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Old Sepp may have said that he intends to resign as soon as his successor is chosen, a process that’ll take six months, but with Jack Warner about to open Pandora’s penalty box, how long will he actually stay in post? My suspicion is that he may be out of there in a few days, but if he does go what happens? Does the general secretary oversee the new election . . . and will he be a candidate?
The presumption is that a new poll will take place under the existing rules, those that led to Blatter creating his fortress. The last thing the game needs is a new Sepp, put in place by that rag-tag of corrupt associations around the world whose votes have been bought for the last five elections. The second-last thing the game needs is for its governance to be handed over to a Sheik from a nation with absolutely no status in the game, and two of those are being named as potential candidates.
In some ways, the situation was better with Blatter in post. Now the door is open for the devil we don’t know.
Mea culpa
Sorry I’m not on the newly launched programme for Bloody Scotland 2015. My fault, I guess.
Last year I was booked in to share a platform with the brilliant Caro Ramsay, but had to pull out, to my great regret, because of my wife’s illness. This year I was hot to trot, naturally, and waited for my hoped for invite with suitably bated, and fresh, breath. Very late in the day, the Director, offered me, by email, a panel. It was an exact repeat of one I was two days away from doing at another venue. I didn’t think that was a good idea from anyone’s POV, so I said so and turned it down.
No alternative was offered, so I won’t be there. Regardless, I urge you to give Scotland’s own crime festival your full support. It won’t be the worse for my absence, but let nobody be in any doubt, I am enormously pissed off to be missing it.
Swindle
I’m a Vodafone user. Every time I come to Spain I’m advised to switch on the Europe Traveller service. For only £3 a day, they tell me, I can use the calls and texts in my UK bundle. Just for fun, I did, then made a short phone call to my daughter to test out a claim that I also saw on the Vodacrap website, that under my ‘Big Red Value Bundle’ the call would then be free. It wasn’t; they lied. Cost me £3. If did did leave the service switched on and sent a couple of texts each day, and made a couple of calls, my normal usage, they would cost me an extra £90 plus VAT on my monthly bill.
My Vodacrap contract is up in a couple of months. I am counting the days.
Parasites in your ear
Half an hour ago, I took a call on my mobile, from a number I didn’t recognise. The caller advised me that he was from ‘Personal Injury Lawyers’, or some such, and that was as far as he got. I am afraid that I was less than patient, advising him that I was in Spain, and that answering his unwanted call was costing me money. I intimated that if he ever did it again he would be in need of his own services.
I know, I shouldn’t have taken it out on the lad. He has a job, where thousands don’t, even if it is in the Derek and Clive class. (RIP Jayne Mansfield.) Instead I should call the chief executive of the Law Society and rip into him, as should everyone else who is as pissed off as I am with cold calls and texts from repellant ambulance chasing lawyers. There was a time when lawyers were not allowed to advertise their services. That may have been a little restrictive but the profession has gone to the other extreme. There is no escape from the bastards.
I have tried to do something about it, through the legal services ombudsman, but its complaint machinery seems designed to protect rather than stop such abuses, and spent so long waiting for ‘live chat’ that I began to suspect the the Zombie Apocalypse has already swept through London. My next step will probably be the aforementioned Law Society itself, and its Scottish equivalent, but I don’t expect too much joy from them, as they set the abuse in motion in the first place by voting to give their profession free rein.
After that? Maybe I’ll have a chat with George Kerevan, my new MP.
Coffee time
After hard morning’s thinking, a change of scenery was needed.
Sepped
Take 15 minutes to watch this; please. Priceless.
Puzzler
Found myself idly wondering last night about the implications of Margaret Paterson, the Edinburgh ‘madam’, being ordered by the court last week to cough up £1m of her criminally acquired fortune.
If it’s true that she was meticulous in paying tax on her activities, as has been reported, does that mean that HMRC is also guilty of profiting from immoral earnings?
It’s broken, but they won’t fix it
So I was wrong; Motherwell did turn over Rangers and will play in what passes for the Scottish Premiership next season.
Am I blue about that? No, of course not, but I am narked that it will be at least 14 months before the next possible league meeting between the two clubs. League reconstruction has become a continuous process in Scottish football and yesterday’s result will put more fuel in its tank. Unfortunately, it doesn’t know where it’s heading and it doesn’t have satnav.
Nothing would please me more than a sudden burst of sanity among the game’s governors, leading to Hibs, Rangers, St Mirren and Falkirk being plucked out of ‘The Championship’, as our second division is laughingly named, and installed in a new sixteen club top division, to kick off in September. A sixteen-club league serves the Portuguese very well, and we don’t exactly look down on them in terms of quality. The game’s administrators will rush to tell me that such a set-up would wipe eight games off the Premiership calendar, but they could be made up by devoting August to a seeded mini-league stage of a revamped League Cup, a format that was enormously popular in my youth.
