Articles of Faith

‘What?! Arsenal away in the fourth round? Damn you, Lucifer. Why have you forsaken me, Lord?’

It’s terrible news for West Ham, and Curbishley implied there might be a jinx as so many of the players he’s bought in have suffered injury. It is bloody unfortunate, but a curse? After last season’s controversy plenty have grudges, not least in the city of steel. Could former Blades boss Neil Warnock be poised in a circle of stone, stinking of chicken’s blood, spewing white-eyed incantations and clutching a buckled dolly of Julien Faubert?

There appears to be a troubling tendency among under-pressure Premiership managers to jab accusatory digits in the direction of the dark arts – Martin Jol cited ‘black magic’ as the reason Spurs didn’t get a penalty at Old Trafford at the weekend. Perhaps Tottenham did deserve something from a tie in which United were less than brilliant and they doubtless had chances but the resulting home win surely owes more to Nani’s right foot and Wes Brown’s chest/upper arm than Aleister Crowley’s necromancy.

Perhaps this is a further indication that top-flight managers are under too much pressure, when in our secular age they crumble into medieval beliefs whenever luck goes against them – ‘What?! Arsenal away in the fourth round? Damn you, Lucifer. Why have you forsaken me, Lord?’ However, the injury crisis at Upton Park, if not the work of Beelzebub, is critical: Dean Ashton, Scott Parker, Dyer, Faubert, Freddie Ljungberg and both Lucas Neill and Matthew Upson joined the afflicted minutes after they signed. The only solution available to the club is to keep signing more players, an approach I believe was pioneered by Stalin in his gruelling fixture against Hitler on the Eastern Front.

His mentality was, as I understand, ‘Right, loads of Germans are dying, loads of Russians are dying and we’re both going to continue to pour young men into this battle until it’s resolved, but as Russia has a larger stack of human chips we can carry on playing beyond the point of German exhaustion. I feel the hand of history, not on my shoulder but cheekily goosing me out of respect.’

Let’s hurl more millionaire footballers onto this bonfire of the lame; why wait till they arrive at West Ham? Just give Eidur Gudjohnsen a sack of money then smash him in the balls with a pool cue. Let’s buy a wing at Whitechapel hospital and send an army of thugs with chequebooks and chainsaws on a tour round Europe to assemble a hobbling chorus of convalescents. I wish Dyer a speedy recovery. It’s a shame, and as an offer of appeasement to the angry football gods I shall sacrifice the next virgin I meet on Green Street. It could take a while.

5 Never mind Israel, I’ve been beaten by Bohemia (#ulink_7b29bc76-0bcc-512c-b032-ac9d98d213c8)

I am writing this at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge, where Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen and where Leonard Cohen received ‘head on an unmade bed’ from Janis Joplin. As is the case with most hotels trading on history, it’s a bloody dump.

When I phoned reception in the dead of night to ask for water, water, I was told: ‘There’s a deli across the street.’ In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs water is right there with shelter and excretion at the pyramid’s foundation; they may as well dispense with the toilet and the building; they could just have a bellhop stood in the street charging you $200 a night for crapping in the gutter and snuggling up with Oscar the Grouch. Comprised neatly in this scenario is the perennial issue of the romantic versus the pragmatic – you don’t stay at the Chelsea for room service, you stay because you’re renting a little counter-cultural history for the night.

‘Rio said not qualifying is “unthinkable” but that just sounds like Chris Eubank describing the Titanic’

Today England face Israel at fortress Wembley, God help us. A draw against Brazil, defeat against Germany – it’s not exactly impenetrable. Steven Gerrard has his own romance v pragmatism choice to make – does he play with a fractured toe, knowing his significance and skill are vital to Blighty, or does he heed the advice of his club and convalesce?

It seems that Stevie will play, which worries me for a couple of reasons. I hope no one treads on his foot in the game of football he is playing against Israel’s national football team on a football pitch. Also it is difficult not to be concerned about the state of our squad when sickbeds have to be trundled to stadiums like wheelbarrows and tipped on to the field so we can scrabble together 11 men.

In addition to Steve McClaren’s grave-robbing selection policy – this week Emile Heskey, next week Dixie Dean – it leaves me thinking that not qualifying is a realistic possibility. Romantically, I think, ‘No, England shall qualify, ‘tis our destiny. None shall pass.’ But bloody hell it don’t look good. Rio Ferdinand said that not qualifying is ‘unthinkable’ but that just sounds like Chris Eubank describing the Titanic. It is thinkable, too bloody thinkable, I’m thinking about it right now in Yanksville, Americee, where in ’94 a World Cup took place in which there was nobody speaking proper English and Alexi Lalas was just a Hanna-Barbera flesh sketch, a living Shaggy, not yet the manager of another resurrected McLazarus selection.

