BRIAN GLANVILLE
writes for worldsoccer.com each week.
RIGHT DECISION, WRONG REASONS
14/08/08
Mark Clattenburg did not referee the Community Shield game at Wembley last Sunday, nor did he deserve to. My view had nothing at all to do with the suspension controversially visited on him for his alleged £60,000 debts. What in the name of logic has that to do with football?
He has merely been sued, the case has not yet come to court, thus no verdict has been given; he has simply been pre judged by the football authorities. But his appalling error at the Emirates stadium a week earlier was far more worthy of sanction.
In the first half of the match between Arsenal and Real Madrid, he did nothing at all when the Arsenal keeper Almunia so blatantly dived at the feet of the oncoming Raul and brought him down, then scrambling across his area to retrieve the ball. An incident which provoked incredulous laughter in the press box, though the reports the following day seemed chiefly concerned with that immensely dramatic moment when Emmanuel Adebayor, scoring the winning second half penalty at that very same end, touchingly kissed the badge on his shirt.
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At last we may see the moral light. It is reported that if the deeply dubious ex Prime Minister of Thailand goes down, as his wife has just done, for corruption, the Greed Is Good League will ringingly condemn him as not being “a fit and proper person” and deprive him of the ownership of Manchester City.
What on earth was he when he originally bought the club, with the Premier League not raising a whisper of dissent? Amnesty International had accused him of showing abuses of human rights. Corruption charges were looming. Fit and proper for what, one asked oneself?
His wife has not been sentenced, subject to appeal, to three and a half years in prison. At risk if Shinawtra goes the same way is the bagatelle of £800 million. Yet already he seems to be ducking and diving at City. It’s been denied that he wants to sell the club but admitted that he is looking for financial backers. It still surprises me that Mark Hughes should have been so ready to work for so unappetising a figure.
If Shinawatra does indeed fail to recoup his money, chaos could loom at City. And now he vows neither he nor his wife will return to Bangkok, how can he hope to recoup the money?
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The Olympic squabble over whether clubs should release players for the tournament has ended in anticlimax. The sports court of arbitration found in favour of the clubs – Barcelona, Werder Bremen, Schalke – who at first refused to release their players, Argentina and Barca’s Lionel Messi most prominently among them, agreed at the last moment that their players could play.
Arsene Wenger criticised the behaviour of those clubs – strongly backed by Karl-Heinz Rummenigge of Bayern Munich, justly pointing out that his own and other clubs had already released their players for China. Yet I don’t think the problem is going to go away; simply because of the gigantism of major football competition, with European club matches taking place now as absurdly early as July.
But if European football has wantonly bloated its calendar, there can be only limited sympathy for the Olympic movement over the soccer tournament. Amateurism has now been abolished, but from the 1920s onwards, a supposedly amateur competition was heavily tainted by professionalism. To such an extent, indeed, that FIFA realised late in those 20s that the Olympic tournament had become so riddled with professionalism that a World Cup tournament was essential. And how significant it was that the dazzling, supposedly amateur, Uruguay team which had won the Olympic title in 1924 and 1928 promptly, in Montevideo, won the first World Cup in 1930.
Post war, of course, we had the fiasco of the Communist block teams, including the marvellous Hungarians, Olympic winners of 1952, fielding so called amateur teams of full time footballers, posing as army officers and the like. But as we all know, the Olympics desperately need a soccer tournament for the chief and sordid reason that it brings in more money than any other event. Including the drug ridden, irredeemable, athletics.
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Welcome back to the Football League, after all those grinding years in the Non League wilderness, to Aldershot (Town). And infinite congratulations to the generous patron, Terry Owens, who made it possible against such odds. What strange years they were!
With the club going bust, enter a young con-boy who claimed he could put them back on their feet, only to prove penniless. For a while their chairman was Colin Hancock, an excellent amateur footballer, captain of London University in his time who played later on Sundays for my own Chelsea Casuals team. A successful dentist who did his best unavailingly to rescue the club. Which elicits for me a good many memories.
As a schoolboy Arsenal fan, I still remember, though I didn’t see it, the remarkable match between Aldershot and the Gunners in 1942. That was the period when Aldershot, thanks to being the location of the Army Physical Training Corps, became a team of England stars; which didn’t cost them a penny. All these players – big Frank Swift in goal, Cliff Britton, Stan Cullis and Joe Mercer, the complete England half back line, Jimmy Hagan at inside left, prolific Tommy Lawton at centre forward, were stationed there in the APTC and appeared as guests under the measures of the time. That day, the Gunners took a weakened team down to play them without four of their own England internationals.
Looking, as Tommy Lawton, later wrote, “easy meat for our powerful side.” Aldershot indeed went into a 3-0 lead in 35 minutes, were 4-1 up when Aldershot’s trainer, saying he had seen enough, went in to turn on the baths. On returning, he asked his Arsenal equivalent, Billy Milne, the score. “6-4,” said Milne. “To us?” asked Aldershot’s trainer. “No,” said Milne, “to us!” Arsenal, in fact, had scored five goals in 20 minutes and went on to win 7-4. Aldershot won no wartime competitions for all their stars.
An actual Aldershot player of that period was the little outside-right George Raynor, “only a second class player,” by his own admission. But destined to go on to manage Sweden to the 1948 Olympic title at Wembley, third place in the 1950 World Cup, second in 1958, and manager in 1954/5 in Italy of Juventus and Lazio.
When I was at school at Charterhouse, I cycled four times the ten miles across the Hog’s Back to watch games at Aldershot’s picturesque little Recreation Ground. Twice, to see Tommy Lawton back there, playing not for Aldershot but against them for Notts County. On the first static occasion, he did little or nothing; on the second he headed the only goal of the game in his familiar style.
Once, I went there to watch Arsenal reserves play the home reserves, the young, blond Arthur Milton playing inside right for the white shirted Gunners. Destined to play outside right for England versus Austria at Wembley in 1951, cricket for Gloucestershire and England.
And there was a game between Aldershot and Bristol Rovers which drew several other Carthusians. My most vivid memory of those games, however, was hearing on the terraces the news that unfancied Leicester, inspired by Don Revie, were beating then mighty Portsmouth in the semi-final of the FA Cup at Highbury.
We must take as read that QPR have three multi millionaires behind them. Yet what have they bought so far? I reported their opening match of the season, where they scraped through 2-1 against a Barnsley team which, by contrast with themselves, had shelled out £1 million plus for a quick new striker in the shape of Iain Hume, who duly scored the opening goal.
Afterwards, Iain Dowie – a somewhat unexpected managerial choice after his three club Odyssey last season, being sacked by two of them – paid credit to Flavio Briatore, the motor racing man (Bernie Ecclestone being the other) for helping him to sign good young foreign players on loan. On loan! One of them being the highly talented Genoan right flanker, Argentine born Emmanuel Ledesma, who had an excellent game.
But where are all the costly new arrivals? Without whom you can hardly see QPR escaping from the so-called Championship. And why has a once pleasant multi-rowed press box been turned into a cramped one slum at the back of the stand?
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More on Man City and the ineffable Shinawatra. Hard not to say, Let’s all laugh at City! Harder still to feel sorry for them and Mark Hughes. Now we’re told by the Greed Is Good League’s Richard Scudamore that you’re a fit and proper person till you are actually convicted!
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