Heroes & Villains, the Aston Villa fanzine
Heroes & Villains => Heroes Discussion => Topic started by: wozwebs on November 27, 2014, 07:00:38 PM
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Brilliant read this, spot on - http://www.thedaisycutter.co.uk/2014/11/how-supporters-became-the-new-villains-of-modern-football/
Cast your minds back to the recent past when the story of football and the supporters who breathe life into it was irrefutably accurate.
The narrative went something like this –
Once upon a time football was the working man’s game and men (predominantly) could take their kids each week and treat them to a programme and half-time pie while watching players who didn’t seemingly reside in an alien, gold-plated universe.
The son wants to bring a mate from school? No problem. Get permission from the parents and into the car they go.
Alternatively you could go with your mates; enjoy a few pints and sway and chant on the terraces, deafened by an electric atmosphere that crackled with passion and hatred in equal parts. Amidst the steam rising from the thronged bodies and the faint aroma of piss it was tribal in there. Exhilarating and brilliant.
One day a big bad wolf called Sky came along and threw a great big bag of money at the game thus ruining everything. Players’ wages spiralled into unimaginable lunacy, luring in mercenaries from abroad with little emotional link or loyalty to the club’s shirt. Each club’s bloodline of young local talent was severed forever – doing irreparable damage to the national side – while in the ticket office ‘our Barb’ was replaced by an automated service. These and hundreds of other examples meant the club that was once the sporting heartbeat of a community became, in time, a cold stone and steel edifice with delusions of grandeur.
Games meanwhile were switched from Saturday to Sunday to Monday on a television companies’ whim. That train ticket you purchased in advance for the weekend away hundreds of miles from home? I hope it’s redeemable because now it’s on a week night, necessitating time off work, further extortionate travel costs, not to mention a match ticket that’s a fifth of your weekly wage. All this to sit in a vacuous glorified library sitting on plastic seats surrounded by plastic tourists a few feet below guys in suits standing behind glass who have got in for free because their brother works for Heineken.
At least you get to enjoy a pint of Heineken yourself at half-time. In a plastic cup of course and on the concourse. You want to drink whilst watching the game? What are you, some kind of animal? Oh and that will be six quid please.
Your team loses 1-0 and they screech out ‘Just can’t Get Enough’ over the tannoy when the goal goes in.
Unfortunately there is no happy ever after to this tale as a few days later it starts all over again. The seasoncard that cost you over a grand and sustained grief from your partner is used to watch a player on a hundred times that a week limp off with mild fatigue before leaving the ground in a supercar usually only seen in Fast and Furious 7.
The end? There is no end.
The above has purposely been written as a fairy tale because that is slowly and maliciously how the past twenty-two years is being rebranded. The established narrative for how the beautiful game became the soulless, expensive, distant incarnation we all know it as today is perniciously being distorted as a work of fiction and worst of all it’s the ordinary supporters – the new villains of the piece – who are unintentionally aiding and abetting the outrageous lie.
Let me elaborate.
This week saw yet another example of supporters getting it in the neck as Villa Park saw its lowest attendance since 1999. Firstly stats be damned because sometimes you have to defer to empirical knowledge and I know from a lifetime of eating, shitting and breathing football that Villa fans are right up there with the best and most loyal around. They always take numbers away; the Holte End is a formidable roaring beast; and they cede to few for noise or passion. This despite enduring decades of unfulfilled hope, the complete absence of silverware, and Bosko Balaban.
The attendance for their fixture vs Southampton was 25,311 which, to my mind, represents a respectable return for a Monday night game, during a prolonged spell of poor football and results, a month before Christmas, and when tickets were £40 upwards. The tempting alternative of course was to stay at home, in front of a toasty fire, and watch the game on Sky and the figure suggests to me that all of the die-hards chose the first option while some of the fair-weather fans opted for the latter.
Considering the factors mentioned above who could blame them? Well, disgracefully some portions of the press could and did, along with rival supporters who gleefully scoffed and called them out for disloyalty on social media.
Sky themselves could barely hide their disgust at the empty seats which really is the height of hypocritical sadism and akin to offering someone a warm chocolate fudge cake then making snidey comments as they enjoy it. “Look at you eating that. You disgust us. You know you’re going to get fat right?”
