Left back - a football blog

Yesterday’s announcement by David Dein that he has sold his shares in Arsenal for £75m is NOT good news for Arsenal, or the game in my (humble) opinion. I’m not going to go into specifics, but several aspects and a couple of quotes rang alarm bells for me.

First - another Russian with buckets of cash and a dodgy background. Bit too familiar, that.
Second - Dein says the club needs people…

…prepared to invest previously unimaginable sums aimed at winning the game’s biggest prizes.

Buying trophies and success in other words. Bit familiar again.

Farhad Moshiri says:

Arsenal is a great club with huge potential and we look forward to increasing our stake and exploring ways to help support the future development of the club for the benefit of all fans and shareholders

Bollocks. Utter bollocks. Not the bit about Arsenal being a great club, but use of the word “benefit”.

Arsenal is seen as a very traditional club, and not one to throw money around too much, a la Newcastle, Chelsea etc. Criticisms levelled in recent years have often revolved around the lack of English (or British) players in the first team - spending “previously unimaginable sums” does not suggest developing young talent - it suggests superstars, Galacticos if you will; and we know that does not breed success as Real Madrid showed during their most profligate times.

The only part of this announcement that is positive for Arsenal in my opinion is with regard to Arsene Wenger. It’s widely believed that if he goes, then the likes of Fabregas will go with him. They’re right that Wenger is vital to the immediate future of this team (not the club, that will carry on long after he’s gone), his work with the new ground, training facilities and youth set up have been integral to the long term future of the club but as we all know, success is needed know and he is the best man to bring it in.

The last thing the game in this country needs is more money.

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“Alisher Usmanov is not connected to [gas company] Gazprom, but to a subsidiary, Gazprominvest Holdings. Mr Usmanov’s skills as a financier are well known. He devises vehicles for handling our most difficult and sensitive financial transactions.”

I had known from my own intelligence sources while British Ambassador in Uzbekistan that Usmanov was in charge of Gazprom bribery and slush funds. I had not expected Kuprianov to come so close to saying it straight out.

Russian Journalist Murders, and Gazprom - see more here.

Welcome to the Premiership! You’ll fit right in with the other new investors.

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The idea of domestic cup winners being given entry to the Champions League is the latest bullshit idea to come from the curly bonce of Michel Platini. It’s amazing how such a great player can have become such a complete twat with no regard for the history and traditions of the game. Granted, the domestic cup winners in England are generally one of the top 4 but from time to time you get surprises like Wimbledon and Coventry.

What about in countries like Spain where the domestic cup is not taken as seriously as the FA Cup in England and the winners can be mid to low table sides. What right do they have to play in the Champions League? Doesn’t it just devalue the competition further? We know it’s not all ‘champions’ these days but this is ridiculous.

He also wants to move to Champions League final to a weekend date rather than a Wednesday night on which it has always been held. ‘Boooo’, I say.

We’ve spoken before about how dangerous we think Platini is before and this is doing nothing to change our minds.

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There comes a point, where the fun is taken out of transfer speculation, and frankly, this summer it has been reached. When papers that sell by the million are prepared to employ ‘journalists’ that rely on blogs for their information and don’t bother to check any facts, as in the Palacio to Arsenal affair, and as Gunnerblog shows today, they can claim a player was on trial at a club, when a cursory look at the facts would have seen he was actually playing for his club on the day in question, you have to wonder why these cretins carry on writing.

If I said something on a Monday, that turned out to be utterly untrue on a Tuesday, and it could be shown that I had got financial gain from it, I would expect to be prosecuted for fraud, yet the brain-dead morons who write the sports pages of the tabloids, lie to us day after day, with no other aim in mind, but driving sales of their vile rags.

To be fair, it’s not just the tabloids. From personal experience, I know that The Times makes stories up, even taking quotes given to another paper, then putting different questions in front of them, in order to distort the orignal meaning! The Guardian has printed reviews of concerts that bore little relation to the performance given, and when I called them on it, I got no reply.

I think it’s time that we all called their bluff. Whenever some fuckwit says “Player X will sign for Team Y tomorrow” and they don’t, we should all write in and ask what they were talking about. Who were their sources, were they double checked or verified in any way at all? Let’s try and get the truth back into sports journalism, and if that means slightly fewer pages of fact-free drivel written by educationally sub-normal troglodytes, then so be it.

