The writing blog of David Stringer
A new edition of The Lower League Week has just gone up at BornOffside.net.
In it, I cover Tranmere starting to struggle, Sheffield United hitting form, Paolo di Canio whinging, Chesterfield take two months to appoint a manager, Scunthorpe taking less than a day, own goals, a red card, dangerous milk, and a really quite horrific injury.
Click here for The Lower League Week – Starting to get Serious
The latest Lower League Week is now up at Born Offside.
Port Vale and Portsmouth are both on the verge of takeovers, and I’ve been slightly mystified by reports that Portsmouth manager Michael Appleton is the favourite for the Burnley vacancy.
Swindon have replaced their chairman (with a knight who was ambassador to Afghanistan – pretty imperial), Oxford insist on being inconsistent, Hartlepool have parted ways with manager Neale Cooper, and York’s Matty Blair managed to get himself injured by a training ground mannequin.
All that and more can be found in The Lower League Week: Owners and Managers
I found out this morning that it’s the fifth anniversary of the passing of Michael Maidens, a young footballer for Hartlepool United. Involved in a traffic accident on Friday 19th October 2007, he passed away that night.
Despite having fallen away from the first team by the time of his death, aged just 20, he had made a number of first team appearances, and scored what was voted the goal of the 2005-06 season in a 3-1 win over Huddersfield, aged just 18.
The number 25 shirt (his squad number) was retired, the club’s award for best goal each season is now known as the Michael Maidens Goal of the Season Award and various tributes were made around the time.
I wrote a little thing as tribute, which appeared on the now defunct Rivals.net website, and the fanzine Monkey Business. While the website no longer exists, I have the original copy of what I’d written, which I will now quote in full.
Michael Maidens, 1987-2007, R.I.P.
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these; ‘it might have been’.”
– John Greenleaf Whittier
It is, of course, always painful to hear about the death of a youngster, which unfortunately, due to suburban violence or the same sort of accident that claimed the life of Hartlepool United’s number 25, seem to be increasingly prevalent in the news over the past few years.
Still, it can be easy to take the news in, absorb it and reflect on what a shame it is, then move on, more or less unaffected. The reason for this is not cold-heartedness, simply the fact that it’s difficult to appreciate the loss of someone who has only become known in retrospect; the death is all the more shocking if a previous relationship is in place, even the tenuous sort that exists between player and fan.
Having been a part of Hartlepool’s juniors since the age of eight, pedants could argue that he was Hartlepool’s longest serving player. And given the extent that the youth system at the club has improved since that time, and the often Darwinian nature of youth development, his achievements seem all the more impressive.
Having seen the majority of his professional appearances at Victoria Park as well as a few of his games away from home, it was hard not to be impressed by his talent; quick, good close control, and a ferocious strike, he certainly had the ability to have a successful career in the game. In fact, were it not for the fact that James Brown and David Foley have been moved back from the front-line while they develop their physique, Michael could quite easily have bettered his impressive 12 starts and sixteen substitute appearances.
His goal against Huddersfield two seasons ago should, in itself, be testament to that. A team-mate bursting through the middle lost the ball, which then broke to Maidens, still significantly outside the area. Taking a touch to steady the ball, he then struck a sweet curling shot, placed perfectly to make it nearly unstoppable. Considering that this was against a playoff chasing team in the presumably tense circumstances of a relegation battle, it was a goal even better than the raw technique it required.
Having made his first team debut as a seventeen year old, and been monitored by the Scotland U21s management, the signs were that he would have a strong career ahead of him. It is, of course, impossible to say for certain what would have followed in the remainder of his career, but it’s far from unreasonable to assume that he would have become a player admired from far beyond his club, a name fans of other teams look on with envy. Perhaps even, had a small amount of luck gone his way, playing at a higher level and winning a few Scottish caps.
Perhaps more importantly, going by the interviews and the quotes from those who knew him well, he was well-adjusted, humble, and was apparently hugely enthusiastic. There have been a number of quotes telling how he was always smiling and joking, was dedicated and hardworking, always the last person on the training ground. All in all, a good guy and a colourful character; a far cry from the increasing image of a young footballer as a dull-minded narcissist full of self-importance before even breaking into reserve team football.
Of course, given the fact that he passed away at such a young age, it’s easy to paint his life as a tragic one, a life not fully lived, only a shadow of what he might have been. The alternative is that his short life was spent doing something he hugely enjoyed; through talent and hard work he had a taste of something that most football fans would envy; he has brought pleasure to literally thousands of people.
And, as should go without saying, his memory will live on.
