Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

We've been spared the usual arguments this year. This is probably due to the fact that St. George's day falls on a Saturday this year, coupled with the lateness of Easter which means it is book-ended by two bank holidays. But I think it is a point that needs consideration; what of England's national day?

Of course the Irish, and pretty much everyone else, celebrate their national day, which also falls in line with a patron saint with great gusto. The Welsh make a show of it on David's day. The Scots seem to be more fussed with Burns Night rather than St. Andrew. I like that, for reasons I shall go into later on.

The French and Americans celebrate the removal of an arrogant and thoughtless monarch, in South America the national days are centred around their independence from Spanish or Portuguese imperial control, in Europe it is independence from Moscow which takes centre stage in the east of the continent.

The Italians celebrate the unification of their country, although I doubt the Liga Nord are quite so enthusiastic. The Greeks celebrate both the day they declared independence from the Ottoman Empire and the day they told the Axis powers to bugger off in 1940 (The Day of the No - now there's an idea).

But what of England?

I'm not fussed about St. George's Day. That isn't to say that I don't think England should have a national day; quite the reverse, I'm just not sure St. George should be it. Firstly, St. George is almost like a default patron saint, with Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia, Greece, Portugal, Serbia and Russia also claiming him as a patron saint in Europe alone. Secondly, because he was Palestinian, not English. Thirdly because the stories about him are fantastical at best - are we really supposed to believe he killed a dragon? It is a simplistic story about the conversion of a tribe to Christianity, I'm not fussed.

Of course, a simple solution would be to adopt the same day as a national holiday in celebration of a English figure. St. George's Day happens to be the supposed birthday of Shakespeare, it is also his supposed date of death as well (I just hope he got his presents and favourite birthday dinner before he popped his clogs), there is no doubt that Shakespeare as he is commonly thought of is probably the most important English cultural figure of all time. It sits nicely with the Scottish observance of Burns. Here's the controversial bit, I don't actually think Burns is that good a poet, but I like the way a tradition and ceremonies have grown up around the celebration of his work, the whole thing is great fun. He's a very important cultural figure for Scotland, but importantly, Burns Night isn't a holiday. Although I get the impression that many Scots would welcome it as a formal national day in place of St. Andrew's Day, because as with St. George, St. Andrew is not Scottish in the slightest.

I dismiss Shakespeare as the cause for a national day, though. There are too many unanswered questions about the provenance of his work, about him as a person. Too much of it too close to the border of myth for my liking, I think we need something to hang our hats on. With Burns the Scots have that, the English cannot be anywhere as sure with Shakespeare.

We have no indpendence to celebrate, until the EU and despite a brief episode under the house of Anjou, we've been free of imperial domination since the Roman Empire, and then England was some way from coming into being. I'd like to celebrate something that England has done.

November the 5th is a day some people would choose, but the weather in November ain't great, and do we really want to celebrate the torture and death of a Catholic who was prevented from doing away with a corrupt and rotten establishment? I don't.

Many people propose the birthday of Wilberforce or the day we became the first country to outlaw slavery. A fine proposition. Whilst we should be ashamed of our country's role in being one of the leading perpetrators of the slave trade, we should also be fiercely proud that we were the first to outlaw it. It sits very easily with the left, and as a Liberatarian, not celebrating the end of slavery is a bizarre position to take, but it cannot be that, because this was a British policy, not an English one.

Similarly, we cannot as the English alone, celebrate VE day, Trafalgar or Waterloo for these were not purely English triumphs.

Some advocate Agincourt. No doubt an English victory, but it is also a little imperialistic. This was a battle to take the French crown, unlike VE day, it did not mark our survival in the face of a ruthless and evil aggressor or like Waterloo celebrate our part in ensuring the liberty of a whole continent. No, I don't think Agincourt is right.

So, I propose 8th August. We can move the existing August Bank Holiday in England. So on an administrative level, it is easy. It also falls in the month with the best weather, so it should be a day most people can be enjoying the weather. I also remember a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the date when I was younger, with some really cool events.

What happened on the date in question?

The 8th August 1588 was the day the English navy defeated the Spanish Armada. We were not the aggressors. We were standing up the greatest power in the world, determined to impose their belief system upon us, to rule us with a puppet monarch, to force us to accept their way of life. A huge fleet was defeated by a much smaller force, led with flair and skill by Howard and Drake - Drake was an amazing character, not perfect, but he's a cracking story behind him. I remember the 400th anniversary, the re-creation of the beacons, I grew up in a location a couple of miles away from one of the original beacons. Just imagine the parks on a warm August evening, with the beacons blazing away, picnics and fireworks, it would be fantastic.

