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Monthly Archives: November 2009
My name is Tom and I’m a football addict
My name is Tom, and I’m a football addict.
You may have seen my interview with Stuart on this very blog a couple of weeks ago. I’m the nutter who did, quite literally, eat all the pies. Or more precisely a pie at all 92 league clubs in 92 matches in 92 stadiums, in just one season. Even the most hardened football fan (which as a reader of this fine blog I’m sure you are) would question why on earth anyone in their right mind would want to do this. So here’s my story.
After graduating from university I didn’t know where my life was heading. Whilst considering what to do as a year out I thought somewhat outside the box. Many of my friends were travelling around the world, exploring exotic paradises in deepest South America or losing their inhibitions in East Asia. There was no frolicking in the Thailand jungles for me. The nearest I got to a tropical beach was Grimsby Town’s Blundell Park on a pneumonia-inducingly cold winter evening.
I travelled across the country, driving the equivalent mileage of England to Australia and back in my ropey old Peugeot 206, all in the name of the beautiful game. I knew there was a different story to tell at every single ground, figuring out what makes the clubs and their passionate supporters tick. I have written about my travels in my as-yet unpublished book 92 Pies; an epic journey into the football unknown.
There were some memorable highlights and lowlights along the way. I experienced a bloody mass brawl at Stockport v Oldham, saw a championship trophy lifted at Brentford (with a subsequent pitch invasion!) and drove for 6 hours to Crewe Alexandra only for the match to be cancelled. Once I even went to 7 matches in 7 consecutive days (at Port Vale, Blackpool, Wolverhampton, Wycombe, Oldham, Macclesfield and Hull since you asked. Mmmmm, the glamour).
I even took my ‘football-indifferent’ girlfriend Annabel a few times, somehow managing to convince her that excursions to the likes of Watford and Coventry City would be romantic. Her patience was well and truly tested when I travelled to watch an FA Cup tie in Swansea by myself on Valentine’s Day. The bunch of £4.99 ‘forgive-me’ flowers from a petrol station only made things worse.
Generally it was all a truly wonderful experience, but I certainly reached a massive low point around January when, in the midst of the coldest winter in living memory, I traipsed around some pretty shabby stadiums with the most painful tonsillitis I could have wished for. Shivering on Carlisle United’s Brunton Park terraces with tonsils the size of testicles isn’t something I would like to ever revisit.
The entire trip had made me become slightly detached from reality. I would cancel evenings out with friends to stare at fixture lists, I would sleep nights in my car, and obsess over the lower leagues I previously cared little about.
My favourite aspect of the journey was the variation. I went to Accrington Stanley’s Crown Ground one Saturday and Anfield the next day to see Liverpool beat Villa 5-0. Both were brilliant, but in very very different ways. The disparity between the 92 was incredible.
As for the pies, 92 is a lot to take in, but I always forced myself to get one no matter how ill I felt. Over the course of 9 months I got lost in a football food-fuelled adventure, culminating in a tour of an actual pie factory before my last match at my beloved Bolton. It was surreal! A bit like Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory if Roald Dahl’s imagination was slightly more grimly-realistic and Lancastrian. Anyway, I thought I would share with you some titbits of my ridiculous adventure last year as a world exclusive for the Ball is Round faithful. Starting at the beginning of my quest, all the way back on the opening day of last season. All bright-eyed and empty of pie I was, unaware quite what I was letting myself in for….
GAME 1 – CHARLTON ATHLETIC
CHARLTON ATHLETIC 2 (Hudson 3, Gray 85) SWANSEA CITY 0 - 9th August 2008, 3pm, The Valley, Charlton, South-East London
The O2 arena (the artist formerly known as the Millennium Dome) came into sight as my scruffy, unshaven old friend John and I stepped out of Charlton station into the pissing rain.
“The Dome was a load of old rubbish wasn’t it.” I grumbled.
John stared at me with his bleary hungover eyes, “I dunno, I can’t remember.”
“Yeah you can, we went on that school trip back when we were 14!”
“No recollection.”
My shoes were acting like a sponge to all the rain. Every step I made sounded like a comedy ‘squelch’ sound you get in a cartoon.
