Ethan Dean-Richards

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At last some self-awareness from within the rightly paranoid walls of blue Manchester. Joleon Lescott, an unlikely voice of reason, has gone and admitted under oath that a title victory for mega-bucks Manchester City would be “unreal”. It’s taken four years and the libellous misappropriation of a quote to do it, but it appears at last that some part of this City team knows that it’s probably nabbed the Premier League title by means that some people might consider artificial: £1 billion of someone else’s money might just make for an “unreal” title win. That is: an anti-real title…a fake title.

Unfortunately that wasn’t what Lescott, the £22 million bargain, meant to say; I’ve looked into it extensively and “unreal” is just accepted footballer-lingo for describing a big win—it means the win feels “surreal” rather than “fake” in the “oh, we’ve cheated” sense of the word. So, no deal, it was simply Lescott playing fast and loose with semantics. And that’s what makes this City win stick in the throat a little: not the semantic mishaps, and not exactly that the win was achieved with a more than healthy dose of financial doping either, but the bit that’s happening now: the bit where everyone who works in a shiny suite on television pretends that this win carries within it the same emotional journeys or delicate subplots as any other. Or at least don’t talk about the other side of it.
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What a couple of weeks for the disenfranchised manager! Okay, it’s a relatively small clique, but the point still stands, baby! Sacked as manager of Liverpool and singled out as a fraud a year ago, Roy Hodgson has just taken on the highest paid poison chalice in world football! (Manager of Team England, duh.) Roberto Di Matteo, sacked to make way for Hodgson at West Bromwich Albion, has reached the Champions League final with Chelsea and already captured an FA Cup winners’ medal! Football: Bloody hell!

It’s quite the turnaround (though I may still come to regret all those exclamation marks when I read this back.) Fifteen months ago, Hodgson was not only dismissed as Liverpool manager, he was dismissed as a manager who couldn’t do it in the big time. Di Matteo, likewise, was widely tagged a naive lightweight who couldn’t cope with the serious Premier League game. And yet here we are. And it’s no fluke either. Hodgson has been gifted the biggest chance of his career quite simply because his time in charge at West Brom made him the only sensible option for Team England. Similarly, Di Matteo’s time at Chelsea has exemplified the pragmatism some reckoned he lacked, dealing brilliantly with the treacherous Neanderthals in his dressing room despite witnessing their various betrayals. Both have twisted their career narratives well beyond what you’d have put any money on a few months before it actually went and happened.
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The study room at La Masia

At last it’s happened: Pep Guardiola has ended the Barcelona experiment – he’s gone and quit Camp Nou!

Obviously anyone who knows anything knows that this has been coming for a while, so the debate instead lies with the nature of the final straw. Was it the pressure, was it falling out of love with football or just the need for a break that did for Pep? Huh? Huh? Huh?

Nah, it was none of those. A coincidence it is not that this was the week in which old Jose was finally, conclusively proven right about football: it really, really is not to be taken seriously; to be legitimated as an area of study by fanciful analysis and pseudo-terminology about the different kinds of ‘pressing’ which might be employed.

This was the week that Chelsea and Bayern Munich beat Barcelona and Real Madrid in spite of the rather significant disadvantage – or so many would have you believe – of being worse at football than the two Spanish skill-jockeys. Even if no-one quite understands what the phrase ‘skill-jockeys’ means, because I just made it up, the conclusion’s the same: passion can beat skill(z), and, evidently, that isn’t a footballing world that Doctor Pep wants to live in. Some people will look to point out that Guardiola wasn’t actually much of a man for stats – not in his press conferences at least – but these are the people who get to me: the people not prepared to embrace lazy stereotypes in the name of making easy assumptions. Guys, facts aren’t where it’s at: idle pigeonholing is. So onwards we go.
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Not only was Carlos Tevez given the biggest cheer as he drifted off the Manchester City team bus to face Chelsea a few weeks ago, his manager also polished off a great evening’s hypocrisy by branding the player’s performance “incredible” after he set up Samir Nasri’s tasty winning goal. It was, sadly, pretty much all in a Premier League day’s work that Charlie Tee should return to the high life just months after hearing that his time at City would be “finished” if it was up to Roberto Mancini, having famously refused to come off the bench against Bayern Munich last October.