Certainly the lowest attendance for fifteen years by a top flight club warrants some media glare. But surely the angle should have been how and why.
Why we’re sick and tired of being royally ripped off and taken for granted. Being expected to pay four times what fans in Germany do and that’s before you get to the over-priced excuse for a stadium hot dog.
How staging games on a Monday night inevitably lessens atmosphere. We’re not Americans and we’ve never bought into it.
How Sky are fucking killing the game that we love, bombarding us with sanitised, Rooney-obsessed hyperbole.
Instead – disgracefully – it was the supporters who took the blunt of it. Those protesting with their feet over Paul Lambert’s miserable tenure. Those unable to get out of work in time to travel into the congested city centre on a Monday evening. Those who cannot afford tickets in a sustained and cruel recession.
Lock them up and throw away the key I say.
This was only the latest in an increasing trend of fan scapegoating.
Recently we witnessed multi-millionaire Paul Scholes enjoying an all-expenses-paid hospitality-laden trip to the Etihad and wasting no time in laying into the Manchester City supporters for generating too little atmosphere for a Champions League game. Bizarrely this was uttered in his atmospheric monotone voice a half hour BEFORE the game was due to start and as he purveyed a half-empty stadium the former United schemer couldn’t resist having a further dig on City’s supposed lack of attendance.
Meanwhile supporters were busy navigating a gridlocked city centre, sweating on making the TV-friendly kick-off time, with a ticket in their pocket they’ve worried their overdraft to attain.
Over on Twitter Scholes’ ex-team-mate Rio Ferdinand dispensed with feigned serious analysis and openly mocked non-attending Blues. He tweeted “Big CL game and fans would rather Ramsey’s Kitchen”.
Is it only me who finds it somewhat sick when multi-millionaires – fabulously rich from the loyal support and merchandise-purchasing of the paying public – ridicule those who currently don’t have a pot to piss in through a bleak economy? Yet this is fast becoming the norm and is occurring unchallenged in a new narrative where Sky, Murdoch, and the Premier League are no longer the villains of what the sport has become. Rather it is us, the life and blood of the game, who are now apparently to blame for the banality of what passes for modern football.
That City match is particularly pertinent to myself. As a Blue I have travelled the length and breadth of the country watching pre-takeover dross and post-takeover wonderment. On this occasion two simultaneous bills arriving the day before the game meant I had a straightforward choice to make –attend the Roma game or eat that week. How was your pre-match hors d’oeuvres Scholes?
We’ve also recently seen Jose Mourinho turn on his own fans for their apparent lack of atmosphere – presumably they’re too busy reeling from the astronomical price of admission to the Bridge – while Emmanuel Adebayor took matters into the realms of the surreal by chiming in with criticism of Spurs fans.
When a player on £200k a week who is known for putting in the minimum of effort – and only then when the mood takes him – feels he can slag off supporters for enthusiastic shortcomings you just know the game is up.
I’m reluctant to haul the wider frame of politics into this but elsewhere in recent years we’ve witnessed often the sick and twisted strategy of blaming the victim for societies’ ills. While bankers gamble away our economy and spiral us into a 21st century depression and multi-billion corporations refuse to pay their tax it appears that the reason you and I are struggling at present is all the fault of a bloke trying to make ends meet by cleaning windows while on incapacity benefit.
The media relentlessly hound the poor, the ordinary, and anyone whose surname ends in a vowel yet give a free pass to the rich and powerful who are immorally screwing this country into the dust.
It appears this very same macabre master plan is now slowly seeping into football.
Yet, as if this wasn’t distasteful enough, there isn’t even solid grounding to the claims. While the average price of a Premier League matchday ticket has risen 15% since 2011 attendances continue to rise with grounds 96% full last term, an increase of 2.1% from the previous year.
As always we are more than doing our bit. As always we are going above and beyond.
As for atmosphere it is impossible to use statistical data to assess whether it is indeed quieting. But anyone who has attended a PL game in recent years will know all-too-well that everything is stacked against us in this regard.
When clubs threaten you with eviction if you have the temerity to stand – or even shout or become agitated in some cases – it is extremely difficult to rouse an electric atmosphere sitting in the plastic, sterile environment of someone else’s making.
