Articles of Faith

It was as if, in that moment, meaning itself had been suspended, the ball with trickling inertia departed from its master, who himself was left to wonder, when would come his first goal in La Liga. Amidst the swirl of the scandals, the rumours, the ignoble chatter and limitless tainted money something chaste and sacred remains and it belongs to us, the fans and cannot be bought, sold or branded. Wenger is aware of this, which is why one can overlook the paucity of Englishmen in his side; he could field a team of ravens and be closer to the game’s essence than most, and I hope, for West Ham’s sake, that tomorrow he does.

9 Whatever next? Joe Cole on stilts? (#ulink_5c6dbbc9-3e56-5e0d-bd11-f8cb47b06844)

I’m in Tuscany. I’ve been sent here by my publishers to finish my autobiography. Usually, this column is the only writing obligation I have to fulfil and is rattishly indulged, today it must vie with literary siblings and is being produced during a hiatus of the solipsistic, caffeinated torrent that has consumed my every waking hour. Goethe wrote here, I am informed, and Auden too, so expectations are justifiably high and this voluptuous, rolling land ought to be sufficient muse for any man.

‘Mourinho has the appearance of a gigolo assassin, Grant looks like Herman Munster’s butler’

I went into town on Wednesday night to watch Chelsea vs Valencia, initially to gloat but as usual when abroad, was seduced by patriotism. My hopes that post-Mourinho Chelsea would fall apart looked likely to be fulfilled before a ball had been kicked, with John Terry in his see-through mask (there’s a baffling concept, see-through masks. What’s next? Cuddly daggers?) and Petr Cech in his stupid bonnet, they look like they’re disintegrating as individuals let alone as a team. For future matches I want Joe Cole to be on stilts and Didier Drogba to wear fake boobies. Let Chelsea field a team of prosthetically enhanced oddities, it’ll be good for morale.

After David Villa’s opener I felt the first nationalistic twinge, the Italians that were watching were hardly vociferous, they indifferently sipped beer, but I took their silent boozing to be a slur upon Her Majesty and all her fleets and became enraged. ‘How dare you!’ I thought, after everything we’ve done for you. I began to crave a Chelsea revival, not in a profound way, just in a ‘I drew them in a sweepstake at work’ way. Then thanks to the skill and persistence of Drogba and Joe Cole, or Johkohl as he’s known on Italian telly, Britannia triumphed.

Were Chelsea more flamboyant under Avram Grant? It seems ridiculous that they could be, using the judge-a-book-by-its-cover method, Mourinho has the appearance of a Latino, gigolo assassin, Grant looks like Herman Munster’s butler. There’s a word that oughtn’t to be bandied about so profligately, butler. Butler means a devoted, Woodhousian gentleman’s gentleman. The lunatic who bears that title and has come as part of the package with this Tuscan villa would have seen Bertie Wooster starved and raped within an hour of his employment. I know that complaining about the quality of your butler is a lament unlikely to elicit much sympathy outside of Kensington but this fella, Sam, could no more butter me the perfect crumpet than take flight over the olive groves that surround me.

It was Sam who took us to the bar where we, me and my mate Nik (who’s also my agent here to force me to write the booky wook), watched Wednesday’s match and let me complain about the coffee and the light reflecting off the TV screen before telling me on the way home that the premises were run by the Mafia. I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t wait till my funeral before mentioning it to my weeping mother.

Had I been aware that I was drinking in the Café Cosa Nostra I might not have been so cheeky with the waitresses, nor would I have sung the national anthem at the final whistle. The problem may be due to linguistic difficulties rather than incompetence – he did yesterday speak the sentence ‘Marijuana Michelangelo my brother Italy.’ I’ve been thinking about it ever since and am no closer to unravelling its mysteries.

What could it mean? It’s almost entirely made of nouns, there’s not a verb to be had. Could it mean that marijuana influenced the sculpture of Michelangelo and in turn inspired Sam and his brother to come to Italy? Whatever he said, it’s better than my Italian, all I can say is ‘grazi’, I say it in different accents to deal with every situation. I just hope that I can intone ‘grazi’ in such a charming fashion that I can avoid being murdered in the plaza by a disgruntled Godfather.

