Ever decreasing circles

I was at a family funeral yesterday, of my second cousin once removed, Margery. I’d only met her a few times in my life, but I think the fact we were both devotees of the English language fostered a connection between us. Both my parents and my sister attended, and it was a very emotional service; I think I was more affected by the tangible grief of her siblings and children/grandchildren than my own emotions.

After the ceremony, we repaired to a hotel in Margery’s hometown for the usual drinks and sausage rolls and a chance to once again delve into the horrible mixed metaphor that is our family tree. There were probably around 30 people there that shared a common ancestor just three/four generations back, but none of the younger of us seem to know who anyone else is, so there were a lot of introductions followed by even more head-scratching as I tried to explain to everyone how the concept of ‘cousins’ works and what ‘once-removed’ means. Anyway, I’m glad I got the chance to put some faces to names I’ve seen on Facebook and the like. And hopefully the interminable family stories will make a little more sense now.

But back to my favourite topic now; myself. At one point, as Margery’s three grandchildren ran full pelt through her brother’s house and conservatory, I found myself talking about ‘the kids’, and in one fell swoop I realised I’ve almost completed my journey along the path to the dark side. I’ve turned into a terrifying amalgam of my emotionally crippled father and my uncle, the rather more sensible family pater. Sitting inside the house while ‘the kids’ play outside is one of the signs of oncoming middle age, I’m afraid.

Similarly, I started a leisure class tonight, in German, and after the session had finished, I popped into Borders to buy the module’s proscribed materials, a BBC German Book/CD pack, for full price, at 9pm, before commuting home on the train. I don’t know if other people fully understand the appeal of the middle-class commuter life to me; I’m not sure I understand it myself. Perhaps it’s due to the romance I find in the tragedy of wasted human potential, the fact we’ll all settle for just so much when we think our dreams are beyond us. I think, tacitly, I’ve abandoned all my own aspirations, perhaps even that of becoming a published author, and I’m more than willing to accept the consolation prize of being a competent professional. I think I may need to visit a psychiatrist before long…

However, I’m doing well to keep up the pretence of writing. While I’m currently ‘writing’ a novel, ‘editing’ another, and penning three or four short stories, in reality I’ve typed nothing other than brainless tweets for about five months now. I am honestly constantly thinking about my stories, selecting words and phrases I might use, and won’t use, whittling characters from the jumble of motivations and quirks in my own neural net, and plotting out where tale is going to go next, but in reality, if I’m not actually putting words in a word file, I’m not actually doing any writing, am I?

Hopefully the longer, college free, summer days will concentrate my mind somewhat. I need to write some songs as well, because I’m letting all my rage store up in my spleen, and that can’t be good.

Doors slowly closing

We live in a world of new media, and it’s interesting to see how our traditional, established outlets have reacted to the freshly-minted era of fully interactive news coverage. The balance of reportage has changed markedly in the last twenty years, where the reporter’s and photographer’s roles have atrophied and the reader’s contribution has increased, and we now have a situation where the media is no longer reporting current affairs to the populace, and instead is sourcing material from members of the public on the scene to feed back to those of us who weren’t so fortunate to be there.

There is change evident as well in the way that opinion pieces and features are written. Once, the journalist’s words would be almost gospel; his/her conjecture and subjectivity would go unchallenged save for a response or two published in the letters page later on in the week. Now, with their new found ability to comment on stories, readers (who might just happen to know more about the subject in question than the author of the piece) are now taking inaccuracies, fallacies and logical mis-steps to task in a way that’s never been done before. Even if the readers’ comments are inaccurate themselves, they will more often than not add to a tapestry of thriving debate and discourse that can shed more light on a topic than a reporter’s necessarily shallow and singular viewpoint.

I feel that newspapers have cottoned on and adapted to this fact recently, adopting a new style of journalism that relies less on imparting events and ideas on its readership and instead goads them, with bludgeoning, relentless repetition of mindless, sensationalistic nonsense, safe in the knowledge that the readers will comment and they won’t have to bother researching or writing a feature properly, and perhaps some online advertisments will get clicked as well into the bargain.

