Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Short story glory

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on May 27, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

Thanks to all who took part in the inaugural Prospect/Franco-British Council prize for a short story of under 1,000 words inspired by France, which was awarded in May by an illustrious jury including Julian Barnes, Ian Rankin, Bonnie Greer and our own ex-deputy editor, William Skidelsky.

Congratulations, in particular, to the two winners: Sarah Collier of the University of Salford (in the undergraduate category) for “The Face,” and Caitlin Hart of St Paul’s Girls’ School (sixth form category) for “Heat.” The standard of writing was, Barnes noted, “very high,” with entries “creating believable and quirky characters—a real achievement in under 1,000 words.” All the stories can be read for free on our website, and are divided into two sections for the undergraduates and sixth formers respectively. The other prizewinners were Daniel Bird, Kitty Wheater and Rachael Allen (second and third-equal places, undergraduate category) and Edith Sinyard and James Gibson (second and third places, sixth form category).

Prospect are delighted to say that we will continue to support the prize next year. Full details of the winners, entry conditions and the future of the competition can be found here. As ever, your comments and feedback are very welcome on this blog.

John Terry and globalisation

Published
by
David Herman
on May 26, 2008
in Sport
. 0 Comments

What is it that got the media so excited about ‘JT’ last week? Obviously, there’s the appeal of Chelsea’s iron man inconsolable, in floods of tears. Just as obvious, there’s the drama of one of England’s best-known players missing a penalty. After all, no one gave two hoots about sulky Anelka. And Terry embodies Chelsea: for many supporters he is Chelsea.

But what does this mean? Of the fourteen players who started or came on as subs in Moscow, four are English, and three of these were bought from other clubs in recent years. Only Terry came up through the Chelsea youth team. When fans say, John Terry is Chelsea, this is what they mean.

The reality of big-time football is that the top teams are owned by foreign millionaires or corporations; they have foreign managers; and most of their players, let alone star names, are foreign. Increasingly coaches look beyond local council estates and comprehensive schools to Africa, Argentina and southern Europe for their stars. Terry, Jamie Carragher, Stevie Gerrard, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes are the last of a species. That’s why Everton fans mourned the loss of Wayne Rooney. Of course, he was a great player in the making. Anyone could see that. But he was also a local boy. He was one of us, in a way Yakubu or Arteta could never be.

Football has gone global. And fans are torn. They know that’s the way of the world. They know that brings more money, more stars, more great football. But there’s also a sense of loss: the break between the fans and their players. Footballers used to be one of us and when they retired they bought shops and pubs and local businesses. That has changed just as that whole world has gone.

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Alex Ferguson was talking about the future of Manchester United. he was talking about one of his favourite films, You’ve Got Mail in which a huge corporation, owned by Tom Hanks, buys up a small local bookstore, owned by Meg Ryan. That’s the future of Manchester United, he said. He wants United to be the huge, unstoppable new force. So do his fans. But they also want local players. Hence the tremendous feeling for the last local players. They are local in the new global game, reminders of a game that’s gone and a world that’s gone.

Poor Avram Grant

Published
by
David Herman
on May 24, 2008
in Sport
. 0 Comments

Was it the width of a goalpost that cost Grant his job at Chelsea? Grant could hardly have come closer to winning the Premiership. At one point, before Giggs scored United’s second goal at Wigan, Chelsea were one goal from the title. Twice they hit the woodwork in the Champions League Final and then they were one penalty kick away. It was a tremendous achievement. Grant had to overcome injuries and the loss of key players during the Africa Cup and yet still they kept coming. In the last weeks of the season they beat Arsenal and United at Stamford Bridge, Liverpool in the Champions League semi-final. And through all the speculation about his job and through all the stress of the run-in, Grant retained his dignity. When he was appointed he was universally dismissed. It was insinuated that he only got the job because he was a ‘friend’ of the owner (code for the fact that they were both Jews). No one expected him to do so well. And yet, at the end, there he was in the pouring rain comforting John Terry.

