Has the growing proportion of foreign players in the Premier League damaged the England team? The Case for the Defence

If any point of view has been doing the rounds for far, far too long it’s the one that says the growing proportion of foreign players in the premier league is bad the England national team. Current England manager Roy Hodgson and his assistant Gary Neville being  just two of the latest in a long line of commentators and insiders to echo this particular age old argument  The slight difference is that when its coming from someone as cosmopolitan as Hodgson, whose CV includes lengthy spells coaching outside the UK, taking in both Inter Milan and the Swiss national side,  it’s tempting to sit up and take notice, but for all that I don’t mind saying that Roy and Gary are both wrong,and here is why…..

Exhibit A for the defence: the historic performance of the England team. If the hypothesis that increasing numbers of foreign players has a detrimental effect on the England side is correct then we should be able to see some decline in the England teams fortunes relative to the increase in the number of foreign players in the premier league, but if we take a look at FIFA’s rankings, there does not appear to have been any decline at all.

As we can, in terms of the FIFA ranking  England’s position has, if anything, steadily improved throughout the Premier League era. England are in fact doing better, at least according to this measure, but even if you are inclined to think FIFA rankings are something you wouldn’t normally trouble a mucky posterior with then put it this way – England failed to qualify for the 1984 European Championships, or USA ’94 whilst their performance at Euro ’88 was hardly a classic. All these were at a time when the proportion of foreign players in the top-flight was minuscule.

Looking more closely at Hodgson and Neville’s comments the main strand of the argument  is that the number of foreign players in the Premier league  - over two thirds according to Hodgson – has been reducing the talent pool of ‘home-grown’ players who can be selected for England. Putting this into numbers the blog The Stiles Council points out that

On April 6th, 7th and 8th, the last full weekend programme in the Premier League, just 73 of the 220 players who started matches were English. Arsenal and Fulham did not start with a single Englishman in their sides; Wigan Athletic did.

The question though is how many players do you really need? An England team is made up of eleven starting players, plus a maximum of three playing substitutes. Even if all 220 players were eligible for England, the question has to be; how many of these would be serious contenders, would it be any more than 73? As a rough guide, in his tenure as England manager, lasting around four years, Fabio Capello selected 77 players and played 63 of them. Of these only 25 made ten or more appearances with just seven of these players making over twenty appearances whilst 17 of the 63 made no more than two appearances under Capello.

The long tail; Player appearances under Capello show a relatively small core of the England team with a small number of players making the most appearances

What this suggests is that  the core of an England team is therefore relatively small over a period of time with a large number of players on the fringes. It is therefore doubtful that the proportion of foreign players in the premier league is anywhere near impinging on the pool of talent from which the core of the England team is drawn and as Gary Neville himself conceded the top players like Beckham and Scholes “would have stood out in any environment.”

For Neville though the issue is not about these top players, but the ones just below them in the pecking order, with him posing the question

“But what about players like me? Players like my brother, Phil, or Nicky Butt?”

The argument here is that foreign players are reducing opportunities for some domestic players to develop, potentially into future England players.  But is this all down to foreign players, and does starting your career outside the Premier League prevent you from playing for England? After all former England captain Stuart Pearce spent several years at the beginning of his career, in the late 1970s and early 1980s – a time when there were very few foreign players in the Premier League, playing  for non-league Wealdstone whilst holding down a job as an electrician before being eventually being spotted and  picked up by Coventry City.

But, to go even further the true absurdity of the argument that the rise in the proportion of foreign players in the Premiership is damaging to the England national team is the reality that it is actually enhancing the England side. There are few who would argue against the assertion that today’s foreign players have with their talent enabled the Premier League to become one of the worlds pre-eminent leagues, a point not lost on Neville. Like the Singaporean economy the Premier league functions by paying top wages to attract top-talent which in turn drives the whole system forward. Those 73 players who are eligible for England are week-in week-out playing alongside and testing themselves against the best the world has to offer which will inevitably result in them becoming better players. The money brought in from Premier Leagues inexorable rise – including a large chunk from overseas broadcasting rights – also contributing to player development with money spent on upgrading training facilities as well as paying for the best coaches, sports scientists, psychologists, nutritionists and physiotherapists that money can buy.

And it’s mainly home-grown youngsters who benefit from any funds spent on youth development. For individual players and their families moving overseas at a tender age, far from their support-networks, when the odds of success are incredibly low is a risky business.  It is therefore unsurprisingly mainly home-grown players who make up Premier League clubs development squads and youth sides. One potentially valid point is that not enough is spent on player development, instead it is  being funneled into first-team wages, but were there fewer foreign players then there would invariably be a decline in the standard of football which would lead to a spiral of lower revenues and though possibly a higher proportion, a lower total spend on player development.

While Neville might look on enviously at the Spanish top-flight with it’s 63% Spanish players there is no evidence to suggest success of a national team is not in any way correlated – in fact the number of foreign players in a league is a measure of that leagues health; with leagues such as the Premier League, Serie A, Ligue 1, and Bundesliga all boasting a proportion of foreign players in excess of 40%. By contrast the leagues with the lowest proportions include Iceland, Albania, Finland, Slovenia and Wales.

The argument made by Hodgson and Neville is also essentially a pointless one. Any barriers, or quotas imposed in the name of enhancing England team would be misguided and damaging. The Premier League has flourished because of a removal of restrictions. Free movement of labour has enabled the League to attract the cream of the worlds playing and coaching talent, in turn bringing success and the financial rewards which come with it. Attempting to even partially reverse this process would send the league into decline and it is this which would be detrimental for the England team.

The Championship Play-offs; What happens next?

