Playing for Pride

There's a crucial game going on at Pride Park, home of Derby County, in the next few days. Not that the final Premiership game of the season is important, it is. It could decide Reading's fate should they embarrass themselves and fail to beat us.
No, 24 hours after the curtain comes down on a miserable season I and another few lucky ones are taking our bow on the hallowed turf.
Now anyone whose a football fan cannot fail to get excited about the chance to play at ones home ground.
The only time I managed to tread the Baseball Ground turf was during two pitch invasions - one after Derby secured promotion against Palace in 1996 and the other after the final ever match there against Arsenal a year later.
It's taken 10 years to get a game at Pride Park - pretty much the same as it feels since the last time we won there - but I am relishing the opportunity.
In my mind of course the hat trick has already been secured, the winner coming in the dying seconds. That was until I found that half the opposition are semi-pros.
No, I will content myself playing the Italian style - strolling around the pitch, taking in the occasion and giving it the odd back heel.
A physiotherapist I was talking to recently said that a client had paid £6,000 for him and four mates to enter a five-a-side competition at Wembley last year. He lasted three minutes before breaking an ankle, but still said he could brag to the grandkids he played at Wembley.
Playing at Pride Park may not have quite the allure, but then it hasn't cost me £6,000. But I'll be just as chuffed and ready to chew the ears off anyone who will listen.

There is, of course, a sub plot. After a humiliating season in which the Mighty Rams have managed one win in 37 league games and are officialy the worst team in Premiership history, you never know who might be lurking in the stands. One lucky rebound off your backside and there's every chance the next thing you know you'll be having a contract shoved under your nose and playing in front of 30,000 people.
Ah well, we can but dream....

The Trouble With The McCanns

HAVING worked on the story of missing Madeleine McCann for over a year - I started on it within hours of her going missing and sometimes don't seemed to have stopped since - it was interesting to finally meet her parents Gerry and Kate last week when I, along with a couple of other national newspaper hacks, was given half an hour with them in the run up to the first anniversary of the four-year-old's disappearance on May 3rd.
To a tee everyone I have mentioned this to since has only two questions: "What are they really like", followed swiftly by "Having met them, do you think they were involved?". No-one has bothered asking me what they actually said or what's happening in the search for their daughter.
That response is fascinating. Since the early furore died down several months ago, no-one has really worked out who is interested in this story or who is driving it. The media has pursued it relentlessly but often with little thought or strategy. Too often it has been a case of having to have a Madeleine story, regardless of what it is. But why?
It has always struck me as a chicken and egg sort of situation. Does the press continually cover the story because the public wants to read it, or is the public reading it simply because the press are writing about it?
It's the old adage of whether the media is there to form public opinion or reflect it.
I guess we'll soon find out because the feeling within is that the papers are beginning to tire. The fact they have managed to keep the story going for so long in the absence of any hard fact - no-one is any the nearer knowing what happened to the poor tot a year later than they were an hour after she disappeared - is remarkable in itself.
At the Daily Telegraph missing Madeleine has not been out of the paper's Internet top 10 stories for a year, which is often the rationalisation given to reporters to keep churning stuff out.
Yet a quick, unscientific survey amongst my neighbours, all of whom are middle class, a similar age to the McCanns and have children, revealed two admitting to being "obssessed" with the story while no-one else is overly fussed, not that anyone doesn't have an opinion about whether they should have left her alone in the first place. And talk of the issue ends up revolving around the parents, not the missing girl.
I get the feeling in many respects that the story has become the McCanns, rather than what has happened to Madeleine. Which, much like a lot of the coverage, is rather topsy turvy.