It was the first day of the season. What a day this was! If you discount the FA Cup 3rd Round weekend and the play-offs, this day is as good as it gets in the football calendar! Normally about now I would be moulded into the sofa, slippers on, kettle boiled, waiting for Jeff Stelling to kick off the new season with his non-stop barrage of beautiful puns. Watching intently for the first goal of the season, the first red card of the season, the first opportunity of the season to hear Chris Kamara scream ‘unbelievable!’ It was always a glorious day of armchair viewing.
Yet here I was, battling a monsoon at Charlton Athletic, about to watch them play Swansea City in a match I would normally have very little interest in. It was the start of my quest. 92 grounds in one season. Beginning today. Gulp.
We had arrived at the rain-sodden Valley early, so quickly found our seats and took out a newspaper. I’ve been to the Valley a few times before and am quite fond of the ground; it keeps the noise in well and I’ve always found the Charlton fans fairly agreeable.
The paper had a preview of the upcoming Premier League games, including my team Bolton’s opening fixture against Stoke. A picture of Gary Megson (AKA the ‘Ginger Mourinho’) bellowing and pointing adorned the pages, some slobbery chewing gum visible in the back of his mouth.
“How uninspiring is this man?!?!” I gesticulated towards the paper. “We need Sam Allardyce back pronto.”
“Big Sam is the worst manager ever to grace the Premier League.” John said, just to rile me. He knows how much I love that man. “He’s an idiot. Remember that season he played Henrik Pedersen at left-back?”
I wasn’t going to rise to John’s attempts to bate me.
“Under Megson though it’ll be another season flirting with relegation with pathetic football in front of a half-empty Reebok,” I moaned.
“You could look at it as a half full Reebok,” John pointed out. He’s forever the optimist.
Becoming a Bolton fan was never something I was destined to do from birth. With neither of my parents supporting a team I didn’t have a club to grow up with. At the age of 10 I turned to my Bolton born-and-bred Godfather Chris for advice.
“There’s only one team to follow young Tom,” Chris wisely said to young me in his softly reassuring Lancashire accent, “and that’s Bolton Wanderers.”
I nodded in enthusiastic agreement. Wow! Bolton Wanderers. They sounded so exotic. I made an oath that day to follow Bolton through thick and thin, but in retrospect perhaps I should have made a couple of checks first. Like the fact that Bolton is over 200 miles away from my home in Hertfordshire. Or that the team had just finished bottom of the Premiership with a record low points total.
Chris took me to see Bolton play for the first time at Oxford United’s Manor Ground in November 1996; a creaky, dilapidated old terraced barnyard that has since ceased to exist. Despite having such luminaries as McGinlay, Sellars and Frandsen in the team, Bolton drew 0-0 on a truly freezing and dreary night. Inexplicably, this was the day I fell truly and utterly head over heels in love with football for the rest of my life.
And here I was 12 years later, waiting for kick-off at the Valley, my stomach filled with doubts. Why was I at rain-sodden Charlton when I could have just as easily been slumped on the couch listening to Jeff enthusiastically ramble about it instead? At least it saved me having to look at Phil Thompson’s face I suppose. I was nervous about this project, was it really feasibly going to happen?
“Come on, let’s get your first pie, that’ll calm you down” John said, sensing my apprehension. I bought a steak effort, which looked bigger and tastier than I had expected. I took a bite and a dollop of brown splodge fell on my shoe, my stupid spongey shoe, which was wet enough to begin absorbing the brown splodge into my sock. This wasn’t getting off to the best of starts.
Moaning to John about my sloppy shoes, we re-took our seats; the impending doom of Carmina Burana was playing on the PA system, suggesting that either the apocalypse was nigh or the new football season was about to begin. The rain had calmed down and my mood was beginning to improve. The players had lined up and it was time for kick-off. The first kick of a ball of a season that would last 42 weeks, during which fans across the country would experience every range of emotion as their team battles their way towards championship contention, relegation or mid-table mediocrity.
Three minutes into the match Mark Hudson scored for Charlton, a powerful header from a corner. Fantastic! Even better was that Hudson was making his debut for Charlton, as captain! This was a Roy-of-the-Rovers style fairytale happening right here right now in front of my eyes. The pie-gloop on shoe catastrophe was long forgotten; I was back in the football zone.
