutary crash course in this weltanschaung, which can't quite be described as apathy. Progress and security are interpreted as the ability to make judgments about things that happened a long time ago: we are invited to assess the value of Heart of Darkness according to our certainties about the wrongness of colonialism. Each text allows a new opportunity to rate ourselves a historical (allegedly disposed-with) demon: Hitler, Idi Amin, Field Marshal Haig, postwar austerity. First year students, unwittingly, are the 21st century's premier proponents of Whig history. Given that their lecturers, and a still-sizable number of their secondary school teachers, cut their teeth on Marx, Althusser, Adorno, and Derrida's seance with Marx, one has to wonder where this guarded optimism is coming from. Repeatedly, politics is displaced into parts of the world where Whiggish benevolence might still be seen to be required: Palestine, Sudan, Tiber, Iraq. Borrowing a notion half-remembered from Slavoj Žižek, it might be said that their appeals are made to the grace of the system, the capacity of which for discretion is read as some Darwinian zenith of political possibility, rather than directly against it. Anything wrong is interpreted as a malfunction within the system, which must be normalised, rather than as an inherent flaw. I've resisted writing about this so far, but the well-intended jubilation surrounding Barack Obama's victory is the categorical example of this: as if Obama's incessant realpolitiking during the election campaign were not enough to make us suspicious, we should remember that the new president is opposed on principle to certain rights that a significant number of his worldwide admirers believe should be inalienable. Labour's 1997 victory - which is not the same thing as a victory for Labour in 1997 - should have served as a cautionary reminded about this kind of triumphalism. In each case, the victory of a nominally left leader acts less as a prompt for real advancement and more as (spurious) proof of our own political perfection. We have no sense of ourselves as historical beyond vague platitude's about the electorate's capacity to 'make history'.

Meanwhile, the right persists with its own unpleasant brand of selective historicism. I've talked at length about the wolf in lamb's clothing of the conservative commentariat, whose assumption of the voice of 'sensible opinion' has allowed for the propagation of opinions which are, quite simply and irreducibly, extremist. Most troublingly, the likes of Richard Littlejohn have been allowed, time and time again, to play the wounded party as they reduce all left-wing critique to the analysis of a crypto-Stalinist 'metropolitan elite'. Absolutely everything they disagree with is dismissed with the wholly unearned seen-it-all-beforeness of a Phillip Larkin poem: they are allowed, like Nick Griffin is, to represent themselves as the revolutionary vanguard of the free- and right- thinking. In spite of the fact that they have a variety (and the majority) of established media platforms to speak from, they are permitted to claim that they are subject to a left-wing conspiracy which aims at their silencing.

To be continued...

Hillsborough 20th Anniversary

There's a piece in today's Observer about the Hillsborough Disaster. Twenty years on and countless eyewitness accounts later, this is still almost unbearably moving. It's shocking too - the anecdote about the policeman telling survivors not to use an advertising hoarding as a stretcher because they were 'vandalizing the stadium' took my breath away.

The tragedy, seen retrospectively, was a watershed in British politics. In its wake, it became unacceptable (or, for more cynical parties, inexpedient) to make Mail-like generalisations about the behavioural tendencies of large groups of people. The article makes it abundantly clear that the disaster was not attended to sufficiently because the police assumed that there had been crowd violence. And yet crowd trouble itself was less the result of a spontaneous desire to fight than it was a conduit for the frustrations of a Britain that was, successively, broke and dominated by an uninclusive monetarist attitude as it moved through the 1970s and 1980s. The old cliché that rave culture put the lid on hooliganism by providing a comparable, and yet nonviolent, outlet for the desire to be part of a mass movement is more true than the noun at the beginning of this sentence would have you believe: very few people were 'fighting just for the sake of fighting'.

