Industrial revolutions

Something to ponder:

The first map shows population movements two centuries ago.  The shading for 1850 is particularly relevant as this is when football started to find its feet.  

The second map is of railways and industrial activity in 1911.

I have added very approximate red dots to the first to show where modern premier league clubs are to be found.

Isn’t it interesting how even now, so many years on, they are concentrated on the main industrial areas: London, Birmingham, the North West and (for now) the North East.  

By the same theories it seems sensible that Cardiff, and industrial behemoth, ought soon to have a top flight team.

But I do wonder why, even now, we can’t establish teams from outside the industrial centres.  Why wouldn’t Bristol be able to sustain a top flight football team?  East Anglia has had Ipswich and Norwich over time, but neither has had much of a look in recently.

Is it just that football, which really boomed as a working class sport, therefore established deeper ties in the industrial areas that kept clubs buoyant until the mid-nineties, at which point the rich got richer and the rest got left behind.  So the big cities/industrial centres have their representations and will more or less keep them, while the South, the South West, the East, and to an extent the East Midlands, are all (and will remain) on the outside looking in.   Where Yorkshire fits into this is anyone’s guess, but the North East seems a fair proxy in that teams in both regions have flattered to deceive despite much in their favour.   Sheffield United will come again, as surely will Leeds, but can they be what they once were? 

Something to ponder anyway.

Link City, Arizona

Mark Schwarzer helping to get kids into reading.  They say that people don’t read anymore, which would be a shame if it’s true.  Getting people like Schwarzer to spread the word surely must make a difference.

Meanwhile, Roy is keeping his feet on ground:

“People can get their heads turned by expectations,” he said. “I’m not so certain that I would because I’ve been football a long time and I’ve seen both sides of the coin.

“When we started this season our goal was a very clear and simple one; to play as well as we did at the end of last season, to be very consistent in our performances and to make certain that we kept our place in the league without the trauma we suffered during last year.

“Fortunately, apart from a spell where we had a blip of three defeats, we’ve not been in a position to worry too much about relegation. As a result the players have been freer to express themselves.”

The Manager was keen to point out that regardless of previous achievements, the top priority every season will be first maintaining the Club’s league status.

“It would worry me if the expectations started to get too high because there are four teams in this league who, every year, don’t even entertain the thought of relegation,” he said. “There are 16 where the thought of relegation is not too far from their mind.

I’ve said it before, but we must be the most consistent team in the league.  Every week we see essentially the same performance, and sometimes we get the breaks and sometimes we don’t, but this consistency and the players’ ability to make the most of it means that the points mount up.

Roy thinks that our improvements may help us to recruit good players:

“The reputation of this club has always been quite high, so in the past people haven’t turned their nose up at Fulham.

“One of the things that could have been seen as a disadvantage is people saying Fulham are a nice club but can they really match my ambitions of being a top-class Premiership player?

“But what we’ve shown this season is that we can offer them that as well.

And Roy’s own reputation won’t do any harm either.  John Paintsil:

He deserves it, because he has done well,” Pantsil told Sky Sports News when asked if Hodgson should be named Manager of the Year.

“Last season the team was going to be relegated and he helped us survive.

“This season, God willing, he’ll probabley take the team into Europe. It’s like he’s our father of the team and everyone loves him.”

Finally, Roy on Erik Nevland:

“Of course Andy Johnson, who is a very similar sort of player in many ways has pushed Erik one place further back,” Hodgson said. “He’s been unlucky not to get more chances but I was really pleased that he made the goal on Saturday and finished it off himself.

“Furthermore, all the time he’s been here, he’s been an outstanding professional. Any time we wanted him to play in the Reserves, he’s played. The man’s an ideal professional.”

The whole Nevland/Zamora thing is a riddle I don’t think any of us on the outside can properly untangle.  Nevland seems to score almost every time he plays, Zamora doesn’t, but the team does well with Zamora out there.  It’s probably best to accept that Roy knows what he’s doing and hope that next year whoever plays makes it a bit easier for us to work out what’s going on.

Top 50 at The Times

Ooooh, here we are.

As noted previously:

This was very hard work

There are no right or wrong answers

That said, I’m not sure I even agree with myself on a few of them

But it’s too late now.