Even though the match wasn’t a classic, I was having a blast. John and I were enjoying the rather questionable banter between the Charlton and Swansea fans, with a huge amount of anti-English or anti-Welsh sentiments. Can you be xenophobic against the Welsh? I’m not sure if it technically counts as racism, but Charlton fans definitely made their opinions well known about what gentlemen from Wales get up to with sheep in the cold lonely valleys.
“So what was actually in the Dome then?” John asked me as Charlton’s terrifically named 16 year old midfielder JonJo Shelvey received some treatment for a knock.
“It was dancers and trapeze artists, and side attractions about science being fun and stuff.” I said trying to remember anything of note. “You remember you got your picture taken with E.T.?”
“What was E.T. doing there?”
I racked my brains for a minute. “Probably watching the dancers and trapeze artists.”
Glancing at the big screen I saw that during a televised advert a fish swam across the screen to a huge chorus of ‘Feeeeeeeeeesh’ from the Charlton fans, which I guessed was in reference to Mark Fish, the former Charlton and Bolton cult-hero defender. I remembered the days I spent shouting ‘Feeeeeeeeeesh’ myself from the crowd at Bolton games, and felt a spurt of warmth towards the Charlton supporters, who had in general been fairly quiet.
After a dull second half it livened up in the last ten minutes when Swansea captain Garry Monk got sent off and Andy Gray scored Charlton’s second goal to seal the victory. It was a slightly subdued afternoon, almost as if the supporters knew, despite the win, what an awful season 2008/2009 would be for Charlton. The rowdiest section of the crows was two boys of about 8 or 9 sitting directly in front of me, who spent almost the entire 90 minutes chanting “Alan Pardew’s eating salami!” which was as confusing as it was inaccurate. I was almost certain that there was no salami consumption occurring in the Charlton dugout.
I left the Valley feeling relieved I had successfully started the mission, and both nervous and excited about what would lie ahead in the coming weeks and months.
“This is it J. I’m going to do it! I’m going to bloody do it!”
“There’s no way in hell you’ll manage 92 of them in one season,” John laughed, being a man with low tolerance for lower-league football, “that one was painful enough! I would bet you anything you like that you can’t do it. I even would get down on my knees and admit to you that Sam Allardyce is a misunderstood tactical genius.”
Now there was an incentive. I was going to do this.
1 down 91 to go.
Eeek.
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The life of a Football Manager – Part 1
So every season around 45% of the 92 clubs replace their managers. Most find another role within months, with clubs ignoring the fact that the reason why they are available is that they failed in a previous role. Some managers are heralded as the next best thing, only to be on the scrap heap within months. Aidy Boothroyd, appointed at Watford to a great fanfare took Watford into the promised land of the Premier League against all expectations. He was held up as a potential England Manager for the future and despite their swift relegation from the top table, Boothroyd was awarded a new 3 year deal by Watford in 2007. Just over a year later he was fired as Watford in November 2008 with the club in mid-table – a position they were in when he took over.
Question – Who was the last English Manager to be voted “Manager of the Year”?
We have already seen on this very blog the craziness around the sacking of Luton’s Mick Harford who was dismissed three days after masterminding an amazing comeback away to Cambridge to win 4-3. At the time Luton sat in 6th place in the Blue Square Premier, just one point below the play offs. Since Harford’s dismissal the club have won a few, drawn a few and lost a few and despite the appointment of Richard Money as manager, the team still sit in 6th place, one point below the play off place.
So what actually goes on in the boardroom when it comes to chosing a manager, and then deciding to call time on his tenure? We often here that there have been x applications for a vacant managers job, but how do out of work (or even in work) managers go about getting a new job? Is there the equivalant of the Times Appointment section or Monster.com? Are there recruitment agents for clubs who “head hunt” for a new boss?
Question – According to the LMA quota system, who is the “top” manager in England for this season?
Amazingly as I write this only seven managers out of the 92 clubs have been in their current positions for more than five seasons. Four of these, Moyes, Wenger, Ferguson and Benitez are Premier League managers. The other three are actually quite a surprise. Steve Tilson at Southend United has been through a promotion and a relegation with the Shrimpers but essentially has kept the club where they have always been. Accrington Stanley have well documented problems of their own off the pitch but John Coleman has overseen their rise up the non-league pyramid and then back into the Football League in his ten year tenure, a similar story to Dagenham & Redbridge’s John Still who took charge at Victoria Road in 2004. In contrast, 47 managers out of the 88 clubs (four still haven’t appointed one at the time of writing) have been in their roles for less than a year.