And the post-match roundups were a continuation on a celebratory theme. Tevez “turned things around” for City. His manager showed “great pragmatism” and “strong management” to look past his feud with the player and was rewarded for it with an important win in the battle for the Premier League title, supposedly. If the leading lights in football punditry, rifling through the filth served up on the evening, were good to hold back their favourite line: “he’s proven his critics wrong”, they were at least getting close to it – bottom-lips were trembling, fingers were lingering over buttons; just waiting for the first person to go for it so that everyone could.

Now that he’s scored a hatrick against Norwich and done a joke celebration, he might even have arrived back in time to win City a title. He’s going to be let off completely, isn’t he?
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A small query (it’s pure theatrics, I already have an answer in mind): what does proving your critics wrong mean? I only ask because it seems to have been mistranslated of late to include Chelsea and Arsenal who, after months of being rubbish or being egomaniacs who didn’t play for their manager, then did the opposite. I’d hate to get technical about it, but that isn’t proving analysis of what went before incorrect, it’s doing something different from what went before, which—not to rock the boat or anything—does kind of recognise that the criticism was a bit right.

It’s not that I want Jonathan Terrance and Frank Lamp to be unhappy, though I obviously do and I often think of ways I can help that happen; it’s that I want the process of proving the critic wrong to remain important. One of the best feelings going in sport is seeing a lot of people say something can’t be done only for one person to prove that it can; we need to make inroads into preserving it, and happily that involves explaining that Chelsea and Arsenal haven’t really struck against a catalogue of people writing them off recently.

The main thing is that nobody ever said those two teams couldn’t ever win again in the future at the time when they were criticising them. It would have been slightly odd for anyone to have written “Chelsea will never in a million years beat Napoli in the second leg” after they’d lost the first leg of their tie 3-1, because, amongst other things, you’d have been silly to think like that with the tie still reasonably close—hence no one did.
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Make yourself irreplaceable and you probably won’t be replaced. Ask Ashley Cole, who played pistols at dawn with an intern without telling him, but wasn’t sacked. Ask Carlos Tevez, who refused to play for Manchester City once, but had his second (or is it third?) chance against Chelsea. Don’t ask Jacob Mellis, the Chelsea reserve who thought that smoke bombs were funny and found out yesterday that his club (at least in public) didn’t, when they sacked him for using one.

The factomundo is: Premier League morality is utility: if they want you, you make your own rules. Mellis was sackable because he wasn’t a first team player like Cole; Tevez returns to City because they’ve stopped scoring goals and he tends to do that when he’s not away in Argentina playing golf. It’s old news. Footballers are indulged because of their talent. At what point the indulgence stretches too far, though, it might be best to mark out in advance. (In case that wasn’t a clear enough pointer: I’m about to do the marking out.)

We can start by re-establishing the boundaries which are already clear. Rule number one: reserves can’t use smoke grenades at training. What more does this precedent establish? Well, presumably it rules out other kinds of grenades and/or grenade-launching devices, but it also starts to sure up exactly what utility means to the Premier League: it’s not just being good at football; it’s being one of the best twenty-two at football at a club. I don’t like to venture into speculation when I’m law-establishing, but with Cole getting away with a shooting—generally considered worse than smoke-grenading—grenades and such may well be okay once you’ve made the Premier League squad list. Another incentive to give 110% in training I suppose.
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One of a few semi-disappointments to come from Andre Villas-Boas’ sacking is the lack of time in which the casual, benevolent fan was afforded to grow attached to him. Less than a season of AVB means that he leaves only a smudged, slightly bizarre impression of what he’s about: a collection of mannerisms, not a personality; a set of affectations, not a person; a well-groomed beard, but no face.

If he’s missed, then, it’s not out of sympathy – not even that half-arsed, 2D public sympathy which is so fashionable; it’s filthy curiosity. Now that AVB isn’t Project Manager at Chelsea any more, no-one gets to know how The Project might have worked out had he been given more time or more of a chance to operate his way. The public’s been cheated out of a full story.

Maybe he’d have spent the summer transfer window buying up players from his old FC Porto side – like Hulk and Alvaro Pereira, who are top, top, top, top, top footballers and who radiate the kind of youthful energy which Frank Lampard must imagine he does too, but definitely doesn’t. Or maybe AVB would have just done what the whole world thought he should do all along and offer Chelsea the signing that they really deserve to replace Fernando Torres and Didier Drogba: welcome to Stamford Bridge, Michael Owen! He’s fit again, you know.
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