There is one thing that could be held against Grant. Chelsea need re-building. The current squad might last one more season, but that depends on who can resist the siren call of Mourinho and one last big payday in Spain or Italy as they pass thirty. Can Grant be trusted to rebuild the team that others built, Mourinho and before him, Ranieri? That’s one thing he’s not been called upon to do yet. His one purchase in January — Anelka who scored two goals in 24 games and missed that crucial penalty in Moscow — was not a success. Everyone thought it was at the time. It raised morale at Chelsea and everyone agreed Anelka was a class act. But it proved a costly mistake. It is one thing, his critics point out, to inherit a great team built by others. It’s quite another to do what Fergsuon and Wenger have done so superbly, time and again, to tear apart a great team and rebuild again. Clearly, the money men didn’t trust Grant to do this.

So Chelsea have now fired two outstanding managers in eight months. Not bad going. Of course, this is the same megalomania which saw Sven and Benitez on the verge of being dismissed. Truly Ferguson and Wenger are the last of a species — the manager who is trusted to stay on season after season. After them, the deluge.

Crewe, Real Madrid and selling papers

Published
by
David Herman
on May 23, 2008
in Sport
. 0 Comments

On the front pages all the talk is of the Crewe byelection and ditching the Prime Minister. On the back pages it’s all about Moscow and ditching Avram Grant — oh, and Real Madrid wanting to buy Ronaldo. This speculation is all about one thing — selling papers and begging for viewers.

Papers need to sell copies. TV shows need ratings, especially twenty-four hour TV news shows, condemned to recycling the same clips hour after hour, like some strange punishment by the Greek gods. What they both need is news, any news, but ideally big news. The disappearance of a young girl is good, especially if she isn’t found. The story of a mad Austrian abusing his children is good for a week. But as Summer approaches, and New Zealand are touring, England aren’t in the European Championship, Paula Radcliffe has a stress fracture and the Olympics is in a different time zone, far, far away… So all eyes on Brown, Ronaldo and Grant (and Lampard and Mourinho).

Labour haven’t got a replacement for Brown, so they will stay steady if they have any sense. if Chelsea had any sense they would thank their lucky stars for Grant, sell Drogba, Shevchenko and Malouda, find some young players and stay steady. If Ronaldo had any sense he would look at what going to Real Madrid did for Robinho and the Galacticos and stay steady. But staying steady doesn’t sell papers. The pundits and editors need a story so they will press on regardless. On the back pages, they are more used to this kind of thing. They know that the three months between the Champions League Final and FA Charity Shield are a terrible time, the dog days. So they will push on with transfer stories. It’s the only game in town.

Champions League Final

Published
by
David Herman
on May 22, 2008
in Sport
. 0 Comments

Richard Williams (Guardian, 22 May) is wrong as usual. He dismissed last night’s Champions League Final as a typical Premiership match, all rush and bustle, but no finesse. Where, or where, he asks were the skills of the great European teams — Read Madrid in the 1960s or Ajax in the 1970s?

Last night’s final only lacked one thing: goals. There were two reasons for that: bad luck and superb defending. And this brings us to the flaw in Williams’ argument. The speed of the passing was at times awesome. The interplay between Rooney, Ronaldo and Tevez, or between the Chelsea midfield during their great surge in the second half, was full of skill, played at tremendous speed. The move which started with Rooney parallel with his own penalty area, finding Ronaldo, running at full speed, with a 70-yard pass, who then crossed for Tevez, nearly produced one of the all-time great European goals. The skill which led Drogba and Lampard to hit the woodwork was exceptional. What more could Williams want?

One answer is goals. When we think of the great European or FA Cup finals we think of goals. How many times have Real Madrid’s 7-3 defeat of Eintracht Frankfurt or Man United’s 4-1 defeat of Benfica been shown? But would Real Madrid have put seven past Ferdinand and Vidic? Would the ‘68 United team really have scored four times against Terry, Carvalho and Cech? What has changed in the modern game is not the level of skill but the speed in midfield and the quality of defending. United and Chelsea not only had the two best defences in the Premiership, they had the two best defences in Europe. Until Lampard’s scrappy goal, United had conceded one goal in six games since the qualifying rounds (where they conceded four goals in six games).