If crimes tell us more than anything else about our culture, can disasters be said to do the same thing? Much ink has been used describing the links between the series of rail tragedies around the turn of the Millenium and the negligence of the Blairite government. Hillsborough, along with the Zeebrugge ferry sinking, are the totemic catastrophes of the Thatcher era. The latter resulted from the attitude that time is money: the boat's bow doors were not secured before departure, provoking the investigating judge to mention a 'disease of sloppiness'. The same carelessness was evident at Hillsborough, but there were clearly other complicating factors. Thatcher declared her intentions towards football supporters with her notorious ID card scheme and one club - Luton Town, owned by the commitedly neo-Tory David Evans - had already made moves to implement it. Fences were put up at the majority of grounds, as if the players, rather than opposing supporters, were the object of aggression. Travelling fans were locked in cramped football specials to ferry them to and from away games. There was little consideration shown for the large majority of fans who did not participate in disorder, and a blanket lack of willing to engage with the social problems that motivated those who did.

On the subject of social problems, the fact that the tragedy occurred in South Yorkshire is fairly unavoidable. Taylor's report bore out the suspicion that inept, inconsiderate policing was largely to blame for what happened. The S.Y. force in 1989 was staffed largely by veterans of the Miners' Strike, and the conflict had clearly imbued the organisation with a siege mentality. As the article, like many before it, shows, the police were utterly incapable of interpreting the events as anything but violence and disorder. By the time they performed the necessary measures, it was far, far too late.

The public response is all that remains in my memory from that day - I was only eight years old. I didn't find out about Kelvin MacKenzie's sociopathic line on it all until much later on. The Sun's reportage on Hillsborough is arguably the biggest misjudgment in British journalism since Rothermere's backing of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and the paper's sales on Merseyside are still significantly lower than in the rest of the United Kingdom. That MacKenzie has made sporadic attempts to defend his editorial choices that week tells us a lot about the ongoing pervasiveness of Thatcherism.

I began going to football the following year. The fences were still up at Feethams, but the attitudes surrounding football had already begun to change. Although I've seen them get unnecessarily baton-happy on a few occasions, the police are now generally responsible and cooperative when it comes to crowd management at football. More importantly, the popular and political determination that nothing of the sort should ever happen again is ongoing. Articles like this contribute to that will.

'A small club gamely failing in a rich man's world' (or not, as the case may be)

Eminently correct football Cassandra David Conn on the crisis at my club, which only seems to find itself in the news when everything has gone wrong.

Arsenal Stadium Mystery

Arsene Wenger compounds his resemblance to Jack Straw by claiming that Arsenal may be a priority target for extremists. It's not the greatest excuse for falling into fifth place, is it? In fact, it's almost 'dog ate my homework' country.

I think he's been reading this novel.

Hard Fact Time

I feel lucky to be in a different country while this situation worsens. Having a new job, meeting new people who speak a language I know next to nothing of every day, tends to take the edge off situations like the precarious health of one's local football team's finances. Last night, though, after an exchange of texts with my brother, I sat down for twenty minutes with a glass of cheap red wine to try and figure out exactly what I think about it all.

My brother and I are both in our mid-to-late twenties and we could both reasonably be said to be beyond the age of no responsibility. He's a full-time journalist with a few years worth of experience, I'm a PhD in English supposed to be transforming my thesis into a fully-fledged book proposal. Last time our football team achieved any real success, I was nearly nine and he had just turned seven, so we were understandably not going to celebrate that by going out on the town and getting drunk and sentimental. Last night, I realised that the window of opportunity for that kind of abandon has just about gone. It will probably be a few years before the club is in a position to challenge for anything again, and I just can't see either of us being a position to suddenly drop everything and travel across the UK for a vital end-of-season away game
by the time that situation comes about.

I've seen Man Utd, Spurs, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea fans who have never set foot inside a football ground wildly celebrating winning various competitions. I've seen them argue with each other about the relative merits of their clubs as if they had any real connection with the place. I've seen them moved almost to tears by adverse results while sitting in the pub on a Saturday afternoon. All Thom and I have got from Darlo in the period of time when we can afford to actually follow a club with the 'passion' all of these plastic fans proclaim they feel is disappointment upon disappointment upon disappointment. The chances are that next time - if there is indeed to be a next time - Darlo get promoted, I'll be sitting in a conference room somewhere, or something equally adult.

