Clearly I’m not the only one for whom Russell Brand’s description of Steve McClaren as “blushing in his shorts like a suspect PE teacher dogged by vicious rumour” rings true. Sure he’s a crap manager but it’s not like he’s the first, and the level, ferocity and personalised nature of the abuse he gets from ‘fans’, compared to say Sven, suggests there’s something else going on. Now I’m not a violent man but even I find McClaren a bit … punchable. But why?

Anyway, fortunately Russell is back with more top-notch analysis this week:

Quentin Crisp said that charisma is the ability to influence without logic; I don’t think McClaren can influence with or without logic … “What matters is what’s on the inside.” I’m with him there - that is what matters. Life is transient and the material world is but an illusion, only love is real. But that’s when you take the infinite and the eternal as your sole and absolute context; those rules do not apply to football. In football it’s what’s on the pitch that matters and who’s in the team and what they write in the papers and what your nickname is. And none of those things look good. In cosmic terms Steve McClaren is a perfect child of God but in international football terms he needs to look inside himself and see if he has what matters.

In other Russell Brand news, I heard him recently describe Steven Seagal as “like a cupboard with a ponytail” and it made me laugh for about a week.

I just deleted a post about Thickipedia, which, as it turns out, does exist. So, to fill the gap here’s yet another odd encounter.

Upon arrival in Kuwait last week, I headed for the toilet in the arrivals lounge of the airport. There stood an attendant, a lonely looking Indian gent, young but haggard. I stood at the urinal, and while issuing forth, he addressed me:

“Where are you from?”

“What?”

“Where are you from, brother?”

“I’m not going to answer you while I’m urinating.”

He apologised, and gave me a peaceful moment to finish. While washing my hands, he asked again. I told him “Ireland” and he told me that I was his brother. I left the toilet saying, “Okay, well, enjoy.”

I’m not sure what I wanted him to enjoy. The toilets? The day? It was a half-hearted attempt at optimism, I suppose, just as much as it was a polite brush-off. I didn’t really feel like getting involved in someone else’s desperation for human contact, especially since I was hoping to ease gently back into my own.

This is fascinating:

In his recent book, The Italian Job, [Gianluca] Vialli touches on the issue of the contrasting conditions he encountered while playing in England and his native Italy, with intriguing results.

The prolific striker, who had spells with Cremonese, Sampdoria and Juventus in his homeland before finishing his career in the English Premier League with Chelsea, suggests wind actually affects everything in football.

He claims it has a huge impact on the standard of football, the way players develop and the way they train. And that, he claims, is the major reason why his countrymen in Italy are often seen as being more technically gifted than players in England.

“I commissioned a bit of research, and what I discovered may shatter a few myths,” Vialli explains.

“I looked at three English cities (London, Birmingham and Manchester) and three Italian cities (Milan, Turin and Rome) and evaluated data on average temperature, wind speed, rainfall and hours of sunshine per month.”

“The research showed clearly there was no substantial difference in temperature and that it rained more in Turin than in London.”

“So why did it feel colder in London? The answer came when I looked at wind speeds. The average monthly wind speed in the three English cities was 15.3 kilometres per hour, compared with 10.3kph in the Italian cities.”

“That meant that in England the wind blew some 50 per cent harder than in Italy - a substantial difference. And if we exclude the non-footballing summer months, the gap increases. The average in Manchester, Birmingham and London is 15.6kph while in Milan, Turin and Rome it is just 10.1kph.”

“I felt vindicated. It supported what I had suspected for a long time - that wind, more than any other climatic factor, influences the development of a footballer.”

“It seems basic and simplistic but it is an absolutely huge factor. And it is not just something that affects young players - it has an impact on how a team trains and therefore how it plays, even at professional level.”

The theory goes that a higher wind speed, which in turn makes the air feel colder, has a distinct impact, most notably on training methods.

In countries with a high wind speed, such as England, the need to keep players warm means there is little time for improving technique or stopping a training game to highlight a tactical issue.

Vialli also suggests the wind affects youngsters learning the game, with the need to keep moving in order to stay warm preventing them from stopping to perfect their volleying or shooting technique.

“The wind makes everything feel colder. You don’t want to do a shooting drill or individual ball work when players spend lots of time standing around. You want to keep them moving so their muscles stay loose,” he continues.

“I have clear memories of standing on a training pitch in Italy as the coaches explained what they wanted us to do tactically in excruciating detail. We would play for around 30 seconds, then everything would stop and they would explain it again if someone had made a mistake or didn’t make a crisp enough run.”

“All of this, of course, was in addition to the time we spent in front of the blackboard. This type of tactical work gave us a base in terms of movement and reading the game. In England the wind makes it impossible to replicate that kind of work.”

Vialli’s theory makes sense, and gets some support from the likes of Fabio Cappello. I wonder whether higher winds also affect style by making long balls more unpredictable and therefore dangerous for defences.

Anyway, you might think that less time spent working through tactics outdoors in the more windblown nations would mean more time spent doing so indoors. Apparently not: here’s a bit from Brian Kerr’s recent article in the Irish Times about his stint as Ireland manager (text from boards.ie):

Another concern for me with the new regime is the downgrading of video analysis. For all the best federations this is a critical element in match preparation. I was criticised for giving it emphasis but when I was coach the longest video session we ever had was 20 minutes.

Unfortunately, the players’ concentration time is quite limited and that was their limit. Whose fault that was I don’t know, but everything had to be fine-tuned to really tight versions of the trends in the game so they could stick it.

Twenty minutes, FFS. And I can’t imagine that’s got any higher under the insightful leadership of Stan Staunton.