Both defences were great, but they were also helped by superb defensive midfield players. Makalele has been a star for Cheslea and was superb against Gerrard, reducing his contribution. Joe Cole was underrated by nearly all the journalists in today’s papers. They all missed the fact that no Chelsea player covered as much ground before he went off and he tackled back through the second half. The reason Ronaldo was less effective in the second half was because Cole and Ballack were frequently set on him, to control his marauding runs which had destroyed Essien in the first half. Cole was superb. Carrick and Scholes were also unsung heroes, making the most number of accurate passes in the game (Carrick 60, Scholes 53).

Much of this isn’t pretty and some of it isn’t even visible, but it is crucial. Without the running and tackling of Joe Cole and the neat passing of Makalele, United would have continued to control midfield in the second half. Without Carrick and Scholes, United would never have bossed the first forty minutes. It’s not Best and Cruyff, but it was great football and made possible the fireworks produced by Ronaldo, Rooney and Tevez at one end and Lampard and Drogba at the other.

There were three turning-points in the match. Two which everyone saw and one which no one has commented on. The first, was Ferguson’s decision to play Ronaldo, Tevez and Rooney from the start (note that only one started against Cheslea at Stamford Bridge in the league — Ferguson wanted to rest Tevez and Ronaldo, along with Evra and Scholes, before the crucial Barcelona match). That and the decision to play Hargreaves, Carrick and Scholes in the middle, was adventurous and led to some exhilarating attacking football in the first forty minutes, cancelled out by Lampard’s goal. The second was Grant’s ability to reshape his team in the second half, setting Joe Cole and Ballack on Ronaldo, moving the luckless Essien forward. They were all over United and should have scored. The third moment turned the tide for United. Earlier Makalele had hit Tevez with his arm, unnoticed by the referee or his assistants. In the 72nd minute, Tevez got his own back. All eyes were on a United attack and without any officials noticing, Tevez clattered into Makalele and struck him with his arm. Makalele was laid out briefly and was never the same force. The tireless Tevez, United’s man of the match despite two missed goals, raised United’s morale and United came back stronger in the last 15 minutes and with Giggs replacing the tiring Scholes, held their own in Extra Time, despite Lampard’s shot against the bar.

Had Lampard’s shot, or Drogba’s gone in, or Giggs’ shot not been saved by Terry or had it not been for those two excellent saves by Cech in the first half, the match could easily have been 3-3. Then it would be remembered as a classic, one of the all-time great Finals. The fact that it was just 1-1 and decided only be penalties, and that some fo the best football was by defenders and midfielders practising the dark arts of their craft, doe snot mean that it was Premiership bustle. This was great football played by two great sides with hardly an inch between them. Everyone feared a repeat of last year’s dull Cup Final, a fitting legacy to ‘1-0 Mourinho’. It wasn’t. It was a match of great athleticism, tremendous tackling and some moments of sublime skill. The sad thing is not that Terry missed a penalty, but that this may be the last glimpse we will have of the team that Ranieri and Mourinho built with their owner’s millions and that Grant has managed with great acumen and dignity. The future does not belong to Terry, Drogba or Makalele. Nor, of course, to Neville, Giggs or Scholes. Only time will tell whether it will belong to Ronaldo, Tevez, Rooney, Nani and Anderson. Among other things, this match was the end of an era.

Disenchantment and dissent

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on May 20, 2008
in British politics
. 0 Comments

Strong stuff at the heart of the Independent this morning, with an essay from Nick Clegg (leader of the Liberal Democrats since December last year, in case anyone wasn’t paying attention) lamenting… well, pretty much everything.