One thing that’s very cool is that they’ve found a picture for many players.   Check out Ronnie Rooke!  Wow, there’s a centre-forward who means business.

Stars are stars

Good spot by Dan, this.

“There’s a poem that compares fireflies and stars. Stars in the true sense of the word come out every night and stay there.”

He added: “You know where they are and can always find them, unlike the fireflies that burn brighter but last a day.

“In that sense we have a lot of stars in this team. Simon Davies is a star because of the number of games he has played non-stop.

“He might not be a star in the sense of profile but I’ve worked with enough high-profile players and that doesn’t really impress me anymore.

“What impresses me are good professionals who can do good job week in, week out. For me they’re the real stars.”

Ah, beautiful.  Simon Davies is one of my favourite players and I’m delighted to hear Roy say this.

Speaking of heroes, Jim White is playing in Islington on Thursday.

White’s about the funniest bloke on the planet and can sing a treat too.   I am more excited than a dog with three tails.

Spies

A tip off from Egan: Roy’s in Norway.  Couple of suggestions there about who he’s watching.  I’d extract the whole piece but I don’t think that’s the done thing, so please do head over and have a read.  Per Ciljan Skjelbred and Marek Sapara are the names you need to know though, and both sound interesting.  I particularly like the idea of a Slovakian playmaker.   Footballers from that part of the world always seem to have a lovely touch.

For all we know though he was just over visiting friends and thought he’d take in a football match, but I can see Norway being a sensible shopping area for us, the players generally being adaptable, cheap and hardy.

This story links to another which suggests Roy wants defenders, and also has a picture of Brede kissing Andy Johnson’s bald head.

[EDIT: Now there's a video up now where Roy says almost exactly the same thing as I did about Norwegians. They've caught him in the carpark after the game.  Then a car speeds off into the night, poetically]

Chalk

It’s about time we had some more Chalkboarding fun.

The evolution of Dickson Etuhu has been a triumph for those “wait and see” advocates amongst us.  I was impressed when he took care of the ball before without trying anything too risky, but he’s clearly grown in confidence and is developing into a good player.

Yesterday was a funny game for him in that he seemed to lose concentration a couple of times.   For a big man he has a beautiful touch on the ball, and his dexterity to make simple, first time passes, is nice to watch.   But a couple of times against Stoke he got his feet in a muddle, which people will remember, but I don’t think this really detracts from another strong performance.  2 or 3 silly but harmless mistakes do not wipe out 90 minutes of good work.   No, Etuhu’s become a useful player for Fulham, and I’ll be interested to see where his game can go from here.   Consistency will be the thing.

Anyway, here’s the chalkboard graphic:

Here we see his ‘perfect game’ against Portsmouth, in which all passes found a white shirt.    But he only made 18 passes, a reluctance on his part to impose himself, perhaps, and also perhaps his teammates not yet having learned to trust him.

Contrast this with Saturday, and we see not just more passes (many more), but more passes into dangerous areas.  Now he will look (and play) crisp balls into the front two.  They’re all good passes because he weights his passes so well, either slow enough for a teammate to gather, or fast enough to keep an attack’s momentum going, depending on what’s needed.   And he played a wonderful cross-field ball yesterday that I can’t see on that map.

So well done, Dickson.

Next, Stoke City, see you, wouldn’t want to be you, etc:

The first is Rory Delap’s contribution to the day’s passing.   How many of those arrows into the box are blue?  None.  Stick that up your shirt and dry it.    Take that away from his game (which we certainly did) and you’re left with a thoroughly futile performance.

The other minor curiosity is the chart of Thomas Sorensen’s goal kicks.   See how they’re desperate to avoid Paul Konchesky.  What?  Oh, right.   Anyway, the unsung Mr Hughes and the gloriously sung Mr Paintsil did quite well dealing with all them, doubly so if you consider that long balls and headers are Stoke’s speciality.

Finally, two more Fulham ‘boards:

I thought Joe Kamara played quite well, but does his board not illustrate exactly what our problem was in the second half?  A lot of passing right around the edge of the box, but nothing going in.   Where’s the clever spin, the one-two, the something or other to try to crack the oppo defence?  I know that Henry, Eto’o and Messi make it look easy, but sometimes our players can get frustrating in their reticence to try things.  By all means keep the ball and wait for that chink of light, but sometimes it does feel as if we’re waiting for the perfect moment to make a pass into the penalty area.