Throughout the years we have been caged like animals, demonised as the scourge of society, baton-charged by foreign police, fleeced stupid, overcharged and under-appreciated. We are not taking the fall for this one.
The next time a club’s fanbase receives criticism for not filling its ground and jumping about wildly at a ludicrously-paid striker going through the motions please refrain from joining in. Stymie your every instinct to ‘bantz’ a rival. Instead consider the source. A manager with a motivational agenda. A deluded player living in a fantasy world. An ex-player pathetically trying to gain a reputation for straight-shooting. A media thoroughly bored of the old narrative. And overall a depressing reversion to assumed type that somehow the supporters are always to blame.
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Can't disagree with any of that. Needed saying. If I had only one sentence to paraphrase all that it would be "the media has turned the sport of football into part of the entertainment industry".
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Great rant .
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Good read, and hard to disagree with.
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Standing ovation.
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As much as I applaud that article,Mondays crowd would have been good in the late 80s,when it was standing,a fiver to get in,pay on the day,3pm kick offs etc.
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Standing ovation.
If you continue to stand you will be thrown out - last warning
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Excellent read
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Excellent piece, absolutely nails it, thank you for posting
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Not seen this elsewhere and not sure where to put this so here seems as good a place as any.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/nov/26/fans-view-aston-villa-have-no-system-no-direction-no-leadership
From the number that turned up the other night it might seem rich saying that Aston Villa fans are a loyal bunch, particularly during hard times, but during the David O’Leary days we used to turn up and do the conga in the aisle because the football was that bad. There is a core group of supporters who will watch the team no matter what, but a Monday night match being played in near-freezing temperatures, that is live on TV and is going to offer next to nothing in terms of entertainment, is a hard sell. The club would have struggled to fill the ground even if they had given away the tickets for free.
Villa sell a lot of seats for decent prices but that isn’t necessarily the issue. What were the supporters turning up to see against Southampton? One shot on target. Two corners. A few blocked shots. We have scored six goals in 12 league games this season. To say our home form over the last few seasons has been dire is somewhat of an understatement.
The 25,311 fans who made it to Villa Park saw a team defend resolutely for 90 minutes, which has been an improvement on previous seasons but there is no creativity in the team and there hasn’t been any for a while. Everything is very one-dimensional. Christian Benteke has been injured and then suspended this season, so it’s difficult to judge but the team’s strategy and even survival has been built around the Belgian in recent years. Everything is channelled through him, with Gabriel Agbonlahor and Andreas Weimann feeding off the scraps.
The core fanbase are loyal but as with many clubs there are a group of floating fans who will come and go. And, being brutally honest, they could buy a lot for £42. Those fans could take their partners out for dinner with that money, take the family to the cinema or buy themselves FIFA 15. Sure, they’ll be looking at their phones every few minutes to see the score, but it will be a pretty empty stream.
It’s funny how you reset your expectations after seven straight defeats. You start off wanting goals, but then you look for shots. And if there are no shots, maybe attacking intent. After that you’d settle for some possession. But there is nothing with the Villa at the minute.
A casual Match of the Day viewer might see Villa playing on the counter-attack and think that we break with great speed and ruthlessness, but for the other 86 minutes it’s aimless. That is the biggest frustration. In the summer we brought in Tom Cleverley, who looked like he could pick a pass in the early years. He could play in a more advanced midfield role, in front of Fabian Delph and Ashley Westwood, but he has become just another runner.
Paul Lambert said he was pleased with the performance last night. But honestly, what are the expectations now? Post-match Lambert found it hard to find the words to say what they had worked on, in the end he settled on Agbonlahor’s speed, but how does a team even work on an individual’s pace. Villa fans have heard the lines before. The manager has been under financial constraints and the supporters understand that, but he is losing his poker face. He must know it’s not good enough, and Roy Keane must know it isn’t good enough, because every Villa fans knows it.
What is the plan? What is the system? There’s lots of scampering around and closing down quickly, but it all descends into back-to-the-walls stuff very quickly. A fragility runs right through this team and the club. For a while, even if we start well and pick up a 1-0 lead, you know we’ll draw or lose 2-1. If we go 2-0 up, you know we’ll draw 2-2 or lose 3-2. It has been a difficult couple of seasons for the squad and every injury or defeat sees the team lose confidence further. There are no rocks in the team, no leadership, not even in “Concrete Ron”.