Under the heading “Westminster isn’t working”—at least in the print edition—Clegg launches one of the most substantial attacks I’ve read for a long time on the cronyism, vagaries and lack of accountability at the heart of British democracy. Here’s the nub of his objections:

Some say the rituals, the eccentricities, give our Parliament a special aura that is crucial in its asserting its primacy at the heart of our democracy. Surely pomp and ceremony is good, harmless fun?… If only. The reality is altogether more disconcerting. The amusing, if unfathomable peculiarities of our Parliament hide a crisis in the way we are governed. A crisis in which the public feel ever more alienated from, and angry towards, the political class. And a crisis in which Parliament itself is neutered by the all encompassing power of the centralised Whitehall state. No amount of whooping and yelling in the Commons can obscure Westminster’s guilty secret: the rules of the game are totally stacked in favour of the Government, rendering Parliament largely impotent to hold ministers to account… MPs can debate and holler all they like, but Downing Street will always get its way. In 11 years, there have been only three defeats for the Government in votes by MPs—a feat unknown across the rest of the democratic world. Ludicrously, one of those defeats was a gesture vote on whether we should all go home early… That is the record of a system in crisis, in which the legislature dances to the tune of the executive. It is a spineless abdication of scrutiny and accountability at the heart of our Government.

I recommend reading the piece in full, as much as anything because it comes across as the exasperation of an actual human being trying to do a job rather than the unguent platitudes of a political automaton. Some might say, of course, that frankness is the consolation prize of a party that will never form a government; others, perhaps, that making loud noises is a tactic often adopted by parties worried by a low media profile.

As Clegg himself notes, however, “the Liberal Democrats…—representing 23 per cent of the voters—are allowed to decide the content of just 1.5 per cent of the debates,” making it seem rather churlish to begrudge them a few inches of newsprint. And, more stirringly, “In 1951, only 2 per cent of voters chose a party other than the Conservative and Labour parties. By 2005, that figure had shot up to 32 per cent, and it will continue to rise.” Whither the Liberal Democrats? It would be nice to think that, under Clegg, they may be starting to make a difference.

The irrelevance of toff-bashing

Published
by
William Davies
on May 14, 2008
in Arts and culture and British politics
. 3 Comments

The government is hoping that the electorate will reject the Conservative party on the basis that they are a bunch of toffs. But it is not at all obvious that the British hold their traditional elites in all that much disdain. The question, I suspect, is how we interpret the cultural politics of the 1990s.

In terms of cultural sociology, John Major’s period in office was arguably the most interesting in Britain since the 1970s. It was circa 1990-97 that working class identity went from being a source of political and economic antagonism, to becoming a form of cultural capital that could be exported and plundered for profit. Britpop, Lad culture, football and a re-remembering of Britain’s 1960s as a mod decade (working class) rather than a hippy one (middle class) enabled Britain to reinvent class as a cultural division—and therefore a more fluid one—rather than an economic one.

There was a sunny six-year period (between the launch of Loaded magazine and the emergence of the word ‘chav’ ) in which men with shaved heads and trainers suddenly appeared appealing to the liberal middle class, comfortingly local yet foreign at the same time. When Jarvis Cocker muttered in 1995 “take your Year in Provence and shove it up your ass” he no doubt inadvertently spoke for many middle class men as well. To this day, the number of people bracketed as ‘working class’ by sociologists is falling, while the number identifying as such is rising.

While this was going on, John Major’s government looked like an old guard who’d had their day. The disappearance of an antagonistic working class surely reduced many voters’ psychological attachment to elderly men in pin-striped suits, just as the end of the cold war meant that Americans were less inclined to have a protective father (i.e. Republican) in the White House.

But we have to be wary of granting these cultural phenomena too much political weight or historical permanence. Would things really have been any different if the Tories had removed their ties or talked football? Moreover, once class becomes understood in cultural terms as opposed to economic ones, no class is ever doomed to the historical dustbin, but can wax and wane over the years. Some variant of toff culture can quite easily make a comeback, if only due to the vagaries of fashion.

Staffed by wonks, New Labour retains a more economic notion of class than most of the British electorate, and is acutely conscious of the contrasting backgrounds of the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet. The former believe in meritocracy because they see themselves as examples of it, while painting the Camerons as examples of aristocracy. But how much does that distinction resonate with the British public? Aristocrats are no richer than meritocrats in 2008, in fact the reverse is often the case (as John Hutton has crudely celebrated). There is nothing intrinsically more ‘normal’ about Ed Balls spending his youth poring over economics books than Cameron quaffing expensive wine. To claim otherwise is the narcissism of small differences. If Britain has anything like Australia’s ‘tall poppy syndrome’, it may even be more hostile to social climbers (that is, meritocrats) than to lucky hedonists (aristocrats). If the latter confess to being a bit lazy but up for a bit of fun, then they may already be speaking the same language as many voters. Just ask George W Bush.