The current average tenure of a Premier League manager is actually nearly 4 years (3.88) which reflects the fact that the movement between it and the Championship is relatively static – teams that come up often go down and so expectations from a manager are not too excessive. As we move down the leagues this figure changes dramatically – 1.6 years in the Championship and just 1.2 years in League One demonstrating the huge pressure there is on the clubs to move upwards.
Question – What was the average tenure of a manager in the Premier League 10 years ago?
Twenty years ago the idea of a “foreign” manager was restricted to the Scots such as Dalglish or Ferguson coming down from north of the border. In fact Aston Villa were credited with the first “overseas” appointment when they turned to Dr Jozef Venglos in July 1990. His appointment lasted just over a season in which he lost more games than he won. But he was a pioneer and the first trend in English football management had begun. Now, young managers such as Eddie Howe at Bournemouth or Lee Clark at Huddersfield Town who are both doing excellent jobs will struggle to land a big appointment as clubs cannot afford to take a risk on an unproven man at the top level. We have moved into a different era – 10 years ago when a club was in trouble the call went out for an Atkinson or a Jim Smith to come and rescue them. But their place in the modern game is over. Now clubs will look overseas for their appointments, bringing in an unheard of to steady the ship – such as Avram Grant at Chelsea who was brought in to replace Mourinho or Martin Jol at Spurs.
So what we are going to look at in the next three installments of this post are the trends in football management – we will talk to a couple of managers about how the game has changed for them, how easy is it to get and keep a job and finally what the future holds for todays players who want to move into management.
So the answers to the questions above for those who didn’t use Google – Lennie Lawrence in 1992 at Middlesborough, Gus Poyet at Brighton & Hove Albion, 6.75 years
Help for the Heroes…
Life is all about choices. Every second of every day we have to make choices, and through those choices we have to be accountable for our actions. Anyone who knows me will know how I bang on about accountability on a daily basis. So this week I had a big choice to make. I had to choose between an all-Kent derby in the FA Trophy at the Crabble between Dover Athletic and Dartford, or a trip to the New Den to watch a League One game between Millwall and Wycombe Wanderers. Again, anyone who knows me will know that I would choose the former any day of the week. Or would I? You see there is something I have not told you dear reader(s) in the past. And that is, for the past fifteen years I have been a shareholder of…..Millwall plc. Yep, I have been an investor in one of West Ham’s greatest enemies.
Why you may ask? And when I look at the 0.02p per share price I ask that question all the time. I do have over 100,000 shares, so assuming the share price increased by 1,000 times I may make my money back. But I am in it for the long haul and not a quitter. I invested as I saw some potential in the club. The club had played in the top division (then League One) for a couple of seasons and for a short period they actually topped the league. Serious money was invested into the club, a new stadium was built and with players like Alex Rae, Kasey Keller, Terry Hurlock and Mark Kennedy took the club back to the play-offs to go back to the Premier League but they fell in the semi-finals. The share price was at an all time high and investors were flocking to get on board (well so my broker told me!).
Since then the club and the share price has fallen, and apart from a couple of seasons in the Championship a few years ago where Millwall spanked West Ham 4-1 in one forgettable Sunday league game they have been in the third tier of English football.
So fast forward a few years and Millwall announce a whopping £5.2m loss for the year against a turnover of £6.4m. But the good news is that this is slightly better than 12 months ago where the figures were £5.6m loss against £5.3m turnover. So lets put that into some perspective. As a business they have lost £10.8m over two years against revenues of £11.7m. Part of the reason is that wages are still far too high – in fact wages last season were 97% of the turnover. Such a situation would not be allowed to happen in leagues in Germany or Spain where wages cannot be more than a certain percentage of turnover. The club is essentially putting its future in serious risk in trying to chase promotion. The problem they have for the next twelve months is that League One is potentially the strongest it has ever been, with Norwich City, Southampton and Charlton Athletic coming down from the Championship to join Leeds United, Colchester United, Southend United and MK Dons who have either the experience or money to push for promotion.
