all the stage is a world

June 10, 2010June 11, 2010Leave a comment

The World Cup is finally here! After all the talk, after the training, the hype, the injuries to big names, the predictions, the greatest show on earth starts in a matter of hours in South Africa. I cannot wait. It is like Christmas Eve. Of course, the matches are all on so early that I’ll be setting my VCR. Damn you, ten hour time difference!

And per tradition, that perennially poor prognostic Mystic Pete has been whispering some predictions to me lately, namely that Brazil will win but it won’t be pretty. This is because (he says) European teams don’t win it outside Europe, which realistically leaves only Brazil and Argentina. Argentina probably have the better stars, but Brazil’s manager will drill them into a better team. Mystic Pete also says, sorry guys, Spain won’t win it, because Spain always do badly at the Wolrd Cup, it’s a tradition, like Scotland never passing round one, or England losing on penalties and having their star players sent off unfairly. (Of course, Mystic Pete fans will know this probably means Spain will in fact win it). He says though, the one Euopean team that could go furthest is… Holland. Nobody is talking about the Dutch, but they have some great players, a great team, and a good manager. As for England, well we all hope of course, but Mystic Pete is saying ‘no comment’ (yeah, last time he said they’d lose the final to Germany). Which African team will do well, and be the new South Korea or Senegal? Ghana and Ivory Coast are the best bets, but it’s a shame Egypt never got there, they have a good team (oops: Mystic Pete predicted them to qualify! Doh).

And then there are the kits… I may have to tackle that in a separate post. South Africa’s new adidas shirt is pictured, and as ever this is a battle between the Adidas and Nike shirts, though Puma’s ones this time are quite nice, the African designs at least. England are the only Umbro participants, and what a beautiful couple of kits they have.

The players to watch? Rooney, Messi, Ronaldo, obviously; Kaka, Drogba (if his injury heals), Xavi for Spain; but this tournament always comes up with unexpected heroes, and villains. I’ll be keeping an eye on the Tottenham players (I hope they don’t do too well, in case someone notices them!).

Oh man, a whole month of footy; I only get this every four years. I hope I have time for sketching! Bonne Coupe du Monde! May the least cheating team win!

PS: I will be changing the background colour of my blog each day, to match whichever team I am supporting on that day… to keep you guessing…

all those oh-so-nears

June 9, 2010June 10, 20103 Comments

Watching the World Cup warm-ups this week, I saw on the side of the North korean bus something like, “Heroes of 1966, Korea DPR will be victorious!” For those who don’t know, North Korea’s last World Cup appearance saw them beat Italy and go 3-0 up against Eusebio’s Portugal in the quarter-finals (before losing 5-3). My first reaction was, now come on North Korea, let it go. 1966 was ages ago! Get over it, move on, don’t live on past glories. England would never do that, eh!

As kids at school we learnt that the Battle of Hastings was 1066, the Great Fire of London was 1666, and England won the World Cup in 1966. History did apparently happen on other non-66 years, but the England football team winning major tournaments alas did not. Years of Keegan, Lineker, Gazza, Beckham… all those oh-so-nears wear you down. Thirty years of hurt became fourty-four, and I can’t see that we have improved so much that we will be able to get past another inevitable penalty shoot-out, probably against the Germans. (Incidentally, England has won the World Cup more times than Germany. ‘West Germany’ however won it three times…) Still we like to hope, and we have Wayne Rooney.

England open their 2010 World Cup against the USA on Saturday. Hopefully it won’t turn out like the first time they played each other in a World Cup, in 1950. On that occasion, when England first deigned to take part in this silly cup of inferior nations, the seasoned US beat the England of Mortenson, Finney and Wright 1-0. The US team still talks about it even now; come on now, 1950 was ages ago, etc etc…

