Gary Andrews

Toddle on down to your newsagents and pick up a copy of When Saturday Comes and you’ll fine a piece from me on Leigh Genesis in there (don’t think it’s available online, soz).

Also, had I got time I’d have liked to have done a quick bit of comment on the Rotherham situation. However, Ian at Two Hundred Per Cent has written a fantastic piece, which would put anything I had to say to shame:

“Next, they have to make a firm promise that they will move back in Rotherham, even though they have no money to build a new stadium (they are completely reliant on council plans for a new community stadium for this to happen).  Knowing the speed at which local authorities move and considering that we are in the middle of a property crisis that we haven’t seen in a generation and that Rotherham’s financial straits are such that, in the current climate, they would never find funding themselves for such a project, they’re going to have make a promise that they surely know that they can’t guarantee. They must be back in four years. This is the same Football League that, ultimately, allowed Wimbledon FC to be uprooted and moved to Milton Keynes, even though they voted against it, isn’t it? It is the same Football League that routinely allows clubs to demolish their town centre stadia and move to out of town sites that are only accessible by car, isn’t it? I can’t think of a single good reason for insisting on this when they have only moved four miles in the first place.”

Sorry if this has all been very football centric in the past few days. Incredibly busy, mostly with football-related work stuff as well. It’s invading my head, badly. I had a dream last night at Dean Windass tackled the feral youths of South London using nothing but a snooker cue.

I could probably do with getting out more, I know…

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: football, Leigh Genesis, points deduction., Rotherham, When Saturday Comes

“It’s about this time,” said Steve as the train passed through Dartford, “that I can feel my soul being sucked out of the window.”

You could see the reason for his anguish. The South Eastern service from Charing Cross into Kent hardly passes through aesthetically pleasing parts of South East London but, in comparison to Northfleet, Lewisham is closer to the Lake District.

Northfleet is meant to be an up-and-coming area: desirable due to the newly opened Eurostar terminal nearby along with a massive regeneration scheme for the area. For the time being, the area currently opens new chapters on the words grim and depressing in the dictionary.

Northfleet is also home to curious football ownership experiment that is MyFootballClub.co.uk, the fansite that raised enough cash to buy Ebbsfleet United and now votes on most aspects of team business, including selecting the line-up. Quite what the Premiership and foreign fans who’ve invested their thirty-five quid in the club would make of the area when they step is the train is a moot point.

Any MyFC member who hails from South Wales will probably recognise the some design principles that lay behind such delights as Port Talbot and Milford Haven: industrial estates, sparsely used land around estuaries, and the occasional bleak house and pub. The shrimp seller en route to Stonebridge Road is one of the few bits of local colour. Even the brilliant sunshine couldn’t do anything for the area. As Dr. Dave, a veteran of Northfleet away travel, commented, the concrete works look just the same in the sun as they do in the rain.

Thankfully house hunting in Northfleet wasn’t the order of the day: even the grimmest parts of Britain can be lit up by the beautiful game, hence my presence on a sunny February day in Kent: Ebbsfleet United v Exeter City.

[Ebbsfleet is not the same as Northfleet, although the two are close. Ebbsfleet, until recently, didn't exist until the new Eurostar terminal opened. It's soon to be joined by an Angel of the South statue. A 30ft lump of concrete would accurately reflect the area. Ebbsfleet United were, until recently, Gravesend and Northfleet but the name was changed to, apparently, tap into the potential growth of the area. Judging by the crowds, they may have some time to go until that vision is realised.]

The game promised to be an intriguing one. Both terms were on a good run of league form with Ebbsfleet winning their last four and Exeter unbeaten in the same number and both had recently seen off teams with title aspirations (Nigel Clough’s Burton Albion and Stevenage Borough respectively). The stage was set for a classic encounter. Shame neither side were keen on playing classic football or, for large chunks of the game, any kind of football at all.

This isn’t to say either side were committed to breaking up the match with consistent fouling to disrupt the opposition’s rhythm. More than the ball very rarely made contact with the foot in the first half, with head tennis the order of the day, and Ebbsfleet 40-love up on points, as the tactic was largely their own doing.

Fleet manager Liam Daish has a side that not play pretty football but, as Jade Goody or Jodie Marsh will tell you, lacking aesthetics is in no way a hindrance to success. Indeed, previous Conference champions have employed a very direct, physical approach, with a touch of skill. Playing like Brazil won’t necessarily get you out of the league.

