Bob's Indespensible Guide to Euro '96...

That's right, as well as being a red letter day in the domestic sport's calendar (the regional heats for 'I'm a Cerebrally Challenged Z-list Dwarf - GET ME OUT OF HERE!!" *and* 'Strictly Come Celebrity Ballroom Blitz Good Game Good Game, Nice to see you, to see you nice' both kick off today), on the continent it's that time again. The long wait for a high quality festival of silky flowing football is almost over - only another *two* years, and it'll be The World Cup again! But until then, you could do worse than watch a few Johnny Foreigner, Carlos Kickaballs falling over and writhing around in feigned agony in an outrageous attempt to cheat a penalty out of the dubious looking Polish referee, I suppose.

Sadly, the Home Nations all failed to qualitfy this time 'round - as did England, so we're in the unenviable position of having to cheer on those plucky part-timers from the Isle of Man. Do the minnows from the Irish Sea have a hope in hell of Euro glory? Hard to say, Brian - on the one hand, that extra leg may come in handy in the event of extra time, but at the end of the day Gary, it's more likely that it'll just give those cynical Italian defenders one more extremity to aim at when they hack you down on the edge of their box as part of their safety first cattenaccio gameplan.

But regardless of the lack of home interest, it promises to be a mouth-watering tournament awash with quality and filled with world class superstars from our domestic league. Brilliant players such as Ronaldo, Peter Cech, Fernando Torres and Michael Ballack *will* be there and any of them might be injured and forced out of the game to give some of the other teams a chance. So, you see, there's plenty of reason to get involved, even if David Beckham's latest hairstyle won't be playing.

A lot of people are surprised, given my appearance, that I take such a hearty interest in 'the beautiful' game, but I've been standing on the terraces since the early seventies. OK, so Skelmersdale aren't the footballing force they once were, but that's the nature of the game, Brian - once it gets it's claws into you're hooked. I may have traded my rattle and scarf and half time pie for an all in one catsuit in the club colours and a Marco Pierre White inspired-prawn cocktail, but underneath the spangly tops and high quality lingerie, I'm still the same wayward terrace tyke of yesteryear once the referee blows the whistle and the punch-ups start

I may be a purist, I suppose, but for me Gary, the game's lost a little of it's romance now that the corporate bigwigs have moved in and want to get the DAF Freightrovers Autowindshield semi-final playoffs moved to Beijing for the television revenues. It used to be an honour to wear those Three Lions on your blouse - now being in the England squad is just a cheap and easy way of getting your face onto one of those collectible silver coins they sell at garages in the unlikely event that England qualify for anything. Besides, long gone are the days when you could stand on a cold, damp piece of rotting concrete and chew on a mug of Bovril then become embroiled in a massive bundle with a gang of testosterone charged skinheads chasing you through the shopping precinct shouting "Ooh, 'ark at her" and "flamin' pooves, they want to chop it off , that'd slow you down you nonce-breathed prevert!" all the way home.

So, I'll be filing regular match reports on all the big matches over the next fourteen and a half weeks in my own inimitable style. "Come on you Manxmen! Let's be 'avin' yer!! Get in there my son, on me 'ead Brian!! Oooh - nice shorts!!

"GOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!"

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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A Shadow and a Ball...

Authors are bastards, aren't they? I could never be a novelist; killing people off every five minutes like that;making the healthy poorly and the wealthy poor. I've seen enough of death and illness already, thank you very much. In any case, it's always there, you never have to look too far to find it. Even here, in a book nominally about the beautiful game, the Reaper's not had to wait too long to get up off the bench and join the fray; Rhys Jones, Puerta, there'll probably be more. Like those black socks that Manchester United used to wear to to commemorate the Busby Babes they lost in the Munich air disaster, the game has a shadow as well as a ball at its feet. So you have to talk about it, sure you do; it's just that you have no need to make it up.

I meant this to be about the act of writing and remembering, not a grim treatise on the inevitability of death. But

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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"A Cheap Holiday in Other People's Misery"...

A lovely Sunday afternoon spent in the company of an old college pal. Courtesy of my local's somewhat dubious Al-Jazeera beam-back service, we watch Wigan keep themselves up at the expense of lovable Neil Warnock's Sheffield United whilst keeping an eye on Geoff's lot's (not to mention the Arse's titanic struggle with Tim's Scummers...) progress at the (self-styled) 'Theatre of Dreams' via teletext. A Tevez goal on 45 minutes is enough to keep the Hammers up, suggesting that perhaps one world class foreign individual is preferable to 11 homegrown triers, no matter how committed.

In between the clashing heads and fluctuations of fortune, we chat about globalisation before heading off for a curry. J. runs a print shop and was telling me how his firm had offered some Polish drivers a bit of work. These guys were on £3 an hour and had been offered double that by J.'s firm to do the same kind of work. They'd turned it down. Because even though the rate would be higher, they'd be tied to the European Work Directive and so would only be able to work for 40 hours a week. They could earn more working all the hours God sent at the lower rate - sleeping in their trucks (or, as apparently is the vogue, in those 20p entry station lavatories - well, you laugh....more comfortable than sharing a bed-sized room with three others...hot and cold running water...etc.), jetting back pound-laden to Warzawa via Easyjet every so often, whenever the batteries needed recharging...

As if propelled by an overly thematic narrative, we left the Arabic news service as its coverage of the US Jujitsu finals kicked off, heading off in J.'s new planet-friendly Japanese-made company car to our favourite Indian retaurant. J. flicked through the canon on the car's super-dooper multi-CD changer (it cost almost as much as the car!) - some Motown, The Queen is Dead, Sign o' the Times, Appetite for Destruction - before alighting on Never Mind the Bollocks..."A cheap *hol*-i-*day* in other people's *mis*-er**eeeeee*. You couldn't make it up...

We're unusually chatty, the meal going on for a lot longer than our usual post-footy scoff and bolts. J. tells me of a visit to his niece's school he made last year. Her mother's daughter, another J., was about to be expelled and refusing to go with her Mum (teenagers, eh?) J. attended in loco parentis. They'd arrived early and J. was struck by the bulletin boards for the huge variety of different after-school clubs and societies. Once in her office, the headmistress' outlined the list of complaints against J.'s niece and after this presumably lengthy pre-amble, asked my mate J. what he thought. "It's all very sad..." he began, before highlighting the story of his own Thailand-born wife. Orphaned at 13, A. had had been consigned to a sweatshop - a school with such facilities and opportunities as this one a distant, mirage-like dream....and so on until both headmistress and pupil had been reduced to tears...

We're both astonished at how prescient 'Holidays in the Sun' was, how fresh and relevant it still sounds 30 (*thirty*!!) years on. When Lydon was writing, modern-style package holidays were in their relative infancy. Now, the formerly exotic feels astonishingly accessible to most of us. Thanks to Gordon and our own "reasonable economy", "carbon-neutral taxes notwithsatnding, most of us can have our "cheap holiday in someone else's misery" provided we can resist the guilt-tripping of all those Tory industrialists turned rainbow-warriors, of course. Only now, you don't really have to go abroad for the other people's misery bit. They're right here, under your very nose - getting some shut-eye in the vans you pass on the way to work, or kipping in the cubicle next to yours as you have that last pre-Eurostar dump before taking your family on that Grauniad/Cameron-freindly non-flying city break. But as J. asked - can you really call it exploitation, when they apparently choose it this way?



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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