Boy Band versus Old School

I recently wrote of Wycombe’s historical rivalries (read it at the Two Unfortunates’ blog!); as well as our regular grubby spats with Essex weasels Colchester United, we do have proper local adversaries this season in MK Dons. Having lorded it over the rest of our county for 117 years, Wycombe fans are right royally riled that we are not undisputed Kings of Buckinghamshire any longer. Harrumph! MK Dons, a new team from the Ballardian horror-show that is its specially-built 1960s town, are the unconvincing, manufactured boy band of League football – let’s call them Another Level. This leaves Wycombe, in comparison, (especially with our grizzled rockster Gareth Ainsworth at the helm), the journeying heavy rock band, forever on tour of small town pubs, reeking of sweat and debating our favourite Saxon album. I went along to see how the foes matched up.

It promised to be a lipsmacking match: Wycombe’s bipolar nature – making us a yo-yo team within our division/season as well as potentially between Leagues – has settled down of late and we’re riding on the back of some goaltastic wins which have lifted us out of the relegation zone. MK Dons, wearing very on-trend kits that were a bit Stella McCartney/Olympicswear with their ‘deconstructed-England-flag-sports-luxe’ look, were looking to dig their heels into the play-off position.

The first half was solid, if not scintillating, Wycombe doggedly working away under the gaze of Adams Park’s resident three red kites, wheeling serenely overhead like benevolent gods. I speculated that we should adopt them as either mascot or new nickname. There was an early penalty to the Dons; Nikki Bull distracted their striker by looking – especially in the glorious sunshine – like his tanned blonde form should be on Bondi Beach catching a few gnarly waves rather than in front of the terrace end down the back of an industrial estate in the Home Counties, and saved it brilliantly. Now that Gaz Ainsworth is eyeing up pipe-and-slippers territory, Captain Nikki is definitely the most characterful and heroic figure on the team.

The second half (following a wedding proposal by one fan to another at half time: congrats, Keith and Wendy!) began with an MK Dons goal that utterly took the wind out of WWFC’s sails, and clearly the fans’ too. I swear you could hear the air sag out of us slowly over the half like a retired set of bagpipes. Moaniness (and slight boredom on my part) kicked in and I began to see why we are still nicknamed the Chairboys and not the Kites: Wycombe looked less like graceful, keen-eyed raptors and rather more like zombiefied armchair botherers, stupefied on X-Boxification. Amazingly, a supporter in the family stand (the supremely quiet end) got up out of his seat and walked half the length of the pitch to berate the terrace end for being muted. Very odd!

Miraculously, from out of the desperate torpor of the closing stages, we had a few set-plays, and one final corner saw Nikki Bull barrelling up and attempting a header, and Stuart Beavon taking advantage of the general mêlée. Cue Bull storming round to the fans at the front to do a wall of high-fives. We left feeling like we’d won, and there was many a salutary hashtag of #BeavonforEuro2012 (people are wearing ‘I’ve got Beaver Fever!’ t-shirts, for god’s sake!), and tweets about us being the only proper team in Bucks, ya boo sucks, etc.

So, old school rock or boy bands? I'm not saying. I'm just off to listen to some Judas Priest...

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Tonight's MOTD2 embarrassment: Lee Dixon and Alan Shearer looking all uncomfortable and joshing as Shay Given unabashedly extolls the virtues of yoga to help him keep trim and youthful; as if doing yoga is the equivalent of popping into a nail bar on the way to a burlesque class, finishing up with a night at Tiger Tiger getting lashed on Archer's and lemonades and dancing on a podium to old Whitney belters. For shame, chaps! Get your metrosexuality on, for the love of God*!

*

Unexpected Rivalries: Two Unfortunates Blog and Gareth's musical news

A heads-up on my latest article for wondrous Football League bloggers, Two Unfortunates, on Wycombe's rivalries with Slough Town and Colchester United. Check it out here!

In other news: Slash 'is a Wycombe Wanderers fan' says BBC 5Live! I don't quite believe it, but by God, it makes for a far better claim than BBC Breakfast's Bill Turnbull. And it means our celebrity fan beats the hell out of Colchester's (read my article!!). Listen to an awestruck WWFC captain Gareth Ainsworth (whose musical escapades I REALLY must write about one of these days) interviewing his axe-wielding hero in a surreal meeting of minds here!