Against this, I quite suspect that Andy Johnson would’ve made something happen in the second half had he not gone off.  I watched him quite closely in the first and he seemed to have a bit about him, making some determined runs and causing problems for the Stoke defence.  I wonder if they’d have been able to keep him quiet all game, either directly (stopping him) or indirectly (stopping someone else from benefitting from his movement)?

Finally, a game to overlook for John Paintsil.  He got a bit of stick from the away fans for his acting earlier in the season, and perhaps it got to him.  Some of his passing was Quedrueuesque, which is rare because usually he does quite well on the ball.  He defended well again, but for whatever reason the passing was a bit off.   That dummy to win a throw in the second half was class though, wasn’t it?  Feigning a 50-50 then letting the ball dribble out harmlessly.

Fulham 1-0 Stoke

Roy Hodgson didn’t get where he is today by not being able to coach a team to defend a long throw in.  Rory Delap hurlded them in, Brede Hangeland headed them out.   We had more trouble from Exodus Geohagan of Kettering.

It was perhaps the worst winning performance of the season.  Stoke deserve some credit here for getting amongst our players and making life difficult, but we were far the better team and would have won by more than we did if only we could have shown some invention in the final third.

Losing both forwards really didn’t help, of course.  Zamora hobbled off first, Johnson did the same just before half-time, the latter a bitter blow because our bald number 8 was running his markers ragged.  In their place Nevland and Kamara did quite well individually, but the team had no cutting edge and spent much of the afternoon passing the ball around the perimeter of the Stoke area.  There was no guile, no cut and thrust, and we didn’t really look like adding to Erik Nevland’s opener.

Nevland did really well here:  he burst through a couple of challenges, played a good ball to Johnson who was breaking with him, then made a good run that was found by Johnson’s fine cross, and buried his finish emphatically.  It was a fast, sweeping counter, and of course a very popular goal.

We could have added to it:  Murphy found Konchesky with a clever free-kick and Konchesky’s cross found Etuhu close in, but the big man’s finish was inaccurate.  Would’ve been some goal.

The second half was only quite interesting, with not much happening and not much looking like happening.  It was fun for Hangeland to get his heading practice in, and Zoltan Gera took advantage of Simon Davies’ injury with a good performance, but it was one of those games when you pity the tourists, who must have left the ground feeling slightly bemused at the non-event they’d spent so much to come to see.  For the rest of us it’s three more points, and now seventh place.

Here we go

Now Fulham are half-interesting to the wider world again, we’re going to see more of this sort of thing.

There are reasonably strong whispers that Hangeland will be off in the summer, so I’m not particularly surprised to see this.   Even if he became our highest paid player, he’d still be on a lot less than a squad player at one of the big clubs.   If that’s what he wants to be – and no reason why he shouldn’t – then this could get a little messy.   Someone’s going to test us over the summer, and I can’t see us turning down big money and keeping a player against his wishes.

Yao

You should always check in on Adam Spangler every so often.  Here’s a great piece on Devann Yao.    Adam’s about the best there is at capturing the soul of the game and he’s done it again here.

Well played

Fair play to the bloke.  Blue or not, people are people, Lampard is entirely right here and the DJ is a pillock.

Roy on video

More good stuff.

Simon Davies gets a nice hat tip there.  He won’t be playing, possibly for the rest of the year, but Roy singles him out as (essentially) an ideal pro.  I think that’s fair.  Davies has been a 7/10 player almost every week, and as I’ve said before, getting him involved seems to be important for the team to really play well.   And while he hasn’t stood out like he did last year, this is as much to do with the improvement as others as anything else.  No, far better to have Simon Davies than to not have Simon Davies.

The “but” is that now Zoltan Gera gets a few games.  I’m quite excited by this, Gera being this year’s Dempsey for me, the player for whom I expect good things to happen eventually, even if initial results suggest otherwise.   Roy seems to agree, the pleasing quote “we like Zoltan Gera, we think he’s a good player” being encouraging.  Being able to leave out good players is not something we’ve come across in recent times either.

