Monday Moan 32

Hazard warning

Pat Nevin, ex-Chelsea player, current broadcaster and weekly contributor to Chelsea’s website, decided that when Eden Hazard kicked the ballboy during last week’s game at Swansea, it was the ballboy’s fault and that Hazard was entirely blameless.  His ‘reasoning’ was that the ballboy’s job is to get the ball back and that as he failed to do this, holding onto it instead, the only course of action open to Hazard was to kick the boy.

Oh really?  Leaving aside the question of whether or not kicking out was an appropriate, indeed the only, option available to Hazard, let’s just have a look at the incident.  The whole episode lasted no more than five or six seconds from the moment the ballboy retrieved the ball after Chelsea had put it out of play.  He ran to collect it.  Hazard ran over too.  Hazard appeared to try to wrestle the ball from the ballboy and in doing so pulled him to the ground – as shown in my picture.  The crowd reacted to this.  The ballboy then failed to release the ball immediately whilst Hazard was still wrestling with him, so Hazard kicked him. 

Five seconds – that’s all we are talking about here.  Was this significant time-wasting on the ballboy’s part?  Hardly up there with the worst examples of time-wasting that we see all the time from players when they are trying to run down the clock.

Even if it was, why on earth did Hazard decide it appropriate to kick him, even if we accept that he was hoping to make contact with the ball rather than the boy?  Why on earth did Nevin think it was right to do so?  If one of the Swansea players had been the one holding onto the ball would Hazard have kicked him? Would Nevin have supported him?  Of course not – so why was it OK when it was the ballboy?

So, if you happen to be in a queue at the checkout of your local supermarket, or waiting in line to pass through airport security somewhere, or waiting patiently at the roadside for the traffic lights to change in your favour, and spot Pat Nevin behind you, be very careful not to cause even an instant’s delay, or you will have to suffer the inevitable consequences. That spell in A&E will be entirely your own fault.

 

 

Glad I did not listen to the forecasters

I watched the weather reports with growing concern last week as the cream of British weather forecasters became more and more convinced that the East of England would be subjected to a major snowfall on Friday night and Saturday morning.  My plans for a weekend break to the Suffolk coast to celebrate my wife’s birthday looked to be endangered, so much so that on Thursday night I looked at the hotel reservation to check that the normal 24 hour cancellation policy would apply.

To my horror I discovered that the hotel had a 48 hour policy – full charges would apply if any less notice was given.  So, the options were either to crawl there through snow on Saturday morning and then wade back on Sunday night through the forecast floods, or don’t bother going at all and be charged the full amount for the room and meals I had booked.

We decided we’d go, come what may.  Saturday morning dawned bright, sunny and dry in Hertfordshire, with not a sign of the predicted snow in our area.  So we set off, convinced that as the journey progressed we’d see increasing evidence of the snow and have to suffer the inevitable delays along the way.  The further we travelled the more hopeful we became that we’d not be too delayed, but it wasn’t until we were about half an hour from our destination that we realised we’d not be seeing any snow at all. 

Of course, we were delighted to have experienced probably the best journey we have ever had to that destination, including a wonderfully clear and blue sky the whole way.  We then had two days of brilliant weather and a wonderful return journey – no snow, no floods, no need for the worry and the planning for the worst.

I know other parts of the country suffered badly on Friday night and that weather forecasting is becoming more reliable.  I am just glad that a combination of the 48 hour rule and our determination to get away this weekend meant that we didn’t cancel and thus did not miss out on a fabulous break, including two days in January where the sun shone all day long!

 

Andy Murray – what has changed?

Not that long ago, Andy Murray was widely viewed as a miserable, moaning, loser, condemned to being Britain’s best player for a long time, but unable to beat any of the world’s top three players on anything other than the rarest of occasions.  In many people he generated high levels of antipathy, such that they actually looked forward to him losing matches.

Things have changed.  I heard from a normally sensible and reliable friend last Friday that they were confused by their changed view of Andy Murray and were now hoping he’d win the Australian Final when a year ago they would have settled down with their favourite food and drink to enjoy watching him lose and then be miserable and ungracious afterwards.  I tried to reason with them and then offer some reassurance but, truth be told, I fear a spell working through their problems in AA meetings (Andy Anonymous) beckons.

One of my lines of argument was that whilst it was slightly distasteful that Andy had taken full advantage of Gentleman Roger Federer’s disinclination to raise anything much more than a gentle drop of perspiration on court in the semi-final, that hard-nosed Novak Djokovic would match Jockie Andy’s bucketloads of the wet stuff in the final.  And so it proved. Andy’s tartan-clad supporters (none of the Union-Jack waving enthusiasm of British fans for Andy when he’s abroad) had to watch as he succumbed to Djokovic’s powerful tennis.  He took defeat well, so much better than his blubbering Wimbledon performance (see Moan 6).

But how to explain his higher approval ratings (he was voted 3^rd on the Sports Personality of the Year contest this year – although we have to remember that the word ‘Personality’ in this instance is just longhand for ‘person’).  Maybe some people found his blubbering endearing, but I suspect it is more to do with our natural (if slightly unedifying) desire to associate ourselves with winners rather than losers.  Since winning the Olympics and the US Open, with Rafael Nadal’s apparently hopeless battle with injury, and with Roger Federer’s inevitable decline as he gets older, Andy suddenly looks like the real deal – so who wouldn’t want to support him now?

 

The never-ending election process in the USA

President Obama has just been inaugurated for his second term as US President.  He made a stirring acceptancespeech full of resolve to move forward on some key issues over the next four years. In many ways a more impressive speech than at his original inauguration four years ago, when hopes were so high for immediate and major change that he needed to promise less in order not to leave all his supporters disappointed. But still offering hope that America can move towards some of the principles set out in its constitution that it seems to find harder to pursue than other countries around the world:-

“Our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts; our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well; our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote; our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity, until bright young students and engineers are listed in our workforce rather than expelled from our country; our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit, to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown know that they are cherished and cared for and always safe from harm.”

Good luck with all that, against a backdrop of a Congress dominated by Republicans who still see Obama as one stop short of being a communist, or worse.  I find it depressing that there are those, in this country and no doubt elsewhere in addition to the USA, who seem to think that it’s helpful to object to everything a Government, President or Prime Minister proposes because there’s at least a chance that in four years, or whatever the period might be, there will be another election and they will get a chance to try to bring in their own ideas – against the opposition of those who will see another election coming up in a further four years, and so on round the never-ending loop that they call politics. 

And in the meantime, those who don’t have the means, the time or the inclination to play this game are left wondering whether anybody really cares about improving things just because it’s right, rather than changing things because it’s helpful to a political cause.