On 8th August we defended ourselves with honour and came out victorious. We have (until recently) been a naval power since then, and despite credible threats from Bonaparte and Hitler, have never looked like being conquered again. Surely that is better than some Palestinian bloke on a donkey stabbing a crocodile?

The One That Will Write Off For The Job. . .

WARNING- THIS POST CONTAINS TALK OF FOOTBALL WHICH SOME READERS MAY FIND DISTRESSING.

What a complete bloody shambles that was last night. My thoughts on the performance are divided between the players and the coach.

Firstly we know that having seen four successive managers try and fail, that Gerrard and Lampard cannot play together in a 4-4-2 system. They both need a holding midfielder alongside them to allow them to range forwards in support of the two front line players. Play them alongside each other and they both become neither fish nor fowl. We know from their performances at club level that they are in the elite group of offensive midfielders, so the problem is obviously not with them, but the system the play in.

Sticking Gerrard out on the left wing is not a solution. He is no winger and will habitually cut into the middle, when you’ve a right winger in the shape of Lennon or SWP, this gives the team a real lopsided feel and makes them all too predictable.

4-4-2 as a system now looks as outdated as the 5-3-2 system so favoured by the Germans in their 1990 win. It is too rigid. too easily neutralised and does not allow the creative players to create. All night last night we saw the Algerians string 5 across the lower half of the midfield, not challenging the English midfield for possession, but just starving the front two of any service. This leads to what we saw from the midfield last night; having no option but to shoot from 30 yards because there’s no space to move the ball forward, and what we saw especially from Rooney; having to drop back to in front of the defence in order to pick the ball up, and then having to shoot from 30 yards because he then had 5 hairy arsed Algerians bearing down on him.

When they line up like this,

I’m afraid this is the most likely outcome. It may work against Belarus and Kazakhstan, but against a very well drilled and organised side, like Algeria or like the USA, most of whom play their football in Europe’s top leagues, you’ll get found out.

When you think back to 1990, the senior players got together after the Ireland game, and again after the Egypt match, and said to Sir Bobby ‘Gaffer, this isn’t working’, they suggested a different shape and style, and Bobby, being the pragmatist he was, listened to his players, worked with them and we got to the semi-finals, and were damn unlucky not to reach a final we would probably have won.

Capello is far too wedded to the 4-4-2 system to change, and I suspect his mantle of ‘strict disciplinarian’ crosses the line into ruling by fear. I also suspect that if Gerrard, Terry or Lampard went to Don Fabio and suggested the same, they’d be shouted out of the office.

It’s a great shame, without doubt we have the best generation of English footballers in 40 years. We have three or four genuinely world class players, something we’ve not had since Moore, Banks, Charlton, Peters. However if they’re not used properly, they’ll not achieve anything.

I reckon if they lined up like this:

The space that Gerrard would have to link up with Rooney would make that pair much more effective, and with Rooney, Lennon and Joe Cole having carte-blanche to roam and rotate between themselves, they’d pull apart and confuse the hell out of a zonal marking system, with Gerrard and Lampard allowed to move forward onto the attack and make a general embuggarance of themselves.

But what do I know?

The One That Can't Wait. . .

Only a week to go now.



We're still going to go out in the Quarter-Finals on penalties, though.

The One That Is Shouting 'GOOOOOAAAAAAL!'. . .

Ahhhh, World Cup year. I do love the World Cup. Always have, I have found it enchanting since I was a little boy. I love the way the players’ shirts shimmer in the hot summer sun (although not this year, it’ll be winter in South Africa), the reaction of the players and supporters of the smaller nations when they cause an upset, or even in some cases just score a goal. I love seeing the unbridled joy of one set of players when they score a victory over their bitterest opponents. I love the almost guaranteed emergence of a new star on the world scene and the drama of the penalty shootout (normally in the Quarter-Finals where England will lose). I love tournament football, there really is nothing like it. You can keep your Monaco Grand Prix, your Olympic Games, Six Nations, Wimbledon, Superbowl, hell, even The Ashes (which I also love), they are all fine events, but none of them compare to the World Cup.

