onionbagblog

I really do despair over recent events down at Meadow Lane. A provincial Fourth Division team getting into bed with the mysterious Middle East millions, a seedy Swede happy to pimp out his services to the highest bidder, plus an ageing pro looking for one final pay check – you have the perfect plotline that encapsulates football losing its soul.

It was no great surprise to wake up on Wednesday morning to find that Super Sol had gone AWOL. Again. Campbell’s appearance down at County was a marketing exercise; he was the marquee player (urgh!) bought in to tempt the other big names down to The Lane for a final fling.

Fourth Division football is a world away from the Champions’ League. It’s a lesson that the mysterious Munto Finance has learnt overnight, and one which will make its famous five year plan to return to the Premiership appear as unrealistic to the plotters, as it did to the real football world when it was first revealed over the summer.

But first a disclaimer:

(Lapsed) Forest fan having a knock at Notts? Not really. You need to understand the hierarchy of East Midlands football to recognise that County are a family club. There’s no worse sight than a bitter football fan, spewing out bile and hatred over a regional rival. But if pressed, I reserve the right to spew out my bile and hatred over the regional rivals of D***y and L*******r.

Pity the poor Notts old boys, who get genuinely angry that Forest fans don’t hate them with the same feeling they hold for their foes across the river. I grew up watching Notts County. Whilst Forest were winning European Cups, County gave my primary school free family tickets, in an attempt to snare a lifetime of misery upon the impressionable young Nottingham football fan.

Thankfully I followed the glamour, and went down the balmy European nights route at the City Ground. But yeah, Notts and I have history. I have happy memories of watching Neil Warnock’s side (really) in the late ’80s, taking the Pies all the way up into the old First Division.

“We’ve got Charlie Palmer, he smokes marijuana.”

Yeah, it was a crazy time, and one which treated any UB40 carrying young man around time rather well, with very generous discounts for the unemployed. It was almost worth not getting a job, just to watch the Pies on the cheap every other week.

The small fan base was one of the genuine innovators of the burgeoning fanzine scene of the time, with the wonderful Pie serving as a template for what football fandom could achieve on a local level. Cult heroes were born on the wrong side of the river, with Don O’Riordan, Mark Draper and Tommy Banana Boy Johnson. I once saw Big T doing the shimmy shammy.

Glorious Wembley days followed. Watching Notts beat Brighton in an old First Division play-off final is one of my highlights in thirty years of watching football. We didn’t like the view from the cheap seats, and couldn’t but help notice that the outer edges of the Royal Box were free. A quick trip around the old stadium, and one almightily blag later, we were sitting within touching distance of minor royalty.

Not many Arabs around, mind.

Ah, and so what attracted you to the multi-millionaire football investors, Mr Sven? It certainly wasn’t the female fan base down at The Lane.

And then along comes Mr Campbell. If paying the thirty five year-old £40k a week for sitting around and being ‘unfit’ wasn’t bad enough, allowing to release him from his footballing reality check just smacks of a short term hit and run investment in the club. Munto Finance has already lost the family ethos of the club, trying unsuccessfully to eject Meadow Lane tenants Nottingham Rugby.

The club has sold its soul, playing around with the infrastructure as though it were a Subutteo game, reducing the few loyal Notts old boys to something of a laughing stock. If it wasn’t for the Forest love / hate thing, then yeah, I would find it more amusing than alarming.

And so as the song said: Notts County had a wheelbarrow, and it looks like the wheel has finally fallen off. They’ll be bringing Gary Birtles out of retirement next.

Fools.

*ah, and we appear to have come full circle, with the very first onionbagblog post addressing… Sol Campbell, almost six years ago – blimey*

West Ham Vs Millwall and the boys up for a ruck: C’mon – even Stevie Wonder could have seen this one coming. But in the land of the media blind, the one eyed knobber is King. Which is why we have on Wednesday morning, much hand wringing from BIG media as it tries to get to grips with the return of the English Disease.

Hey fellas, listen carefully: Football working class hooliganism *shhh* – it never went away.

What has changed in the past two decades is the embourgeoisement of football (yeah, I’ve got a degree in sociology, and I’m going to bloody use it.) Sanitise the beautiful / ugly game with TV matches re-branded as events, players as pop stars and supporters as the… supporting cast, and football loses its appeal. It did for me, anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh woe and a return for the good old-fashioned days of running from The Millwall after Neil Warnock’s Notts County had an unlikely 5-0 away win down at the old Lane. But it was, y’know, rather exciting at the time.

I was also rather young at the time, and being caught up in a ruck with other lads from a different part of the country, trying to pull one over the police, is exactly the kind of thing that gets a young man about town rather excited. Nowadays and an evening in with a bottle of bolly and a flick through of the New Statesman seems to help me sleep at night.

I can plot the downward trajectory and isolate exactly where I lost all interest in football – August 1992 and the first live Sky match as Liverpool came down to the City Ground. This is the exact moment when football went from being a passion to becoming part of the showbiz catwalk.

Across the river in the Fair City and the peak appears to have been reached this week with The Pies agreeing to pay the thirty four year-old Sol Campbell £10m over the next five years. Dear old Jimmy Sirrel wouldn’t have even given the big man a free bus pass, so that he could travel along to the game with his gaffer.

A return to city centre run-ins every Saturday afternoon isn’t the answer. But boys will be boys, and a bit of a Mexican stand off instead of a crappy Mexican wave might actually liven up some of the s**** Sky serve up on a Sunday afternoon.

The Nu Football Hooliganism (ha!) just might end up saving the game. Carling can’t be too happy being associated with the Hoolie Cup; I can’t see the Sky execs enjoying the gritty side of the game either. The only downside is that it can’t be too long before some knobber Tory politician fancies making a name for himself with a call for ID cards.

I’m personally hoping for a re-match, with West Ham drawn away at the New Den in the FA Cup come the start of the New Year. Now that’s a fixture I would happily pay to watch on TV.