Interview between Russell Brand and David Baddiel (#ulink_859f9431-0f61-5b73-94bf-081658641d4a)

DB: Y’know, I did have this complicated thing that I was going to talk to you about, but we’re just going to talk about football, right?

RB: We can talk about the complicated thing as well as football if you want.

DB: Well, yeah, can you include in that complicated thing the creation of comedy as rock and roll in Britain, that has led directly to your career?

RB: I will – you may have noticed there is a rock and roll element in my persona. That is in no small part owing to David Baddiel, very much the John the Baptist to my Christ. Not only did you plant the seed for this comedy as the new rock and roll revolution, but this is a very specific favour you’re doing me now, as it was you who suggested that we talk about the time we went to the England Croatia game where England famously lost and they didn’t qualify for the European Championship.

DB: Yeah, we have to talk about that although obviously my abiding memory is depression exacerbated by the amount of very attractive women in the area that we were in who came up and offered you their phone numbers at a time when you were supposed to be celibate as well, you’d made a public statement about your celibacy and yet in the…what’s it called…the corporate section of Wembley, not really a hotbed of sexual activity, still I would say about eight women came up, all of them very attractive, and offered you their phone numbers, some of whom you may or may not have slept with, we probably can’t go into that.

RB: It was the only way I could heal the scars of that horrific defeat.

DB: I probably wouldn’t have minded on some level because obviously I was aware that going out into the open air with you that might happen but it was a particularly bad time for it to happen because I get genuinely depressed when England don’t qualify or go out of major tournaments. So I feel I was particularly more indignant towards it than I might have been.

RB: And to heighten this sense of defeat and failure, here’s a man enjoying the spoils of an idea of comedy that you’ve set up, right in front of your defeated face.

DB: I tell you though, because when England, I’m trying to keep it to football…when England went out of Euro 96, when I was at perhaps the very height of my fame in England because everyone was singing my football song, one of the things I particularly remember, being with my then girlfriend and Frank Skinner being there with his then girlfriend, who was half German, and Frank Skinner basically in his relationship with her never really recovered from Germany defeating England on that day. So I suppose a small part of me might have been thinking, how can he be thinking about sex at a time like this when he should be full of rage, that you can’t possibly be doing that. But you were doing that. I mean it’s all rubbish because I would’ve been thinking about sex had the women been coming up to me but…

RB: Yeah.

DB: I’m just following the line of thought really.

RB:(Laughter) I was particularly proud to be at that England Croatia match with you and the defeat for me was all the more bitter on account of it meaning there wouldn’t be a chorus of Football’s Coming Home. Oh, that would be amazing if that happened, oh they’ll see David and it will be really really exciting.

DB: Yeah, there was actually a small chance of that I think because it was a very important game, the England fans don’t really sing it anymore. I’m not entirely sure why. Well one reason is because England never play well enough. It’s a strange football song in that respect in that it is only sung when England do well because Football’s Coming Home implies that we are doing well, that the trophy is coming literally to our house, and if England aren’t doing well it can’t really be sung. And England haven’t done well really for a long time and the only time I have heard it sung recently was when Germany played us and the German fans were singing it. Someone was with me and they said, ‘Oh, they’re singing your song,’ and I feel hollow inside because I didn’t actually put him right, I knew it was a German fan because Germany were doing well, and they said to me they’re singing it, but I just left it because I wanted him to think that people still sung our song all the time.

RB: That’s heartbreaking. I’ve always thought that that song has a flaw in that it’s too triumphant thus restricting it to occasions of triumph, perhaps it could have done with a little more nuance…

DB: That’s right, one of the strange things about the song is the reason it became a very big hit is that it was written in the spirit of melancholy because most other songs, England songs up to that point were, ‘We’re going to win it, we’re coming home, we’re off there to win it.’

