Watford and Cherries move up in unlikely footballing scenario

The curtain comes down on another English football season for the lesser lights. That is for those of us who follow clubs outside the glory-glory land of the Premier League. Yet the Championship is so unpredictable that unfancied outfits such as Watford and AFC Bournemouth have already booked their places among the elite next season. When you consider how many so-called sleeping giants are engaged in the week to week conflicts, it is no mean feat. But what lies ahead for the lucky social climbers? Until a few weeks ago the bottom three places in the Premier League were occupied by the trio of promoted sides from last season. Namely that is Leicester City, QPR and our Claret cousins from near the Yorkshire border aka Burnley. At one stage I was even wishing that the Dingles would win a few games and survive just to break the seeming inevitable outcome. But a comical penalty miss and jangled own goal all within 50 seconds in the Turf Moor do-or-die clash with Leicester seems to suggest that my Blackburn Rovers will be playing them again next season. The fun and frolics at the bottom of the table are much more entertaining to behold than watching the rich kids at the top. Chelsea are boring. Fact. Piled with the dosh from a dodgy Russian, you would think they would manage to win the League with a touch of panache. But no… Jose Mourniho is becoming a self-parody and his team of continental mercenaries make Don Revie’s ruthless home-grown robotic assassins groomed within the Leeds United empire of the 1960s and 70s look like a bunch of gung-ho footballing cavaliers. Anyway, at least Watford and AFC Bournemouth can look forward to rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty come August. And probably getting stuffed every week. During my wayward travels as a permanently worried Blackburn Rovers fan, I have had little contact with Watford or the Cherries. I remember standing on an open end at Vicarage Road in January 1975 in our Third Division days as the rain poured down. There was nowhere to repel the elements as Rovers earned a goalless draw. I was drenched cos a Rovers scarf tied around your head does little to keep off a Hertfordshire version of a monsoon. And the rain was cold. I suppose I must have enjoyed the pint afterwards as I dried off. I recall Bournemouth becoming almost trendy in the early 70s as the changed their moniker from Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic to AFC Bournemouth under the smooth, swarthy tutelage of future Clarets’ mentor John Bond. They had Ted MacDougall scoring goals for fun and seemed destined for great things. But it seems to have taken until now. My only visit to Dean Court was in September 2013 en route back to Adelaide from a working stint in London. Rovers were 3-0 up at half-time. Bournemouth were down to 10 men and I was looking forward to a cricket score. But to their credit, Bournemouth dug in and won the second half with a goal to keep things in check with a 3-1 margin. Perhaps it signalled a sign of the spirit that would fuel things to come. I wish both of the unlikely aspiring high-flyers all the best. Rovers, alas, are nowhere near. We bid farewell to David Dunn this weekend, a local lad who has been a great servant. But the Indian interlopers’ deeds as owners mean our future is clouded with uncertainty. We are not alone as foreign intruders muscle in and treat clubs that are part of their respective communities as playthings. The old terrace chant of “You don’t know what you’re doing” has never rung more true. Still, there’s always next season. We all live in hope.