Another point in all of this is that, for all the complaining fans do when their clubs go into administration, there are people who (understandably) have no interest in football whose livelihoods are damaged when '1p in the pound'-type settlements are imposed by preferential creditors. It's all well and good the 'club being saved for future generations', but when its debt management agenda can involve other, smaller, companies taking a serious hit in the pocket, there's something pretty grubby going on. Football fans need to be less blinkered about what 'administration' actually means: it isn't just a problem for the club which results in a ten point deduction, it has a real and palpable effect in the community. Clubs must learn to live within their means soon, even if that means a number of them going part-time. I'd rather see Darlo fielding semi-professional players than think that their mismanagement had cost anyone a job or their livelihood.

England bad, England good...

Darlington are going into administration. Given the situation we're in, it could - could - be the end.

In better news, I just swapped my SIM cards back to phone HMRC and spoke to a very helpful Mackem called Daniel, who assures me that I am now registered. They have something about avuncular northerners there - when I was trying to get my rebate, the only person who stopped me going stir-fry was a genial Yorkshireman called Mick who seemed as bemused by the process as I was. That's a bloody relief though, anyway!

Sorry lads, we're bizzies...

The police have postponed Everton's home fixture with Stoke so the BNP can have a get-together in Liverpool. With any luck, this means that Nick Griffin has got on the wrong side of the Blues' vaguely Christopher Walken-esque manager David Moyes.

I've met the Hungarian police a few times this week. On Tuesday, a couple of pensioners burgled a flat in our block (you've read that right - Jenny's description makes it seem like a particularly vigorous outing for Compo and co). The Rendőrség pulled up in their car about two hours later, just as I was attempting to get into the block without my outer-door key. The leader walked over to me and tried gamely to speak English while I tried gamely to speak Hungarian, a conversation which eventually elicited the information that I 'should' drink the bottle of wine I was holding in my hand. Still, at least he didn't confuse me with the superannuated robbers.

Then, on Wednesday, I made my usual short-cut to WestEnd mall, an implausibly large shopping outlet containing about three million shoe shops, through Nyugati Station. The station had been evacuated the day before because workers had found some unexploded WWII grenades on a construction site next door, so the Rendőrség had decided to go and do some tokenistic 'anti-terrorist' quota-filling in the station. As in Britain, this generally involves stopping all men between 14 and 40 and making them feel guilty for a couple of minutes. In this case, they checked my passport briefly and returned it politely, without the supercilious attitude that I've seen so often from British police (particularly at football matches, where I've witnessed some absolutely ludicrous timesheet-completing activities.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm very far from being one of those 'maaaan, the police are, like, always bad and that' type people,* and I've met some very polite and helpful PCs in Britain, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (where an officer just chuckled and gave me the right answer when, rather tipsy, I asked him for directions to the train station I was standing right outside at five in the morning. In Italian.) But I'm convinced that I have one of those faces. My criminal record is pristine, but I have:

- been asked for my name and address whilst mucking about innocently in a park, aged 14.
- been thrown out of a W.H. Smith store by a security guard, aged 13, because I'd been in there 'too long'. (I was looking for Christmas presents, you wanker.)
- had my luggage and all my possessions heavily scrutinised by the French douanes at Calais on two separate occasions. I admit that the second time this might have been provoked by my making a sarcastic remark, but I only did that because the police were treating everyone like idiots, as they generally do in France.
- been put into an 'escort' on my way to a match at Lincoln, only to realise that it was full of the full complement of Hogan's finest, who'd travelled en masse to the end-of-season fixture in the hope of a 80s-revivalist pagger.
- Been accused at Carrow Road of beating up a Dagenham & Redbridge supporter outside the ground and stealing his ticket. In all fairness, this was due more to some lacksadaisical organisation (it's a long and boring story) on an ex-girlfriend's part than to over-zealous policing
, but still...