I could write a huge missive about what is wrong with the game, and there’s plenty, but once every four years a large proportion of the country is brought together, collectively willing our players not to make an arse of it in the Quarter Finals against Portugal/Germany/Argentina/Brazil again. It is a good thing.

However there are one or two things in a World Cup year which are equally as predictable as England’s Quarter-Final exit. There will be the tut-tutting about working days lost when England are playing. There will be pursing of lips about the promo offers on booze in supermarkets and pubs. There will be children sent home from school because they’ve copied Beckham’s latest fashion statement (this year it’s called the ‘foot cast’) and someone somewhere will be banned from flying the St. George Cross.

Imagine my shame when I realised that is was my own home town.

Taxi drivers in a Kent city are upset after being told they are not allowed to fly flags from their vehicles during the World Cup football tournament.

Canterbury City Council has said attaching England flags to cabs would breach rules on what can be displayed on public service vehicles.

Why? What bloody harm will it do? No. People won’t get offended. It’s the national flag of England, for crying out loud. You wouldn’t see the same about the Saltire on cabs in Elgin or the dragon in Merthyr, would you?

Larissa Laing, from the council, said: "We accept that many taxi drivers want to be patriotic and we have been fully supportive of them wearing England shirts.

Oh, that’s nice. Isn’t that nice? The nice lady from the council will let the people in their own private businesses wear what they want. A big cheer for her.

"However, it is a public service vehicle and as such there are very strict rules and what can and cannot be displayed on a taxi and sadly an England flag, or any flag, cannot be displayed."

The rules ban any signs, letters, motifs, emblems, or marks from taxis.

Yes. But why? This is one of those we just want you to ask our permission so we can hum and har about it before making a great show of very generously granting the request which you so humbly put before us.

Larissa Laing almost won authoritarian fuckwit of the month. Almost.

The thing is, what do they do in places where there’s no World Cup participation? How does one show one’s absolute idiocy and total removal from pragmatism and reality then? Let’s go somewhere where the team didn’t qualify. Let’s go to Northern Ireland.

There was a policeman, sat in his vehicle, having objects thrown at him by a group of youths. What did he do? Did he shoot them? Did he hit them with his asp? Did he run them down? Did he refer them to an inclusivity outreach diversity community cohesion liaison officer? No. He played ice-cream van music over the speakers of his police car.

Young people were throwing bottles at a Land Rover vehicle in Lisburn last Saturday when the officer used the tannoy to play the tunes.

A police spokesperson said an officer had used humour to defuse the situation and the trouble had stopped.

However, senior officers are believed to have spoken to the officer involved.

I’m hoping that when they spoke to him they said. ‘Well done, you showed initiative, guile and humanity. You are a credit to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.’ I’m betting they didn’t.

Ah, no, they didn’t.

"The youths stopped throwing the bottles. However, police accept that this was not an appropriate action.

"The officer has been spoken to by a senior officer in order to establish the circumstances of the incident."

Hang on, are you suggesting that you wanted the officer to get out to hand out a kicking, running the risk that he’d get one himself, or to sit waiting for backup to arrive and hand out a kicking, whilst running the risk that they’d get into his car and give him a kicking?

Look, I’ve problems with the way policing is done in this country. I’ve a problem with the way some police officers act. Senior officers will back these horrible little SS wannabes to the hilt. Show me an officer who acts in exactly the way we’d all want an officer to act in a difficult situation and you feed him to the lions. Really? Seriously? WTF? Look, these kids deserved a good, hard kicking, but he was obviously on his tod, what he supposed to do?

So we’ll leave the authoritarian fuckwit of the week award to Cllr Angela Nelson (SF):

Angela Nelson told the Andersonstown News that the officer's actions "beggared belief".

"The PSNI are put on the streets to do a serious job and that is to keep order on the streets and face down anti-social elements. This is like a sick joke.

"It goes against everything we are trying to solve and eradicate in the area."

Now, I’ve no love for either side in Northern Ireland, it’s like Israel vs. Palestine but with wetter weather and better music, they can all go to hell, but people still vote for them, so there you go. Anyhow, I’m betting that the kids were Protestant and the SF lot are disgusted that they didn’t get the kicking they so richly deserved, or the kids were Catholic and the Protestant humiliated them instead of calling for the inclusivity outreach diversity community cohesion liaison officer over his radio.

Jesus Christ in a World Cup Willie costume on a pogo-stick, what is wrong with these people?