the greatest

June 2, 2010June 2, 2010Leave a comment

Who was the greatest footballer of all time? And is that the same thing as the best footballer of all time? For most people the default answer is Pele. Even for those who never saw him play, except for a few inventive long shots, a header saved by Gordon Banks and that scene with the tactics board in Escape to Victory, he is the greatest footballer of all time. We trust what they all say; those who watched him know what they’re on about. He did score more than a thousand goals for his club, Santos. He did win World Cups in super stylish fashion, surrounded by a super stylish team, at the time when the TV age was bringing the World Cup to many more millions than ever before. I’m just saying. True, Pele never tested himself in the big European leagues, preferring to stay at Santos where the goal just opened up for him, but he also didn’t live in an age where the multi-million dollar transfer to Real Madrid was absolutely inevitable; unlike so many ‘new Peles’ after him, Santos were able to ‘match his ambitions’. He did live in the age where you went off to the United States for a bagload of cash though (yes Beckham, it has been done before), finishing off his career at New York Cosmos in the NASL, before helping the Allies (along with Sylvester Stallone and half the Ipswich team) defeat Nazi Germany. Can’t get greater than that.

However, I was a kid in the 1980s, so for me Maradona is king, hands down. It’s all subjective. Puskas might have been the best. Stanley Matthews even. If Rivelino, Gerson, Carlos Alberto et al had all been born Ulstermen, George Best may have lifted the Jules Rimet in 1970 in the green of Northern Ireland, and we’d probably all be saying he was the greatest of all time. I’m just saying.

I’m sketching World Cup greats in my football sketchbook in anticipation of the World Cup, which begins next week.

the special one

May 24, 2010June 10, 2010Leave a comment

The European football season is over; Internazionale, of Milan, are European Champions for the first time since 1965 after beating Bayern Munich. Their manager, Jose Mourinho, has won it with Porto (but not with Chelsea), now with Inter, and it looks like he’s off to Real “we will do anything to win it yet again because we’re, like, obsessed” Madrid.

Drawn in my football journal, which is becoming increasingly manager-centric.

no time for losers, cos…

May 6, 2010May 6, 20102 Comments

We’re not Champions, no, but it feels like it. Spurs, my team, beat Manchester City (again; sorry City fans) to guarantee fourth place and a spot in the Champion’s League for the first time. Peter Crouch (a man so tall he has to, erm, crouch to avoid volcanic ash) scored the winner; that is supposed to be him above, drawn in my football diary. I’m recording football events. I enjoy doing that; now I’m trying to draw some of the people involved. Hopefully I’ll see an improvement as I go on.

As I write, I’m watching the BBC online, the tail end of Election Night, and no clear winner; a Hung Parliament beckons. I’ll write more about this some other time. Perhaps it will go to penalties? Maybe even a replay (as they did in 74)? Or maybe, just maybe, football can learn something from politics. Get rid of penalties, spoiling World Cup Finals, and have a system whereby the team that comes second can do a deal with the team that comes third to become coalition world champions; of course to come second you’d have to lose, so that analogy doesn’t work.

Anyway, I’ll leave politics for tomorrow. For now, come on you Spurs!

much more important than that

May 1, 20101 Comment

I never thought I’d see the day. A couple of weeks ago, I bought the England away shirt, the new Umbro ‘tailored’ kit in red. I’ve never bought an England shirt before, but this one is nice. I live in America now, so I can wear it without getting the urge to throw chairs. I am getting ready for the summer, when I will be following the South Africa World Cup. For those who aren’t aware I am World Cup crazy, and have been since I was a kid. I watched the last one on the Mexican stations, but this time I have upgraded to the English-speaking sports channels, which means I’ll nderstand when they talk stats, but will have to provide my own exclamations of“goooooooooooollll!!!!!”.

But before the summer of World cup, there’s a week of highly exciting Premier League left. It’s between Man U and Chelsea for the title, but for me it’s all about my own team Tottenham, and that fourth Champions League spot. If you’d have told me at the start of the season that Spurs would be in fourth place with a week to go I’d have said you were nuts. Well we have to thank that guy on the left there, Harry Redknapp, Tottenham’s manager (drawn in my football journal-cum-sketchbook). That could all change in the next couple of hours of course, and we have to beat (or not lose to) Man City, so I am still expecting us to throw it away again. Even if we do, we haven’t been below 6th all year and that is incredible. Come on you Spurs!