Given the extent to which modern games are filmed and photographed at all levels, whether officially or by fans with cameras and mobile phones, a significant portion of his career will, somewhere or other, have been committed to film. It’s easy to imagine that, years from now, the children and grandchildren of Maidens’ peers will come across either footage of his single goal for Pools, or one of the tributes that has already been put together on the internet following his demise.Obviously, all of that can only be a small condolence at best to his family, friends and team-mates. Michael was about the same age as myself, and I find it difficult to comprehend his death. In fact the temptation while writing this has often been to write in present, rather than past tense. Being fortunate enough to have never gone through anything similar, I can’t even begin to imagine how much more horrible it must be for those close to him, so I won’t try to articulate the inexpressible.
A life can’t be measured by a list of achievements, nor by a series of anecdotes. Ultimately the value of a life should be measured in how it affects others. In that respect, the brief life of Michael Maidens was far from wasted.
I was inspired to write the above, in part, by a moving video which was edited together and appeared over the course of the weekend, drawing from photos and clips available on the club’s official video channel.
In fact, going by the date on the video, it looks to have been edited and placed on Youtube by Saturday 20th, which makes the turnaround pretty impressive. Worth a watch, in my view.
For the next home game, against Brighton, the players took to the field all wearing the name Maidens on their shirts.
The players ran out to what I think is Let Me See by Usher, (though I may be wrong on that) apparently Michael’s favourite song. This was followed by a minute’s silence pre-match, which was prefaced by a tribute from John Orley the stadium announcer at the time.
I didn’t know Michael personally, and my only connection with him was as a fan of the club and an admirer of him as a player, but I feel that the above is worth sharing.
Seriously. I mean, just take a look at how cool and laid back he looks, even when he’s not leading European teams to continental glory:
There is a sort of reason for the above. Davids has just been named as the Joint Head Coach of Barnet, currently sitting 92nd in the English league structure, whcih I’ve written about for BornOffside in the Lower League Fortnight.
I’ve also covered Peter Ridsdale’s tax dodging, Bournemouth’s surprise managerial appointment, Portsmouth’s secret boardroom history, more accusations of racism (yey, navel gazing!) London Orient, transfer embargoes, and Tranmere’s confusingly good start to the season.
Come this way to read The Manager in the Coloured Glasses
Having not found the time to write a Lower League Week last midweek, a Lower League Fortnight went up at Born Offside yesterday morning.
There seems to have been a lot of managerial sackings, resignations and appointments over the last fortnight, so they dominate the column.
Plus there’s been racial abuse at a football stadium, so for people who can’t get enough of that kind of thing (there seems to be a lot working in Fleet Street) you can read about Hartlepool fans yelling at Marvin Morgan.
Like myself, I’d imagine most people will be aware of Gulliver’s Travels as the book where the little people tie down the hero. What I didn’t realise before reading it was that Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput are just one of four parts, as the hero visits a series of different lands.
Swift’s writing is very dry prose that demands the reader’s full attention. I was reading partially during my lunch break, and often not quite taking in what I was reading, having to go back and read it again.
According to the introduction, traveller’s diaries were a popular genre at the time, full of fantastical stories that modern readers would recognise as fantasy.
John Mandeville, an ‘explorer’ a few centuries before Gulliver, told a series of ludicrous lies which were apparently one of the motivating reasons for Columbus’ most famous voyage.
Gulliver, the narrator of his adventures, states near the beginning that he’s travelled to the places in other books, only to find they were much more mundane than the tales, and left him disillusioned, pretty much pointing out up front that the book is a deliberate exaggeration of this genre.
It’s probably not the most obvious description to apply to the book, but Gulliver’s Travels is fun and inventive, in a dry, understated, deadpan way. As a taste of the kind of thing I mean, in A Modest Proposal Swift put forward an argument for solving Ireland’s twin problems of overpopulation and lack of food…by eating their own babies. But by the tone of writing, many people at the time thought that Swift, an influential political figure in his day job, was putting this forward as a serious suggestion.
There’s nothing quite as radical in Gulliver’s Travels, but that kind of mad invention and deadpan tone are on display throughout Gulliver’s Travels.
Part I covers Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput. These aren’t laugh out loud hilarious, but pretty funny in an understated deadpan way. They’re written in a way you could believe that the extreme events really happened.
In Part II Gulliver visits Brobdingnag, a land of giants just north of California, and offers a semi-plausible reason why they had remained out of touch with the wider world, before, amongst other things, fencing with a giant fly.