Last season they reached the play off final at Wembley, losing to Scunthorpe United at the last knockings. Many feel that would be the end of an era for the club but this season they are again pushing for a play off spot again. Unfortunately attendances are down at the New Den by 20% which will have an impact on the long term. The visitors for this one, Wycombe Wanderers came into the game bottom of the league, with just one win all season and having been thrashed 6-0 in their last away game at Huddersfield Town and dumped out of the FA Cup by Brighton & Hove Albion in midweek. Hardly the form you need to walk into the Lions den.
So anyway, back to my reasons for choosing Millwall over Dover (or even Ramsgate which was a late option for their FA Trophy game versus Bishops Stortford). There was two reasons. Firstly, Lolly had wanted to “experience” Millwall for quite awhile. She had heard lots about them, since a few of her class mates support them (and I hasten to add had never been to see them) and it would give her even more “cool points” with the boys, which she loved. CMF was not so keen, thinking of the recent game versus West Ham at Upton Park as the model for their games. But I persuaded her that it was not the case. In fact she had actually been to the New Den twice and on neither occasions had we seen any problems (well apart from an armed robbery and a couple having sex on the roof of a car but they happened outside the stadium so technically the club or its fans cannot be blamed, although one of the people having sex did have a home shirt on).
But the second reason was much more of a defining point. Two of our guys from New York were over for the weekend and wanted to catch a match. With such limited Premier League action on offer in London their thoughts turned to lower down the table, and bingo, Millwall came up. Now, Luge is English, a die hard Torquay United and Man Utd fan, if there can be such a thing and someone who appreciates the finer things in live. He regularly dines at the Tribeca Grill, shops at Saks and lives in the heart of Chelsea. So Millwall would be right up his street. Andy on the other hand is a true New York sports fan, following the Giants and the Yankees and getting his fix of “soccer” from The Football Factory and Green Street. Yep – Andy was coming over the Atlantic as a modern day Elijah Wood, preparing himself for some Seventies style action. Unfortunately, the good work that the club had put in over the past years in developing a safe environment for fans had been undone by these films.
We met up in London Bridge, a few hundred yards from the office and caught up on gossip from the respective offices (and there was certainly some of that from both sides of the Atlantic – I could tell you but then I would have to kill you). I also got to meet the “new girl” in the New York office – Kellie. Now Kellie, despite being American, was a Millwall fan. She times her annual leave trips back to the UK with Millwall games and sports a Millwall screensaver on her PC – hard to believe but its true.
So we had a couple of beers before heading 5 minutes down the line to South Bermondsey station and into the lions den…
Millwall 0 Wycombe Wanderers 2 – The New Den – Saturday 21st November 2009 3pm
So apart from a dozen or so police around the entrance, there was nothing out of the ordinary to see for the Americans. Andy knows his sport, and probably watches more football (of the UK variety) than most English fans and was looking forward to a game of quality, excitement and passion. Well he came to the wrong place as the game was hardly a classic played in swirling rain. Millwall did not create a single chance in the first half as Wycombe set out their stall early on and simply did not budge. For a team yet to record their first win on the road, and in fact being bottom of the league, they controlled the game from the first whistle. The highpoint of the first half was when my own Jeff Stelling, Danny Last from EFW (for once without a game today) text me that West Ham were 2-0 up at Hull. I told Lolly and her reaction was a little over the top for the audience around us and I had to tell her in no uncertain terms to shut up.
The crowd around us were a strange bunch. In theory we were in the family section, but the vast majority were single blokes. In front of us was an interesting bunch. Dad, complete with Millwall lion tattoos on both sides of his neck wearing Millwall shirt, hat, dog-tags, jacket and by the smell of it, Millwall aftershave. He was accompanied by his blonde (with very bad black roots) wife and their 5, yes 5, children, all under the age of 5 who had absolutely no interest in the game. All of them had matching Millwall shirts and tucked into crisps for the whole half. So at a cost of £7 per child and £20 per Adult plus £30 for each Child shirt their day out cost at least £225..what a bargain.
The first half had absolutely no flow. Millwall had to replace Ton Craig early on after he received a kick in the head from Wycombe’s Gareth Ainsworth, and Pitman was stretchered off for Wycombe a few minutes off meaning we had over 4 minutes of injury time before the break, and everyone was glad to hear the referees whistle to bring the misery to an end. Lolly’s smug grin was wiped of her face when I told her firstly that her hero Carlton Cole had scored an own goal for West Ham, and then that Hull scored two late first half goals to put them 3-2 ahead. So, add to the fact that our original choice of game, Dover v Dartford was a pulsating 2-2 draw and we had really drawn the short straw.