A shame, then, that Exeter play best as a neat passing side with ball to feet and got quickly sucked into an aerial battle that they had little chance of winning. Fleet are a tall, physical side and were winning much of the headers in the centre of the park, while Akinde was having plenty of success against Rob Edwards at left-back, often drawing the centre-back out of position as well and exposing holes in Exeter’s rearguard.

After nearly twenty minutes of hoof and head (with a bit of running), and Exeter getting very little of the ball, Ebbsfleet’s tactics paid off when Akinde lured City centre-half Danny Seaborne into making a lunge in the area. No mistake from McPhee and Fleet were one up from the spot.

But for Andy Marriott in the Exeter goal, Ebbsfleet could have been three-up by half time. And that’s about the only other comment you could make of the first half: a dire spectacle but one with Ebbsfleet very much on top. Any MyFC fan wanting good football would have been disappointed, but impressed nonetheless at the efficiency of the home side.

Proceedings picked up in the second half when Exeter manager Paul Tisdale rang the changes, moving Edwards to a deep-sitting central midfielder, bringing on teenager George Friend at left-back and removing striker Steve Basham to go 4-1-4-1.

What seemed to many like a defensive switch had the opposite effect, with Edwards on hand to mop up the second ball, something Exeter were badly lacking in the first half. Suddenly the away side were on the ascendancy and were back on level terms after a sustained period of pressure saw Matt Gill strike a sweet low shot from outside the area into the bottom right-hand corner.

Soon after Ebbsfleet started to work out how best to cope with the new formation and the game slowed down again, albeit in a far more open fashion than the first half. Both sides had chances to win it with Akinde rounding the keeper before deciding to take an extra twenty touches and contrive to blast over from five yards, while at the other end Exeter’s Wayne Carlisle was denied an almost certain goal by a superb last-ditch tackle from Fleet left-back, and purveyor of a dodgy mullet, Sacha Opinel to leave it honours even.

If the first half was to football what Northfleet is to architecture then the second half was akin to the Eurostar terminal: pretty but not a lot going on beneath the surface, although impressive in places.

Both sides look well primed to steal a play-off spot and with teams above them faltering this match could well be repeated as a play-off semi, or even final, in which case MyFC fans may fancy running a campaign to get Liam Daish installed as the ‘Angel of the South’. Assuming he stays, that is, and doesn’t resent having his team picked by people playing a glorified Championship Manager game.

Waiting for the train back to civilization, the Eurostar terminal was visible from the less glamorous surroundings. On one hand, it had done its best to blend into the surroundings with a large, empty car park. On the other, the sleek new building seemed somewhat incongruous with the sparse industrial estates.

And therein lies the same for Ebbsfleet United FC. The long ball football is as attractive as the area its played in, but its effectiveness is closer to a high-speed Eurostar train (albeit one that requires you to spend vast portions of the journey looking up into the sky). And just as Northfleet is looking to evolve as an area, so is the fan-owned club, although we won’t know for some time if either can be called a success.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: depressing parts of England, Ebbsfleet United, Exeter City, football, MyFc, Northfleet

Of all the places in the world, Ebbsfleet United seems a strange club to attempt to start a footballing revolution at. But today there’s much hype, excitement and general hyperbole about the future of football, as fans site myfootballclub.co.uk announce their takeover of The Football Club Formerly Known a Gravesend and Northfleet, or TFCFKAGAN for short.

For those not 100 per cent au fait with the altruistic website’s aims (and who can’t log onto it due to the heavy amount of traffic), it can basically be signed thus. Twenty thousand plus members have all chipped in £35 with the aim of buying a club, and running it along open, transparent and democratic principles, where the fans have control and vote on all aspects of the club, right down to team selection.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? The REAL fans reconnecting with a club and keeping out all those evil millionaires who so slight the Beautiful Game. Which is fantastic, but this is a football club we’re talking about – a private business – not a peace keeping mission to restore democracy to Pakistan, which seems almost more in keeping with the site’s mission statement.

Still, there’s been a real grassroots fans movement in recent years, with Supporters’ Trusts coming to the fore. Surely this is not only a logical conclusion, but good news for the game in general.

Well, in a few words, no. No it isn’t.