Over in France meanwhile, the team I followed when I lived there, Olympique Marseille, are set for their first title since the early 90s when they dominated and then exploded in match-fixing disgrace. Again, I’m still expecting that familiar capitulation but I’m hopeful for l’OM. Besides, my other old favourite equipe, Auxerre, are right behind them. Lyon’s time is over, and Bordeaux have lost it. Allez allez!

“Football football football football football. What you men see in it I don’t know. A load of men kicking a bit of leather around a field. You men, the things you think are great fun.” (Mrs. Doyle, Father Ted)

so let’s see your kit for games

September 16, 20092 Comments

#27 of 30. Some of you know my love for football shirts (or soccer uniforms, if you prefer). I’m a bit of a connoisseur, an enthusiast. Not really a collector, but I have a few. I have a Spurs away kit from the early 90s which is signed by Klinsmann, Sheringham, Anderton, Ardiles, and the rest. I do wear my tops at weekends sometimes, but all that static polyester turns me into a walking van de graaf generator.

I’ve wanted to have a chat – my annual chat, for sure – about this season’s footy kits. All summer I checked daily the following sites, footballshirtculture.com and football-shirts.co.uk, for news on every new shirt release around the world. As always, the South American and smaller British clubs choose practically naked women to promote their tops (almost oxymoronic there); see Linfield’s away kit if you don’t believe me. Some kits this year have been nice – England’s new tailored home kit is lovely, and is the first England kit I’d even consider buying. I’m incredibly envious of Arsenal’s two new away shirts. But there have once more been a slew of lame blah-blah kits this year, with few really original designs for clubs, particularly from the larger companies such as Nike and Puma. Oh, Puma – will I ever like a Puma kit? It’s funny, because the answer to that is yes – I will always like the previous one better than the new one, because they are getting worse. The current windscreen-wipers /chevron template they are overusing has produced some horrific results, but none more ghastly than Tottenham’s current home kit. Awful sponsor aside, the introduction of yellow streaks (cue jokes all over N5, “what do you mean ‘introduction'”, etc) to produce this monstrosity means I’ll be waiting another year for a home kit I might want. It’s not just Puma though – even Adidas have gone for the shock factor with Newcastle’s new yellow-and-custard striped away shirt. Poor Newcastle – they get relegated, and are then told to wear that shirt in front of thousands – okay, hundreds – of people.

But the foulest kit, the most shocking kit of all time perhaps, even more so than Arsenal’s early 90s away kit, has to be Partick Thistle’s new away kit, surely done as a bet, a pink/grey/white camouflage kit. It just has to be a joke. It’s chavalicious. And Puma again.

You can see many of the best and worst kits of all time at perhaps my favourite site on the net: historical football kits. The research these guys have done at HFK is beyond phenomenal, showing images of shirts from all years of English and Scottish football. Its readers help out by forwarding any information they may have; I once sent them a photo I’d found of the Spurs laundry-lady hanging out kits in the mid-30s, showing that we wore navy and white hoops away. Highly exciting stuff for the football kit historian!

And so there you have it, my football kit obsession. It’s funny really, because apart from the beloved adidas trainers, I actually really hate most sportswear.

he’s had a dream for a year or two

August 19, 2009August 20, 20091 Comment

#20 in a series of 30. The cobalt copic fineliner pens are still holding out!

So this one is very appropriate, because right now Spurs are sitting at the top of the English Premier League, albeit after only two games. This new season has been very unusual – so far we have had no draws at all, and all of the London teams have been winning. But Spurs are top, and I’ll enjoy it while it lasts (that’ll be Saturday, then). It’s a nice change after last year, when we had to wait nine matches for our first win – and had to sack the manager to get it. Interestingly enough, the last time we won our first two matches was in 1994, when of all people Ossie Ardiles was manager! And he was sacked by November. Well, that’s Tottenham Hotspur for you.