I used to sit opposite a hopeful for the police when I had a rubbish job at a stationery wholesalers. He was a nice guy, and intelligent, but he had this spooky regard for 'the law' as this immutable, inherently correct thing which made me wonder about what his attitude would be if he lived in a country which places less emphasis on personal freedoms than the UK - Berlusconi's Italy, for example. One of the many ways in which I used to kill time in that job was by constructing ethical dilemmas of ever-increasing baroqueness for him to solve, but his answer was always 'if it's against the law, it's against the law, and I'd arrest them.' I hope that not all potential PCs are so dogmatic. I should add, in mitigation, that he had an uncanny attractiveness to muggers and random assailants, and that he was from Grimsby, a town which could make anyone yearn for some Dixon of Dock Green-style idyll.

Anyway, I'm thinking of going to the football this afternoon, so we'll see how they do 'crowd'** control in Budapest.

* My uncle is a raconteur ex-policeman with a caché of good stories. He arrested Keith Moon at Prestwick Airport once. Moon pulled a 'gun' on him, and pulled the trigger, only for a flag with 'bang' written on it to protrude from the muzzle...
** Average attendances at Soproni Liga 1 games have dropped below 2,000 this season, largely due to the fact that Hungarian football has been ruined by corruption since 1989, and everyone in BP supports Italian, German, and English teams. 2,000 would be understandable in a country the size of, say, Slovenia, but Hungary's population is twice Scotland's. I'm thinking of going to see my local team, current champions MTK, play Kaposvar at 5.00pm, but I'm slightly depressed by the thought that they've had <1,000 gates this season.

Football, Sublime and Ridiculous

I just celebrated being offered an interview by watching the paradigmatically graceful goal 'new Zidane' Yoann Gourcuff scored for Bordeaux against Paris St. Germain last weekend whilst simultaneously listening to the hook where it all goes 'Scottish Tourist Board advertisement' in the first song on the new Mogwai album (still up in its entirety on MySpace). Here's the goal:



But football: bloody hell. I'll be chirruping the disapproval of a billion know-nothing Daily Mail columnists here, but this 'Kaka to Manchester City on half a million quid a week' affair is absolutely beyond the already-hugely-budged pale. I won't insult your intelligences by pointing out how much useful stuff that money can purchase.

Elsewhere this week - I read Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March and Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, and now I'm re-reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And did some other stuff. Writing, mostly.

On the subject of pervy links...

Here's one for the Hungarian equivalent of football-porn Gomorrah Pyramid Passion. It isn't quite as easy to navigate as the procastinator's paradise of PP, but it seems to be similarly exhaustive.

I'll put some more Budapest notes and pictures up in the next couple of days. It snowed today, by the way, and the staff in Muvesz allowed me half an hour before turning off the unintrusive jazz in favour of some undoubtedly very chic off-the-shelf trip hop. Music, too: I'm writing a little piece about the Velvet Underground's White Light/ White Heat, for no reason other than I want to.

But right now I'm sitting on my sofa, soaking my brown rice and lentils, and indulging in my favoured Saturday evening pursuit of checking the football results. My, oh my, what is going on in the Premiership? In list form, then, the things which have made this the best Premiership season since the glorious, surreal escapades of 95/96.

1 - Liverpool playing with some mettle. I doubt they'll win it (and actually hope they won't, preferably failing in a manner that involves last-day capitulation allowing United to overtake them and causing Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson to turn into human teardrops in the MOTD studio), but their revitalisation gives me a touch of Match of the Eighties style nostalgia.

2 - Hull City, a side who have sashayed straight out of Roy of the Rovers. Dean Windass - hard man local hero with the proverbial pugilist's face. Geovanni - maverick Brazilian who scores banana free kicks almost routinely. Ian Ashbee - lower league grafter who has crept to the top virtually unnoticed. Marlon King - flashy bad-boy striker who has spent time at Her Majesty's Pleasure and - you couldn't make it up - gets in a brawl with local hero Windass. In a casino. In Scarbrough. The art-life continuum is right out of joint in the East Riding these days (delete the final two words as appropriate.)

3 - Stoke's employment of the similarly if-he-didn't-exist-we'd-have-to-invent-him Rory Delap, a professional footballer whose playing style is largely grounded in his ability to use his hands. Sorry, I know Delap-mania is a bit Football Focus, but he's a one-man Eagle strip.