In longer words, It’s as near to pure communism or socialism as you’re going to get in football, and while a community owning the club is, in principle, seems attractive, there’s all sorts of areas that are heading for trouble on this.

Firstly, there’s the potential for this to be a footballing version of Orwell’s Animal Farm. You’ll have some people with more experience than others, you’ll have some with better ideas than others, and you’ll have some with inflated senses of their own importance. Eventually there’ll be the realisation that pure democracy within a business such as a football club isn’t effective, and there’ll be much bickering as those at the top try to convince those at the bottom that THEY KNOW BEST.

Secondly, I can’t see somebody like Liam Daish, or any other football manager worth his salt being overly happy about having his tactics and plans dictated to him by fans. These views may differ wildly and you’ll probably end up with a conservative consensus formation for most games. That may be fine for some, but on other occasions a more attacking or specific formation/tactic may be required for a specific game. That’s what scouts are for. Having fans, especially a large number of whom who’re not familiar with lower league football, and who won’t have the inclination to scout Crawley v Droylsden to get a handle on tactics, is another recipe for disaster.

You’re also going to face problems with firstly signings and secondly cash flow. I can see a vast proportion of those who’ve put money in wanting ‘names’ to sign for them and there’s a real danger they could end up signing aging pros at the end of their career on vastly inflated salaries, at the expense of gems from the lower leagues, or even the youth system.

Take Dagenham and Redbridge. Their top scorer last season, Paul Benson, came from way down the lower leagues (not much further above park football), while Craig Mackail-Smith, now at Peterborough, also came from down the lower league pyramid. My team Exeter City signed a guy called Matt Taylor from Team Bath over the summer, who is somewhat of a lower-league Vidic and has turned out to be somewhat of an inspired signing, having netted for us half a dozen times this season from set pieces, make a couple of vital goal-line clearances and is generally a defensive colossus. Again, not the kind of player a group of fans would vote on, as they’d have never heard of him. That’s the manager and scouts’ job.

This doesn’t even consider the very daft idea of transparency which, presumably, involves ensuring the balance sheet is available to all. If rival clubs know how much cash the club can spend, they’ll adjust their prices upwards accordingly. That’s not going to help Ebbsfleet.

Also, there’s the players to consider in this as well. How would they feel knowing their future ultimately lies in the hands of the fans rather than the gaffer, who’ll often see things on the training ground the rest of us aren’t privy to.

For example, last season two Exeter players – Richard Logan and Dean Moxey – were out of contract. Logan had been signed in January on a six month contract and had looked average, bar the odd spectacular goal. Moxey was a youth product who’d had an injury hit couple of seasons and appeared to have lost his way. I advocated releasing them both. Paul Tisdale begged to differ with my opinion, and those of a vast proportion of our fanbase. The upshot? Logan is currently our top scorer having reached double figures before November, while Moxey is having the season of his life and has easily been our best, most consistent player and should be the first name on the team sheet each week at the moment. Goes to show what I know.

In the short term, and with the type of cash they’ve apparently got floating around, it could work. TCFKAGAN may sign a couple of decent players for their push to the play-offs, it’ll attract interest, and potentially more cash, for the club.

But the BSP (or Conference to you and I) is a notoriously difficult league to get out of , and if the success takes a while in coming, I can see interest in this dwindling as all those Premiership or casual fans who’ve got enthused lose interest in a team that’s hovering around in the top-tier of the non-league and gradually start to stop paying their subs.

Sure, Ebbsfleet may pick up a few extra fans, but how many of these will be there come the end of the season, or even the following season when Fleet need to travel to Northwich on a cold, wet Tuesday night to keep in touch with the play-offs. Say you, as an Arsenal fan, put you cash into it, but the team had a poor run of form and it was a choice between stumping up a bit more cash or staying in to watch the Gunners in the Champions League on the box? Which would you choose?

Finally, I think their choice of club is a poor one. Ebbsfleet are a bit of a ‘one of those’ clubs. They periodically threaten the play-offs and have a reasonable band of support but, much like Woking, they’ve not really achieved anything in recent years and suffer from their proximity to bigger teams in nearby London. They also changed their name to an as-yet non-existent place to tap into ‘burgeoning’ support, a la Franchise FC. They’re reasonably stable, but suffer from having bigger, ex-league clubs around and other non-league clubs with sugar daddies.

