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The Importance of Sport (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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On second thoughts you are right. It was clear that England had undergone a morale collapse. That kind of thing happens when people intuit something bad is happening but they don't know what it is so it can't be addressed. If you are correct, the sight of their talisman having apparently abandoned the heights and now shoring up the defences would start a backs-to-the-wall mentality and we all know what that leads to... hoofing the ball as far away as possible. There being no-one at the other end to receive it would matter not a jot.

This brings us to what Southgate did to stop the rot. Like I keep saying, Grealish has to be at the centre of a support staff. It is hard to imagine anyone less suited to the role of lone galvanic messiah. Ditto Saka. A rolls-royce player, not what is needed if you are going to replace Trippier. That would require a tireless up-and-down merchant like ... er ... Trippier.

All this does have one possible AE explanation. We were the only team at the tournament for whom football is the 'working class' game. We produce too many Indians and not enough chiefs. And this applies to English management as well as on-field generals.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Certainly everyone says football is a working class game, but if your team are Wanderers, or Rovers, or Athletic, I personally would have doubts. All the early winners of the FA Cup were posh teams. Still the ortho position says you are right.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Old Etonians, Royal Engineers?
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Wile E. Coyote


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Wiley's view is that football is about as working class as social realistic films. There is this romanticised nonsense that working class England is the true home of football, a land where poor kids play hard and fair, put in a shift, fail to triumph against the odds. It's like drinking lager and watching Kes. No wonder we are all depressed.
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Mick Harper
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Certainly everyone says football is a working class game... Still the ortho position says you are right.

Are you saying that I have to abandon the position because I agree with orthodoxy?

but if your team are Wanderers, or Rovers, or Athletic, I personally would have doubts.

I did not say supporters of football teams are working class. I said the players -- and managers who are ex-players -- are working class.

All the early winners of the FA Cup were posh teams.

I was not referring to the Euros of 1871 but of 2021. Sorry, I should have made myself clearer.

Old Etonians, Royal Engineers?

Very well spotted, Wiley. In ye olden times football was an ordinary Victorian sport, dominated at the higher levels by people who did not have a proper job. Then came a world-transforming moment when some Lancastrian football-freaks decided to go 'professional'. Football immediately became infra dig for gentlemen who thereupon turned to rugby (union), cricket, athletics, tennis and all those sports who either remained amateur or became shamateur.
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Wile E. Coyote


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To say football is working class is a bit like saying "Hollwood" is working class. It had an era at the start of the century when it served as primarily working class entertainment and featured some working class stars and directors but that is now heavily mythologised.
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Wile E. Coyote


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My early guess would be that where you have two teams in one city, with the exception of Liverpool and Glasgow (religion), this is because you have a team for the better off Rovers and a team for the worse off City.
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Mick Harper
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To say football is working class, is a bit like saying "Hollwood" is working class.

Now you're flogging a new dead horse. You keep on mistaking popular for working class and all classes for working class. There is no mythologising here. I am simply saying that in England, the education system divides rather starkly into upper and lower and that, broadly, the upper went in for certain sports and the other others. Football was for the others.

I accept that the class divide has been eroding but it is still quite noticeable how, say, rugby union is socially different from rugby league or that Welsh rugby union is socially different from English rugby union (and Cornish rugby union is different from English rugby union). In France, the only other team at the Euros with a major winter sport rival to football, the situation is so extreme that football is no longer even the working class game, it is the game of the underclass beneath the working class!

My early guess would be that where you have two teams in one city, with the exception of Liverpool and Glasgow (religion), this is because you have a team for the better off Rovers and a team for the worse off City.

This is in fact the case elsewhere. It's politics by other means. (War in the case of Buenos Aires.) In England we can't do it because, as it were, it's already been done. I notice you've used the old 'bogus list' dodge so you probably know this deep in your heart.
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Boreades


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Mick Harper wrote:
it is still quite noticeable how, say, rugby union is socially different from rugby league or that Welsh rugby union is socially different from English rugby union (and Cornish rugby union is different from English rugby union).


