To See Ourselves As Others See Us
A geezer at work is a Leicester City fan. In fact he's from up that way so I suppose he's not really a geezer. Whatever is the Midlands equivalent. Anyway I asked him about the game on Saturday as he'd been there while I was at the poker wedding of the year (to follow). Er, not that I would have gone anyway to be honest.
He's a nice enough geezer/bloke/whatever, very polite, always respectful when talking about football, and was almost embarrassed to relate that he'd never seen a game where so little football was played. By which he stressed he didn't mean that the ball was in the air all the time, but that there were so many stoppages. He said that the ref added 4 minutes on the first half and 5 on the second "but it should have been 10 each time".
In other words that we were a bunch of time-wasting gits (Rangers having been a man up and a goal up for most of the game). And frankly we are. Knowing him as I do, if anything he was probably understating the case. This issue is coming to a head in football - on the first day of the season Middlesboro took a short corner and stood on the ball with a minute to go in their home game against Liverpool. When the score was 0-0. The standard response is "you never complain when your team does it".
Well that's exactly what I am doing. I'd rather see Rangers go forward and try to score goals, except in extreme circumstances. If that costs us 8 points a season so be it. If that means we end up playing in a lower division so be it. Is how I would see it anyway. But I saw a bizarre Ian Holloway press conference on the Internet today. Bizarre really is the only word for it. Rightly upset with the back-room shenanigans going on at the club at the moment, he said that Rangers had been told that if they went into administration again, they'd be closed down. He then became angrier and angrier, and finally went off into the most surreal rant about Tony Blair and Iraq before closing with "The whole world's gone mad. Which suits me because I'm as mad as a March Hare" and stomping off, shouting "any more questions ?" over his shoulder as he left.
Which tells us two things. 1) How much pressure the guy is under because he feels that the whole club's future existence is on his shoulders and 2) how mad he is. Maybe I'll have to put up with time-wasting if the alternative is the club ceasing to exist. It ain't like the old days. There are too many people taking money out of football who have never kicked a ball in their lives. Agents, Peter Kenyon, twats like that. There's your lesson, poker. Heed it well.
He's a nice enough geezer/bloke/whatever, very polite, always respectful when talking about football, and was almost embarrassed to relate that he'd never seen a game where so little football was played. By which he stressed he didn't mean that the ball was in the air all the time, but that there were so many stoppages. He said that the ref added 4 minutes on the first half and 5 on the second "but it should have been 10 each time".
In other words that we were a bunch of time-wasting gits (Rangers having been a man up and a goal up for most of the game). And frankly we are. Knowing him as I do, if anything he was probably understating the case. This issue is coming to a head in football - on the first day of the season Middlesboro took a short corner and stood on the ball with a minute to go in their home game against Liverpool. When the score was 0-0. The standard response is "you never complain when your team does it".
Well that's exactly what I am doing. I'd rather see Rangers go forward and try to score goals, except in extreme circumstances. If that costs us 8 points a season so be it. If that means we end up playing in a lower division so be it. Is how I would see it anyway. But I saw a bizarre Ian Holloway press conference on the Internet today. Bizarre really is the only word for it. Rightly upset with the back-room shenanigans going on at the club at the moment, he said that Rangers had been told that if they went into administration again, they'd be closed down. He then became angrier and angrier, and finally went off into the most surreal rant about Tony Blair and Iraq before closing with "The whole world's gone mad. Which suits me because I'm as mad as a March Hare" and stomping off, shouting "any more questions ?" over his shoulder as he left.
Which tells us two things. 1) How much pressure the guy is under because he feels that the whole club's future existence is on his shoulders and 2) how mad he is. Maybe I'll have to put up with time-wasting if the alternative is the club ceasing to exist. It ain't like the old days. There are too many people taking money out of football who have never kicked a ball in their lives. Agents, Peter Kenyon, twats like that. There's your lesson, poker. Heed it well.
posted by Andy_Ward @ 6:28 PM
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