Pub-based punditry on the beautiful game.
The Football Pubcast is a podcast featuring four (or more) blokes, in a pub, talking football.
Shows are recorded every week from our local pub in Canary Wharf, London.
Remember Denilson? Perma-shit Arsenal midfielder? Well, somehow he’s still on their books but has spent the last two years on loan at Sao Paolo. And then…this…
Now if only he could do that on a wet Tuesday night in Stoke…
Last week I posted a video of a wonder volley from Swiss goalkeeper Dominic Niederhauser. Well, just when you thought it didn’t get any better…
We’ve all seen goalkeepers go up in search of a late equaliser, but Jakob Kohler of Danish Second Division East side Frem has put them all the shame with that stunner. He’s not the first Dane to attempt it, but unfortunately this beauty from Peter Schmeichel in the 1997 FA Cup was disallowed…
If you spot a goalkeeper scoring, whether its Premier League or Pub League, send me a link via Twitter to @michaelcoxon
We missed this on this week’s show but take a look at what can only be described as “a peach” by Dominique Niederhauser of Dardania Lausanne during their 6-1 away win at Genolier-Begnins
You cannot beat a goal scoring goalkeeper.
Those Germans aren’t particularly well known for their sense of humour, but they have given us this wonderful little video…
After unsuccessfully soliciting help from former Manchester United goalkeeper Ron-Robert Zieler when trying to open a “water pod”, referee Dr. Felix Brych ended up with a little metaphorical egg and a lot of water all over his face…
Das ist nicht gut!
As mentioned on last week’s show I’ve just had a rather pleasant two weeks in Thailand. Like most of South east Asia it has a huge football fanbase (the sport vies for most popular along with Muay Thai boxing, a martial art that would make Simon Head quiver behind his UFC bed spread) and as such the sport is pretty prevalent in the country in the form of TV coverage, replica shirts and merchandise. But the Thai people indulge their passion for the beautiful in different ways to your average bloke in Northwich, Medway or Lancing…
We’ll start with the sweets…those lovely sweets that I brought back with me only to have them shunned by the rest of the Pubcasters. There were the referee whistlepops, horribly sweet and making a very poor whistling noise, and there were the marshmallow Man Utd players…where to start on those? Apart from the fact that they tasted like a packet of Canderel crammed into a sponge and looked rather bizarre they were quite nice. Oh, and they were made in Sidcup, so quite why the people of Ko Tao (an island of around 1,000 people) had them shipped over I’m not sure.
When you’re out and about in Thailand you’ll probably see a plethora of replica (and not always authentic) shirts. The four biggest teams in terms of fanbase are seemingly Man Utd, Liverpool, Real Madrid and Barcelona, with Chelsea also growing in popularity, but they’re by no means the be all and end all. I saw a few Arsenal shirts, a couple of Everton shirts, Inter and AC Milan and even an Ivory Coast shirt. There were no signs of Man City shirts, possibly due to the uneasy relationship (to say the least) between the much loved Thai Royal Family and former Premier (and Man City owner) Thaksin Shinawatra but more likely due to City being a tiny, tiny club…
However the most bizarre shirt I saw in Thailand however was the first thing that greeted me at Bangkok Airport…The duty free shopping at Bangkok is run by a company called “King Power”…as in the “King Power Stadium”…as in the owners of Leicester City. As such, each terminal has a few sports shops (and you’d be surprised how many there are, the shops repeat themselves with the frequency of a background from an episode of “The Flintstones”) and each one of these have what I would describe as a “Leicester City” annex. You can buy home and away shirts, leisurewear, caps, footballs, DVDs (they were showing Leicester 1-1 Birmingham on loop…) and other collected tat and, bafflingly, it didn’t seem to be selling very well. Still, somewhere in Koh Phi Phi there’s probably a little kid who idolizes Neil Danns.
Beer is one of the best things about a short holiday in Thailand (apart from, y’know, the culture and natural beauty and that…) and inevitably its almost synonymous with football. There’s three (authentically Thai) beers on the market and one of them, Leo, doesn’t seem to be so popular (which is strange as its rather palatable). In the white and brown corner you have Singha…the official beer partner (in Thailand at least) of Manchester United and Chelsea.
At the moment Chelsea players are plastered all over their cans (it makes drinking beer difficult when you have to wrap your lips around John Terry’s face) while Man Utd seem to be all over the promotional hoardings outside bars (it makes drinking beer difficult when you have Wayne Rooney gurning down at you). There was also a lovely promotional video on my flight from Bangkok to Koh Samui with Edwin van der Sar, Gary Neville, Ji-Sung Park and Ryan Giggs extolling the virtues of Singha. Given that three of the four have now departed and Ryan Giggs didn’t play last night I guess we can’t blame that for the woeful performance.
In the green and gold corner you have Chang; 6.4%, can lead to hallucinations…lovely stuff. You probably know Chang as the sponsors of Everton, but surprisingly Phil Neville and Leon Osman are shunned when it comes to promotional material in favour of the Spanish heavyweights…Barcelona and Real Madrid. Funny that.
Leaving Thailand has left me torn on the globalization of football. On one hand I was delighted to be able to speak the universal language of “Manchester…Wayne Rooney!” and sample the delights of marshmallow footballers. On the other I struggled to imagine the people in this tropical paradise having any sort of connection with the people of Salford or Anfield or Fulham. Still…Leicester City, big in Thailand…maybe they’d stand a fair chance at success if they moved there.