4 - Arsenal. They're imploding, but doing so whilst employing a cast of improbably talented kids who no-one has ever heard of. William Gallas displays the leadership capabilities of Tom Berenger's character in Platoon and Wenger presides over the whole affair like a miffed but ultimately powerless head teacher. The 'whole side consisting of unknown foreign teenagers' ploy has aesthetic merit, for sure, but it seems to me to be a strategy that works best - and even then, only in a limited way - in the psychedelic utopia of Championship Manager.

5 - Manchester United's decision to not only play with fourteen forwards, but to sign a pair of identical twin full-backs, thus employing a tactic not seen since Cobra Command's dastardly fielding of Tomax and Xamot in Action Force. Incidentally, does anyone have any idea why that article on Cobra Command is hosted on the website of some nightmarishly useless Goth metal band?

6 - Newcastle. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.

7 - Stephen Ireland's highly unlikely maturation into the new, arguable improved, Steven Gerrard.

8 - Gabriel Agbonlahor apparenly growing half a foot, thus putting himself forward as a candidate to become England's best all-round centre forward since Alan Shearer. Feel free to laugh at me if this doesn't occur.

Anyway, that's enough frivolous football-chat for now. Off to see some French garage rock bands on a boat tomorrow night: intriguing.

Maradona! Butcher! Marguerite Duras!

So, Diego Maradona is the new Argentina manager, then. And the first game of his tenure is a friendly away to Scotland at Hampden.

Even into the 1980s, when Maradona was at his freewheeling best, this would still have been a Grade 'A' humdinger of a fixture. At that point, Argentina, with a Michel Platini-inspired France, had taken on the mantle of the best footballing side in the world from the similarly improvisatory Brazil team of 1982. And the Scots? Well, Scotland have historically been the flair side of the British Isles, with a record of maverick playmakers, firebrand strikers and gifted schemers stretching from Hughie Gallacher and Alex James to Charlie Nicholas and Davie Cooper. Between those points, of course, one finds players like Jim Baxter, Kenny Dalglish and Jimmy Johnstone, all of whom could categorically be said to be players who, like Maradona, operated within the true spirit of the game.

'Ah,' I hear you say. 'But Maradona didn't play within the spirit of the game. His second most famous goal was....a handball!!'

That handball is at the root of the current fuss. Terry Butcher, the technically-limited but appealingly (if you're into that kind of thing) 'man at Harfleur' centre-half who was on the receiving end of Maradona's single-handed demolition job in that 1986 game, is now Scotland's assistant coach, and he's planning to 'snub' the Argentinian coach at Hampden tonight. The fact that the incident in question happened 22 years ago notwithstanding, I'm more than a little uncomfortable that Butcher and the media seem prepared to turn Scotland's meeting with Maradona into a revisiting of an issue that specifically affected England: indeed, I'm sure that there were more than one or two 'dancing in the streets of Raith' the night the English were punched out of the World Cup. It's as if Scotland are considered a side-show to what always seems to be the main event, namely the circus of inanity that is the England football team and it's ongoing failure to succeed at international tournaments. I would have thought, even hoped, that Scotland wouldn't be too enamoured with Butcher's annexing of their fixture for a restaging of a vendetta which is either personal or Anglo-Argentine, but of little importance for those north of the border.

Revisiting a notoriously weird interview between the theologically-questioning French novelist Marguerite Duras and Platini - the key extract of which is here - the Nietzscheans among us might see Maradona as drifting into those hinterlands of the 'démoniaque et divin' (or, the handball and the dribble) which are the playgrounds of the truly free. Others, and I'm probably one of them, are simply prepared to forgive Diego his moment of supreme naughtiness. Let's face it, if Theo Walcott did that to win a World Cup Quarter Final, the English would see it more as Dennis the Menace mischief than a piece of international incident-prompting blackguardery.

