Quintin Jardine's blog

The manager of Blackpool Football Club is a man with a reputation for telling it like it is.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/b/blackpool/9300866.stm

This link (copy and paste if you have to) might not work outside the UK, but hopefully it will, because it says all that needs to be said about the nutters, lackeys and toads who run world football.

I’m going to have to break ‘The Journey’. I’ve been reading Tony Blair’s autobiography for quite a while now, and I’m still less than halfway through. The rise and faltering of New Labour was an interesting period of recent British history, and the testament of the man who was at its heart will no doubt be a source document for future students of the era. It should be fascinating for anyone who’s as interested in politics as I am: it should be but it isn’t. Our former prime minister may be a man of many skills, but  story-telling isn’t one of them. It wouldn’t be so bad if it had been well edited, but it hasn’t been. Next time I see my bro-in-law, I’m going to have to apologise for giving it to him for his birthday. To put it in perspective, I’m currently listening to The Essential Leonard Cohen fora bit of light relief.

A good friend of mine describes Scotland as a poisonous mix of self-interest and naked tribal politics. She’s from Paisley, so she should know. But are we really that bad? Doesn’t that description fit most western societies?

I have a confession to make. My family and friends might disagree, but I am not the most patient man in the world. Remarkable in some ways, since I spend a lot of my life in a nation famed for being laid back.

At the beginning of last week, I decided that most of my Christmas shopping would be done on line. Mistake. I’m looking out of my window at a snow-free environment; temperatures have been above freezing for close on a week now, and everything is back to normal. For all that both DHL and ParcelForce have effectively declared Scotland a no-go area. Fine, they must have major backlogs to clear. However they have also declared themselves no-go areas when it comes to customer information. You can get through to a depot, but it’s bloody difficult, and when you do, it isn’t worth it, as they don’t even know where your consignment is within their warehouse, far less can they tell you when you might receive it . . . or even whether.

But it’s not the carriers alone. My phone rang a few days ago; I picked it up and an automated voice told me that  ‘Due to the adverse weather, your TESCO wine order has been delayed.’ Then the line went dead, and I’ve heard nothing since. Sorry Mr T, but to me customer service involves real people, not computers. The people at DHL etc, might not be able to help, but at least they are invariably sympathetic.

There’s worse. Last night I had an email from Marks and f*cking Spencer about another order; it said that home delivery would not longer be possible, but that I could log on to my account and specify store collection. I tried; the system wouldn’t let me. I decided on their second option, cancellation: that wasn’t possible either. In fact their system wouldn’t let me alter the order in any way.

This morning they sent me another email, contradicting the first. It told me that I will receive my purchases after all, in two parts, by December 24 (estimate). So now I’m one of thousands of M&S customers who don’t know where they stand, and I’m not happy. Twiggy herself could turn up on my doorstep to apologise and I wouldn’t let her in, far less offer her coffee and biscuits. They could send Jamie Redknapp, another front of house star, (Isn’t that guy lucky that he has his mother’s looks, not his dad’s?) and I’d tell him to piss off back to Thomas Cook, or Sky TV, or wherever. Peter Kay? I’d nut him.

This is supposed to be the season to be f*cking jolly. Not around here it ain’t.

You couldn’t make Sepp Blatter up. Not content with the organisation over which he presides having sold . . . sorry, mistake, delete that . . . having awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a country with absolutely no domestic history in the game,  with summer temperatures that will require all the games to be played indoors, and with immigration laws that deny entry purely on the basis of nationality, he has now made a joke of another of the potential host country’s quirks, its ban on homosexuality. Sepp’s solution: (shrug) (smirk) gay fans can refrain from sexual activity while they are there. (Okay, I’ve inserted the shrug and the smirk, but you can picture those, can’t you.)

I’m not alone in being offended. This by John Ameichi, a respected gay sportsman.

http://amaechiperformance.blogspot.com/2010/12/sepp-blatter-fifa-and-proof-of.html

There’s another line in the story that caught my attention, another quote from Herr President. “I think there is too much concern for a competition that will be done only in 12 years.” That reveals a lot about his mind-set. He’s 74; by the time of the Qatari World Cup he’ll be 87, so there’s a fair chance he’ll be looking up at it by that time. (Although maybe not, on the basis that only the good die young.) So, although he knows that millions of people around the world are offended by his organisation and by its conduct, he doesn’t actually give a shit.

Clearly, Blatter should be removed from office, but it’s not going to happen.

I believe it’s Christmas next week. Bugger. Bah. Humbug.

I can appreciate that night happen if you read the series out of sequence, but the latest Skinner will always tell you where big Bob is at. The next one’s going to do even better. It’ll tell you where he was at fifteen years ago. You’ll get to know him a lot better as well, and to uncover quite a few secrets that lie hidden in his past.