It’s awful when England don’t qualify; I’d rather watch every woman I’ve ever loved drunkenly fellating handsome idiots at a bus depot than sit through another USA ’94. Actually the bus depot thing could be quite sexy, inducing a masturbatory experience that flits between jealousy and intense excitement, where one cries, despite oneself, during the act of onanism. I believe it’s popularly known as a ‘cr-ank’. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to crank my way through Euro 2008. I’m older now and more dignified.

How are we to avoid this phantom of a nation lost in sexual flagellation – which would be an awful, Catholic, Marvin Gaye anthem: ‘In this situation I need, sexual flagellation, get up, get up, get up, let’s cry-wank tonight’? It’ll never catch on, so how do we avoid it? Where do we look for salvation? Dear, hobbling Stevie Gerrard? Confidence junky Emile Heskey? Joe Cole? Possibly, but he’s not starting for Chelsea and I don’t think he’s ever recovered from Glenn Roeder’s barmy decision to make him put on two stone – why did he do it? He might as well’ve bulked up Darcy Bussell or Harry Potter.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch the qualifying matches as I’m all caught up making a documentary about Jack Kerouac and On the Road for the BBC and I’ve got more chance of discovering the essence of being that the Beats quested after than a telly showing soccer-ball – even in the Beckham era.

Good luck England. I reserve the right to flood these pages with hyperbole if we beat Israel and Russia, and begin a campaign for McClaren’s knighthood. Such is the nature of football. Now for a spot of breakfast at the Chelsea, which will most likely be a lampshade smeared in peanut butter, by me with a room key. No wonder Sid killed Nancy – he was probably hungry and had a delirious vision of her as a hamburger. Arthur Miller was probably bored into writing that play and I bet Leonard and Janis’s bed was unmade when they arrived.

6 Repent, for the kingdom of Steve is at hand (#ulink_4a450554-09d5-5f67-adda-16862904cfef)

The one thing that could perhaps redeem the column I wrote seven, vast days ago; immense days, days with the limitless, intimidating scale of the expansive Kansas plains that I’ve been crossing this past week is that, at its close, having spent 800 words fear-mongering, I did offer, with rare perspicacity, the sentence: ‘I reserve the right to flood these pages with hyperbole if England win both matches.’ Well England did win both matches but hyperbole is not what I’m going to offer, no, I think more appropriate would be contrition. I feel contrite at having referred to the team’s key player in those games, Emile Heskey, as a ‘confidence junky’. So what if strong, committed, unselfish, skilful Emile sometimes requires what Ron Atkinson (note: this stereotyping refers to pre-racist Ron, when he was just a bejewelled vending machine for clichés) would doubtless describe as ‘an arm round him’ once in a while.

I think that’s rather lovely. In this age where the modern footballer is regarded as a brash millionaire floozies-harvester, players like Emile, and indeed Shaun Wright-Phillips, occasionally suffer from self-doubt and need assurance from their manager if they are to perform to their potential. Unhelpful then to reduce Heskey to a man who uses esteem like a drug and sees his coach as the pusher, hence ‘confidence junky’. Sorry.

Also in my doom-laden scribbling I conjectured with grisly portent that Steven Gerrard would end up in a wheelchair as a result of fierce Mossad attacks or assaults from ex-KGB but, I now accept, he seems to be fine. Again, I’m sorry.

Then dear, triumphant, indefatigable Steve McClaren or ‘McLazarus’, as I dubbed him due to his tendency to resurrect dead or at least departed players, a tendency which I now realise marks him out as brave and willing to take risks rather than being a victim to the whims of an all-too-fickle press, of which I must now stand as the worst example. Also ‘McLazarus’ doesn’t quite work because the biblical character Lazarus, upon whom my cruel, cheap pun was based, was resurrected by Christ and did not resurrect anyone himself, so I’ve offended theologians as well as the great tactician McClaren.

I’ve had scores of complaints from theologians but I’m less concerned about insulting a group who have forgiveness as one of their core tenets than I am noble McClaren who is as wise and gracious as Christ. I’m so very sorry.

‘When I left, McClaren picked his teams like a drunk shuffling bags in a trolley. Now he is indispensable’

I did also say that Alexi Lalas looks like a live action version of the Scooby Doo character Shaggy. I stand by that. Thank God I didn’t have time to express my ill-informed views on Michael Owen who I would’ve probably dismissed as ‘finished’ or ‘a bastard’ but would now like to celebrate as a great servant of the game who will doubtless surpass Bobby Charlton’s 49 goals during the qualifying phase of this tournament, a tournament that last week I revealed grave doubts that we’d be attending beyond this formative stage but now firmly believe we’ll win.