Many of Scotland's greatest players were dogged by similar problems of temperament and intemperance which were to prove the end of Maradona's career. Unlike Argentina, Scotland's reserve of footballing mavericks has more or less dried up: the latest archetypically Caledonian playmaker, Aiden McGeady, has opted to play for the Republic of Ireland rather than the country of his birth. In terms of its population, Scotland was punching above its weight (if you'll pardon the pun) in terms of the quality of player it was producing up until the 1980s. Butcher's attitude seems to me to represent the trajectories of football on either side of the border since that period: the English falling back on their well-prepared hard luck stories, and the Scots having ceased to be a major story in their own right. In an ideal world, we'd see the return of evenly-matched home internationals, a Scottish footballer as talented as Dennis Law or Baxter (even an Archie Gemmell or Pat Nevin would do!), and English players with the composed magnanimity of Bobby Moore or Gordon Banks. Unfortunately, I can't see that state of affairs coming about any time soon.

---

And, while still on the football theme, isn't it good to know that Arsenal fans are still as myopic as ever? See the first question in this week's update of the Guardian's brilliant footie triv series 'The Knowledge': as Ernesto has reported, young Carlos Vela is a very special talent indeed, but fourteen (!) career goals probably doesn't make him the 'most prolific teenage striker ever'!

I Spy...

'north-western non-league team at home in the FA Cup 1st Round'

For five points:

- Jovial, optimistic pensioners looking for a bus.

- Former league striker with a point to prove.

- Man dressed as a viking in the bar before the game, honking a klaxon.


For ten points:

- Uncannily identical middle-aged couple who have chosen vigorous support of a footballing minnow in preference to having children. Because of this, they treat away games in the cup as particularly important parents evening or nativity plays.

- Home fans singing disparaging songs about visiting team's lowly/ semi-professional status (ie. 'Sunday league, Sunday league, Sunday league'/ 'Come in a taxi/ you could have come in a taxi'/ 'What's it like to see a seat'.)

- Overly confident home team wasting first half hour on Cruyff turns and fifty yard volleys.

- Home team becoming frustrated and forgetting how to play football.

For twenty points:

- Dawning realisation on part of home fans that lowly visitors have plundered a replay.

- Celebrating vikings, pensioners and childless superfans who know that the replay is likely to yield an upset.

I love English football.

Update #2

Lopped off around six thousand and written bits to make two chapters less zany. One more big chapter edit to do tomorrow (although I have started with this), plus little 100-word bits here and there. Nearly there now.

Boastful aside: I took an hour off last night for seven-a-side. Five goals. Mint.

Love for football restored in one fell swoop

The main reason that I wish I was not sat in front of a computer right now trying to write chapter summaries for my introduction.

Still, if I'd gone they'd have lost one-nil.

Real Ale: stronger than you think!

Hence the 'staccato' sentences in the last post. I hadn't even been watching the game; I'd merely read that report as I was eating my late-night chicken in black bean sauce and it had wound me up...

To clarify, the 'I work bloody hard' referred to when I play football, obviously not to the PhD/ teaching/ editing (which generally gets deferred in favour of blogging and, well, playing football.)

Straw Dogs is still pretty much as delicious as a weisse beer can get though...

Football is now wrong, but structurally

And this paragraph says all you need to know:

The defeat, though, will not be too hard to take for United, who not only had Cristiano Ronaldo watching from the stands, but who will also be hoping to add a striker - most notably Dimitar Berbatov - to their ranks before the close of the transfer window on Monday.


It's the final of the European Super Cup. I'm not a professional footballer (obviously), and I still spilled my guts to handball a shot off the line in 6-a-side training last night. I play three times a week in top of everything else, and I work bloody hard when I do. Football's a laugh, but I still want to win every time I play. Unfortunately, I find it entirely plasuible that United just didn't care tonight. I remember being proud when Darlo won the Durham Senior Cup final in 1991, even though they only had to beat Bishop Auckland and Billingham Synthonia to do it (though we did get to beat Hartlepool 4-2 in the final). The idea that defeat in a competitive final would not be 'too hard to take' takes the piss out of anyone who bothered spending cash on going to that game.

Tunnel Vision Time #1

I really really really miss football at the moment. It's almost September and I'm still to hear the reassuring click of a turnstile or catch the Bovril on the wind.