No sure things in sport, as Jose Mourinho shows all too well

A late upturn in fortunes saw my tipping results swerve towards a touch of respectability after the weekend fixtures in the Australian Football League.  As an Englishman abroad, I  hardly consider myself an expert on Aussie Rules but I take meticulous care and study before ticking the boxes on my two tipping cards in a couple of Adelaide’s finest watering holes. The pubs in question  are the Alma Tavern on Magill Road in Norwood and the Stag Hotel on the corner of Rundle Street and East Terrace. I saunter into both these welcoming establishments every midweek to place the tips, confident that this time it will be a clean sweep for me of nine out of nine games.  If only it was so easy.  The glorious unpredictability of sport always wins through.  Last weekend I started with a horrendous run of losses before super Sunday saw me finish with a comforting six in the Stag and five in the Alma respectively. It means I am hovering around mid-table mediocrity on the standings in both pubs. I’m not a betting man but I find the Aussie Rules tips gives me an added interest in each game on the schedule.  The Alma has a top-to-bottom table posted each week by the tipping machine, so I can see exactly where myself and my good lady Gabs stand in the grand scheme of things.  So far, it’s only fair to middling. Yet two seasons ago, for one heady week I rated top of the pile. What a buzz. An ignorant Pom leading the way ahead more than 100 other hopefuls – including Adelaide Crows’ legend Mark Ricciuto.  Alas, that’s where my surge towards glory ended.  It was all downhill from there.  The Stag, featuring Kym, Elsie and Sarah among others behind the bar,  goes for the more traditional marker of progress, with cumulative results filled in against your name each week.  It’s hard to gauge exactly where you lie on the overall ladder, but put it this way, I’m not getting excited about muscling in among the leaders.  All these right and wrong results are what make sport so much fun. The AFL seems to be predictably unpredictable. There would be no point watching sport if everything followed the supposed script. In the UK, the “fun’  betting option has always been the football pools.  For those not knowing, this is usually the ability to pick draws. The pools started in 1923 with the firm of Littlewoods.  In 1925 Vernons  came on the scene before 1933 saw Zetters complete the big threesome.  For decades it remained a family dream to “scoop the pools.”  Most households would fill in a pools coupon and dutifully send it off each week. Form went out of the window in most cases, certainly with my dad Tom  – it was just an assortment of “lucky’ numbers based on birthdays, anniversaries and such. The supposed bankers never seemed to come up. It was left for another week to dream about what you were gonna do with your jackpot. The salacious tales of how pools winners spent their winnings were the staple of the Sunday tabloids for years. However, as the social map changed, the pools found themselves usurped in the 1990s by the National Lottery  as the most accessible tool to have a tilt at untold riches.  Suddenly it was Lottery winners who had squandered fortunes who became the fodder of the scandal sheets. But the pools hung in there. In 2007, Vernons,  Zetters and Littlewoods united to form the Football Pools.  The move ensured that footballing forecasting would still pack some clout in Lottery-obsessed Britain. One of my former esteemed colleagues on the Daily Telegraph in London, Vince Wright, has contributed his weekly pools column for many years.  In the UK summer months Vince even switched his expertise to Aussie football clashes in the little-known states leagues. Now that took some doing.   Yet Vince used to reckon that his tips for the fixtures down under came up with a bigger success percentage than his forecasts for the English and Scottish leagues.  Ah, the subtle vagaries of sporting knowledge.  Just look at last weekend… After I had dredged up a late revival on my Aussie Rules fancies, I settled down to watch Liverpool  v Chelsea on the box.  A potential Premier League title decider but in reality already dubbed a nailed-on home win with Chelsea coach Jose Mourinho supposedly fielding a weakened team with one eye on the midweek Champions League semi-final  decider against Atletico Madrid. Yet the Machiavellian Mourinho pulled a masterstroke.  His team adopted a strategy of positive negativism. They defended in mass from the first whistle, pulled every time-wasting trick in the book and gave Liverpool nothing.  The Reds, with the weight of history stretching their nerves, grew more apprehensive as the minutes ticked by. The Merseysiders have not lifted the league title since 1990. So as Mourinho’s  massed ranks adopted some seemingly crowded Subbuteo bedlam where each board game player had forgotten to flick to click, the tension in the Anfield arena was ramped up. At times, as I looked at the screen, Chelsea’s back four became a line of six.  If necessary, it mutated into a crazed, suicidal formation of 7-2-1. It made the Italian defensive concept of catennacio seem vaguely adventurous.  Yet somehow,  Mourinho’s  mischievous plotting carved out a 2-0 “smash and grab’ win for his men that has blown the title race wide open.  Who would have predicted that? Certainly not the baying Liverpool fans before the match. Once again, the unimagined, magical pitfalls of sport had conjured up a seismic upset.  Now if only I could get in touch with Mourinho, maybe he could help me out with my Aussie Rules tips this week…