Southampton are a model of what Aston Villa could be. They lost a lot of players in the summer but have managed to maintain consistency and, more importantly, their identity. New players came in, but it’s almost plug and play. There should be a core that runs through a club, even if managers and players come and go.
Villa had Martin O’Neill, then Gérard Houllier, then Alex McLeish and now Paul Lambert. But if every time a new manager is appointed, a new five-year project begins and is never completed, then that’s a lot of waste. Villa have seen a lot of managers since 1999 without any consistent plan. There was initially hope when Randy Lerner bought the club but we have probably seen the biggest waste since then.
We could have won last night, we could win a couple of matches and move up the Premier League table but it wouldn’t solve the problem? How does Lambert want the team to play? Does he even know anymore? I always love to ask other Villa fans what system they think we play because it always varies wildly. What we have seen under Lambert is an over-reliance on Agbonlahor’s pace or an individual moment of brilliance from Benteke.
The system should come from the top. Any organisation needs leadership but there is none at Villa, just an uncomfortable silence. When Lerner took over the club, he did all the right things. He did the community elements, he spruced up the ground, he put Acorns Children’s Hospice on the shirts, he converted the kitchens in Villa Park so they could be used to teach kids how to cook, and his assistant General C Krulak spoke to the fans on message boards. All of these are good things but what is the plan now? Is there budget while we’re up for sale? What if a buyer doesn’t come in? The uncertainty must be hard for all involved with the club.
We are going to be in a mess next season. Ron Vlaar will go, Fabian Delph will go and I wouldn’t be surprised if Benteke finally forces through a move. Then where are we? Who will fill that spine? Some fans wonder if going down, rebuilding and coming back up could be a good thing, but looking around at the other clubs in the Midlands - Coventry, Birmingham City, Wolves and so on - suggests that might not be the case.
For as long as the club is run the way it is, like a business, operated and motivated by calculated business decisions then it will be viewed or attended like one. There has to be more for football fans, if not there will be wild swings in attendance. At least we scored last night. And two draws after seven defeats has at least stopped the rot. Going to Burnley on Saturday is not going to be easy, but every game is a struggle this season.
Ryan Baxter is a lifelong Villa fan. He was speaking to Paul Campbell
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Why do they all have to be so longwinded?
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Precisely - the length of the Birmingham Press articles are entirely sufficient to get the relevant points across.
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Precisely - the length of the Birmingham Press articles are entirely sufficient to get the relevant points across.
Another of life's great ironies - print media is easier to read long articles but has space constraints whereas the internet is limitless but I always find it hard to follow epic-length writing.
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Not seen this elsewhere and not sure where to put this so here seems as good a place as any.
Posted on the Paul Lambert thread a couple of days ago.
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Sky premiership , black Friday
Modern life is rubbish.
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That is why I write 6 pages of being pissed off for H+V. It would be better in print mind.....
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Sky premiership , black Friday
Modern life is rubbish.
If it makes you feel any better, it's not been called the Premiership since 2007.
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Excellent article and analysis that you will not find in the main stream press.
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Excellent article and analysis that you will not find in the main stream press.
This.
Because it's a fan's view.
Fans don't count anymore...except as a slightly football-related topic for "experts" to comment on.
Looking forward to my day out at Burnley tomorrow!
UTV!
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Considering the factors mentioned above who could blame them? Well, disgracefully some portions of the press could and did, along with rival supporters who gleefully scoffed and called them out for disloyalty on social media.
Sky themselves could barely hide their disgust at the empty seats which really is the height of hypocritical sadism and akin to offering someone a warm chocolate fudge cake then making snidey comments as they enjoy it. “Look at you eating that. You disgust us. You know you’re going to get fat right?”
If Sky (and/or other broadcastors) have such a problem with empty seats them maybe all PL season ticket holders should be offered free Sky Sports and BT Sport for a twelve month period. It might encourage fans to go to games in the knowledge they can watch all the other live games too.
No, it will never happen.
And if they're unhappy with gates now, just wait until 8pm games on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays become a regular occurrence (Virgin are reportedly claiming that at 41% there are not enough PL games on live TV). When that happens I expect many ST holders nationwide to pick and choose games or pack it in altogether.