It’s a bit hard to get into the mentality of a 17th century reader and understand their understanding of the world, at a time when many corners of the world weren’t fully mapped out. But the tone really sells these crazy stories.
Although I don’t imagine much of this has survived into modern TV and movie adaptations, there’s a fair bit of pretty silly contemporary satire. There is a major religious divide in Lilliput is over which end of the egg is the moral end to crack, and the people of Lilliput are buried vertically, and upside down, in the belief that Judgement Day will begin on the far side of the world.
Personally, my favourite parts of the book were the less famous Parts III & IV.
In Part III Gulliver travels to Laputa, which, thanks to a mineral naturally occurring in its soil, floats in the sky. Laputa is a nation of incredibly talented mathematicians, who have very little understanding of any other subjects, but feel their mathematical genius qualifies them to be experts on everything. Interestingly, according to the notes (I read the 2001 Penguin edition) the people of this nation were based on Swift’s political opponent, Sir Isaac Newton. Yes, the same one.
Gulliver then visits the projectors of Lagado, a nearby nation. Influenced by Laputa, they had embarked on a series of grand plans to utterly reinvent their society, very few of which work.
In Part IV Gulliver travels to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of hyper-evolved horses so noble and idealistic that they have no understanding of the concept of lying. The Houyhnhnms are noble and logical, but contemptuous of the barbaric humans (the Yahoos) who live amongst them. The Houyhnhnms and the increasingly impressionable Gulliver put together a strong case against the barbarism of the wider world, while allowing their own love of reason to lead them down a quite horrific path. While I thought Part III was the cleverest of the stories, Part IV was the section that grabbed me most on an emotional, instinctive level.
I’ve no supportive evidence for this, but reading Part IV it struck me as a possible inspiration for Planet of the Apes, so deep are the similarities.
However, in spite of all that, Gulliver’s Travels is, to a large extent, defined by the time that produced it. Though the notes explained what a reader of the time would have been reminded of, the explanations understandably interrupted the flow, and I’m sure many things would have struck a 17th century reader that didn’t occur to me.
Verdict: A drily written adventure, with a mixture of satire and silliness, that’s most entertaining and imaginative in the lesser known sections.
I’ve done something that I really don’t do often enough, and sat down with no distractions, and written a short piece of prose from beginning to end. No grand, ambitious plans for a multi-storyline epic that fizzle out into nothing, just a brief, punchy little story.
I hope you enjoy it.
Comrade Sidorova stood on the Middle Line of the Moscow GUM, looking down to the Lower and observing what capitalism had brought upon his country.
Huge arches, maybe fifteen feet across each, contained the glass storefronts of shops owned by multinational corporations. The architecture was stunning – Pomerantsev’s genius had survived communism from beginning to end, which at one point he feared nothing in his beloved homeland would manage. But their use was a barbaric joke – he could see three arches in a row containing the name and products of an American jeans company.
Sidorova had never been able to follow the logic of jeans as a luxury product. He had worn them on occasion in his younger days – they were uncomfortable against the skin, and downright abusive when wet. It was the propaganda which swung it, he had decided – marketing, to use the capitalist term. Perhaps knowing that the product itself was not much use, units of the rough material were moved out of stores worldwide by using imagery of rugged American cowboys and trendy modern party-goers.
It hurt Sidorova’s pride to know that, for many young Russians today, their ideal of masculinity was not their fathers and grandfathers who had worked without complaint in the fields and the military, but an American posing in the Texas sun.Sidorova looked upward. Shukhov’s glass ceiling was magnificent – even a century after its construction there were few like it anywhere in the world. It flooded the building below in so much light that Sidorova could almost believe a God must have created it. There was a train station in London whose roof was also built more of glass than metal. But even there the ratio of iron to glass weighed more heavily on the side of practicality. Saint Pancreas? Some body part, but he wasn’t sure which. Even the great Victorian engineers – perhaps the greatest engineering nation ever to have lived – could not match the innovative genius of Shukhov.
Beauty comes from that which is natural, Sidorova felt, and man should only interfere when it is a necessity. Centralised planning is the worst form of human interference.This building had played it’s part in Sidorova’s awakening from his propaganda induced childhood stupor. As a young man, he had been assigned here, in the days when queues for the more practical items it stocked stretched across Red Square.
Although the desperation on the people’s faces were hideous, his superiors had drilled it into him that one day this magnificent, palatial shopping centre would serve it’s purpose, to help feed and clothe the people of the world’s rising superpower. The problem was that the party simply had not had enough time to get things working the way they should.But the offices of the shopping centre silently debated this point. A few were still used, a faded image of the days when this was the central point of planning for Stalin’s first five-year plan. Many more laid empty, abandoned.