Millwall had designated this game a “Help for Heroes” game and proceeded the match with a collection. At half-time a group of active servicemen were paraded around the pitch, some holding their Millwall scarves. I have to say the reception given to a man by the crowd was outstanding. Following up at the end of the group was an ex-serviceman who had lost both legs in a recent conflict but received by far the biggest cheer as he went around the pitch. I was staggered by the reception. Here was a crowd that’s reputation goes before them but they showed their patriotism that perhaps at other grounds would be outlawed, complete with a chorus of Land of Hope and Glory – brilliant work Millwall and you should be very proud of your stand on this.
So, the second half brought the same inept Millwall performance. No Harris or Alexander up front, instead Jason Price who was being mocked by the crowd for looking like the ex-X-Factor Jamie Archer. Let me repeat his name. Jason Price. But for some reason he sported the name JJ Price on his back – why? Have the rules changed to allow nicknames, or is there two J Prices at Millwall? Egos taking over the world…..
Wycombe were being encouraged by their fans high up in the North Stand, took the lead in the 55th minute when a corner from the right was headed home by Christ Westwood. Did Millwall respond at all? No. The long balls continued to be pumped over the heads of the front two and it was no surprise when the visitors doubled the lead in the 71st minute by Kevin Betsy who shot into the corner of the net after an excellent run. We were still to see a Millwall shot on goal and now they needed two goals. But nothing came. Even five additional minutes did not provide an opportunity for the home team to create an effort on the Wycombe goal and the chorus of boos at the final whistle showed what they thought of the team.
We wandered out, through the railway arches in the pouring rain. Lolly was a bit happier now that West Ham had secured a draw, and amazingly Lewes had scored a 95th minute equaliser away to Eastleigh to secure a FA Trophy replay but was glad that Millwall had lost and she was there to see it. Next time I will go with the gut instincts and take the non-league option!
About the New Den
The New Den opened its doors in August 1993 at a cost of around £16million. It was the first stadium built in the UK that fully complied with the Taylor Report. The ground is a dramatic improvement from the dank and foreboding ‘Old’ Den and is quite smart looking. The new Den is made up of four fair sized two tiered stands that are of the same height. The corners of the ground are open, apart from one corner where there is a large video screen. The stadium is used to film the Sky One Channel TV show; Dream Team, which features an imaginary team called Harchester United. Views from all stands are good and unobstructed.
How to get to the New Den
It is probably best to go by rail, as South Bermondsey Railway Station is only a few minutes walk from the ground. There is a direct walkway specifically built for away fans which takes you directly to the away end and back to the station afterwards. This has made the Police’s job of keeping rival supporters apart so much more manageable. If your team brings a sizeable following, then an ‘away fan’ football special may be laid on from London Bridge. In these instances the police are well drilled in getting away fans into the ground from the special train and safely away afterwards. Although don’t be surprised if you are held in the stadium for sometime after the final whistle, before being allowed back up the walkway to the station.
Although there are two tube stations that are about 15-20 minutes walk away from the ground. Surrey Quays & New Cross Gate, both on the East London Line. The line is now closed until sometime in 2010.
Driving is not really an option as there are few places to park around the stadium. If you do chose to them follow signs from the A2 at New Cross Gate for the ground.
How to get a ticket for the New Den
Tickets for most games can be bought on the day of the game at the Ticket Office (not at the turnstiles themselves) or Online at http://millwallfc.com. Ticket prices are as follows:-
West & East Stands (Upper Tier): Adults £25, Over 65′s £17, Under 16′s £14, Under 12′s £12
West Stand (Lower Tier): Adults £25, Over 65′s £15, Under 16′s £11, Under 12′s £8
Cold Blow Lane (South) Stand: Adults £20, Over 65′s £13, Under 16′s £11, Under 12′s £8
West Stand (Lower Family Enclosure): Adults £20, Over 65′s £13, Under 16′s £10, Under 12′s £7
Thanks to Duncan Adams for the above information from his excellent Football Grounds Guide.