What is most galling about New Labour’s attack on toffs is that it trivialises and pastiches the sense of economic injustice that many on the Left have expressed, but which the government has steadfastly refused to acknowledge. Fierce inequalities in capital ownership (underpinned by the housing boom), in educational attainment, and even in health are suddenly being obscured by the suggestion that Eton College is the biggest threat to social justice today. The strategy is unlikely to succeed, and doesn’t deserve to.

Reasons not to be cheerful for Chelsea and Arsenal

Published
by
David Herman
on May 12, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

This should have been Chelsea’s season. They started (and ended) with an outstanding manager. They spent more than anyone else. They were not in transition but had countless players at their peak, in their late 20s (Essien, 25; J. Cole and Wright-Phillips, 26; Malouda and Terry, 27; Anelka and Lampard, 29; Drogba, 30; Ballack, 31). They only had two players under 25. Their team, assembled by Ranieri and Mourinho, were settled: seven players had played over 150 times for Chelsea, key players all through the spine of the team (Cech in goal; both centre backs, Carvalho and Terry; Lampard, J. Cole and Makele in the middle and Drogba up front). Experienced, settled, balanced and at the top of their game. Temperamentally pretty sound.

And, crucially, both their main rivals — United and Arsenal — were still in transition, bedding in new acquisitions (Hargreaves, Anderson, Tevez and Nani) or building a new, young team. United had won one league title without Van Nistelroy, but could they win a second without a big-name striker and with so many new, young players? Arsenal had been even more radical. In two years (2006-07) they had lost Bergkamp, Cole, Pires and Campbell, then Lauren and Henry. Could Wenger’s latest new team sustain a long run with so many new or newish players?

Think of 15th August 2004. Chelsea under their new manager, Mourinho, beat United at Stamford Bridge. The United team that day is unrecognisable. Only Scholes and Giggs, Silvestre and O’Shea played for United that day.

Yes, Chelsea lost their manager. They had the Africa Cup which deprived them of key players at a crucial moment and they had a number of major injuries. But this still should have been their season. The prospect for next year is not as good. They have no strikers worth a damn apart from Drogba (hence those ten 1-0 wins—they only scored more than two goals six times in this season’s Premiership). More important, they only have a couple of young players (Mikel and Kalou). Crucial players are getting old. Makelele, superb against Gerrard in the Champions League, is 35. Ballack, Belletti, Shevchenko, Carvalho and Drogba are all past 30. There are ten players between 29 and 35. And then, crucially, there is the Mourinho factor. Sooner or later the Special One is going to turn up at a top Italian or Spanish club with a big chequebook and Drogba, and Carvalho at least, perhaps Lampard and Terry as well, will find it hard to resist his siren call. These are big players, Chelsea’s heart. Even if they’re possible to replace, it will cost more than £70 million. And then there’s the Grant question, still unresolved. he has done superbly well. Chelsea have made it to a Champions League final and were within a whisker of winning back the League title. But Abramovich still dreams of glory. He doesn’t just want to win, he wants to win gloriously. Grant, like Mourinho, is not a glory manager. He’s done well with the team he inherited from Ranieri and Mourinho. But can he rebuild a team?

This is what separates the great managers from the also-rans. Ferguson has done it again and again. So has Wenger. Think of Wenger’s team which did the Double in 1998: Seaman in goal, Dixon, Winterburn, Adams and Keown at the back, Petit and Vieria in midfield, Overmars and Bergkamp. By the team he did the Double again in 2002, Overmars and Petit had gone. In had come Ashley Cole, Henry and Kanu, Lauren, Pires and Wiltord and then Sol Campbell to replace Adams. Few of these played in the team that got to the Champions League Final in 2006. That famous defence had retired, Vieira, Kanu and Wiltord had gone. In had come Fabregas and Clichy, Flamini, van Persie and Hleb.