It isn’t going to happen, not because of European qualifiers or anything like that, but because of greed. Forty years ago this summer Scottish football abandoned its traditional home and away structure in favour of a new format in which clubs played each other four times a season. They didn’t do that to serve the best interests and development of the game, but so that each non Old Firm club could have four Old Firm home games in each season, with the full houses they insured. There may have been a hope that general quality would improve also, but with the exception of the Fergie years at Aberdeen and the McLean period at Dundee United, that didn’t happen. In fact the opposite came to pass; for the last thirty years no side other than Rangers or Celtic has won the Premier League title, and in the same period only three clubs other than the big two, namely Aberdeen, Hearts and Motherwell, have ever finished runner-up. The original purpose of the structure has been lost also. Yesterday’s season-ending game, with so much at stake, attracted only 9,220 spectators, around 60% of the capacity of the Fir Park ground.
If it isn’t working any more, at any level, why do the governors of the people’s game cling to the structure?
Eh?
A quote from the Footjoy TV ad: ‘This is the shoe that took advancement to a new level.’
WTF does that mean?
A painful necessity
I’m posting this an hour before Motherwell FC, my team and my curse, take the field to defend a two goal lead in the second leg of the play-off for a place in the Scottish Premiership next season. Their opponents, Rangers.
They will lose. Gary Lineker is credited with saying that the rules of football are simple. The game is played by teams of eleven a side and the Germans always win. There is a third rule that he overlooked. Motherwell never beat Rangers twice in a row.
The really terrible thing is that this time the Scottish game needs them to lose. We have to have Rangers back in the top flight, suitably humbled, yes, with lowered expectations, but Scottish football can’t do without them at that level.
If by some miracle,’Well do see them off this afternoon, the Gers face another year playing Hibs, St Mirren, Falkirk etc, another year of significant financial losses, and a steadily declining balance sheet. Sure, they now have Dave King as chairman. Yet I do not hear of Mr King, who is said to have blown twenty million in his previous association with the club, having put any of his own cash into the pot this time around. He does have significant equity in the business, but this was acquired from existing shareholders. His plan seems to be a share issue but this will be severely hampered if Rangers do remain in the second tier. What would he do then? Stump up his own money? I wonder.
And if not? Suppose, heaven forfend, that he doesn’t actually have as much folding money as the Scottish media believes. Is the great Govan monolith as safe as we are told? That’s why Rangers have to win in a couple of hours. Our game can’t afford to discover that it is not.
No comment
Predictive text on my iPad turns ‘Sepp’, into ‘Seppuku’, a form of ritual Japanse suicide by disembowellment. A little extreme, but understandable.
Doppelgänger?
Wee bloke in the Scottish Cup presentation party yesterday; looked disturbingly like Sepp Blatter. Did you spot him?
Ads I truly hate
Sometimes a TV ad is so bad that it makes you loathe the product, instinctively.
There is one such on the box at the moment, for a very dodgy home-selling website. It features two unpresentable guys pitching a very bad script, and offering an ill-defined proposition. It’s called Purple Bricks: easy to remember, rhymes with Pricks.
One volcano one vote
Of all the stats and facts thrown around in the last couple of Blatter-dominated days, one caught my attention more forcefully than the rest.
The island of Montserrat is a British protectorate in the West Indies. It has a population of 5125, although 8000 people left in 1995 because of the volcanoes. 9% are urbanised; the remainder are rural. Its capital is called Plymouth, although that was abandoned in 1997, because of those pesky volcanoes. It doesn’t have an army, and it is listed by the CIA as a transhipment point for illicit South American narcotics bound for the US and Europe. Its main industries are tourism (when the airport and seaports aren’t closed by the volcanoes) and rum. It also grows cabbages.
Montserrat has a football team. More than that, it has a Football Association. Its national team has only played a handful of matches, 25, at last count, and most of those were away from home . . .you guessed, because of the volcanoes. None of its international squad actually plays club football in Montserrat; the second top scorer in the current group, with one goal, half the total amassed by the top scorer, plays for Partick Thistle. Its most notable away performance came in a 2012 friendly against a Network Rail XI, staged at the ground of Charlton Athletic, when it held the fearsome railwaymen to a 4 — 4 draw.
Because of this stellar record, Montserrat is a member of FIFA, one of the 209. As such we must assume that it cast a vote in yesterday’s election . . . if we assume also that it could afford the flight and hotel for its delegate, although I’m pretty confident that if that was a problem someone speaking French or German with a Swiss accent would have picked up the tab.
Yes, a volcanic heap in the Leeward Islands has the same voting power as the football associations of China, india, Germany, England, Italy, Scotland etc.
When the FIFA revolution finally comes, and it will, the first priority must be reform of the voting system, so that it reflects the strength and status of each member. For example, the top-ranking nation, averaged across a presidential term, might be allocated 209 votes for its preferred candidate, the second 208, the third 207, and so on, down to Montserrat and Bhutan, who would be fighting it out to see which had two votes to cast for Blatter.
