Still standing: 20 years after Hillsborough the debate rages on

WITH the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster fast approaching, standing in making a comeback to an English football league ground for the first time since that horrendous day on April 15th 1989.
The news that Morecambe football club is to incorporate safe standing areas into their new stadium, ready for the 2010/11 season, will delight campaigners across the country fighting for the re-introduction of standing areas at all grounds.
The danger is that it will encourage more people to stand as a way of making their point to their own club’s owners.
Currently the law states that football grounds in the top two flights must be all seater but some supporters, particularly when travelling but increasingly at home too, are happy to ignore that despite the cost to fellow fans.
Those who want to sit often have no choice but to spend 90 minutes on their feet because everyone in front of them is standing. Views are ruined and tempers frayed because people cannot be considerate or bothered to observe the rules.
Clubs are either unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Stewards are outnumbered and powerless in the face of selectively deaf and often aggressive spectators and promises by clubs to crack down by penalising fellow clubs or indeed their own supporters are rarely, if ever, kept.
It seems that if people are determined to stand, there is nothing to stop them.



Groups such as the Football Supporters' Federation feel that there is a growing momentum to their campaign for standing areas to be re-introduced.
An early may motion introduced into Parliament in 2007 to bring back standing areas currently has the support of 107 MPs yet there seems little appetite from the regulatory authorities, the police or the clubs themselves to move the issue forward or even address it decisively.
The Independent Football Commission (before it changed its name last year) said it could find nothing to suggest that standing areas were inherently unsafe and with modern monitoring techniques and modern stadia, there seems little reason not to allow a section of supporters to stand if they so wish.
Greater safety at grounds and better crowd control would ensure there could never be a repeat of Hillsborough. Fences have gone and even if standing were brought back there would never be enough people allowed in to re-create the crushes experienced at grounds across the country in years gone by.
However, until that happens, the law says supports have to sit.
And for the good of everyone involved, that’s exactly what they should do.

Red Dog bitten by Sir Alan?

Bad week for the Red Dogs down the road. Not only did Notts Forest lose yet again last Saturday, slipping back into the relegation zone, but "star" striker Rob Earnshaw got kicked out of The Apprentice at the first hurdle.
At least now we know what Earnshaw, the club's top scorer with a measly nine goals, has been doing while spending so much time on the treatment table in the last couple of years.



Earnshaw will of course claim that it was Anita Shah, a qualified lawyer and business strategist, and not he.
But ask yourself this - ever seen the two in the same room?

Goody's gone, but where does it leave the rest of us?

AS the Jade Goody circus staggers out of town, its star turn is still clinging on to the final curtain, even from beyond the grave.
Goody’s very public death was a horrible thing to behold for a variety of reasons; none more so than the way the mawkish, voyeuristic public so enthusiastically lapped it up.
Newspapers, television, internet sites, pub discussions have been dominated by Goody in recent weeks. The Prime Minister’s been talking about it. Michael Jackson phoned the hospital.
Yet whatever the whole miserable shebang said about its protagonist, what it revealed about the British public was considerably worse.
Since the death of Princess Diana 12 years ago, Britain has turned into a nation of professional mourners.
We love wrapping ourselves in the cloak of someone else’s misery. No longer is anyone allowed to die privately, it seems.
And the age of digital media interaction has given us the perfect way of doing so.
No death can pass these days without memorial websites springing up, filled with illegible trash written by people who should spend less time “grieving” and more time learning to spell.
Phone and text-ins are jammed with those so emotionally bereft they feel pouring out crocodile tears for someone they don’t even know will somehow make them be a better person.
The mother of a lad who was killed recently in Nottingham was on Facebook within minutes, updating her status. To what? Fairly miserable? A little peeved?
I have received emails and text messages from people who should know better canonising Goody as a saint just because she did her best to look after her children by striking huge financial deals to sell her death to the highest bidder.
I’ve no problem with that if that’s what she wanted to do, but as a mother a natural desire to protect your children should be a given, not something that awards you hero status. And when you’re dying and someone comes along waving cheques worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, it’s not a hard decision to make.
Cancer campaigners say Goody has helped those women who might otherwise not have bothered to have smear tests, or those who, like Goody herself, stupidly ignored results which showed abnormalities (had she had acted, she might even have been alive today) to come forward.
How damning is that? What does it say about people that it takes a semi-literate reality television star to tell them they should have regular smear tests or ought to see a doctor if there’s a chance they might have cancer? Are people really that stupid?
I have no issue with Goody. She got lucky and made a mint. Then her luck ran out. I feel sorry for her because she’s a young mother who died and her children will grow up without a mum.
But I won’t mourn her because I didn’t know her and she played no part in my life.
My fear is that I might just be alone.