Myfootballclub would have been better, and more welcome, investing into a club with history and/or troubled by debt. Someone like Halifax or Swindon, for example. In that case they’d be more welcomed by fans and there would be a real sense of ‘Hey, we can achieve something here. We can awake a sleeping giant.’

Ebbsfleet, with no disrespect, are a bit of a ‘nothing’ team. They’re not especially bad, they’re not as good as the top teams, they simply exist. It’s hard to get excited about that kind of club, just as it’s hard to get excited about Chelsea suddenly buying their way to the best manager and players in the world. To be honest, even forming their own team and working their way up through the non-league pyramid would be a better, and more satisfying idea. You just can’t buy passion.

It could give them stability (although TCFKAGAN has always struck me as a very stable club). What’s more likely is, after a good first season, the great scheme will hit a few unforeseen problems and they’ll either start running into financial and administrative difficulties, they’ll start slipping down the league, or, as is most likely, they’ll be forced to sell. I give them about 36 months before the dream turns sour and TCFKAGAN is on the lookout for new owners.

It’s a nice idea in principle, but will bring chaos in practice.

There’s actually a couple of clubs out there who operate a similar, but more practical method. AFC Wimbledon immediately spring to mind, and that’s largely because they’ve got such a dedicated and large fanbase determined to stick one to Franchise FC. And good on them. Their model works because they’ve started from scratch, everybody’s clear on their aims and objectives and they didn’t try to shoe-horn an existing reasonably-well run football club, and an idealistic fans model together.

Exeter’s the other example, with the Supporters’ Trust taking over when we were on the verge of folding. But even then, there’s the realisation that we can’t have complete democracy and transparency in everything. Our original model worked well for the first season and a half, but there was soon a growing realisation that a fan’s passion was no substitute for business nous, and we couldn’t ask the supporters to dig into their pockets every time we needed cash.

We’ve now got a clearer line of communication between the Trust board (the majority shareholder) and the club’s directors – we’ve got a more business-like, commercial operation in place and we’re one of the very few teams now in the lower leagues to turn in a profit. It’s also very satisfying to know those in charge are, ultimately accountable to us – the fans – and we’ll never again be fleeced by a couple of conmen.

That’s not to say the Trust model is perfect, and there are problems and issues I won’t go into here. Trusts such as that at York City eventually sold up. There’s also the issue of investment. If a rich Exeter supporter offered to invest in the club for a space in the board, it that would cause a serious amount of soul-searching.

Fan involvement, and money IS a great idea, and I honestly believe more clubs should have some form of supporter trust representation involved at boardroom level, if not as majority shareholder (this won’t work for everyone) then at least being a shareholder with a say in how the trust is run. I’m a passionate believer in Supporters’ Trusts and think their involvement is generally a positive thing in football, even if they come equipped with their own set of problems.

But myfootballclub.co.uk? It’ll go down as a worthy and well-intentioned, but ultimately unsuccessful, footnote in the annuls of non-league clogging.

I’d be interested to see what bloggers with a good understanding of economics, like Tim Worstall and Chris Dillow, make of it. But, for the time being, Two Hundred Per Cent has the final word:

“Ultimately, this club has been sold to be the plaything of a few thousand would-be Alex Fergusons. Whether this proves to be beneficial to the club and its supporters is open to question, but one thing remains certain. Myfootballclub and Jason Botley have done very nicely indeed out of this, and would appear to be the only thing that matters to them.”

UPDATE: Brian’s not too impressed either.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Ebbsfleet United, football, good intentions, myfootballclub, supporters' trusts

Following the Usmanov case,there seems to have been a raft of ‘cease-and-desist’ actions around the internet, most notably the bunch of Sheffield Wednesday fans wondering where the money’s gone[1], and secondly the Society of Homeopaths who got somewhat miffed at the suggestion that this relatively unproven medicine might not be all that [2].

Firstly, I doubt very much this is a relatively new tactic. It’s just before Usmanov the internet community wasn’t quite as aware, or as bothered by it. Very much like the phone-in and BBC scandals, once people start looking, or bothering, the instances are there. Anyway, that’s somewhat of a side issue.

What this does show is that the internet, while on one hand democratising us all and giving anyone and everyone a voice, is also the most vulnerable to the stifling of free speech.