Four-Year Plan: Get Goals, Win League, Buy A New Helicopter

I watched the quite astonishing documentary, QPR: The Four-Year Plan, last night, which is surely a football doc for our modern times. It followed the club 2007-11, following their buyout by a conglomerate of largely rich, spoilt popinjays; whilst the title suggests that over four years, QPR worked their way patiently and measuredly to the top, really the title should have been 'QPR: The Three Year Plan Of Trying Out Every Manager Until You Find One You Don't Feel The Need To Insult, Followed By A Successful Year And Promotion, Almost Scuppered By Dodgy Dealings By One Of Our Crazies'. For three years, the power-hungry team, led by Flavio Briatore, lorded over the club, sifting through managers like cards in a pack, elbowing their way into the dressing room to try and make changes, and seeming to have no idea how a club should work. They wanted to play at this football lark, like a real-life version of Championship Manager mixed with Monopoly, and were just gallingly rude and obstreperous. Poor Gareth Ainsworth, now Wycombe's very own legend but previously a QPR mainstay, hovered quietly around in the background for a bit, occasionally having to do another stint as caretaker manager, before being rescued by us, knights in shining blue quarters.

The documentary laid bare the three-tier system: egocentric yacht-owners at the top, the players and manager (well-paid but exuding the air of good honest journeymen, one and all) in the middle, and right at the bottom, the fans, struggling to pay the most expensive seats in the Football League and surely following the managerial meddling (5 in one year!!!) with furious bafflement. My favourite moments were the threats of peasants' uprising: lunkheads singing derisory songs at Gianna Paladini as he smiled uneasily, surrounded by minders; and lustily singing 'fuck off, Flavio', to which the outrageously arrogant one simply said to fans 'find me the names of those who sang that. I want their names or I sell the club'. He needs taking down a peg or two (or at least the keys to his helicopter taking away).

Chelsea operates like this on a grander scale, with poor, adorably delicious Andreas Villas-Boas unsurprisingly now out on his ear. Andreas was a silly appointment I'm sure, a bit too young for such a mega-club, but once he was there, you'd think they might give him a BIT of a chance. In our instantaneous culture of everything-on-demand, chairmans and owners (and I'm sure, fans too), expect immediate, mostly utterly unrealistic results. No one has the werewithal, or the stomach, for the long game.

I'm not sure what Wycombe's Four Year Plan is. At the moment, our quite baffling short-term plan is to lose most of our games, some in extremis (Huddersfield walloped us 6-0, Scunthorpe 4-1 yesterday), with less occasional stonking wins (3-0 and 5-0 against Rochdale and Hartlepool respectively). Yet through a wetly crap season, our very own moneyed overlord, Steve Hayes, hasn't sacked Gary Waddock, and I respect him for that. Now, where's the door to my helipad...

Modern Classical Music/Silent Football Experiment No. 2

Ill on the sofa under the duvet for a red-hot FA Cup clash, so it's time for another music-football collision. I watched most of the Manchester United vs Liverpool FA Cup 4th with its usual 'naked' sound (ie ITV's slightly humdrum commentary) before trying a little bit of Debussy's Arabesque I, which worked momentarily, in the vein of classic silent film with ole' joanna accompaniment, but it was a little too coquettish for this match. Instead I moved into the 20th century (just) for some early Webern, easing into his 1904 symphonic poem Im Sommerwind. This worked a treat, with its late-late Romanticism taking the edge off the supposed aggression and tension in this North-West el classico; I hate all that pre-match media hype stoking up images of grudge-bearing gladiators in the ring, gnashing their teeth and slavering with racist thoughts, when you look at them and they're (mostly) a load of nicely-manicured boys just looking forward to a bit of a run-around. So the Webern turned the second half into a calmer, quietly euphoric state of affairs, with a few uncanny hilarities: some hints of homoeroticism between De Gea and Evra via some swoony string section frivolity; some perfect comedy when Gerrard was cued off the pitch to a massive cymbal crash, followed by menacing low double basses as Bellamy barrelled on; big chords for Kenny Dalgleish as he made furious hand gestures; and finally, the 'Hernandez theme', a flute and harp sparkling with youth and innocence. Fabulous!

All this is a distraction from the less glamorous endz of the Football League, where Wycombe have been  zinging wildly about like an old-skool Pong ball between dramatic wins and losses: our last four results have been 0-3, 2-3, 3-0 and 2-5, today against Brentford. As a sorry-bottom-lipped WWFC supporter lass tweeted forlornly, 'I try to keep positive but the table doesn't lie.' Indeed. The team does though: prostrate, snoozing and flabby at the bottom of the League. UGH!