Or “Tottingham” as Ossie used to call it. I was dumbstruck when I met him, outside the old Spurs training ground in Mill Hill, shortly before those two victories in ’94. I had met Klinsmann too of course, who had just arrived at the club, plus Sheringham, Anderton, Barmby, Mabbutt, all of those guys. After getting their autographs on a Spurs shirt (which I still have) and a few polaroids, I sat on the hood of a car to pack up my bag. And then Osvaldo CésarArdiles comes up and opens the car door! He was really nice, posed for a photo, said hello to my little sister, shook my shaking hand, and we left. He drove past as we walked down Bunn’s Lane, and actually waved. I know, it is incredible that a World-Cup winning footballer can actually say a few civil words and wave from a moving vehicle, but when you were the kid who wanted to actually be Ossie Ardiles, that is in fact a big deal. My knees were even trembly.

never stopped me dreaming

August 14, 2009August 14, 20092 Comments

And so the football season begins, at last! I hate odd years, those long footy-less summers. But then, as a Spurs fan, the new season always brings a mixture of ridiculous over-expectation and glum resignation to what will likely be yet another transition season (surely a successful season for us would be a transitional season). But I don’t care, because football is finally here. Still the summer brings its own excitements, namely the wild transfer market, and (for me at least) the constant flow of new kit releases; I’ll talk about those in another post. This summer has seen world record transfer deals, with Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka going to spend more time with Real Madrid’s endless chequebook, and Manchester City’s Mark Hughes spending his Arab bosses’ huge stockpiles of cash safe in the knowledge that he’ll probably be sacked by Christmas so he may as well enjoy it before he moves on to a poor (and more realistic) club. Most of it has been spent at Arsenal’s Big Summer Sale. And then possibly the biggest transfer surprise was Michael Owen going to Manchester United, on a free. That will either be the best move of his life or the worst. No, no way could it be worse than his move to Newcastle. I think it was pretty shrewd of Sir Alex to pick him up; he may just coax those goals out if him. After all, they have a shared interest in racehorses.

Spurs meanwhile have picked up Peter Crouch, who, at thirteen foot six, is the tallest humanoid in the galaxy. I remember when he was a trainee at Spurs, back when he was a little lad of six foot ten. That meant Darren Bent was shown the door (though he actually missed three times before he managed to walk through it). I felt a bit sorry for Bent. He was actually our top scorer last year. He never shook off the big price tag, and going to a club like Spurs which collects strikers like Michael Owen collects betting slips, and has a ‘Have I Got News For You’ guest-presenter policy on managers (perfected by Newcastle, who can barely get through a match without changing coach), the odds were against him. Well, he’ll be at Sunderland now, where he may not find that managerial stability, but at least he’ll get a game of a Saturday.

Possibly the most bizarre move of the summer was managerial – oops, I mean director of football, or whatever the term is these days. Sven, back from his unsuccessful jaunt as Mexico boss, has made the inexplicable move to Notts County, in the English League Two. That’s the old Fourth Division; that’s three divisions below the Premier League. That is one giant downward leap for Svenkind. Well, it’s easier explained by the presence of new Arab cash (in English football, Arab cash, like Russian cash, is far more valuable and easy to spend than regular cash. But when people know you have it in your wallet, they jack up the prices). Greavsie was right. Football really is a funny old game.

soccer shoe

August 2, 2009August 3, 2009Leave a comment

Third in the Luke’s Shoes set. Another slip-on Robeez shoe, this time with a football (or ‘soccer-ball’) on it. I drew it a bit darker than intended, perhaps due to not knowing when to stop, but I’m still pleased with the overall effect. This was a very difficult thing to draw. It barely stayed in any sort of shape. In real life it is red and black, and would often get comments of ‘cute shoes’ from passers-by. But all baby shoes are cute, aren’t they?

Speaking of football, I was sad to hear about the passing of the great Bobby Robson, one of the real old gents of football, who perhaps may not have won the glittering silverware at home that some managers have, and unappreciated as England manager (aren’t they all?) until he was on his way out, but what he did at Ipswich and at clubs around Europe, and as the mentor of Mourinho, stood him in the highest respect. RIP Sir Bobby.