The other thing I like is this return to a childlike sentiment of the “first team”, “the shirt”.  When I was younger in various sporting settings it was always the first team I looked up to.  I remember in cricket, working up from U15s to filling in for the second XI, then watching the firsts, then filling in for the firsts, then getting a regular game, then being a proper first team player.   It was only village cricket but I always felt quite proud of the whole thing, being in the first team.  I felt proud not because of anything worthwhile in a real sense, but because as a boy I’d held the first team in such high esteem.   The players were effectively heroes to me.

So to have a very identifiable first team squad feels right to me.   The Fulham first team is MS-JP-AH-BH-PK-SD-DM-DE-CD-BZ-AJ, and I like that.  Contrast that with Roy Keane’s Sunderland, where a poor performance on a mountain biking away-day would result in 8 changes to the first XI, and, well it’s just another example of Roy doing things in a good, proper way.   He’s been lucky with injuries (we must assume – if we do it again next year then this will bear further scrutiny) but still, there is a value placed on the first team shirt.  This is my first team, and will be until I have a good reason to change it.  Which he has effectively done twice all year.

Stoke.  We beat them 3-0 a couple of years ago, Vinny Montella carving them apart, I recall.  Saturday may be a different game, but not that different.  We really should be too good for them, but against that, if you were to pair Stoke with two other teams in the league it might well be Hull and Blackburn, so banana skin warnings should be posted on the changing room walls tomorrow.   I dunno.  Personally I think we’ll cream them, but anything could happen.

Scoreboards of the future

One of many reasons why the New Yorker is essential reading, even in London.

But from the perspective of one fan in the press box, where the seats are free, the new Stadium experience did offer some unexpected pleasures, such as the running transcript, on a couple of the outfield scoreboards, of the new P.A. announcer’s remarks. (Bob Sheppard, the ninety-eight-year-old mainstay, has fallen ill with a bronchial infection.) Baseball has long been a game of records, and the transcription service introduced a new level of historical certitude, for instance, to the crowd reactions during the pre-game introductions. For the Indians’ Carl Pavano, a former and unloved Yankee, there was this: “No. 44, Carl Pavano [crowd boos].” On the home team’s side, meanwhile, the digital display provided a clear delineation between the stars and the also-rans: “No. 42, Mariano Rivera [cheers and applause] . . . No. 43, Damaso Marte . . . No. 46, Andy Pettitte [cheers and applause].” Poor Marte. He would go on to yield six runs in one inning of relief work, confirming the fans’ suspicions, and now, it appears, we will have an official record of when, if ever, he earns his pinstripes in the public’s estimation

Imagine the fun if this ever happens in football:

And for Hull, number 21, Jimmy Bullard! [crowd asks who he is (some swearing)]

Number 3, Ashley Cole! [crowd observes that there is only one greedy b@stard]

Number 20, Dickson Etuhu! [crowd says "shoooooot!"]

And the Fulham goalscorer, number 23, Clint Dempsey!  [crowd states emphatically that Clint Dempsey makes Drogba look sh1te]

And so on… the future, eh?

Wayne Brown interview

This from the comments.  Cheers, Gav.  Les Rosbifs interviews Wayne Brown about his start in Finland.

Also

keep checking Championship at Best, folks.  Colin’s edging closer to something extraordinary.

In his latest work, he has established that, shooting from each area of the pitch, certain players should score x times.

He has therefore got a ‘difficulty’ rating for each shot, which is based on how often people in the league overall score with that sort of shot.

Then he’s worked out how difficult folks’ chances have been.

Then he’s worked out how many goals they ’should’ have scored from these chances.

And compared it with what they have scored.

So a player who takes a lot of difficult shots and doesn’t score any is wasting everyone’s time.

A player whose shots are quite straightforward but not going in may have issues.  Gera and Hangeland have suffered from this this season.   Bobby Zamora, given the shots he’s taken, should have 8 goals by now, not 2.

And so on.

But the clever thing is that now Colin’s looking for trends.  So if a player consistently scores more goals than he ought to, given the shots he takes, well he might just be a decent player.    Joe Ledley at Cardiff currently fits the bill.  Colin also shows how Southampton’s Andrew Surman, linked to us, is having a terrible time of it, taking a load of very difficult shots and not doing very well with them at all, effectively wasting attacking situations.   Palace’s Ben Watson (as was) has also got a track record of hitting from distance, but his have been going in.  Wigan may have a player on their hands.