Arrgghhh!
Flashback memories to Rugby Union school days and having my nose involuntarily rearranged on my face. Then wandering around the pitch not knowing who I was, or where I was. Our Rugby Coach / PE Teacher was the very model of "different times" coaching. He took one look at me, said "It's only concussion, he'll be alright in 10 minutes".

I have to confess my exposure to Rugby League was limited to watching Eddie Waring and "up & unders" on Grandstand.

Nowadays, Rugby Union is much safer and genteel (for me). I'm the designated driver for M'Lady going to meet family outlaws and watch Bath at home. She stands on the terrace drinking Somerset Cider, like everyone else, except for me, cos' I'm the designated driver. I know my place. I should get a peaked cap and practise my Parker impersonation.
Yus M'Lady 'e's 'ad 'is hinjections.

She screams abuse at the opposing team, including encouraging physical assault & GBH. Nobody is outraged or offended, and the police don't turn up to "check your thinking" . Drinks get spilt, on the ground and on other people, but everyone takes it in good humour.
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Wile E. Coyote


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All this does have one possible AE explanation. We were the only team at the tournament for whom football is the 'working class' game.


So this is unique to England, Scotland and Wales and not Italy?
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Mick Harper
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Oh, a list. Good-oh. The principle applies to Scotland where fitba is the national pastime. Scottish managers have always been 'middle class' even those who came up through the mines, shipyards and what have you. Ditto scheming midfielders. It is 'the national discourse'. Why do you think Glasgow is the dominant force, not Edinburgh?

It also applies to Wales where football has always been a minority sport. Every small town and village has a rugby team, not all have football teams. Which is not to say that the Welsh actually prefer football these days but these things take aeons to feed through to 'national discourse' level. The thought of a middle class Welsh footballer or manager is laughable. However neither Scotland nor Wales are Euro-powers so I wasn't including them.

Italy is the perfect illustration of the principle. Compare Italian managers to English ones! Can you imagine English Agnellis or Berlusconi's taking over English football clubs as dynastic aids to power?
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Mick Harper
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I will though tell you when it all began to change. When When Saturday Comes comes. That was the moment when the intelligentsia suddenly woke up to the fact that it was football that should be the national discourse. We have never looked back. We're on our way from Wembley, our brains having all gone trembley.
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Mick Harper
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So this is unique to England, Scotland and Wales and not Italy?

AE is always on the lookout for special cases. So what do these have in common but no other country has? Answer national sports stadiums. Wembley, Twickenham, Hampden Park, Murrayfield and the National Stadium, Cardiff. The reason being that no other country on earth is so stupid as to build stadiums that are only used a handful of times a year. Yes, I am aware of all the caveats and no, I don't know why we're stupid and yes, I am quite proud we are.

And the Americans who build stadiums all over the shop and play NFL home games eight times a year. And Qatar who have just built stadiums all over their shop that will never be played in again after 2022.
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Mick Harper
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Dear Moeen Ali

If you don't get a grip soon I'm coming round to get a grip of you.

PS I can't put this on Twitter because of the new racism rules so I've asked my friend Mick Harper to post it up on his website.

Signed
Your mum
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Cricket has a new sister. Cricket 100

The format of the new game is:

100 balls per innings.
A change of ends after 10 balls.
Bowlers deliver either five or 10 consecutive balls.
Each bowler can deliver a maximum of 20 balls per game.
Each bowling side gets a strategic time-out of up to two and a half minutes.
A 25-ball powerplay start for each team.
Two fielders are allowed outside the initial 30-yard circle during the powerplay.
Teams will be able to call time-outs, as has been the case in the IPL since 2009.

See what they have done. They have changed time. They have straightened and speeded it up. They have also changed the language to describe the game eg you have batters, you dont have silly mid-ons. You also have fireworks.

This is exactly what modern historians do, they straighten and speed up history, they impose a different rhythm, a different understanding.

If you mentally imagine commentating in the style of John Arlott on a old Test Match Special, but instead doing it on a Cricket 100 you can sense the problem.
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