Furthermore I cast aspersions on Owen’s assertion that Wembley would become a fortress, claiming it was as impenetrable as Nancy Spungen’s jugular. I was writing the piece in the Chelsea Hotel and it seemed a fitting simile as it was there that Sid Vicious for once lived up to his name and murdered her. The line was cut from the published article on grounds of taste – I only wish the censor’s pen had removed the relentless, pulsating pessimism which seeped through the column staining the page the way Nancy’s blood did the tarnished floorboards of my hotel room.

Tentatively, let me say this: West Ham were tumbling towards the Championship last season with such fervour and pace that one could be forgiven for thinking that the players were sexually aroused by the prospect of poor stadiums, then I went to Hawaii to work and they immediately became a squad of well-drilled, committed heroes winning eight of their last nine fixtures.

When I left the country 10 days ago England were playing like a bunch of berks and McClaren picked his sides like a homeless drunk shuffling bags in a trolley. He is now indispensable and Gareth Barry is the new Bryan Robson. I said if England won both games I’d campaign for the manager to be knighted; I now demand that Her Majesty kicks Phil right out of the royal sex-pit and instates Steve as her lover and the new King of England. I’d also like her to sit beside him on the bench and squeeze his thigh and coo when things go well.

Well done England and sorry for last week’s column. Prudently, I’ve read this week’s column back and I’ve written nothing that could offend anyone, what a relief. Finally, huge congratulations to our dear brothers north of the border. I should probably stay in America for football’s sake.

7 Chelsea too small for these two randy stags (#ulink_0e2adde3-fd34-5721-86a3-65f91aaedc33)

Jetlagged and delirious, I’m trying to make sense of the events that adorn the front and back pages of the English newspapers. José Mourinho and Chelsea have parted company ‘by mutual consent’ due to a ‘breakdown in their relationship’. This doesn’t seem to me to be the typical language of the boardroom but the brittle nomenclature of damaged emotions. When I recall the numerous occasions on which I’ve been, in my case deservedly, sacked, my incensed employers seldom said things like ‘It’s not you – it’s me’ or ‘I just feel we should spend some time apart.’ It was usually ‘Get out you thief’ or ‘You smell of gin.’

I’m not suggesting that Mourinho and Roman Abramovich were having a big, saucy, gay love affair that has ended in recrimination and unfulfilled potential but the fact that it would be impossible to allocate who would be passive and who the aggressor in such a tryst is perhaps central to this saga. Whilst I acknowledge that most homosexuals chuckle at the antiquated, heterosexual assumption that gay relationships have a ‘man’ and ‘wife’ dynamic, partnerships the world over are defined by status, and the inability of these powerful men to find professional harmony, to me, resembles two randy stags, nostrils flared, bristling, with angry erections, locking horns over which one is going to bite on a branch and be Bambi’s mummy.

‘Mourinho provoked a kind of neutered lust. I enjoyed his manipulative interviews and eccentric outbursts’

Ultimately Chelsea are Abramovich’s club and there could be only one winner but as a result we, the English nation, the Premier League and the media, have lost an intriguing and charismatic figure.

Like most people I became aware of Mourinho when he darted down the touchline arms aloft in that coat, at Old Trafford, having engineered Porto’s victory over United. ‘What a twit,’ I remember thinking. The fact that the coat became independently famous is a testimony to the unique place he attained in the firmament of top-flight bosses. What other garments have secured such cachet? Brian Clough’s green sweatshirt? Arsène Wenger’s specs? Fergie’s gum? Unless Roy Keane starts turning up to matches in cowboy boots it’ll be a while until personal style makes such an impression from the dugout.

His departure is significant enough to prompt comment from figures as diverse as Gordon Brown and my mum – ‘He made a huge impact in such a short time’ and ‘That dishy manager’ respectively. Neither of them cared when Alan Pardew left West Ham.

We can glean from this momentous event several things: Abramovich will be satisfied with nothing less than immediate success in Europe, he wants attractive football and he wants to stick his oar in whenever he fancies and put his mates in the team. One of the difficulties is that most of the great footballing dynasties have achieved success with practical, as opposed to flamboyant, football. Milan, Juventus and recent Real Madrid sides have prioritised winning over all else whereas teams like Barcelona or Arsenal always have moments of vulnerability and but two European Cup wins between them.