This permanent revolution costs money, but above all it takes guts. To dismantle a great team is painful. Think of Ferguson losing Cantona and then Keane, Schemichel, Pallister and Bruce, or the controversial decision to let go Ince, Hughes and Kanchelskis. They thought he was crazy to let Van Nistelroy go to Real Madrid, just as some thought Wenger would never manage without Henry, once he left for Barcelona. can Grant do it? Can he build a new team without the old and familiar heartbeat of Chelsea?

Is this Arsenal’s moment, again, after three seasons without silverware. Wenger’s new team isn’t old like Chelsea. It is young, full of potential. Fourteen players 26 or under. Even after Flamini and Lehmann, there are six players who have played more than 120 times for Arsenal. All of them, except for Gilberto, are at their peak. It could be Arsenal’s year.

And yet… He’s already lost Flamini. he may lose Hleb. if he loses Hleb, then will Fabregas stay? The centre of his team, that exhilarating midfield, could fall like dominoes. All three played more than 30 Premiership games this season. They were key players. It would be like 2006 all over again, when Wenger lost Bergkamp, Pires and Cole. Wenger’s been there before but he’s never had to go through this with a team before it had reached its potential. The team of 1998 did the Double, so did the modified team of 2002. The team of 2008 has not won anything. This raises an interesting question about Wenger. His great teams were a hybrid. European flair up front built on a rock-solid English defence which he had inherited. That famous defence went back to the ’80s (Dixon, Winterburn, Adams) and early ’90s (Seaman and Keown). They were all there before Wenger arrived. He has never built a defence like it and since Keown retired, Wenger has only won the FA Cup. Has Wenger got in him to build a great defence comparable to Arsenal’s then or Chelsea’s and United’s now? It doesn’t seem so. Without it, he is building on sand.

So, if Chelsea are getting old and Arsenal are still too young, what of United? Fergsuon too can hear the winged chariot of time. Neville, Giggs, Scholes and Van Der Sar are all in their mid-30s. None of them have more than one more season in them. But nine of his best players are 26 or under, another three are 27. While everyone has been looking at Wenger’s babes, no one has noticed how young Ferguson’s new generation are. Rooney is 22, Nani 21, Anderson 20. Ronaldo is 23, Tevez 24. Carrick, Fletcher and O’Shea are still in their mid-20s. Evra and Vidic too. Fergsuon has 17 players younger than Gallas, Carvalho or Drogba. There are still gaps to fill, but not as many as one might think. Anderson, Nani, Hargreaves and Tevez have bedded down incredibly quickly, in one season during which United have won the League and reached the Champions League final. Not bad for a transitional season. No wonder Ferguson thinks this might be his best team yet. Hard to beat at the back (even without Neville for an entire season); solid in midfield; thrilling up front. Wenger had one player who scared more than seven goals in the Premiership. Ronaldo, Tevez and Rooney scored almost 60 between them. Even the much vilified Saha scored five goals in the Premiership alone.

All will go shopping in the summer. Chelsea desperately. Arsenal perhaps desperately. Ferguson selectively. He will replace Saha and look for a crucial 4th striker. He needs at least one more top full-back and perhaps cover for Ferdinand and Vidic (who missed only nine matches between them—can he be so lucky again?). And perhaps a new goalkeeper to go with Ben Foster. Then the $64,000 question. Think of Scholes’ goal against Barcelona or Giggs’ at Wigan. Will the current midfield manage without them?

It looks like next year might be United’s. But then this year’s should have been Chelsea’s.

That Was The Season That Was

Published
by
David Herman
on May 12, 2008
in Sport
. 1 Comment

1. Most Dignified Managers

The most dignified in the face of defeat was Avram Grant, both because he was so close to victory, against all expectations, and because he was constantly underrated and sneered at.

The most dignified in the face of victory (just as hard) was Roy Hodgson at Fulham, who spoke generously of Reading and Birmingham, knowing full well how close he’d come.

2. Least Dignified Manager

Wenger was justified in feeling his team had deserved better—they had played wso well, scored so many goals and accumulated so many points and still ended up 3rd. And yet they had fallen short in too many crucial games against the other big teams (losing to Liverpool in the Champions League, only 1 point against United and thrashed in the FA Cup and overtaken by Chelsea thanks to a defeat at Stamford Bridge).