While most of the rest of Britain were watching a young man achieve his lifetime goal, my telly was on another channel watching a God-given talent that’s above and beyond anything Simon Cowell ever produced. A few years back, Bill Massey, my  then editor, a West Ham nut, told me that there was nothing he enjoyed more than watching Paolo di Canio just pissing about. But not even Paolo, that great eccentric, could generate the sheer pleasure that’s to be gained these days by watching Lionel Messi when he’s given free rein by Barcelona, ‘mes que un club’, to express himself. The lad is so extravagantly gifted that he makes me laugh with admiration, and no other footballer has ever done that. Best of all, unlike so many others in his sport, he does it with a smile on his face.

I believe that something called The X Factor, came to an end last night and that 20 million UK viewers tuned in to ITV to watch the final. I know very little about the X Factor, beyond what I see in headlines, but my impression from those is that its purpose is to give the mainly mediocre their five minutes of fame, and that it pulls in viewers by relentless promotion and by letting its judges get confrontational. That’s right, same as ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, but less posh. Seems to work, though; if it pulls one third of the British population then it must generate mountainous advertising revenue, and ITV surely needs the money.

Not an auspicious start for the new Aberdeen management team. I wonder if Craig and Archie will have third thoughts.

I subscribe to just about every available football channel on TV. This includes ESPN, but there I am a reluctant customer, and I might even chuck it. Why? Because of their commentator, one John Champion. He may be the humanitarian of  the year in private, he may be great company in the pub. But I’m afraid there’s something about his style that sets me off. I sense a sneer in everything he says, the tone of a true smart arse, and you know what they say about them. It would be fine if he’d stick to football, but he doesn’t seem capable of describing a game without interspersing his commentary with snide, irrelevant and unnecessary comments. He reached a nadir yesterday when, during a game, he picked out one particular player (No, not Joey Barton) and told his audience that he had been ‘ a bad lad’ and that he had spent some time in a young offenders’ institution. I didn’t know that, and I doubt if many other viewers did either. I don’t know either, why Mr Champion chose to mention it. I’ve since checked on it. Yes, it was a serious offence, but the individual was punished. He might have gone out of the game, but his present employers saw good in him, and now he’s getting on with his life; or he was until a knobhead with a microphone dug out his past and broadcast it to the nation. ESPN is a respected broadcaster, but it’s being brought into disrepute; it should do something about it.

Oh yes, Chris, I knew your father. Allan and I were colleagues in the 1970s: a man who was universally liked and who’s still mourned by everyone who knew him. He had a fund of stories, including one about a popular entertainer of the time who visited his restaurant, and . . . here I quote . . . ‘Took my breath away.’ You had to listen to him all the time, in case a great one-liner slipped past. The last time I saw him was at the signing table at the Edinburgh Book Festival; you might even have been with him. Lovely man; God bless him

I don’t feel bad at all about 2018. I do feel bad about the FIFA crew, and wish that the football associations of the ‘major’ countries had the courage and motivation to flush the shysters out of there. Maybe there’s a nearby river that can be rerouted, for that’s what it might take. As for 2022, you Aussies had a much better case than Qatar. If Israel qualify, it’s going to have to amend its laws to allow its team and supporters into their country. The very fact that it have such a law should have disqualified its bid from ever being heard. That, and the fact that if your average Qatari was given a football he would either try to eat it or would confuse the life out of himself trying to find the control buttons. And speaking of buttons, don’t write off your cricket side. Without being anti-English in any way, (I married one while in full possession of my senses.) you should realise that your visitors have one of their own; it’s labelled ‘self-destruct’, and sometimes it goes off of its own accord. It ain’t over till the fat umpire sings. You ask my pal from Bradford; he’ll back me up.

Sorry to be football obsessed, but that’s the way I am. I noted the following in Henry Winter’s Telegraph story on the Alan Pardew press conference following his unveiling as manager of Newcastle United:

‘It’s a shame this London connection is thrown at me. I do not consider myself ‘London’. I managed last at Southampton and I live in Surrey.”

I feel sad for Mr Pardew. To the northerner, Surrey is a suburb of London and Southampton is somewhere next door, just as Londoners often think nothing of asking colleagues in Edinburgh or Glasgow to ‘pop along to Aberdeen’. Football managers step into dead men’s shoes; it’s the nature of the game. But to do so with such a lack of understanding of the place to which he’s going, that’s almost suicidal. Not surprising though; his entire football career as player and manager has taken him no further north than Crystal Palace.