When Colin’s done with this he’s going to have some pretty powerful information on his hands.    Do keep checking in…

Creepiness in south london and a new kid on the block in the precious gems game

Odd day.  Up early this morning for a presentation in Bracknell, out to that, spent two hours talking, back again, nip down to Crockatt & Powell to say hello to Matthew, up to Waterloo, and oh look, there’s Mark Schwarzer in WH Smith, buying himself a copy of The Times.  In those famous hands were several Harrod’s food hall bags (staff discount, I imagine).  Mark waited for his wife, who was looking at magazines, then gave up and wandered off into Costa coffee.

So there you go. Stalking the goalkeeper.  A new low for the site.  At least I didn’t take a picture.

Dan noticed this about Phillippe Christanval.  I loved Christanval, who was the sort of player you just like to have around, so smooth was he.  He was so bloody good, and while the defence was far from sound back then, I always liked to think that if he’d had a run of games things might have been a bit better.  But Coleman had to keep switching things around to accommodate his injuries, so you’d get Christanval/Knight, Knight/Pearce, Knight/Bocanegra, Christanval/Bocanegra (that one didn’t work so well I recall) and so on and so forth.  Has ever a player better demonstrated that staying healthy is a skill in itself?  If Christanval had been able to play 35 times a season he’d have been back at one of the big clubs.   But he couldn’t so that was that.  Shame, but he’ll have some fond memories of a decent career.

Times things

Added my 2p to the Barclay/Hodgson debate.

Angela

While squinting at Saturday’s stream I caught sight of a strange name on the back of one of our players:

“ANGELA”

In the split minute it took for me to process this information ANGELA turned into HANGELAND, but it just goes to show what your mind can do if it wants.   If he weren’t such a good and important player I think it’d be a fine nickname.  But the last thing you want is to have your team’s best player driven out of the club for demasculinitive reasons.

Anyway, this being Craven Cottage Day Old Newsround, here is a link I spied this morning.

Here is the Eurosport team of the season:

GK: Shay Given (Manchester City) – 33.84 average
RB: Glen Johnson (Portsmouth) – 32.48
CB: Brede Hangeland (Fulham) – 33.55
CB: Martin Laursen (Aston Villa) – 33.84
LB: Patrice Evra (Manchester United) – 31.73
RM: Shaun Wright-Phillips (Manchester City) – 33.42
CM: Frank Lampard (Chelsea) – 34.91
CM: Steven Gerrard (Liverpool) – 35.46
LM: Ashley Young (Aston Villa) – 33.05
FW: Wayne Rooney (Manchester United) – 34.35
FW: Robin van Persie (Arsenal) – 33.00

It’s remarkably close to what I think I’d conjure up myself.  I’d pick Schwarzer ahead of Given and I’m not entirely sure about Shaun Wright-Phillips, but the rest of it’s bang on I think.

This gets double interesting when you look at their ‘flops’ of the season:

GK: Scott Carson (West Brom) average 29.72
RB: Andre Ooijer (Blackburn) – 28.59
CB: Carlos Cuellar (Aston Villa) – 28.45
CB: Fabricio Coloccini (Newcastle) – 27.87
LB: Jose Enrique (Newcastle) – 26.65
RM: Keith Andrews (Blackburn) – 28.25
CM: Borja Valero (West Brom) – 28.63
CM: Amdy Faye (Stoke City) – 27.47
LM: Chris Brunt (West Brom) – 28.68
FW: Roman Pavlyuchenko (Tottenham) – 27.54
FW: Afonso Alves (Middlesbrough) – 28.00

If Cuellar’s been that bad no wonder Villa are struggling, having lost star man Laursen.  Has Amdy Faye been bad?  I thought he was quite a handy part of that team’s squad.  And what about Roman Pavlyuchenko, who Harry Redknapp may not fancy, but who always looks alright when I see him.   It is nice to see Keith Andrews on the list after his repeated assaults on Jimmy Bullard back when the latter was a Fulham/Premiership player.  Alves is interesting too.  I know Dutch goalscoring feats are puffed up by endless cup rounds against village sides.   Was this his route to glory?