The 'writing-up period', also known as 'the period of borderline insanity when you write for hours and hours every day and spend the rest of your time chewing your nails and not being able to get to sleep.' Every day I think about the things I used to do before this state of affairs descended:

1 - Wear clothes that made me look neat.
2 - Play in a band; a band that were actually not that bad.
3 - Go to nightclubs, occasionally, and have a dance.
4 - Go to football. Not just play it (though I'm glad I have that to fall back on.)

I came back to football hard at the beginning of my PhD. It wasn't that I hadn't watched it or played a bit in the years following my leaving home. I think I just felt at the time that it was a bit hokey to be spending half your life indulging your love for a middling-to-awful side from the north-east. The jump-start back into obsession began when I went to visit my brother, Thom, in Manchester just before I went back to university: I was working for a stationery suppliers, was on the verge of being (temporarily) 'removed' from the band for personal reasons, was in a state that can best be described as 'relationship chaos', was not really writing or even reading very much. I had just been awarded a prize for my Masters dissertation, which somehow managed to contribute to a sense of identity crisis.

Anyway, Thom was living in Manchester at the time, as I say, and Darlington - in their woeful, post-George Reynolds downturn - were away at Bury that weekend. So after a lovely, if famished, journey over, and a preposterously Britpop-heavy night in (we did this again in January after going to see Spurs: after a few cans T. 'djs' and thinks that listening to Ultrasound
would be a good idea), we got the Metrolink up to Bury to go to Gigg Lane. I had actually been to a home game a couple of weeks before, but this was something else: bloody freezing, booze-veined and participating in the cameraderie of the awayday charabanc. In a non-Danny Dyer way, I was buzzing. I think I decided then and there to embrace my provinciality once and for all.

Anyway, since then, it's been pretty good, in a 'isn't my harmless obsession amusing' kind of way. There was the spontaneous, three in the morning decision to go all the way to Macclesfield the next morning (Thom tried to make me go and see The Wedding Present in Sheffield that night. I was not having it. I believe that was also the week I taught a lesson on Bertolt Brecht, despite the fact that the most complicated thing I've ever seen in a theatre is The Hound of the Baskervilles starring the affable, anxious tax collector from The Darling Buds of May.) There was the visit to the Millerntor Stadion to see St. Pauli take on Wattenscheid, the fulcrum of a marvellous boozy weekend in Hamburg. There was, most notoriously, the day that I dragged Jenny to deepest Cambridgeshire to see Histon lose 1-0 to Carshalton Athletic in subzero temperatures on the grounds that it was the kind of thing Bill Brandt would have done.

The thing is that, although there are many serious academics who like nothing better than listening to the Fall on the train en route to see AFC Fylde or Whitby Town or Saltash United, they are still in the minority. Footie is a kind of conversational no-go most of the time. It is often automatically assumed that 'liking football' means going to a bar and talking ill-informed nonsense while watching the team you 'support' on Sky Sports. I often want to round on these people and say that no-one seriously 'likes football' unless they have done the following things:

1 - Been to watch an FA Cup game in one of the rounds prior to the Conference National teams entering.
2 - Have seen a Blyth Spartans fans threaten to murder the referee if he abandoned the game, despite the fact that half the floodlights had stopped working.
3 - Owned a copy of the Non-League yearbook and read it in the bath. Aged 12.
4 - Chatted to a player from a team you support and told them that they'd had a 'good game'. Through gritted teeth, naturally.
5 - Performed the 'naming all the grounds in the football league' party piece.

As you might expect, this can cause some friction. Anyway, the problem is that I feel like I don't get to games even a quarter as much as I should: I compulsively read the When Saturday Comes forums and it seems to be packed with people like me (ie PhD-writing, krautrock-loving types) who seem to be getting to games all the time. I partially blame Norwich, a city where the non-league options are relatively limited. Anyway, I've promised that Budapest shall feature plenty of football, though I'm still open to offers regarding which team I'm going to support.

Whinges about clothes and nightclubs still to come...