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2 days ago
Twelve minutes gone and two goals down. A month ago we would have caved in and got tonked. Hammered. Instead sleeves were rolled up, the pace when we lost the ball was upped, and City roared into an unlikely 3-2 lead going into the break. For once we got the rub of the green, a weird exhibition of ballistics from this season’s new ball saw it fly into the England keeper’s least accessible part of the goal via two deflections, and an extremely fortuitous penalty award enabled the mercurial little wizard Jimmy Bullard to net twice, and sandwiched in between came Kamil Zayette’s near post finish. We stood and cheered the players off as this was the first time in our Premier League history that the Tigers had scored three times at Walton Street. In the second half Mendy was correctly dismissed for a clear professional foul and West Ham made the numerical advantage count by the way they moved the ball and an equaliser was inevitable. Ironically Hessle Road was hauled down for ...
3 days ago
If Stephen Hunt, Kevin Kilbane, Paul McShane or indeed any other Irish player had done what Thierry Henry did in extra time at the Stade de France on Wednesday, I would have repeated my demented leaping about the house that accompanied Robbie Keane’s first half strike. I would have felt a bit bad about it, but then remembered how the rub of the green had also gone Ireland’s way in the Georgia game (outrageously lucky winning penalty), and in the dim and distant past Steve “One Minute” McMahon’s schoolboy error that allowed Kevin Sheedy to equalise that squalid night in Sardinia during Italia ’90. Then there was Daniel Timofte’s weedy penalty in the shootout which saw Ireland progress to the last eight of the same tournament. Similarly we have been on the wrong end of poor decisions, especially in the Turkey play off for Euro 2000. C’est la vie. Luck plays a tremendously important role in sport. Take it away ...
4 days ago
“It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain”. This memorable piece of Parliamentary rhetoric was spoken by Sir Geoffrey Howe in November 1990, and brilliantly reconstructed by John Sessions for the just repeated BBC drama “Margaret”, where we are party to the behind the scenes shenanigans which led to Thatcher’s exit from Downing Street. Hearing that speech again in the wake of this week’s lobotomised effort by the Government to wrest back the political agenda from the Tories, made me reflect on what a total shambles this last few months have been for the Labour Party. “In Office, but not in Power”, is another phrase from the past that has come back to haunt the current occupant of Number Ten. Gordon Brown had the courage and backbone to ...
6 days ago
Just a list of the top of my head... 1. Muse: Black Holes and Revelations (2006). 2. Amy Winehouse: Back To Black (2006). 3. White Stripes: Elephant (2003). 4. Bob Dylan: Modern Times (2006) 5. Killers: Hot Fuss (2004) 6. Johnny Cash: The Man Comes Around (2002) 7. Sterophonics: Sex, Language, Violence, Other (2005) 8. Dirty Pretty Things: Waterloo to Anywhere (2005). 9. Kaiser Chiefs: Employment (2005) 10. Lily Allen: It's Not Me, It's You(2009) 11. Editors: Back Room (2005) 12. Blur: Think Tank (2003) 13. Libertines: Libertines (2002) 14. Franz Ferdinand: Franz ...
7 days ago
The Tories and the Right have no answers for today’s problems. Fact. The Banking crisis is rooted in their free and un regulated market values. Some on the Left have argued for the Nationalisation of the Banking System for years but have been vilified as “extremists” or “idealists not living in the real world”. The “real world” of Capitalism now comes knocking on the door, cap in hand asking for handouts from the taxpayer as, twenty years down the line the Thatcherite chickens come home to roost. My vision of Socialism which has sustained me through 25 years in the Labour Party is about what’s achievable in a modern context, about compromise, about a move away from the “politics of denunciation”, about building relationships across traditional socio- economic boundaries, and about making the economy work for the benefit of the majority in this country, and across the globe. And this is why what I propose has to be ...