Pass on the word.

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While I am no Manchester United fan, I was a little disappointed to read of the enforced retirement of Ole Gunnar Solksjaer. This was a player who had an uncanny knack of scoring goals, especially from the bench – 126 goals in 366 appearances, including 11 goals last season when he was far from an ever-present.

I hated it when he played against my team, as I thought he was bound to score, but what I always liked about him was that he never once moaned about being on the bench, or about the money, and never talked up a potential transfer to some other club – he just got on with playing football (Four goals as a sub against Forest sticks in the mind for me, never mind the Champions League Final winner). It’s rare these days to see that kind of behaviour, all you see is the likes of Ashley Cole touting themselves about.

It’s good to see that Man U are rewarding him with a position at the club; in the times of Bosman transfers, unscrupulous agents and other unsavoury aspects of football it’s good to see a bright spark of loyalty.

It does mean that Man U are even shorter of strikers though; Saha is clearly not the answer, Smith and Rossi have gone and if Rooney and Ronaldo are going to be absent for any length of time again this season there is going to be a problem. There is still time to for Ferguson to buy, and it would be ironic if Mr Loyalty was replaced with someone like say, Nicolas Anelka?

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During the ITV commentary for the Liverpool game last night, the name “Harry Kewell” was mentioned. Apparently, he’s a Liverpool player.

Now, the name does ring a bell, but can anyone claim to have seen him?

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How sad and sobering it all is. As fans we get so worked up with the little things, who didn’t chase a pass or track their man. This puts it right into perspective.

22 years of age, a baby on the way, a great career ahead of him, it’s just too sad.

Descansa en paz.

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It seems a backlash is about to begin against websites that provide links to streams of football games. Every weekend hundreds and thousands of people watch English, Spanish, Italian, German and French football via websites which offer links to the games.

Some software is needed but generally a reasonable quality picture can be found for pretty much any game you want to watch.

Now though, this is under threat. The internet police are going to do their utmost to take these websites down and prevent coverage of the matches reaching the web.

What this reminds me of is the battle that record companies have had over the years with file sharing. When sites like Napster and Audiogalaxy made it simple for people to share their music the first thought of the record companies was not ‘How can we use this technology to expand and improve our operations?’ but ‘How can we stop it?’.

It took them years to realise they can’t ever stop it as Napster was replaced by Kazaa which in turn was replaced by torrents. People will always share music but when it became easier and cheaper to buy music online we’ve seen the success it’s been. The iTunes music store, like it or hate it, has been incredibly successful and has made Apple one of the most important and powerful companies on the planet. They went with the new technology and have benefited from it.

The TV companies will say that they’ve paid a fortune for the rights, and that of course is true. However, the sheer demand for internet streams must surely be making somebody think ‘Hey, let’s look at this as another way of providing people with live football’.

As well as that you can be quite sure that the vast majority of people who look at streams already have a subscription to a TV service like Sky and use the internet to supplement their football watching. At the moment the quality is not bad but nothing compared to sitting on your couch, drinking a beer and watching on your flat screen LCD. So the impact of people watching streams is nowhere near as bad as they would have you believe.

I think you’d find most people would happily pay €10 a month to a website if you could go and watch streams of any match you wanted. €10 is just about two pints of beer in a Dublin pub and nobody would even think twice about handing over that money.

I’m fearful that football fans like us will be left without the choice that we have at the moment, even if it is just about illegal. The broadcasters need to get with reality and start providing this service themselves. They can close down as many websites as they want but new ones will keep cropping up. Their attempts to disable streams and software will only result in new programs being made to bypass those restrictions.

They are pissing in the wind trying to stop it, they need to embrace it, and it’ll mean more football for us.

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Royston Drenthe, new Real Madrid signing, is making his mark in Spain almost immediately. Not so much on the pitch but on the streets where he crashed his Audi into a police car, causing a minor injury to one of the coppers. Drenthe was breathalysed but there was no question of him being drunk.

Driving in Spain can take some getting used to, what with them all being complete lunatics on the road and stuff. Not as bad as Italians but not far off at times.

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Spanish press report this morning that Antonio Puerta remains in critical condition in hospital. Doctors have also indicated that he has suffered some brain damage although the extent of it is not yet known.

Sevilla have set up an email address for anybody who wishes to send messages of support and goodwill.

puertaestamoscontigo@sevillafc.es

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