The Fulham Review 07/08: It’s here!

NB – if you use Internet Explorer and tried to purchase yesterday you probably hit a snag – this was a PayPal issue, which has now been fixed. Please try again!  Sorry about that…

It’s here and ready. I’ve just carried six boxes of them home, four boxes at once (which was a back busting mistake) to begin with. Ow.

Anyway, 96 pages (12 more than last year’s!) of good stuff. We got amazing feedback for last year’s, and I think this one’s better. It has:

match reports from all the games (most by me, some by JamieR)

essays on all sorts: a brilliant overview of players who left last year by Chopper; a great essay on Baird Baiting by Rob Griffin, several other articles from Jamie, a bit by Dan (With A Plum) on Clint, a couple of deadline day essays from my mate Martin, and some odds and ends from me. There’s a long appendix from Colin at Championship at Best which looks at the season statistically; very good stuff. Finally, the book contains a number of Jon “Ormondroyd” Hall’s photos.

So yeah, I’m very proud of it.

If you’d like to buy a copy (please buy a copy!) please go to www.godsfoot.com. Follow the links there to pay with PayPal. If the first couple of people to have a go could email me (see address here or the book one on the God’s Foot site) to say that it’s worked that’d be great.

As I say, please do support this enterprise, which is the culmination of hours of work (and football watching!). I’m confident you’ll enjoy the book, and I reckon it’s a bargain at the price (£5 plus £2 shipping; $10 plus $4 to the US). Last year’s books are also for sale, but are published by Crockatt & Powell, so I’d need to handle these separately. Just email me if you’d like one of those and I’ll make sure the money goes to the right place.

Finally, please spread the word!

cheers all
Rich

Zamora and Pantsil: confirmed

Here.

There’s been a lot written about these two on the message boards, but I’m happy with this.  I know nothing of Pantsil except that he was something of a cult hero at Upton Park, which should be fun if nothing else.  So, Zamora:

I think we’ve proved this week that goalscorers are rare and expensive.  So it’s not as if we bought Zamora instead of David Villa.   There are limited options available, and while the money might have been better spent elsewhere, we just don’t know how much other teams quoted us for their forwards.

West Ham fans have mixed views on this, it seems.  They are happy about the price but sad to see Zamora go.   He has had one very good year in the top division (two years ago when, in partnership with Carlos Tevez, he scored the goals that kept the side up), one average one (the year before that) and one bad one (last year, when he suffered with injuries).   He scored a lot of goals for Brighton at better than a goal every other game.

This, to me, reminds me of the Simon Davies signing.  Talented player, good character, slightly lost his way.  It could be a classic case of buying low.

Roy emphasises Zamora’s “intelligent play”.  This, together with the player’s character (he’s supposedly a good player to have around the place) means he’s clearly the type of person Roy wants around.   This is important because Roy’s team was all about being a team.  Individual play was great, but had to be part of the overall system.  Zamora should fit into this system and spearhead next season’s attack.

As noted earlier this week, we shouldn’t expect 20 goals, 15 would be a fantastic achievement.  If Zamora can stick away 10-12 and contribute to the team’s overall play he’ll have been a good signing.

Welcome to both players.

In Roy We Trust.

Corinthians! What might have been

Wow, excellent new shirt for Corinthians.  We could’ve done this, it has a sort of throwback feel to it.  Fulham early 80s almost.   For those of you who aren’t into all this shirts stuff, apologies, but it’s something I’m a big fan of.   Footballshirtculture.com is a must-visit site at this time of the year.

The baldness of 2008/09

There’s sometimes a thing in the papers where they show people who have been to a gig and ask for their opinions.  It’s always “Pete, 28, Clapham” or something.  Recently I’ve been thrown a couple of times by these because the ages look all wrong.  I see someone and think “oh, they’re about our age, what do they think?” then I see that they’re actually 25.   I’m 32, nearly 33.  This is happening quite a lot at the moment.

Remember in The Simpsons when Homer looks in the mirror and sees a big, confident, muscular man, rather than his usual rotund self?   Is this happening to me?

We went to Spain for holidays this year.  For once we took quite a lot of pictures.  There were some of me skimming stones by the sea.  Everyone – every man, I should say – skims stones by the sea when in a position to do so.  I did quite a few, with results varying from massively successful to embarrassingly bad.  Hade took some photos of me doing this, reaching down for a stone, picking it up, winding it up, them unleashing the thing like an Ancient Greek athlete at the top of his game.

In my mind at least.  The pictures show a strange tall man with what’s basically a bald patch, rummaging among the pebbles then lobbing some of them.   Funny, I thought, I’m not that bald.  But the picture doesn’t lie.  So why does the mirror?  Maybe I don’t look at that bit of my head?

And so it is with Fulham.  Last year I saw a quite intelligent manager replace some of our bad players with players he knew would be successful.  He knew because together they had beaten Spain and England for Northern Ireland.   I was quite happy to go along with this, and didn’t see the cracks until the whole thing had pretty much fallen apart.

Under Roy we looked like a top ten team to me.  Now we’ve got Mark Schwarzer, Zoltan Gera, Andranik from Bolton, and soon we will have some more exciting players.  What can stop us?

I remember last year deciding that much of football is luck, and that a team whose real quality is, say, 45 points, could easily finish with anything between 30 and 60.  I ran this by someone at The Times who analyses such things for a living, and he confirmed that this was surely the case, that little was certain in football, particularly over only 38 games.

But it’s a new season isn’t it?  We have to hope that Mark Schwarzer is EVDS for the new era, that Zoltan Gera will be as good as his name and his reputations suggests, and that all of these attacking midfielders will combine to make the lucky centre-forward of choice an unexpected and massive goalscoring hero.

Even when the season starts I’ll presumably only see what I want to see anyway, which is fine, because until early May there’ll always be another game, there’ll be plenty of time to turn things around, and who knows what might happen.  Back in the real world I am going bald and will only get balder.   Football is great.   With football you never go bald, and if you do it might grow back next year anyway.