Last point: if Vialli is right, then isn’t high average winds a natural handicap of the sort that should be compensated when handing out trophies and the like? Clearly, the answer must be a resounding ‘Yes’, and a quick perusal of the relevant data suggests that Ireland is especially hamstrung in this area, so much so that the superficially average nature of our general level of performance starts to look like a sustained record of sporting brilliance.

Watching the excellent Once Upon A Time In New York, about the almost simultaneous emergence in the 1970s of punk, hip-hop and disco in one city, I was struck by how many people brought up an old obsession of mine - cheap housing as the foundation for great artistic innovation. Large parts of NYC in the late 60s and early 70s were so terrible that the city literally gave away homes in run-down areas like the Lower East Side to people like John Cale who turned up to the housing office claiming to be artists, while low rents naturally attracted those whose particular skills were not greatly rewarded in the prevailing economic climate. For lack of anything else to do, many of these people set about creating. Much of what they created was complete rubbish, but there were enough sparks of genius flying around that eventually we got some great music out of it. And I seem to remember interviewees in that Bob Dylan documentary saying something similar about Greenwich Village in the early 60s - lots of young people came to the city to try new things, and cheap housing concentrated enough of them in close proximity for interesting things to happen.

Now it’s different, of course. One talking head (not a Talking Head, though they were interviewed too) in Once Upon a Time came straight out and said it - New York is screwed, because they’ve made it too expensive for young people to come here. Now, that’s not completely true - plenty of young ‘uns do come, but economic necessity means they tend to be the more conventionally talented, so there’s less chance of anything unexpected coming out of it.

I might be overstating the case here - maybe there was just something in the New York water in the 1970s. Maybe it was sheer pervasive boredom, borne out of the same recession, that was the key. But I think I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. In a brief trip to Berlin several years ago now I got the impression of a lot of fairly barmy but fun people who would simply not be able to do their barmy but fun stuff if they had to get proper jobs to get by. And I suspect it’s happening the other way here in London, where large-scale abandonment fed our own punk movement in the 1970s but the high cost of living today means hanging around until inspiration strikes isn’t really an option. But hey, at least we’ve got a Culture Strategy, which I can’t help but feel misses the point somewhat.

I’ve just watched Luis Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, and found it agreeably baffling. There’s a great review of it (and Bunuel’s career in general) by Roger Ebert here, which includes this lovely bit:

His firmest conviction was that most people were hypocrites–the sanctimonious and comfortable most of all. He also had a streak of nihilism; in one film, a Christ figure, saddened by the sight of a dog tied to a wagon spoke and too tired to keep up, buys the dog to free it. As he does, another dog tied to another wagon limps past unnoticed in the background.

(Speaking of which, what would be the long German word for Department Of Long German Words For Stuff?)

Was talking to Abbie last night about why the new Arcade Fire album isn’t quite as good, IMHO, as the first one. We decided that what made Funeral interesting was the mood of nostalgia, but ‘nostalgia for a bad time’. Seems to me that would sound much better in German - anyone want to volunteer a translation?

Jesus that was intense

Cecil Rhodes, Robert Mugabe - your boys took one hell of a draw-ing! Porterfield, Langford-Smith, Botha - these are names to live long in the annals of Irish sporting history alongside the likes of Cascarino and Charlton.

Shaun Hutson in an old interview with Jonathan Ross. Make sure you stick around for the clip from ‘Slugs’

Former US basketball coach Russ Bradburd moved to Kerry to learn the fiddle and coach the Tralee Tigers. He now has a book detailing his travails with the team. From this interview at Salon, I presume much of it is taken up with explaining sponsorship changes.

The Tigers, known as the Frosties Tigers after their sponsor, what Americans know as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, were hit by a wave of injuries and defections and finished last in the Irish Superleague

[…]Despite having married after that first year, he decided to return for a second, this time leading the team, now called the Horan’s Health Store Tigers because of a new sponsor, to the league title. At that, he took his leave, though he still signs e-mails with “Go Tralee Tigers!”

They’re the Abrakebabra Tigers now. “It’s a 24-hour kebab stand,” he says.

Best blog ever?. I especially love the Most Generic Country.

Language Log reports that chimps in West Africa have been observed making pencils and, possibly, communicating through writing.

Using their hands and teeth, female chimpanzees were seen repeatedly tearing the side branches off straight sticks, peeling back the bark, and sharpening one end. Then, grasping these pencils between their thrumbs and forefingers, they made apparent symbolic indentations on large, flat leaves that they held in their other hands.

In one case, after using the pencil to make repeated marks on a leaf, the female chimp handed the leaf to a nearby male, who looked at it briefly, then scurried off as though on an errand of some kind.

What did it say? WHAT DID IT SAY?

Linguists studying animal communication are anxious to get their hands on the leaves that contain the alleged writings but so far the Senegal research team has been unsuccessful in their efforts to retreive any.

In most cases, the female has eaten the leaf immediately after her mate rushed off into the savannah.

Deadly typo in John Water’s column today on Bertie’s crusade against “aggressive secularism”.*

“They argue that the State and public policy should become intolerant of religious belief and preference, and confine it, at best, to the purely private and personal, without rights or a role within the pubic domain.”

*Is Bertie cracking up just like Blair has?

Anne Coulter, who is what they call a “conservative pundit”, has raised the tone of the embryonic 2008 US presidential race. Here, she speaks (at the ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’) about John Edwards. You know, the ineffectual one…with the hair.

It’s always funny to see things descend to this level, but this is pretty fast. I think they should wait til each party has selected a candidate, then concentrate all their powers of cutting  satiro-lambastment at him or her.

I think it’s time to say hello to Mystery Science Theater 3000:

Loads more MST3K shorts here.