Dual defeats for Rovers and England fuel misery of the sporting kind

Sometimes I envy people who are not interested in sport.  They seem to be few and far between but now and then you run into someone who would think that the Ashes is a brand of firelighter or would be totally oblivious to the build-up  to a footballing World Cup.  What a cushy life.  It simply cuts out all the suffering from defeats that your team/country has to inflict on you. The only stress you have to endure as a non-sporting person is what kind of salad to take to an Aussie barbecue.  I do actually morph into indifference when it comes to “solo” sports. Rafa Nadal seems a nice bloke but I don’t go into emotional meltdown if he loses during a tennis grand slam. He doesn’t represent me.  Or where I am from.  Meanwhile, Tiger Woods is a rich and obnoxious human being but he won’t go without if he misses the cut of some obscure but well-funded golf tournament in any particular money-crazed outpost of the modern world.  There are also some team sports that leave me cold. Basketball. What’s that all about? Points a-go-go every single second. American overkill. Much ado about nowt.  So if that’s where it finished, I’d be fine.  But no… All my life, the big two – football and cricket – have loomed as emotional thermometers. I would love to work out a graph of how joy and suffering have scored during my sporting dependencies of Blackburn Rovers, Lancashire and England. There are cursory diversions such as Aussie Rules sides Sydney Swans, Norwood Redlegs and, in baseball,  San Francisco Giants. But they don’t count in the big picture. I even used to watch Balmain in Sydney where rugby league reigns, via the Orange Grove pub in Leichardt. But they were forced into amalgamation with the Magpies of Western Suburbs. It was never the same for me. It is wacky though how you seem to remember the bad days rather than the emotional victories. This week has been a classic. Despair with bells on. Rovers made a rare appearance on Setanta in the FA Cup replay with Manchester City. I loathe City for reasons which I may explain at a later stage.  I tuned in and had to witness a 5-0 mauling. It was not unexpected but very unfair. Under our idiot Indian owners, Rovers have gone from a stable Premier League club to a Championship basket case within no time at all. Only now are we heading towards some form of stability. City were kept out until half-time stoppage seconds. After that, things fell apart and City looked like they could go further ahead at will. It was awful. Rovers had actually played okay, but it doesn’t read like that. 5-0 is not good. And neither is 4-1. That was the next rout at Nottingham Forest over the weekend. I only have those highlights to look forward to on Setanta. Nine goals leaked  in a week. We are on the road to recovery – I think? However, the play-offs may have to wait.  I was pretty distraught. But the real mood churner was still to come after the City carnage. I have been down-playing the England one-day cricketing campaign in the wake of the Ashes surrender. But I still care. And there we were in Brisbane on Friday night. A win at last within our reach.  At 244 with just one wicket to fall, chasing 301, surely England would wrap up a long-awaited minor success. What James Faulkner did thereafter left me in a state of disbelief.  In an Aussie summer of one disaster after another, I was experiencing a new form of numbness. Losing is horrible I know, but losing when it seems impossible to do so is detrimental to the thought process.  I’m sure the England one-day squad are now as mentally shattered as the Ashes fall guys. It’s been a sudden and painful experience. The ensuing Sydney slaughter was so predictable I agreed to turn over the TV to watch Midsomer Murders instead.  The series which makes murder totally trivial was more preferable to a real life working-over. To see the intellectually-challenged David Warner in full flow was too much to take.  Watching someone be bludgeoned to death by a gigantic piece of cheese was lightweight by comparison. There seriously can’t be many people left in those idyllic villages around Midsomer. So if has come to this… Just two one-dayers to go. Oh, and the Twenty-20s. No wonder Kevin Pietersen looked quite at ease in the stands at the Chelsea v Man United  game. Well out of the way. Trust him to go and watch two poseur clubs. Out here,  I foresee more suffering. The final one-day episode will be in Adelaide.  I s’pose I had better go. Just to show loyalty to a losing England cause. Sport eh, don’t ya just love it…