Ratings though, eh?  I don’t know how journalists do it.  I feel reasonably happy rating Fulham players after each game, but a lot of the time I don’t even notice the opposition.  I’m watching our boys, see who’s where, etc.    So mainly they’re to be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt, although this aggregation approach is quite sensible and something that should iron out scorer biases/incompetence.  It’s a shame they don’t give us access to the whole season’s worth of scores, might be quite interesting.

More Bolano

Ah, beautiful:

Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team.

Some exciting news

Sportspages is back!

Charing Cross Road used to be all about books.  As the years have marched on and the rents have gone up, bookseller after bookseller has packed it all in, to be replaced by temporary nonsense that really does nothing for the area.   For the teenage me, living in rural Bedfordshire, Sportspages was London.   Get the train down to King’s Cross, tube it to Leicester Square, hop back up past Les Mis and there, on the right, in a tiny little courtyard, was Sportspages.

Inside the door was the American Sports section.  This was important as, back then we’d gone through an American Football craze (many fans still followed the games) and baseball was showing on TV.  Even before we got baseball on TV I was reading about the game, entirely because of Sportspages.   The game’s literature was first class, and I always came away with something interesting.   On the floor they kept all those preview magazines and newspapers, and I made sure I had a few of those too.  This was before the internet, remember, so information was not readily available.

Move round the wall and you had cricket, loads and loads of cricket books.  I played a lot of cricket back then but didn’t really read much on the subject, so this was never somewhere I really looked much.  Then there was a blackboard on the wall with all the latest scores.  The guys behind the desk must have got fed up with all the “What’s the xyz score, mate?” questions, so there, for all our benefit, were the scores on the board.  And round the next corner was football.  Four walls of football books:  almanacs and yearbooks, team annuals, biographies, the lot.  In the middle was a shelving unit that contained fanzines from around the country.   This was always worth a good rummage, too.

In short, it was one of those golden palaces of joy from which you could only ever emerge victorious.   I spent most of my available money there, and picked up a load of great books over the years.

As best I recall the fellow who founded the shop fell seriously ill and things started to unravel.  The stock wasn’t quite A1 like it had been, there were more and more sale tables, and the amazing sense of now was gone.  Then before I knew it the shop was gone, closed down and gone.   In moved… a t-shirt printing shop.  That didn’t last.  Now the building is one of many empty shops, in a prime location but dead, dead, dead.   A sign of the times and a huge shame.  There’s a rant to be had about commercial rates in the area – the bookshops down Cecil Court are clinging on but face another 5% hike, which will surely doom them too – but we’ll save that for another day.  Another day where every shop is a pound shop or a shoe shop or somewhere to be cool and have coffee.    There’s a rant to be had about the net book agreement, about this country’s insistence on desperately scrambling after money, money, money, but we’ll save that for another day when every shop is a pound shop or a shoe shop or somewhere to be cool and have coffee.

Anyway, Sportspages is back online now as a rare and second hand book seller.   This is exciting stuff, even if the interesting things all seem to be quite expensive.   No matter, Sportspages lives on, and this is worthy of celebration.

Wayne Brown’s adventures in Scandinavia

I got a nice email this morning from Egan Richardson, pointing me at this.

The Turku side had started with a fantastic goal from loanee Wayne Brown, volleyed in from the edge of the area, but it was all downhill from there. That former Inter defender Diego Corpache scored the winner, and was by most accounts the best player on the pitch, will not have made the defeat any easier to take.

“I got into a good shooting position,” Brown told Turun Sanomat. “Of course it was nice to get the first goal quickly, but we should have been able to push on and get at least one more goal in the first half.”

“I’d rather play in the middle, behind the strikers, but the coach decides where I play,” continued Brown. “This is a slightly different kind of football to what we play in England, but I thought the standard was pretty high.”

“The pitch was quite good, and in any case it was the same for both teams,” Brown offered, in his capacity as an Englishman and therefore also a gardening expert. “My teamwork with the rest of the side will definitely improve in the next few games. Our passing game deteriorated in the second half.”

So there we have it.  Kudos to Brown for trying something a bit different in his career; moving to a new country is sure to make a positive impression on him, and hopefully improve him as a footballer too.

And here’s a link to the goal (h/t Johann on TiFF).