And they did…for years Everton have been promising a pitch invasion should erstwhile right back and “extra-from-Trainspotting-lookalike” Tony Hibbert score. And so it came to his testimonial…
After 300+ baron games, Hibbert stepped up to take a free kick…and this happened
Legend.
Monday morning, 6am, 25th June 2012. As per usual my alarm goes off at an annoyingly early time (the perils of living in a small flat with your teacher girlfriend…) and as per usual it is tuned in to the heady sound of BBC Radio 5 Live.
Except, it isn’t really BBC Radio 5 Live. The build up to the news bulletin is not there, and in its place we get…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHOf3s70w-c
Of course…England are out of Euro 2012. And as has become the vogue in recent times we used pop music to highlight the fact. Tracks like “Dry Your Eyes” by The Streets, “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” by Oasis and “Walkaway” by Cast have become synonymous with England failure at major tournaments, no doubt to the great pleasure of Mike Skinner, Noel Gallagher and John Power (and their bank managers).
But football music isn’t all about sadness and misery, blokes blubbing into their Stella and effigies being hung from lamp posts. We also get the pre-tournament, joyous, blokes-holding-their-arms-aloft-and-spilling-their-Stella, effigies-of-the-rest-of-Europe’s-stars songs. The songs are rolled out every two years and played on pub jukeboxes up and down the country. Three Lions, World In Motion, Vindaloo and to a lesser extent On The Ball, Back Home and Diamond Lights (ok, maybe not the latter).
But while Ian Broudie, Barney Sumner, Keith Allen and the rest count their royalties pre-tournament (I can’t confirm whether Waddle and Hoddle actually wrote “Diamond Lights”, hence their exclusion), does anybody ever stop and think…are these songs ACTUALLY any good? Three Lions has a nice mix of chest thumping patriotism and realistic ambition (until they start saying “no more years of hurt”…), but Frank Skinner and David Baddiel aren’t the first people that spring to mind when you try to think of “good singers” (or “singers” for that matter). World In Motion was unquestionably cool…for a football song. If New Order had released it as an ordinary single, sans the John Barnes rap, would you rank it in their top five? Or even top ten? No.
But there are SOME good songs about football (or at least influenced by football) out there. Songs that you might not have heard, or might have chosen not to hear, but if you dig around then you might just be surprised.
Morrisey – Roy’s Keen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_3guDyMfEY
Morrisey has a peculiar relationship with football. In 2003 he claimed to have stopped following the game, claiming he’d still watch it only if they “used politicians instead of balls”. His Hollywood home famously had a picture of Bobby Moore hung in the front room (although this was apparently due to the row of terraced houses in the background) and throughout the 90s he had “Cantona 7″ emblazoned on his tambourine.
But Morrissey’s back catalogue is surprisingly sprinkled with songs about the “beautiful game”. His 2004 single “Irish Blood, English Heart” featured the b-side “Munich Air Disaster 1958″ but it is a 1997 single taken from his poorly-received album “Maladjusted” that stands out.
A song about a window-cleaner. Called Roy. Who’s apparently very “keen”. A very thinly veiled tribute to the then United captain, “Roy’s Keen” failed to crack the top 40 but was voted the best “lost” Top of the Pops performance by TOTP2 viewers.
The Fall – Theme from Sparta FC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ-lsCkvbOs
If you don’t include Garth Crooks then Mark E Smith is undoubtedly the strangest man to feature on BBC Final Score. Not only did he famously read the classified results in his thick Mancunian brogue but those very results are now introduced with a burst from his fantastic 2005 song “Theme From Sparta FC”.
The song revolves around a bunch of savages and warns “English Chelsea fans/this is your last game/we’re not Galatasaray/we are Sparta FC!”. It’s menacing, frenetic and absolutely brilliant.
Half Man Half Biscuit – All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na12OyJEgJ8
The go to band for football fans who find their songs funny because they mention “Bob Wilson” and “Borussia Moenchengladbach”. But HMHB are a fantastic band and one of their most incisive pop culture references happens to be a song about Subbuteo.
The song evokes memories of playing round at a friend’s house as a child, a friend with better toys who bends the rules to beat you and is the apple of his mother’s eye. Plus it had the fantastic phrase “your travelling army of synthetic supporters”, a phrase that sums up the fanbase of certain Premier League teams perfectly…
The Proclaimers – The Joyful Kilmarnock Blues
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMajPPh6D04
And I would walk 500 miles! And I would walk 500 more!
That’s what you think of when you think of The Proclaimers, isn’t it? It is, don’t lie. Surprisingly it wasn’t their biggest hit until the Comic Relief re-release a few years ago (Letter From America reached #3 in the charts) but apart from being Frankie Boyle doppelgängers and purveyors of Caledonian folk pop the Reid twins are also big Hibernian fans.
While there are numerous mentions of Hibs throughout their back catalogue the best comes in “The Joyful Kilmarnock Blues”, a song about hitchhiking to Ayrshire to see Hibernian play Kilmarnock and not really enjoying it enough to stay permanently (i.e. an ode to the magic of Edinburgh…I don’t get it either). A strange premise for a song but it makes for a nice wee toe tapper.
The Streets – Not Addicted
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD-y9RgWugI
Now this is the Mike Skinner song that people should think of when they think of football, not “Dry Your Eyes”.
A song full of dread and tension and based around a luckily aborted trip to the bookies to bet on the “blues to beat the reds” (always a mistake in my opinion). Skinner admits in the song that he doesn’t know the first thing about football, but judging by some of the dross that gets pumped into the charts at every major tournament I don’t think it really matters.
Mick Warren 3:58 pm on August 27, 2012 Permalink
cool blog mate.
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