Perspective
Watching Sky this morning I heard a quote from a newspaper, describing yesterday as ‘the darkest day in the history of football’.
That is, of course, nonsense. There have been many darker days; the Heysel Stadium disaster, Stairway 13 at Ibrox, the Munich air crash, Hillsborough, the Bradford fire, to name five tragedies in my lifetime alone.
Nobody died yesterday: but in the name of all those who did, at those terrible events, for no reason other than they were following their team or their occupation, something needs to be done. It’s an affront to them that the horrible little Swiss bastard is trying, even now, to cling to office through a disgustingly tainted voting system. He needs to go, even if it means tearing the whole structure down and rebuilding from scratch.
Libby and Sweety
Yesterday I had a strange and unsolicited email from a person named Libby Barr, managing director of customer care with BT. She told me that she’d been snooping on my Broadband usage in Gullane and that my wireless connection wasn’t great. That wasn’t news to me. It’s so unreliable that I’ve been using powerline adaptors for almost a year. She told me also that I could buy a range extender from the BT online shop. I knew that too; in fact I have a range extender, a better model than BT sell. Its benefits are marginal.
The Libbster’s message also included the following gem:
“We want to make sure you’re getting the best from your BT services so we recently checked the data from your BT Home Hub to see how well everything’s working and saw that you might not be getting the best wireless connection to some of your devices. Don’t worry, we can’t see what you’re using the internet for – only how well it’s working.”
Nice to know, but it doesn’t explain how she was able to do that, since I haven’t been at home, nor used my broadband there, for over a month. Nor does it offer any form of recompense for BT’s self-confessed failings.
When I tried to quiz Libby about the content of her message and to express these concerns, I found that it is impossible to contact her. Instead I was referred to a section of the BT website labelled ‘Contact Us‘, where I was able to key in my questions. I did so, at some lengths, then pressed ‘Send‘, so be advised that missives had to be restricted to 240 characters. Undeterred, I asked a simpler question: ‘Are you a help desk or an extension of Twitter?‘ That led me to be connected with someone named Sweety Pathak, who thanked me for my patience, before I’d even shown any. This cued an even simpler question; ‘Do you speak English?‘ Sweety wasn’t sure, for her only response was further gratitude for my patience, at which point, I decided it was in fact exhausted.
Well offside
Six years ago I read a book called ‘Foul!’ by a man named Andrew Jennings, a journalist on a mission to expose the shady dealings of FIFA, football’s notorious world governing body. Staggeringly, that title now appears to be out of print, but I expect to see it reappearing on the shelves very soon, after this morning’s events in Switzerland.
International football is a multi-million pound industry that has fallen into the hands of rogues. The cell doors in Zurich had barely clanged shut this morning, before FIFA’s Communications Director was on camera claiming bizarrely that it was a good day for his organisation, and that its congress and presidential election would go ahead as planned.
If that happens, the time has come surely for those with integrity in the sport to take action. FIFA’s main commercial sponsors should send a swift, clear message that they will pull out if the present regime is continued in office. The European federation, which is and always will be the financial engine room of the game, should back this up with a warning that they will withdraw from FIFA, and set up a rival administration. If they did that they would be joined very quickly by the South Americans, and probably Asia also.
The beautiful game is a corrupt laughing stock. It can’t go on.
The Colonel
Quote of the morning from Bruce Critchley, the veteran Sky golf commentator; ‘One should never wear brown shoes after six o’clock in the evening.’
To my mind there are two ways of looking at Bruce. He’s either a national treasure or he’s an annoying old twat. I know which camp I’m in.
Fit for purpose?
So I was wrong about Mr Tristram Hunt coming t through to lead the Labour Party. I guess that the cousin of a former Tory Cabinet Minister would have been a step too far. That leaves us with three likely candidates, since Mary Creagh may not clear the threshold of 35 nominees among the parliamentary party.
I’ve been looking at the CVs of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. Apart from their Oxbridge link, they have one other common trait, and that is minimal experience of the working world outside the political sphere. Liz Kendall does list a spell as director of the Ambulance Services Network, but even after a good rummage in the NHS website, I’m not exactly certain what that is. If Mary Creagh does make the list, she will add experience as a lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Cranfield Management College. How one can hold such a post on the back of a modern languages degree followed by a stint as a volunteer in the European Parliament and then a post with the European Youth Forum, and without every having been an entrepreneur, well, that rather beats me.
My point is this. These people all want to be Prime Minister, yet none of them seems to have any real practical work experience outside their very limited, enclosed little world. Surely there is room for a public examination of the credentials of everyone who aspires to be leader of a national political party. If there were, I suspect that most of the candidates would fail.
Quintin Jardine's blog 