Greenwood and Gazza revisited?

This weekend we witnessed the final games for the England football and rugby teams. Both groups of players have been away from home testing themselves against some of the best players in the World. As far as the rugby team is concerned they lost a three test series 2-0, gaining some comfort for a 14-14 draw in the final game against South Africa.

For the football team it was defeat in the quarter-finals of the European Cup, to Italy.

The similarities of the two national sides are worth considering. Both have relatively new coaches trying to impress their own styles on their side. Both, sadly lack creative and dominant players, the like of which is vital to be able to compete on a world stage.

Lets look at the football team first. Two banks of four players protecting the goal, with two isolated strikers is not the best recipe for attractive football. What alternatives are there, however?  If you were to name the three most creative players in the top English premiership teams you would struggle to find too many English qualified players. Tottenham have Modric, Bale and Adebayor, or even Van der Vaart. Chelsea have Drogba, Torres and a host of others, Manchester City have Alonso, Balotelli and Nasri. Its only when you include Wayne Rooney in the Manchester United trio that you can select a player who starts regularly for his club, as a key international.

Mirror that process with the rugby team and you consistently see the core players in the top teams, fly half, centre, fullback, scrum half, number 8, flanker and hooker more often than not being sourced from other countries, and,   at a point in their career when they are looking for a source of money and a gentle passage into retirement.

While the rugby team are trying to redress the balance by introducing a salary cap and we are seeing English fullbacks coming through, it will be a few seasons yet before they can have the right young talent to choose from. They need to be clever as well as muscle bound and the professional game is not doing much to aid that process.

So we have to be realistic at the moment and not expect our sides to be world beaters, although with the Rugby World Cup in England in 2015 it would be good to see a semi-final place as a realistic target. At that stage anything can happen.

Alright my lover?

This week I have been down in Plymouth with the sole purpose of moving my aged mother up to a flat in Hoylake on the Wirral. My mother is 86 years old, and by the look of some photographs we found, was a bit of a looker all those years ago. No wonder she caught my father's eye.

We moved down to Plymouth as a family in 1959 from Isleworth in West London. My dad worked for National Benzole, a petrol company, in those days and was posted to Devon and Cornwall a year or so earlier. He supervised the completion of our house which was part of  a Costain development  in Plymstock and my mum and I moved down when it was ready.

I went to school in Plymstock from 1959 until 1964 when I moved to a grammer school in Beacon Park, Plymouth. The area was notarised by the folk singer, Cyril Tawney, in his ballad of the same name, and there I stayed until 1971 when I upped sticks and moved back to London to go to college.

My mum and dad stayed in Plymouth. My dad retired in 1975 and my mum set up and ran a pre-school playgroup in a local church hall, with one of her closest friends. There are many Plymouthians who went through that facility at a time when play groups were relatively new and certainly not as regulated as they are now.

When my dad died in 1980, my mum stayed in the family home for a few years, before deciding to try to settle back in her family town of Wisbech. Sadly her family never really embraced her and after a few years she abandoned the exercise and returned to Devon. An inappropriate house purchase in Oreston soon found her back in Plymstock, living less than 100yards from the original family home.

Yesterday she said goodbye to Plymstock and that house, her home for twenty years,  for the last time. We spent the week filling a skip with 'stuff' that people of all ages collect over time, and which has little or no value, either sentimental or monetary. We then labeled the furniture which was to be collected and distributed to the poor and needy, as mum's new flat is fully furnished and brand new. We then sat back and waited for the removal people.

As I write this, they are moving my mum into her new home, having earlier delivered all the unwanted car bootie from her house to Oxton. We will probably need two or three sales to clear it all.

The new home is about 20  minutes away from us, no longer a 5 hour journey if emergencies call. It has an in-house warden and is populated by about 25 other like minded souls looking for companionship, security and a bit of sea air.

So ends her 50 year relationship with Plymstock. Many of her good friends did not last as long, and those that are still there popped in to say goodbye, knowing they would never see her again, but would stay in touch by phone or letter, a trait still very common with the older generation.

She did not seem sad to go, and being blessed still with a sharp mind , she sees the move as a new adventure to be embraced as enthusiastically as that train journey on Brunel's mighty GWR  all those years ago.

Will I miss Plymouth?  No not really, its not been my home for almost 40 years, Although I made many of my strongest and longest lasting friendships there, those friends no longer live there.  I expect I will find myself down there again, not least when I have to reunite my mum and dad for the final time, but for now it's up the Argyle and  continue to try to master the golf course which is Wallasey.

Proper job.

NeverSeconds

Every now and then  there is a story in the papers or on the internet which makes you wonder where the genetic malfunction of the human race began. Today we have been treated to the news that Martha Payne , a nine year old from Scotland,  has been banned from photographing her school dinner, because she then uses it on her blog here.

Her headmistress acted on orders from her superiors at Argyll and Bute council who were concerned that press publicity was having a stressful effect on their dinner ladies, albeit the web site was set up with the blessing of the school as a way to raise money for a charity called Mary's Meals.

There has been uproar, and the good burgers ( no pun intended) of Argyll and Bute have conceeded they acted hastily and have allowed the young girl to carry on.

In the meantime the charity donations have gone from £2,000 to well over £20,000 indicating once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Its good to encourage youngsters to start blogging. I look back over the five years of this blog and remind myself of things which are a distant memory, imagine when people can look back 50 years.

Light at the end of the tunnel

We embraced the start of the Olympic Games on Friday evening when the torch relay arrived on the Wirral. It came through the Mersey tunnel into Birkenhead Park at about 6pm and was carried by various runners with compelling reasons to make the short trip from one end of their section to the other. The standard celeb was sporty Spice, Melanie Chisholm, who carried the torch on part of the 'Race for Life' route. Here she is partly obscured by the torch, no bad thing eh!!

This is not the first time we have been in the company of the Olympic torch, as we were in Atlanta for the 1996 Games, and spent several hours in Buckhead on the outskirts of the City, the day before the event started. I must admit the controls in America were very lax, and the poor runner had to eventually be bundled into a van to complete his leg of the journey. We were on that trip with Dave Jones, sadly now the subject of the sad entry I wrote last month, and I recall we were very brazen in 'acquiring' a Olympic torch relay banner form outside one of the bars. It went on the wall in Twickenham RFC but has long since been lost to redevelopment.

I have had a very mixed relationship with the London Olympics. I have tried on numerous occasions to get interviews for salaried positions with them, and failed miserably. I am particularly grumpy as they have always advocated the uniqueness of the event and that people with previous experience would be well placed to assist.

I was also disillusioned at the whole ticketing situation and have now resigned myself to watching on TV. I am still available at short notice for seriously boozy corporate invites but I can't see it myself.

We were fortunate to be in the Olympic stadium in Atlanta when Carl Lewis won the last of his 9 Olympics Gold medals when he retained the long jump title. It was, however, eclipsed by Michael Johnson winning the 400m in his golden running shoes, which he then threw into the crowd.  I wonder where they are now?