Do I honestly believe that, that a national newspaper would publish sub-standard tosh, styled as ‘blogs’ that are more badly written than anything in the blogosphere itself? I’m not convinced actually, but there must be some reason for how bad the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section is. One article, based on a false premise, was defended in the comment section by the author who claimed he didn’t have time to research the piece properly. I’m not sure what terrifies me more, the fact that journalists are now openly admitting lazy practice (something we all knew anyway) or the on-going black-and-white sensationalism of the world, something the likes of the Sun and Mirror always indulged in, but which, sadly, more and more broadsheets are putting their stock in while chasing falling circulations.

This somewhat lengthy, and ironically subjective (I am exempt from my own criticism as I’m not getting paid for this, and there’s certainly no-one actually reading it) introduction is a pre-cursor to my trying to come to terms with the human/football car crash that’s been ‘Boozegate’.

If you’re a fantastically lucky bastard, you’ll live in Australia, support Brazil as your football team and will never have heard of any of the players in this tawdry drama of next to fucking nothing. In a nutshell, a rather large nutshell, the story breaks down like this:

• On Saturday night last week, the Scottish international football team played the Netherlands in Amsterdam. The Scots lost 3-0.
• Between 2-4am on Sunday morning, the Scottish squad returned to their ‘luxury’ (the Sun’s words, not mine) accommodation on the banks of Loch Lomond, and apparently, with the approval of the team manager, a number of the players began drinking in an ill-advised team building exercise.
• The story that at least two of the players were still in the hotel bar at 11am when the rest of the squad woke up began to break on Tuesday night.
• By Wednesday evening, with the second match of the World Cup qualifying group looming, it had become apparent that goalkeeper Allan McGregor and midfielder, captain Barry Ferguson had been dropped from the starting line up.
• The two players in question were photographed on the sidelines, making thinly-veiled two finger gestures in the direction of the massed photographers.

Apparently, the story of two  men getting drunk after a bad day at the office held more import in Scotland than the crash of a helicopter in the North Sea and the G20 riots/President Obama’s visit to the U.K. It’s a sad indictment of the ‘best small country in the world’ that two of our foremost international professional athletes would think it acceptable to get utterly shit-faced between two relatively important football matches and that the fallout should consume just as many column inches as it has. Indeed, as of this afternoon, McGregor and Ferguson were both banned from representing Scotland for life, and were put on the transfer list by their club side, Rangers. So, in the space of just under a week, Barry Ferguson has gone from being captain of both his club and his country to being served his jotters. There’s a lot of shite has been published by the papers regarding the story this week, but I don’t think the full story is being covered. Or rather, it’s being forgotten amidst the hyperbolic, hypocritical, hysterical reaction from both the press and the Scotland support. I’d like to try and cut through the miasmic nonsense and get to the crux of the matter.

Firstly, if it is true that the players were allowed to commence drinking as a team-building exercise at 4am, having just played an international game and with another forthcoming, surely questions must be asked of the manager and the coaching staff? It can be argued that the players were given an inch and took a mile, that they needed to unwind and ameliorate the adrenaline coursing through theirsystems. They took a mile, but they were given a kilometre, not an inch. The manager should have ordered them to bed. Of course, that’s presuming the players respect the manager.

It’s also apparent that the manager found the two players in question in the bar at 11am. Following a heated exchange, the two were told to pack their bags and leave the squad. Some time later it’s alleged that five other players approached the manager and urged him to rethink his decision, revealing that they too had been in the bar, at least one of them left shortly before eleven, and that if two players were ejected from the squad, the would all walk. This is why McGregor and Ferguson were reinstated, at least to the substitutes bench.

Yes, while they were on the bench, they made rude gestures towards some photographers. This  was childish, but was clearly aimed at the media rather than the Scotland support as has been so self-righteously alleged. However, the fans are within their rights to take offence that their representatives were acting like little brats.