Clough Be Damned

Amassing free publicity akin to U2 on the BBC, the new film about Brian Clough’s ill-fated spell in charge of Leeds United has spawned huge amounts of column inches.
Brian Clough remains one of football’s biggest draws, five years after he died.
Witness the publicity when his son Nigel took over at Derby County, the club his father turned from provincial club to England’s championship winners.
He is already two months into his reign at Pride Park and outwardly very unlike his father, yet still barely a match report goes by without mentioning Clough snr.
The Damned United has polarised public opinion. Written by David Peace and published in 2006, some view it is a literary masterpiece of early 70s social commentary, some suggesting it’s the greatest ever book about sport.
Others feel you cannot inject such a degree of fiction into what is essentially a work of non-fiction, while the Clough family abhorred it, saying it failed hands-down to reflect Brian Clough’s nature. Perhaps because Clough was cast as a man eaten by bitterness, perhaps because Martin Sheen, who plays him in the film, swears constantly, something the Cloughs said Brian never did.
The press has used the film’s release as an excuse to partake in one of its favourite pastimes – reliving Clough the man. Pages and pages have been given over to favourite anecdotes and tales.
Mine has always been what he said about handling players who disagreed with him: “I'd have him into my office; he'd have his say, I'd have mine, we'd talk about it for 20 minutes before deciding I was right.”
There are some great new ones. Peter Shilton has recalled how Clough made him practise for the 1980 European Cup final on a roundabout because it was the only piece of grass they could find neat their hotel.
Stuart Pearce, a Forest stalwart who played under Clough at the City Ground (but also wore the back and white of the Rams. Only once, but he wore it – and kissed the badge!), has another. “Brian Clough was funny about Liverpool. His opinion was that they were the sort of club who put things in your tea. He used to tell us ‘don’t drink the tea. The cheating bastards have probably put something in it.’ At Liverpool he wouldn’t drink anything that wasn’t sealed.”
The film, like the book (which incidentally covers much of his turbulent latter days at Derby), will be ignored by the Clough family but promises to be a big deal here in the Midlands when it comes out later this month.
No-one loves Clough like the Derby and Forest fans and if it is deemed Peace and Peter Morgan, the film’s producer, have got him wrong, they won’t hold back in saying so.
Morgan has produced the film after tackling character such as Idi Amin and Richard Nixon. It will be interesting to see whether with Brian Clough he has met his match.