Contemporary Classical Music/Silent Football Experiment No. 1

Now here's the way to enliven an drizzle-sodden midweek footy match on tv: turn the sound down and whack on some 20th/21st-century music. You wouldn't have thought that the incongruous pairing of Cardiff City vs Crystal Palace (Carling Cup semi-final 2nd leg) and orchestral works by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu would work, and I had just come from watching 'The Artist' in the cinema, but by golly, it worked a treat! The game transcended from an unglamorous fixture between Championship teams in the Cup competition that no-one cares about to a thing of impossible tension and daring, life or death stuff. The players, with one sweep of Bernard Herrmann-esque strings, transformed magically into dance-theatre performers of soaring balletic wonder; the manager's desperate flailings became exquisite choreography; Stuart Pearce and Chris Coleman, watching in the stand, were glowering villians accompanied by foreboding brass; and referee Howard Webb became, somewhat bafflingly, a romantic lead. The timing was hilariously apt, with emotional peaks of near-hysteria on certain attacking moves, or a flute line denoting the inner torment of a player doing a throw-in, who looked so confident but was made pitiably anguished by the music. Ha ha.

This only works, of course, when you're a neutral. This was proved by my experience of JazzBall at London's premier jazz hangout, The Vortex, in which two trios free-improvised to an early England game in Euro 2008; I couldn't bear it and dashed to a friend's house at half-time to watch it properly. But still, maybe this is the start of a whole new ball game, with grimy fixtures accompanied by the doyens/doyennes of modern music: QPR vs Wigan, soundtracked by Ligeti; Hull City vs Millwall, underscored by Saariaho. Tee hee.

Kerry Goes To The NON-Non-League

My first Saturday off since the summer! And I made the most of it by not going to my own team's home game (a rather vital one against bottom of the table Chesterfield, with whom we were equal on points; we got a last-minute winner to haul us to... oh, second bottom still) but my REAL local team, a mile away from my familial homes: Holmer Green FC, whom my Dad has been supporting for a few years, having shunned the groaning excesses, rabid egos and coruscating glamour of lower League football. So I thought I should, for old times' sake (we watched Wycombe together for 15 years), see what all the fuss was about.

I had to do a crash-course in the below-Conference Leagues on the way, negotiating the complex world of Evo-Stick, Ryman, Cherry-Red Records Combined Counties League (my favourite) and HG's own, the Molten Spartan South Midlands Football League Premier Division, into which they re-ascended after last year's relegation. This means they are a Step 5 team: 5th level down from the Conference, and I think 9 actual tables as there are countless Premier and Division One Leagues... erk!. They're currently sitting unpretty at the bottom of the table, with only 12 points to leaders Royston's 48.

I have to say, the ground - Airedale Park, right opposite my primary school - was even more brilliantly lowdown than I'd anticipated. Step 5 teams have to have covered terraces, so the south-end stand has recently undergone some renovations, ahem:

Here's the seated side, the Don Want Stand, named after their twinkly-eyed septuagenarian ex-groundkeeper who is addicted to the club, and was for most of the match trying to help get one of the match balls down from a refusenik tree with ladders and javelin poles.

Step 5 teams also have to formally announce the teams, so the ex-chairman, clad in green and white scarf, brought on his battery-powered mini-amp and mic and took us through the line-up. And by us, I mean Dad and I, the only supporters present when the teams ran out, rather unnervingly. It did fill up, with a whole 20 or so others trickling in casually as the game progressed.

Holmer Green faced the broad-shouldered Dunstable Town (not, confusingly AFC Dunstable, who are 3rd), who frankly ran HG ragged in the first half, and, both fitter and hungrier, were 4-0 up at half-time, though without the understated heroics of Nick Hancox in goal it could have been 10. Used to MOTD's glossy and lean thoroughbreds, galloping around all gold-toothed and whinnying, it was quite a shock to see both the wobbly-thighed goalkeeper,and the quite resoundingly ample striker Sean Christie gallumphing around up front, rather ineffectually dare I say. In fact the only player who looked lively was the main striker, the stolidly-named Andy Shed.

The second half brought a bit more spark, with HGFC at least neutralising the visitors for a spell. Then a decisive substitution saw Gary Lines' abortive meanderings replaced by the Emile Heskey of the club, a lazily nonchalant Danny Boateng, who managed to score a hat-trick, including a penalty. Dunstable had scored one more too, but a 5-3 scoreline is much more respectable, though the old gents around me (all three of them) still grumbled their way through it, as is the football fans' wont - Andy went to Chelsea to hear the fans carp their way through a 3-0 victory over Valencia this week.

Stamford Bridge and Airedale Park: rather alien worlds in so many ways. Defender Tom Alabaster advertises his own carpentry company in the programme. There was a distinct lack of arrogance, aggression and nasty tackling (well, there weren't many tackles at all, to be honest); a lack of pretension and a lovely nearness to the action (I watched most of the second half from the touchline, watching the ball rattle around alarmingly and enjoying the robust language of all players - frankly, they all need to wash their slatternly mouths out), with the teams clattering muddily between us on our way to the tea hatch at half time. The proper tea, along with real home-made sausagey hot dogs, was dished up by the manager's wife and daughter, the only other females in the near vicinity. There was a bizarre reserve to the HG fans which makes Wycombe's sometime sotto voces seem cacophonous - you really wouldn't have known at any point just by listening, that they'd scored any goals, as NO-ONE clapped or cheered at all! I couldn't help whooping mildly here and there just to add a bit of atmosphere, to the huge embarrassment of Father.