The other underlying issue here is an uneasy relationship between Rangers and Scotland, be it the fans, the management or the players. Scotland supporters think Rangers players don’t give their all and claim the fans all support England instead of their country of birth. Rangers fans think Scotland fans don’t appreciate the contribution of their players to the international scene and are distrustful of some of the more outre behaviour of the Tartan Army. The two have never been easy bed-fellows, not helped by the natural emnity between supporters of the smaller teams and both the large Glasgow clubs.

Barry Ferguson, or Mr. Marmite, has never been truly accepted by the Scotland support. To some, he’s an overly-cautious, limited, dirty, whining violent drunken ned that doesn’t care about the team and only passes the ball backwards. To others he’s one of Scotland’s few truly international class players, a metronome in midfield that retains possession by careful and economic use of the ball. And a whining ned. Five years ago, his talent was less in doubt than it is now but a succession of injuries have taken their toll on his frame. In short, the Scotland support, having never fully taken him to heart, were always likely to come down with great vengeance and furious anger should he make any kind of slip at all.

Goalkeeper McGregor is in a similar boat, if only because he has spent his brief international career playing second fiddle to the more highly regarded Craig Gordon. He was given his chance in Holland because he’s been playing regularly and Gordon’s played only one game in three months. Another issue raises its head here; the manager had a very public falling out with striker Kris Boyd last year where the latter was dropped because he wasn’t ‘playing regularly for his club side’. Having made this rod for his back, the manager then found himself having to choose between two very closely matched players using a criterion he himself had made an issue of. McGregor was subsequently blamed for the 3-0 defeat in Holland, despite the poor defending at the first goal, being obstructed by Dirk Kuyt at the second and the third being a penalty conceded by Christophe Berra. From Saturday night through to the breaking of ‘the story’, the wisdom of McGregor being selected for the Holland game was being hotly debated.

On my drive to play seven a side football tonight, I listened to a programme on Radio Scotland about ‘the story’. Stuart Cosgrove was on the panel, and he was making some points, some I disagreed with. But it wasn’t so much what Cosgrove was saying, it was the vitriol and bile towards Rangers players that I found objectionable.

Sometimes, non-Old Firm fans make me laugh. They denigrate Rangers and Celtic fans for their religious and political bickering, but they can be as reactionary, as shallow, as flat-out bigotted as any of any supporter of the gruesome twosome. I’ve heard twisted logic, ridiculous generalistations and advocation of violence from St. Mirren fans, who seem to think this is also acceptable. But on a casual level, there seems to be an inverterate hatred of Rangers and Celtic players and fans that I think has influenced the thinking of many Scotland fans when reflecting on this affair. That said, there is an argument that another Rangers and a Celtic player were involved and they haven’t copped any shite. But neither have the Derby, Hibs, or Tottenham players that going by the lack of a denial were also part of the session.

So what exactly is going on here? Has the manager lost the respect of the dressing room? Why have four players now quit/being banned from the international scene under his reign? Is the fact they all play for the same club a coincidence? Does the SFA chief executive trust his manager? Does the president of the SFA trust his chief executive? What exactly the fuck is going on here?

When the SFA banned the two players for life today, they reasoned it was for the benefit of the team, to minimise ‘distractions’ for the remainder of the qualifying campaign. I suspect our true handicap is the shambles of an organising body. We have an uncertain, seemingly weak-willed manager, a vain chief executive who will not tolerate any criticism, no matter how small, of his regime, and a president that just loves sticking his oar in. Ignoring the larger problems of Scottish football , this holy trinity I think will be responsible for a disastrous era of Scottish football, one that may even match Berti Vogts for plumbing the depths. I’m firmly of the opinion that all this mess, all this commotion, this media circus and the kangaroo court could all have been avoided if some kind of organisation had been in place from the start of the manager’s incumbency.

I think it’s worth keeping sight of what happened here. Seven men got drunk, and two of them got caught by their boss. Nothing more, nothing less. No, they really shouldn’t have been drinking, but spare us some of the moral indignation.