3. Most Silly Remark

It had to be Keegan: the Premiership has become too boring. Really? The closest race for the title of the top division in 40 years with two teams separated by goal difference until injury time in the last match and three teams fighting to stay up until Danny Murphy’s goal decided it in the last minutes at Portsmouth.

4. Most Welcome Return

It has to be Keegan. Not that he’s done anything yet, but fond memories of the beautiful game his Newcastle team played in the 1990s are not confined to Tyneside.

5. Best buy

Several categories here. a) Torres stands out among the big money buys. Runner-up: Tevez. who got better and better as the season drew on, scoring numerous crucial goals (most obviously at Blackburn and Tottenham). b) Santa Cruz at Blackburn as best buy among the smaller clubs.

6. Worst buy

Anelka started 23 matches for Chelsea and came on a sub nine times and scored—two goals. Even by the standards of Malouda (3 goals in 44 games) and Pizarro (2 in 52) that’s pretty poor. By comparison, Shevchenko (21 goals in 98 games, more than 1:5) was a great buy.

7. Worst moment for a player

Eduardo’s injury was the most shocking but will Riise ever forget that own-goal against Chelsea?

8. Best Achievement by a Manager

All the managers of the top clubs could lay claim to this. Ferguson because he rebuilt a Premiership winning team yet again, playing exciting attacking football but also conceding fewer goals than anyone else. Grant for defying all expectations and making Chelsea virtually unbeatable in the run-in. Wenger for all the beauty and entertainment with such small resources by comparison with the teams above him. Benitez for almost getting Liverpool to yet another Champions League final with all the chaos going on in the background at Liverpool.

And then there are the next level of clubs: David Moyes, getting Everton to 5th place without a single star player, Mark Hughes getting Blackburn to 7th and Harry Redknapp getting Portsmouth to the top ten and to Wembley on a shoestring.

And then there are the miracle workers down at the bottom: Roy Hodgson, of course; Gary Megson for rescuing Bolton; Roy Keane (the only manager of a club promoted last season to keep them in the Premiership); and Steve Bruce to have kept Wigan safe. The last three were out of the relegation dog-fight with a week to spare.

Tottenham fans will add that they won silverware, scored more goals than Chelsea and got to mid-table while conceding more than 60 goals. And Newcastle fans will say that Keegan brought them hope of exciting football again.

9. The George Graham prize for 1-0 wins

Ten of Chelsea’s 25 Premiership wins were 1-0. They scored fewer goals than Arsenal, Liverpool and 15 fewer than United. They even scored fewer than Villa and Tottenham. They were effective and sometimes exciting — but only rarely.

10. Best newspaper coverage

It has to be The Times, though strangely they faltered at the very end and both the Telegraph and, in particular, The Guardian provided much better coverage of the last round of matches. Brian Glanville award for best football writer: Martin Samuel of The Times.

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on May 12, 2008
in Inside Prospect and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

The great faultline in Turkish politics is usually considered to be the authoritarian secularists, as represented by the army, vs the democratic Islamists, who in the form of the AK party are currently in government. The recent attempt by the country’s chief prosecutor to get AK closed down for violating the country’s secular order is seen as merely the latest example of this feud, which dates back to the founding of modern Turkey by Atatürk.

But this is dichotomy is a false one, argues Nicholas Birch in a web exclusive for Prospect. Both the secularists and the Islamists are locked into a “Kemalist” system that ties Turkey’s form of Sunni Islam close to the state in a brew of piety and nationalism. At the heart of the Islamist posturing so hated by secularists is their own authoritarian tradition of co-opting religion for national purposes.

Also this week, John Quiggin and Tim Lambert attempt to rehabilitate Rachel Carson, of Silent Spring fame, from right-wing attempts to smear her as responsible for the deaths of millions from malaria.

PLUS It’s your last chance to vote in the Prospect/Foreign Policy public intellectuals poll. Voting closes on Thursday; be sure to have your say.