It was as he stood here, in this very spot so many years ago, that he was struck with an idea. Simply seeing the sheer amount of light that flooded in from the ceiling, while the ceiling held solid, was a revelation to him. A combination of nature and man – the warmth of the indoors, with every inch of the hallways flooded with natural sunlight. He saw the beauty of the natural world with eyes that he had never used before, and realised immediately that it must have been a genius who could build such a structure. A genius who built a thing of beauty before the Communist party rose to power.
It was a beauty that was misused by the party – he could see thugs in state uniforms pushing around the poor as they merely looked for enough food to keep their families alive.
Sidorova had thought of the entire building as a new form of propaganda, created not for the glorification of Stalin, but the glorification of the natural world, and the men who could tame it.
As he took the train journey back home, Sidorova appreciated the beauty of the fields, the skies, even the ramshackle huts, in a way he never had before. The thought had simply never occurred to him that Mother Russia could thrive without the party’s blessing, that his dissatisfactions were circles that could not be squared.
By the time he reached home, his mind was consumed with blasphemous ideas.Sidorova did not consider himself a killjoy, he knew there were important things in life beside bread and water. But he also knew the profit margins on trousers, sports shoes, jewellery, and considered it a sick joke that so much of the price went to the propagandists. In Asia the clothing was crafted by workers who toiled for pennies.
Banner after banner on the Lower Line bore a single message – advertisements for a perfume company. Giant bottles were painted on the sheets, repeated over and over, lest consumers forget their implicit message – CONSUME! – in the seconds walking from one to the next.
Despite Sidorova’s melancholy, he knew that, beyond doubt, what he saw around him was better than what had gone before. He had no doubts over the side in the struggle he had chosen, and, were he required to do so, he would do the same again without a moment’s doubt. But he had dreamed – more than that, believed – that the fall of communism would see power given to the people. That they would no longer be manipulated into actions for the benefit of the powerful.
Thinking back over his life, Sidorova realised what it was he missed about communism – the struggle against it.
The secret meetings. The walks through the streets of Moscow on winter days when the poor starved and his breath seemed to freeze in the air… He was warmed by the knowledge that he and his colleagues were struggling together for the common good.
But now… Who was left who would struggle with him against the modern propaganda for over-priced trousers?
Wednesday afternoon the latest edition of the Lower League Week went up… shortly before the announcement of Terry Brown’s departure from Wimbledon, and Mark Robins’ appointment at Coventry. If a week is a long time in politics, an afternoon is apparently a long time in lower division football.
I write about Steve Evans’ latest ban (the Rotherham manager probably has a worse disciplinary record than most midfield enforcers); Tranmere and Andy Robinson’s great start to the season, Coventry’s stadium negotiations, some of the impact of Financial Fair Play, and a transfer from League On to the Conference being delayed because it’s classed as an international transfer.
There wasn’t a clear theme to this week’s edition, so it’s subtitled The ‘I Couldn’t Think of a Title’ Edition.
Since the horrors of Hillsborough and the rebranding of English football under the Premier League logo, the culture of the game has changed dramatically. Football has moved away from the gritty, working man’s game it once was, with players being required to be hyper-drilled athletes, smooth and inoffensive in front of the cameras, in case they accidentally say something that could affect one of the club’s sponsors. This has resulted in an interesting contradiction – there’s never been more ways to interact with players, and learn about their lives, but the truth is often hidden away behind a glass-sheet of superficial perfection.
While of course the game itself is the main draw, getting inside the head of the players we admire, understanding how they push themselves to the levels they do, and what their lives away from the pitch are like, are also more than a little intriguing.
Around two years ago, a footballer began sharing stories of his playing career in a weekly column in The Guardian. To avoid repurcussions, not to mention offending his team-mates and family, this column was published anonymously, under the name of The Secret Footballer.
Last month saw the publication of the player’s autobiography, I Am The Secret Footballer.
A little late, as this post went up on Born Offside on Thursday night.
This week’s Lower League Week focuses on Port Vale, whose financial woes have deepened, with prospective owner Keith Ryder no longer returning the administrator’s calls.
Harry Redknapp returned to football with Bournemouth, di Canio refused to stop talking, Preston have put together a decent run of results, an Oldham player made his international debut against Brazil, and Martin Allen took Gillingham to Barnet, who decided against appointing him manager in May.
Click here for the column in which I ask Where in the World is Keith Ryder?
SciFiFootball 