All things must pass

Though I have no obvious connection to the football club Hinckley United, the acceptance for its petition for insolvency I find sad.  £200,000 worth of debt is less than a week’s wage for Wayne Rooney but gargantuan for anyone of more modest means.  My paternal grandfather in his tenth decade lives, still in his own home, in Hinckley and whatever FA Cup triumphs the local team had, I derived pleasure. 

I wonder what happens to the fans?  Where does one redirect one’s passion?  Is it diminished and they drift away from the game?  Do they hold the faith, pining for a phoenix rebirth?  The tenuous existence of the country’s non-league clubs must lead to a pragmatism among those who follow the exploits of their precarious passion, like Victorians who lost children to disease and death, never without sorrow (expressed or otherwise) but with a weary understanding.

One of my closest friends is generally a Tottenham follower but first and foremost a Rushden fan.  When Rushden and Diamonds (so called, apocryphally, becase when they were formed Moscow Dynamo were touring England in the aftermath of World War Two and it was simple case of a misheard statement becoming fact and the Diamonds was appended to the name) went out of business two seasons ago, despite rising as high as the third tier of the football league at one point and holding a then-mighty Leeds United to a draw in the FA Cup, there was no question of lying down and taking it.  A reformed Rushden AFC (sadly lacking their Diamonds signature) was in business in time for the start of a new season, at the very bottom of the pyramid, winning their division.  The crowds were smaller but all the more fierce for that and far in excess of those supporting their opponents at this more humble station.  Upwardly mobile at the moment, they aspire to Wimbledon AFC who made the successful transition from the bottom back to the football league after MK Dons ‘stole’ their league position.  Meanwhile, Kettering, bitter local rivals took over Rushden’s old ground.  Kettering themselves are now liquidated.  It can be a transient existence.

At a higher level, people feel more comfortable to play games that are only tangentially related to 22 men kicking a ball around.  Alan Pardew confirms he met Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley and director of football ‘Joke’ Kinnear after the 3-2 defeat to Everton and insists it was to establish the way the club was going.  I rather think they were going to sack him after the Magpies slumped to 3-0 at half-time in an abysmal performance and held their fire by the Toon’s second-half fightback.  Though Pardew’s side got a fine away victory at Cardiff (their first ever in the top flight against the home of the ‘Blue’birds, rubbing it in that the Magpies wore their away strip of blue), briefly hoisting the team to 10^th in the table, the manager remains one heavy drubbing away from receiving his P45.

David Moyes is another manager under pressure.  He has already written off the UEFA Champion League, saying he is four or five top-drawer players short of realistically competing for it.  This is clever wordplay as it implicitly lowers expectations for a successful retention of the Premier League.  Moyes knows the players he will buy in January will be cup-tied in Europe, hence his dismissal of winning a European trophy but Man Utd might still remain champions come May.  As it stands though currently Moyes thinks they won’t be, but can’t possibly say that just seven games in to the season.

Greg Dyke, the new big bod at the FA said that England would win the World Cup in 2022.  This is not pie-in-the-sky as it might be usually as it is predicated on the Qatar World Cup being held in winter, when English players will be at their prime, plus will have fewer injuries than they do in april/May and other leagues won’t get their customary benefit from the winter break.  Michel Platini said that English players were like lions in autumn and lambs in spring.  Dyke’s clever posturing seems to back wholeheartedly a winter World Cup.