Quintin Jardine's blog

The subject of drug testing in sport confuses the hell out of me sometimes. For example, today i’m strugglimg to understand how Mo Farah was allowed, allegedly, two strikes, ie two missed drug tests, while in football, Rio Ferdinand was banned for eight months (it coukd have been two years) for missing a single test.

Indidentally the best way Mo can fight back against the Daily Mail, and the rest of the racist Britush media who seem to be jumping on the ‘Let’s destroy a hero’ bandwagon, is by winning every race he runs this year, then insisting on being tested with each tesult made public thereafter.

A habit has crept into modern journalism, one which I find annoying, but occasionally risible: that is, the insertion of explanatory words in brackets in direct quotes in news stories. I suspect that it is a product of the new age, where most journalists use mini-recorders rather than old fashioned Pitman’s shorthand.

Its purpose is to make the speaker’s meaning absolutely clear. Fair enough I suppose, but the golf writer who inserted (Woods) after Tiger while quoting Rory McIlroy this morning really did test the bounds of silliness.

Quarter to eleven last night in  L’Escala and the fireworks exploded. That’s what happens when Barca win the Champions League. Oh for such pyrotechnics in Glasgow next year.

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.

Take 15 minutes to watch this; please. Priceless.

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?

A quote from the Footjoy TV ad: ‘This is the shoe that took advancement to a new level.’

WTF does that mean?

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.

Predictive text on my iPad turns ‘Sepp’, into ‘Seppuku’, a form of ritual Japanse suicide by disembowellment. A little extreme, but understandable.

Wee bloke in the Scottish Cup presentation party yesterday; looked disturbingly like Sepp Blatter. Did you spot him?

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.

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.

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.

I have arrived at a turning point in my life. Yesterday. Motherwell FC, my team since I was a little lad, were condemned to a play-off to determine whether they are relegated from the Scottish Premier League, or whatever the bloody thing is called this week, a competition so charismatic that it can’t find any sponsor willing to have its name associated with it commercially. There is no realistic prospect that ‘Well will emerge victorious, regardless of the opposition. The club is going down, to what is called illogically the Championship, and who knows what lies in wait beyond that, maybe even relegation to the Highland League in the fullness of time.

For me the terrible thing is not that. It is not the prospect of weary journeys to Forfar or Falkirk, or even scenic Brora . . . not that I’d be going. No, it is this; after sixty-five years of loyalty, (this is a man who, aged seven, gave up the chance to see the now legendary Stanley Matthews FA Cup final on TV to stand on he terraces and watch Motherwell Reserves) I find today that I do not give a good Goddamn.

(No, I’m not going to explain the relevance of the title of this post: work it out.)

Harking back to the Kevin Pietersen business one last time, a thought occurred to me as I lay awake early this morning listening to the Mother of all Tramuntanas. Wouldn’t it have been simple, and at no cost to whatever personal code of honour drives Andrew Strauss for him to put a proposition to KP?

The Enfant Terrible isn’t an Enfant any longer. Very soon he’ll be 35, an age at which most top batsmen have opted out of at least one form of the game, to prolong their careers. So why didn’t Strauss say something along the lines of, ‘Look Kev, why not get us both off the hook by announcing your retirement from Test cricket on grounds of age and self-preservation, and we’ll pick you for the short form England teams, which are in dire need of help.’

I’ve followed cricket since I was a little lad, from the days when the late Richie Benaud was a player rather than a commentator, and when Trueman and Statham inspired far more fear in  the hearts of opponents than Anderson and Broad manage today.

Throughout that time the governance of the game in England has been questionable to say the least, but this week it seems to have lowered its standing still further. A year after sacking Kevin Pietersen, their best player, because he was a maverick whose face didn’t fit, they’ve just concluded a weird and pointless ritual dance by effectively sacking him again, on the very day that he proved conclusively that he is still their best bat by a country mile.

The excuse on offer was a breakdown in trust, between the ECB and Pietersen. Strange that since KP trusted the  Board enough to walk away from a £250,000 deal in India to play for Surrey for peanuts in the red ball form of the game, to prove what everyone knew anyway. He did that on the word of the incoming chair of the ECB, and boy, was he let down.

Fact is, for the last several years, nothing has happened in English cricket  without the approval of Giles Clarke, the outgoing chair, who hands over next week to one Colin Graves, the man who gave his word to KP, only to have it broken by the new Director of England Cricket, Andrew Strauss, who is, in turn, the man who had to apologise last year when he was caught calling KP a lady part on a live microphone. It might bugger belief that Strauss was allowed to have the final say-so on KP’s future, but he’s a Clarke man through and through, a good Tory. (Giles is the nephew of Tom King, Maggie Thatcher’s Defence Secretary.)

Fact is, although Clarke is leaving office as chairman, he’s still there and everything this week has happened on his watch. Furthermore when he does go he won’t be going far, for he is taking up a newly created post as President of the ECB. If Graves is as pissed off at being portrayed as deceitful in his handling of KP as he is entitled to be, there may be some interesting discussions between those two. But how any of it will benefit English cricket, well, that beats me.

If Leo Messi ran for public office, I’d vote for him.

On my lifetime there have been a handful of great footballers. As a nipper I grew up hearing stories of Stanley Matthews; then there was Puskas, After him came Pele, Best, Cruyff, and Maradona, each supreme in his era. Then there was a fallow period, with excellent players in Zidane, Ronaldo (El Gordo), Ryan Giggs, (Don’t argue.) and Ronaldinho, not quite on the pinnacle  that those predecessors had reached.

We are lucky now in that there are two global superstars on the planet together, each at his peak and both playing in the same league as a bonus. There’s been nothing like it since Di Stefano and Puskas lined up since by side.

Cristiano Ronaldo is possibly the best European footballer ever, so it must frustrate him to be sharing the stage  with someone who might be the best player ever to pull on boots, anywhere. CR7 or Messi; each has his supporters. I don’t see the point in choosing between them, but if I had to I would have to pick the little man. He can do everything that Cristiano can do, but he adds on a few things that he can’t.

It’s akin to a choice between a surgeon and a matador.

Okay, I admit it. I’ve been hiding away from the blog for a few weeks.  To those who’ve missed me, i apologise. To those who haven’t . . . I hope you enjoyed my absence while it lasted.

Where have I been? Usually, when I disappear it’s because I’m wrapped up in the final stages of a book, or on the road promoting a new publication. That was the case throughout March and for much of April, but Skinner 26 went to my publisher four weeks ago and the ‘Last Resort’ events were pretty much over by April 19.

Since then I’ve been keeping out of the way, in a vain attempt to distance myself from the great debate. I’ve passed TV screens with my hands over my ears and my eyes screwed shut, doing my best to keep it all out, wishing only that the damn thing was over.

But I’ve failed. I can go on no longer without making a prediction, and expressing a hope. So here goes.

The prediction: Floyd Mayweather Jr, an unpleasant little arsehole who’s done time for domestic violence, will win by unanimous decision or possibly by a late stoppage.

The hope: that I’m wrong and that Manny Pacquiao knocks ten bells out of him.