Some stuff

Two transfers: Moritz Volz has gone on loan to Ipswich; Luis Saha has transferred to Everton.

The first first: Volz, I’m sure, will like it at Ipswich. And Ipswich will like Volz. They have a thriving youth setup, and do give youngsters a chance in the first team. So having someone like Volzy around will really be good for the team, which has talent and tries to play a good passing game. Manager Jim Magilton was a good footballer and seems to be on his way towards being a good manager. It’s a proper club too: there is a popular anecdote about the former owners, the Cobbold family, whose idea of a crisis was said to be when the boardroom ran out of wine.

Here’s a good overview of them, which I really recommend having a read of:

“they were countrymen and alcoholics who loved football in a way that has gone out of fashion, certainly at the higher level of the game: they thought it fun. They knew how to lose and, by favourable comparison with many of their current counterparts, were no fools. Early in [Bobby] Robson’s period as manager, the supporters were restless. The Cobbold response was typical. Robson was given a 10-year contract, which enabled him to build the team that eventually brought the UEFA Cup to Suffolk.”

Ipswich retained some of the throwback spirit until reasonably recently. I did some work there in 2001, and interviewed the Club Secretary (who’d been there for 40 years or so), the Chairman (who didn’t seem to like me at all), the manager (George Burley, who was very personable but didn’t make eye contact), and captain Matt Holland (who was every bit as nice as you’d expect). We had approached a number of clubs to take part in the project (on behalf of the FA), but none were so helpful as Ipswich and none gave us access to their ‘top men’ like this. Volz has made a good choice.

Saha… interesting, eh? We’ve bought a forward from Everton, Everton have replaced it with our old forward. The knock on Saha is that he’s injury prone. Johnson? Well perhaps there are varying degrees of injury proneness. I’m not sure he’s what Everton need, although it has been said that they’re so short of bodies that desperation is setting in. So in that sense, Saha should work well for them. I guess the important thing is that the Saha of now is not the Saha we sold, so any sense of missed opportunity has to be tempered by that thought.

Finally, below is something I read last night by Gary Snyder. This is a football site and poetry is probably “a bad thing” in that regard, but hey, why not? Somehow seems appropriate at the moment. Have a good weekend.

Hay for the Horses

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”