This largely comes back to a problem I’ve repeated ad infinitum. You could make an argument, certainly in the Quackometer site, that what is being raised is in the public interest. To my mind, Dr. Lewis would have several other defences in a court of law before he’d even have to fall back on Reynolds. That’s assuming he’s actually libelled someone, which I’m not entirely convinced he has. Yet Ben Goldacre can write about the same topic in the Guardian and nobody’s removed the article or forced Goldacre or Guardian Unlimited to be taken down.

If anything, this neatly highlights the problem. On one hand, major media organisation writing about issue worthy of debate. Publish and be damned, and the article remains in situ. Internet blogger catering for a more niche community on exactly the same subject - one lawyer’s letter later and the offending article, if not the whole site, could be forced down.

Yes, given anybody can take finger to keyboard and make any kind of accusation, it’s probably useful to have some form of legal controls and redress in place. But the playing field seems far from level with all other forms of published media, tilting the scales away from freedom of speech.

That, to my mind, shows our libel laws need to be rewritten sharpish to take into consideration the vastly changed nature of communication rather than waiting for piecemeal case law judgements that can often be at odds with each other.

In the case of the Sheffield Wednesday fans, there’s a slightly different, if still very much related to the core area, issue. To be honest, much of what I have to saw on this would be parroting my post on Martin Watson, the Hereford United fan banned from the ground for running an internet forum.

It’s not unsurprising football should be seeing more than its fair share of cases in regard to this issue. The 92 league clubs, plus the hundreds more in the lower tiers over have a very passionate, (inter)active fanbase who willingly engage online. Take a look at any unofficial forum for any football team and that’ll immediately become apparent.

In some respects the Guardian somewhat mislead by describing the Wednesday fans as bloggers when the offences took place within a forum. Unityneatly describes the differences between libel issues faced by bloggers and those by forum admins:

“Getting back to Iain [Dale] and his warning to anonymous commenters on his blog, notwithstanding anything else that I’ve said, the position in law that Iain faces is no different to that which has been explored by several bloggers in the wake of the Usmanov issue. UK libel law hold ISPs, webhosts, forum owners and bloggers liable not only for their own content, but for anything they ‘publish’ up to, and including, anonymous comments. It all very well issuing ‘warnings’, as Iain has done, but in doing so he rather misses the point that its only by virtue of the largesse of the litigants in the Owlstalk case that it appears that they’ve chosen to pursue claims against a small number of specific members of the forum, when  they could just as easily – more easily, in fact – have pursued the owner of the forum.”

What I would disagree with Unity is on his explanation of the reasoning and motvations behind the original postings on the Wednesday forums – namely suspicions about the balance sheets.

There are a lot of very suspect characters who’ve been involved in football clubs in the past, and there are probably some still running clubs at the moment. You’ll also get a section of the fanbase who are better informed than others and ay use the forums to raise awkward questions. It certainly gets done a great deal on the Exeter City forums.

There will be some postings that are downright libellious. In my experience, moderators are usually pretty swift to pick these up. Genuine discussion of the off-the-pitch matters often concern matters that are in the public interest, and deserve to be at the very least debated and aired. [3]

However, there is a fine line between libel and genuine discussion, and not all posters will have received the basics in libel. Nonetheless, the free speech issue still remains. It may be uncomfortable for the club or individual and they may not enjoy what is written but if it is done fairly, and is an honestly held opinion or, better still, true, it has the right be be heard – nobody should be allowed to censor something just because they not like the content on an unlibellious piece of writing.

The net, specifically forums and blogs, are a fourth and a half estate of sorts. They should be given the chance to behave like one and develop properly into a fifth estate, or merge with the fourth.

[1] Something they’ve probably been wondering ever since they fell out of the top tier of English football.

[2] At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical ‘I’m not an x, some of my best friends are x’s', I use some homeopathic medicines, mainly to ward off colds. But then I use paracetamol to do the same thing. Both appear to work. One could probably do with a bit more research into it.

[3] And, in the past, I’ve heard some pretty-eyebrow raising football-related stuff covering several different clubs that the media often don’t touch but gets picked up on the forums and then by the media. At least several of these have come from pretty impeccable sources and without the forms a large proportion of the fanbase would have been none the wiser.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: bloggers, football, free speech, libel, Sheffield Wednesday, Usmanov