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Posts tagged football
In April 1989, 96 football fans from Liverpool - many of them children - were crushed to death at a cup semi final match at Hillsborough in Sheffield. In the immediate aftermath, and for years afterwards, the official line from politicians, police and the media was that the fault for the disaster lay with the fans themselves, whose drunken hooliganism was blamed.
After the tragedy, the Sun newspaper reported quotes from police sources claiming that drunken Liverpool fans had hindered police efforts to help the injured, urinated on the dead and dying, and stolen from them. The official inquest concluded that all of the victims had died within minutes of the crush, and that no efforts by emergency services would have saved them.
After more than two decades of campaigning by the families of the Hillsborough victims, today an independent report was released that took in account thousands of documents that had previously been unreleased.
The report details the efforts made by the police immediately after the disaster to cover up their own failings, including passing on false information to news agencies, deflecting the blame to the victims themselves. 116 of 164 statements from police on the scene were amended so that comments that put the police in an unfavourable light were removed. Police carried out blood alcohol tests on the victims - including the children - to “impugn their reputations.” Those without alcohol in their bloodstream were checked for criminal records.
Most shocking of all is the fact that the original inquest’s conclusion that all 96 people died immediately is false. As many as 41 victims “had the potential to survive” if emergency services had been adequate.
There isn’t a community in Liverpool that wasn’t affected by the Hillsborough tragedy. My high school has a rose garden dedicated to Kevin Williams, a 15-year-old student at the school who was crushed to death. The building opposite my house has a plaque dedicated to the people from our town who died that day. There are similar commemorations all over the area for the sons and daughters whose life ended.
Now, 23 years on, the families of the victims who suffered both the tragedy of loss and the insult of a horrendous cover up are a step closer to justice.
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- Me: My wife has an ultrasound this afternoon at 1:30, so I'll be out of the office for about an hour. Also, I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow at 11:30.
- My boss: Okay, thanks for letting me know.
- Me: Also, the fact that these two things coincide with matches in the European championships is utterly coincidental, as they have been booked for some time and if there's any suspicion that I am going to the pub to watch football, I can provide documentation if needed.
- My boss: Oh, it's the Euros? I'm not much of a sports fan, and we don't really get a lot of coverage of them over here. If you hadn't have mentioned it, I wouldn't have known.
- Me: In that case, I also have a dentist's appointment on Friday afternoon, and surgery all next week.
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Brilliant
In today’s Guardian there’s a story about a Manchester United football player being accused of (shock, horror) diving in the box in order to get penalties. At the end of the article there’s a quote from the Man U manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, in which he claims that, over the course of the season, there’s a balance between penalties that you should get but don’t, and shouldn’t get but do:
“We didn’t get one against Wigan during the week. We didn’t scream from the rooftops about it. It happens,” he said. “We got one given against us for Newcastle, we didn’t scream about that either. You get bad decisions and good ones. Believe me, it does even itself out.”
What I love about this is that the phrase “we didn’t scream about that either” has been linked to story on the Guardian site from last November. The story is entitled: “Alex Ferguson: ‘Newcastle Penalty Decision was an Absolute Travesty’”. From that story:
“Everyone, including the referee, was astounded when the linesman put his flag up [for a penalty],” the Manchester United manager said. “He was put in a terrible position. Why can’t the referee overrule it when he is only eight yards away? It is not for me to decide whether the assistant referee gets another game again but it was an absolutely shocking decision.
“It costs you, a decision like that. Two years ago, when the linesman gave the offside goal against Chelsea, it cost us the league, so hopefully we’re not saying that at the end of May. I don’t think we played badly at all today – if we carry on playing like that I’ll be happy – but we slaughtered Newcastle and not to get the three points was a travesty.”
“We didn’t scream about that either”
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The Unsolicited Rabbit Email Conversation Continues
(If the title means nothing to you, my last three posts will illuminate you)
My response to the response to my reply to the original Unsolicited Rabbit:
I must say I’m very relieved to read the reason why Aileen was receiving the nurse rabbit picture (not that I have any desire for her to be ill, of course). It just struck me that it was possible that Aileen could be an employee who was well-known by all her colleagues to be phobic of both nurses and rabbits, and that this email was a particularly vicious form of office bullying in which both of her phobias were combined in a way that was intended to push her over the edge of sanity into the realm of madness and straitjackets. Then I got worried that I had become somehow implicated in the whole sordid affair by receiving the email, and that a Hitchcockian storyline would follow, with crop-dusting airplane chases and mysterious strangers waiting for me in my hotel room, etc.
But that’s just my paranoia about the whole ‘shared name’ thing. I think it stems from when I was awarded a Gold Award for football skills by my local youth football organisation when I was a child, yet I had only completed the Red Award training program (which involved being able to kick the ball without falling over and knowing the difference between the bit inside the white lines on the pitch and the bit outside it, if my memory serves me correctly). Indeed, I was three years too young to even qualify for the Gold Award. But still they gave it to me, and I still put it on my wall, and I knew for years afterwards that there must have been some other [my name] in our town who had received a Red Award when he was actually at the Gold Award standard, and some day he would find me and sue me for the terrible effect I had had on his burgeoning professional football career and I would die a pauper.
(I’m not sure if you’ve been sharing this conversation with your colleague [My name] II, but if so, please don’t tell him about that last part in case he is indeed the other chap who still harbours deep resentment about his footballing prowess being insufficiently recognised as a child. Thanks!)
Anyway, I am digressing. Thank you for excellent response, and In the spirit of our agreement that bunnies are great for cheering people, I have included below a photograph of a rabbit next to some conversationally relevant footballing paraphernalia. Have a wonderful weekend!
Levante has the smallest budget in the First Division — and by some way. Its budget stands at €22M ($30.6M); Barcelona’s is €461M ($641M). Each year, it makes around 2 percent of what Madrid and Barcelona make — and then it loses it again, paying off its creditors. Last season coach Luis García admitted that he did not use the computer program that measures players’ every move because “every time I put it on, it costs €3,000 — and we haven’t got €3,000.”
An excellent article about the Spanish football team Levante, who currently top the Spanish league after eight games (usurping Barcelona and Real Madrid), despite being a team of unwanted cast-offs which has literally never won anything in its entire history.
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The elusive best score ever
At the weekend football teams East Fife and Forfar met in the Scottish Second Division. The final score was 4-3 to the home team.
This means that we will have to wait for another year - at least - until we hear football score announcers in Scotland utter the fabled, yet as-yet unachieved, mythical Greatest Football Score of All Time:
East Fife 5 - Forfar 4
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The worst penalty shootout ever
After last week’s Women’s World Cup final, there was a lot of talk regarding penalty shootouts. It may interest people to know, then, that the worst penalty shootout ever was as follows:
In January 1998 Under-10 sides Mickleover Lightning Blue Sox and Chellaston Boys faced off in the Derby Community Cup. The game finished 1-1 and the Blue Sox won 2-1 on penalties, though not until a remarkable 66 penalties had been taken.
(Source: Guardian)
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My favourite sports story of the day, summarised
- Football club A’s manager is forced to retire due to health issues.
- Current manager of football club B is tipped by the media for the vacant position.
- Football club A say “We have no intention of approaching football club B’s manager for the vacant position.”
- Manager of football club B, whose contract negotiations had until then been going well, suddenly and quite surprisingly invoked the breakout clause of his contract, leaving his job with the club.
- Club A say “No, REALLY: We have no intention of hiring you as our manager. And quite frankly, your contract-related behaviour just now was so poor that even if you were the only manager in the world, we’d still look elsewhere.”
- Former manager of club B is now looking for work.
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