I hope Pardew succeeds, I really do, even though my step-son is a Sunderland supporter. I just don’t believe he’s the man for the job; nor do 98% of the club’s supporters, as polled by the local newspaper. He is one of nature’s Reading, or West Ham, managers, going to a club that needs someone with Man U qualities. His respected predecessor, Chris Hughton, might not have been that man, but at least he’s spent his entire career at assistant/caretaker level at big clubs, and had a decent record throughout. If Mike Ashley, the club’s owner, was determined to get rid of him, be should have gone poaching and hired Owen Coyle. Little wonder that Ashley, lacked the courage to sit beside his new employee as he faced the media, leaving him instead to take the flak alone.

Skip back two posts, to the one headed ‘Hands off!!!’ and read the last sentence. Once you have, you’ll realise why I’m not surprised to have learned that 70-year-old (as he hates to be called) Craig Brown has resigned as manager of Motherwell FC, and seems about to accept the task of leading Aberdeen out of the SPL. I take this as renewed proof of a theory of mine that football management is about ego, far more so than money or anything else. It is also incontrovertible verification of one of life’s great maxims, that there is no  fool like an old fool.

If I was a Westminster MP, I’d have voted against the increase in university tuition fees that our Parliament passed this evening. As an elector I’m going to want to know how my local MP voted . . . although since I live in the champagne socialist republic of East Lothian I’m pretty sure how she did. However that does not mean that I approve for one second of any of the stuff that went on in London this evening in the guise of protest, anarchic conduct so violent that TV reporters were forced to wear hard hats, as if they were in a war zone. I can only hope that every person convicted of offences committed in these riots is banned from ever setting foot in a British university again, even after they’ve done the lengthy stretches which are warranted. Let the punishment fit the crime.

What is it about Aberdeen Football Club? Eighteen months ago, they lured away with untold blandishments, one Mark McGhee, then manager of Motherwell, the team that both Bob Skinner and I support, as a result of boyhood curses upon us. Maybe they did us a favour, for things didn’t work out so well for Mark at chilly Pittodrie,and a couple of weeks ago, he received the football manager’s traditional reward, his P45. So what have they done now, these gentlemen with delusions of adequacy? They’ve only gone and tapped up the venerable duo who are currently enjoying great success at Fir Park, having led the club into Europe last season and this year being well placed to finish third, in other words to win the real Scottish Premier League, the one that’s unconnected with the mini-league that Rangers and Celtic contest between them. Craig Brown and his assistant Archie Knox are probably the most senior management team in British football. Craig is a respected figure, a former national team manager in an era when we actually qualified for the finals of major tournaments. He is also 70 years old, even older than Sir Alex, even older than me, and Archie isn’t far behind him in the years department.

So what is it with the Aberdeen chairman that makes him imagine that our Craig and Archie would have the slightest interest in leaving a currently successful club, for one which is just as starved of resources and which is currently propping up the league. Beats me. So far the signs are that it beats Craig and Archie as well. Let’s hope it stays that way, for as Mr Mike Ashley has proved at Newcastle, logic, common sense, and a few other things as well have no place in modern football.

I’ve been known to suggest on public platforms that man’s three greatest inventions have been, chronologically, the wheel, the condom and the internet. But when great inventions become universally available, great danger can follow. For example, the first has carried many a hostile force into peaceful territory, while the second lulls users into a sense of security that can sometimes be false. The third? In a word, Wikileaks. I’m all for freedom of information, but I’m also for realism when it comes to national security. It’s not up to individuals to decide what secrets a state keeps, it’s a matter for the government of that state. If  the majority want to change that policy, then it’s up to them to change the government if necessary.

If a guy like Julian Assange, a convicted computer hacker, is given material that he knows is restricted and must have been obtained illegally, and chooses to circulate it on his website, regardless of the consequences for the states, organisations and individuals affected without editing or discriminating, what does that make him? Some would say it makes him a terrorist. I have sympathy with that view, but I’d prefer to suggest that his disregard for national and individual rights to privacy, and most particularly for any statutes that protect them, is best described as the behaviour of an outlaw. But not the Robin Hood type, not a socialist with a bow and arrow; oh no, he’s a highwayman, pure Dick Turpin, pure Billy the Kid, completely ruthless in his readiness to appropriate the property of others. There’s nothing romantic about this guy. Most countries have data protection legislation to stop people like him. Yet look what’s happened since he’s been arrested. Regardless of the fact that the charges he’s facing have nothing to do with the Wikileaks operation, his followers, his acolytes, his would-be merry ****ing men, are launching cyber attacks on organisations they perceive to be ‘the enemy’.

In my eyes, (maybe my site will be attacked for my saying this) they really are terrorists, and it’s time that national governments joined forces to shit on them from a very great height.