The away fans were, it has to be said, a little rowdy, banging the corrugated iron roof and tumbling down the slope in front of them in excitement after a backpass claim. They even SANG, once. Here they are, meddlesome lot:

I had a pretty great time for my fiver. I can see why Dad comes: it's why anyone goes to any game of football in the end, once you strip away the sponsorship (HGFC are sponsored on the shirts though, by - YES! - Country Bunches), the ludicrous salaries and the slavering media: to see a bunch of sweaty chaps scrap over a ball and hope for the sugar rush of a goal. And, at times (at least when I could ignore the  pain in my utterly benumbed toes) really quite romantic: players steaming about under a low winter sun on a frost-tinged pitch, lusty expletives and hot breath billowing from their mouths. If I'm not careful, I'll be daubing my face in green and white and chanting... well, I'll invent some chants!

WWFC - The Best Campaigners In Football! (But Not So Good At Actual Football!)

God love 'em. I was hugely proud to see a couple of weeks ago that MY team, not any of the high-profile tattoosome moneybags of the Premiership, were the first professional football club to sign the I Love Sport But I Hate Homophobia government campaign, causing David Cameron to tweet his congrats. Hurrah! It's part of the government's general Kick It Out campaign to banish any form of prejudice on the terraces (or, indeed, is it has been alleged rather a lot this week in the Prem, on the pitch). It frankly seems astonishing to me that there could possibly be anyone left in the world who feels that it might be a bit of a giggle to abuse anyone for their sexual preference, or indeed ethnic background, but then I'm an artist who mixes happily with all and sundry, not someone who lives in the Dark Ages eating meat pies, collecting Daily Star clippings of Page 3 beauties and getting a bit nervous when watching Graeme Le Saux, because he can string two three-syllable words together and has nice hair. I'm looking forward to someone, somewhere amongst our 92 professional teams of men, being as brave as Sweden's Anton Hysen and coming out. Wycombe Wanderers at least would make sure they were the first to give them a big, non-embarrassed man-hug. Here's Matt Bloomfield doing us all proud!

Not content with being pro-gay/lesbian/trans etc, the boys are also throwing themselves into Movember, the month in which men grow moustaches to raise money for prostate cancer awareness. Tomorrow, on November 1st, 14 players will begin their 'tache growing, and can be sponsored for the pleasure here! I've done so, and hope to hot-foot it to MK Dons at  the end of the month on my day off to witness what will surely be the Extreme Hilarity of a full team of handlebarred and face-fuzzed gents (AND manager - Gary Waddock is doing it as well), as if we'd all been transported to 1973. Brilliant! And again, I challenge the self-involved Prem boys to do the same: however much money WWFC raise from their 5,000 or so supporters, imagine how much Manchester United could inspire at the promise of Rooners, Nani, Hernandez et al looking like disco kings... Gareth Ainsworth, whose brainchild this was, has already been practising, and appears to have transformed into some sort of Leone-style villain, hur hur.

And if this isn't cheerily homoerotic, I don't know what is!

All this charitable loveliness makes the falling about ON the pitch that the boys must be doing seem a little less terrible... we are now sunken treasure rusting away in 23rd place with only Yeovil for company. Wycombe's new starlet, Jordan Ibe, who scored on his debut at the Battle of the Garys (Megson vs Waddock) on Saturday, is probably too wet behind the ears to grow a beard, being 12 or whatever he is... Just like bright young thing Matt Philips before him, who now plays for Blackpool, he'll be away to Liverpool or some such before he can even fashion a wee tuft of dormouse fluff on his chin, I should wager.

Making money out of rising stars has always been part and parcel of the youth training embedded in lower league clubs, sad as we might be to lose them. But this system is being threatened by the Elite Player Performance Plan, which proposes a fixed payment system that would mean the Big Bad Clubs at the top could cream off lowly clubs' talent for next to nothing, which hardly seems fair. The Premier League shoe-armed this scheme in by saying they'd otherwise withhold funding for youth training. What absolute darstardly gluttons. £1 million might only garnish the canapés at the VIP boxes for a season in the top flight, but it can keep a club going for a bit longer down at our end. Matt Bloomfield, who when not signing anti-prejudice charters does some online journalism for the BBC, writes about it his latest column, and there's an online campaign here. Let's bite the heels of those racism-spouting, Gillette-smooth fuckers!