Bono, Brian and the BBC

IT'S only been five years since their last album, but U2’s latest offering No Line On The Horizon, has been greeted like the Second Coming.
The BBC – the same BBC who would not run a charity appeal for Gaza because it might impinge on its impartiality – gave the band a week of free publicity across all platforms.
Turn on the TV, radio, internet, and there they were, sadly more often than not with the distinctly dodgy new single, Get On Your Boots, which on early listens is the worst song on the album.
So what gives down at the “impartial” BBC that allows blatant favouritism to the biggest band in the world? Has Bono, bored of playing with world leaders, taken over at Broadcasting House (from where he and the gang did a little live gig to the Regent St shoppers. Aired on the BBC, by the way)?
He hasn’t. But Lesley Douglas has become Director of Programming and Business Development at Universal Records, which U2 are signed to.
That’s the same Lesley Douglas who was controller of Radio 2 and 6Music who left the BBC in the wake of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand scandal.
Beeb aside, music critics have been falling over themselves to label it the band’s best album ever. Probably because Bono has told them it’s their best album ever. But then he always says that.
Some of the reviews have, in typical muso style, been unreadable and bamboozling, describing not a set of songs but just printing a whole load of long and waffling words they’ve nicked out of the dictionary that look good but mean little.
They talk about new horizons (pun intended), experimentation, breaking new boundaries, Bono’s brave new world etc etc.
As a lifelong and committed U2 saddo, and therefore feeling well placed to judge, I don’t agree with any of it. In fact my wife probably summed it up best when she walked into the room, stood for 30 seconds, said: “Hmmmm, that sounds like U2,” and walked out again.
Which it does. In many ways it’s a compilation album. Not of songs, but of ideas. It’s peppered with riffs, bass lines and themes nicked from the whole U2 back catalogue.
Which means, to any U2 fan, it’s a great record. There are some belting tracks. It will work on the road. It may go down as their best ever, but I doubt it and I can’t se Bono changing the world with it.
As Brian’s mother said in the Monty Python classic: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”.

Slumdog has little bark

Am I the only person to think that Slumdog Millionaire is not a great film? True, its pulsating, exhausting and brilliantly shot. As well as being laden with Oscars, Globes and the haughty thanks of the British nation for helping those poor Indian kids (that we ignore the rest of the time).
Yet its greatest asset is also its greatest curse. To produce a film reflecting life in modern-day Mumbai results in a vivid pastiche of colours, sound and a constant visual battering.
But too often director Danny Boyle allows his excitement to get the better of him and the end result is indeed exactly what Mumbai is: noisy, messy and confusing.
It clumsily flits around from present to past without any effort at continuity, reasoning or explanation. When questioning the implausibility of the plot threads, we are asked far too often to simply take Boyle’s word for it.
The greatest inconsistency of the film is its central thread, as our hero Jamal Malik answers his way to winning a cool 20 million rupees on India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
The film opens at its end. Jamal Malik, the slumdog in question, has improbably got to within one question of hitting the jackpot and the opening sequences show evil cops electrocute him as they try to force a confession of how he cheated.
The inflexible formula of each question awakening a childhood memory supplying the answer soon becomes tired and unnecessary, while the sudden turning of the main police officer from a torturer to, without explanation, a sympathetic listener of Jamal’s tortured soul is utterly implausible.
Growing up, Jamal and his brother Samir, who without warning turns from nurturer to psychopath and then, at the end, inexplicably back again, disappear and pop up here, there and everywhere. Seeing them thrown off the top of a train and landing by chance at the foot of the Taj Mahal it was almost impossible not to scoff out loud.
We are expected to believe the central love story fits around two people who see each other three times in 20 years and that Jamal, every time he goes looking for her, finds her quite easily amongst the 1.7 million inhabitants of Mumbai. There is a chase and they are separated. They reunite, there is a chase and they are separated again. And so it goes.
Another problem is the lack of suspense. Without wishing to spoil it, everyone knows the end as they take their seats at the beginning. We know he wins the money, he’s obviously going to get the girl and the twist in the tail is; well, there isn’t one. It just finishes.
Slumdog isn’t a bad film at all. It’s adventurous and quite breathtakingly shot, and set to a pulsating soundtrack. There are some touching scenes, mostly involving Samir and Jamal as little boys. As they grow, it is difficult to keep sympathy with them as Samir turns nasty and Jamal constantly aloof.
Like any Boyle film, it doesn’t dare to shield us from the gruesome and brutal realities of life in the Mumbai shanty towns, but it has the feel of a film that takes in thriller, romance, Bollywood, action but is left not quite knowing what its meant to be.
It has been showered with awards and glory but underneath, like Mumbai itself, little of it makes sense.