Personally, I’m sad about it. I’ve mentioned in this column before that Mourinho’s presence at Chelsea prevented me from harbouring the hatred expected of a West Ham fan for our rivals across the capital because he provoked in me a kind of neutered lust. I enjoyed his aloof, snooty, manipulative interviews and eccentric outbursts; calling dear Wenger a voyeur and Frank Rijkaard a pervert. What about when he fled from police with his unquarantined lapdog? That’s berserk, I can’t imagine any other manager embarking on such a mad quest.

Sam Allardyce would not try to sneak his cat into a disco, David Moyes would never ride a cow to work and Alex Ferguson wouldn’t squabble with cider tycoons over the ownership of a gee-gee. Actually he would because he too is a genius in the business of football management and in exchange for that bedazzling gift we’ll tolerate his refusal to speak to the BBC, his hurling of boots at national treasures and his insistence on absolute authority at his club. But Abramovich wouldn’t tolerate that, which is why when Chelsea visit Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United tomorrow it’ll be under the stewardship of Avram Grant of whom I know little but suspect if Abramovich demanded his yacht play in goal and his wife on the wing would offer little resistance.

Like many a spurned lover before him Mourinho said he was going to take time off to unwind and wait for the phone to ring. I don’t imagine he’ll have long to wait till he gets optimistic tinklings from north and possibly east London and whatever he chooses to do I don’t suppose it’ll be long before he’s back at the Bridge with a new paramour and then I suspect it’ll be Abramovich who ends up heartbroken.

8 His Grace Arsène, the shaman of our football (#ulink_ab984a4b-6d5f-55ad-b9c6-080379a2a78b)

‘I consider him a mystic, a shaman, an alchemist, speaking from somewhere far behind his inky eyes’

Six or seven games in we are able to ascertain the flavour of the season, we have savoured the first giddy sips and can now assess whether this shall be a vintage year. It’ll be some time till we rinse away the spectacular taste of that swoonsome, dark rascal José Mourinho, probably we’ll dispatch into the spittoon far sooner the bitter tang of Martin Jol, the poor sod, like a cuckolded father putting a brave face on for his bewildered kids, while Daniel Levy capers around Europe in a push-up bra with his knickers showing.

Fernando Torres is reckoned to be the new Ian Rush by Steven Gerrard and the arrival of the cartoonishly pretty Spaniard does seem significant. His input could ensure a realistic challenge from Merseyside for the first time in a decade-and-a-half and who but the blue faction of that city would begrudge them?

There is much to ponder in this richly evolving drama but my attention is drawn currently to Arsène Wenger, whose beautiful, more ‘royal’ than ever, Arsenal visit Upton Park tomorrow. Last season West Ham bested the Gunners twice, a feat that is unlikely to be repeated as Arsenal appear to have several teams playing with a grace, confidence and joy that is almost transcendental.

Given the concern that many expressed pre-season about post-Henry Arsenal this is a surprising and exciting development and one that can only really be attributed to Wenger, who to me seems to be vibrating above the frequency typically associated with our national game. I consider him a mystic, a shaman, an alchemist, speaking from somewhere far behind his inky eyes, issuing spiritual sermons on the game’s decline and our obligation to nurture English talent.

‘English football’s responsibility is to continue raising quality without losing its soul,’ he says, talking of foreign money and bare terraces as potential symbols of an atheistic erosion of our holy essence. Ten years ago Wenger came over here, taking our jobs, recruited a clutch of Gallics and Latinos and picked up the Double with the insouciance of a gent collecting a baguette and an espresso. The debate continues to this day as to whether the influx of foreign talent has harmed our national team; I feel that if the game is elevated and standards raised that will ultimately be positive across all strata and few would dispute the contribution made by ‘the professor’ unless they are actual racists or Spurs fans.

Now that Wenger has expressed concern about the development of young English players it does seem more serious. But aside from his new ecclesiastical role he has no duty to anyone other than the fans and board of Arsenal and that doesn’t run to positive discrimination in favour of Anglo-Saxons.

He spoke of fans as ‘the keepers of the game’ which is a further nod to the civic, if not sacred nature of the sport, which makes me query the new directive to referees to regard with renewed positivity ‘hard to call’ offside decisions, the reasoning being that ‘a dodgy goal is preferable to a dodgy offside’. Is that an edict with which most fans would concur? Obviously that would be contingent on whether it was scored or conceded.

For me the relative scarcity of goals, perhaps the factor that has prevented football enchanting America, enhances their sanctity. Gary Lineker and his sexy, brown legs would never put the ball in the net in a pre-match kick-about so as not to tarnish the magic of that rarely achieved objective and in midweek I saw, in a match against Real Zaragoza, that paragon of the footballer as divine, Thierry Henry, on sighting a raised flag, curtail his magisterial canter towards goal with the despondency of a man abruptly woken from a beautiful dream.