RB: Yeah.

DB: When me and Frank talked about it we said, ‘Let’s write a song about what it’s really like being an England fan which is, oh we’re probably not going to win it but we sort of hope we are anyway.’

RB: That is four more years of hurt.

DB: Yeah, exactly, and it begins with you know ‘everyone seems to know the score, we’ve heard it all before, England’s going to throw it away, going to blow it away’, all that stuff is about, oh well, no one thinks we’re going to win but maybe we will anyway. But unfortunately the lines of triumph over adversity, ‘football’s coming home’, which is the epiphany following that thought, they can only be sung when England are doing well.

RB: In a way David, yeah people wilfully took those lines out of context out of clear cockeyed optimism.

DB: I should’ve stood up at Wembley every time they sung it and said, ‘No, you don’t understand, it’s a sweet, melancholy ballad about loss.’

RB:(Laughter)

DB: You’ve made it into a strident national anthem.

RB: It was a Jeff Buckley-style lament on the futility of football.

DB: Yeah. But anyway, what else do you want to know about football?

RB: Wait a sec…well, I’ve got a very lovely linking device because West Ham’s song Bubbles is perhaps the only other song that captures the sort of sentimentality and pathos of being a football fan, as most songs do tend to be triumphant, and perhaps the team you follow, Chelsea, are a fine example of the kind of stripped-down refined success, lacking in magic but you know, under recent ownership, how do you define the romance of being a Chelsea fan for you at this time?

DB: Well…to start…the song I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, is that a West Ham song, or is it just an old song that West Ham sing?

RB: I think it was, yeah I think it was co-opted.

DB: So what is it about when it’s not about West Ham? I never know quite what it is…is it about someone who is blowing bubbles?

RB:(Laughter) It is quite difficult to find a literal connection, other than fortunes always hiding.

DB: Yeah, it is. But we sing it. We sing it as an anti-West Ham anthem which is about beating up, I believe, West Ham fans. How does it go? ‘Tottenham always running, Arsenal running too’, yeah, that’s essentially the hooligan’s anthem of course, so we’ve absorbed your song.

RB: I’ve heard the hooligan version David, and I’ll go for a similar emotion that you’ve experienced when Germans sing Football’s Coming Home. I think this is abuse of the lyrics from the intentions of the song.

DB: Yeah, I think it’s a beautiful anthem, but to answer your question, I don’t completely agree obviously with the Chelsea thing because having been a Chelsea fan since 1970, the only thing about being a Chelsea fan if you were a Chelsea fan then is that you were actually reared on a very stylish but rather pale form of play, so something very romantic which was Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson and Charlie Cooke, and all those kind of players being brilliant and stylish and clever but not actually winning very much, they won the FA Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup but that was it. And then I went to Chelsea, I wasn’t old enough to go when I started supporting them, when I was eleven and they were shit. They had Micky Droy in their team and they were utter shit and I went for twenty years watching them be complete shit and thus I actually get quite annoyed, not as enraged as you do about your mum, and questions over her sexual endeavours but…

RB: Even you mentioning it now is making me a bit cross.

DB: Also I’m worried that the initial conversation won’t be in the book and so people will think well why on earth has he said that, that’s awful.

RB: No, we’ll pick that out…

DB: But what I get annoyed about is the suggestion that this sort of wealth has somehow just landed on Chelsea fans unfairly whereas in fact when it first happened, I thought well this is actually Chelsea going back to its roots, because I think Abramovich, in his heart he wants Chelsea to be a bit like the Harlem Globetrotters, he wants them to be an incredibly skilful, exciting, flair-based club which he hasn’t really chosen the managers to do.

RB: No.

DB: He’s got that slightly wrong, but I think that’s what he wants. And for Chelsea fans of my age there is a sense that we should be that club, you know, we should be this very flair, colourful club with lots of fancy dans like Peter Osgood playing for us, so I’m all for it. And I’m slightly fucked off that now that there are Arabs at Manchester City who’ve got much more money than us.