With the Championship Play-offs in full swing I’ve been looking at the stats to see what has happened to past winners. So just what can the winning team expect from the future? The one thing which seems most likely according to the first graph is that the winner can expect a fairly swift return to the Championship with around two-thirds of teams being relegated at the end of their very first Premier League season.

As we can also see survival rates for the victors compare rather unfavorably to those who are promoted to the Championship via the play-offs, this is perhaps due to the gigantic gap between the Championship and Premier League in terms of the standard of football and clubs incomes compared to the gap between the Championship and League One. Interestingly clubs promoted from League Two to League One through the play-offs do less well which suggests that there is similarly a  gap between these divisions, albeit  one less marked than the Championship/Premier League one.

The good news however, is that for clubs who survive their inaugural Premier League season their subsequent survival prospects improve drastically, this is undoubtedly because the Premier League is so competitive that weak sides are found out straight away and relegated in their first season. Survival is no accident.

So what is the medium-term outlook for clubs – where can fans of the play-off winners expect their club to be in five years time? According to this pie-chart the most likely place for a play-off winner to be at the end of their 5th season following their triumph is in the bottom half of the Championship, with 25% of former play-off winners finding themselves in this position. In total 35% of clubs finished in the Premier League, 60% in the Championship and 5% in League One.

Bigger than the FA Cup? The Rise and Rise of the Play-offs

It’s the time of the season where all attention turns to the play-offs. A brief-flurry of excitement capped by what is billed as the most valuable game in football, the Championship play-off final, but how did the play-offs come about and just how have they grown so much in stature since their introduction just over quarter of a century ago, and just what happens to the winners…

“It feels like we have landed on the moon without a rocket or a space helmet” – Blackpool FC’s Brett Ormerod immediately after winning the 2010 Championship play-off final in which he scored the winning goal

Play-offs have been used to decide promotion between divisions in the football league since the 1986/87 season. Their introduction to English football thanks, in large part, to then Crystal Palace chairman Ron Noades and his Brentford counterpart Martin Lange who met to discuss how additional funds could be generated for lower league clubs to offset the share of income about to be conceded to the top tier clubs as part of a deal to prevent a breakaway. The plans were put to a meeting of the football league 48 hours later and accepted, though with one modification which Noades had not envisioned; The wider-restructuring plans had called for the top-tier to be reduced in size from twenty-two to twenty clubs, however, according to Noades, no agreement could be reached on how to go about this,  relegating more teams from the top division, or promoting fewer from the second-tier.

The play-offs provided a way out of this conundrum and for the first two seasons followed a format where the three highest finishers outside the automatic promotion slots were joined by the lowest placed club above the relegation positions from the division above. This format meant that the first ever play off for a position in the top-flight did not see the victors gain promotion with Charlton retaining their first division status after three matches against Leeds, winning the decider 2-1 at Birmingham City’s St Andrews following two games which had both finished 1-0 to the respective home sides. The use of the play-offs in this compromise however, led to some cynicism about the new system, but some quarter of a century on the play-offs are an established part of English football reaching far beyond the football league to the lower levels of the non-league pyramid.

One reason for their success is that the play-offs make the league a more enthralling prospect with more clubs having something to play for over a longer period, as Noades pointed out in answer to critics at the time the play-offs would mean

 ..it was possible for over half the clubs in a Division to be interested in promotion right up to the final matches, consequently providing a great deal of interest for the fans, increased gates and the opportunity for many more teams to have a successful season rather than just the lucky few as at present

Replacing the two-legged final with a single game  was also instrumental in the continued success of the play-offs. In the first Wembley final in 1990 over 70 000 people watched Swindon Town and Sunderland play for a place in the top-flight – this compared to around 18 000 who had seen the Leeds/Charlton decider at the less glamorous St Andrews just a few years before and whilst it may be said these days  that cup football has become less fashionable than league football the play-offs have built their success by successfully combining elements of the two; The pinnacle of a league season, a winner-takes-all cup-final at Wembley with all the pomp and spectacle that entails, including the winning side climbing the stairs to receive their trophy. But the trophy is, of course, largely for show – the real prize is the place in a higher and more prestigious league.

The Championship play off in particular has been elevated to one of the biggest games in domestic football, arguably on a par with if not the FA Cup final then certainly the League cup. This is overwhelmingly due to the financial importance placed on the match; While the commentators back in 1987 were speculating against Charlton v Leeds that the ‘prize’ of a first division place was worth half a million the figure talked about in advance of West Ham and Blackpool’s meeting in 2012 was an astonishing £90 million. By comparison the winners of this years FA cup can expect to pocket something in the region of £3.4 million in prize money The reason for the riches on offer in this one game? The reorganisation of the league which gave birth to the play-offs was only successful in delaying a breakaway by the top tier clubs who went on to form the Premier League in 1992 a league which with the aid of escalating broadcasting deals subsequently became the highest revenue generating league in Europe with a revenue of €2.5 billion in the 2010/11 season

The growing inequality between the leagues is something of a paradox for the play-offs. The bigger the gap between the divisions, the bigger the prize, and therefore the bigger the game, but at the same time the lower the chance of survival in the higher league. Unsurprisingly it is the between the Championship and Premier League where survival rates are the lowest; Between 1986/87 and 2009/10 of 23 teams promoted to the top-flight via the play-offs fifteen were relegated in their first season, over twice the rate of clubs who were promoted as league champions. After just two seasons some 73.9% of clubs found themselves back where they began, a much higher rate than for clubs promoted to the Championship from the play-offs, where 20.8% were relegated after the first two seasons, and higher than the figure for League One where 37.5% of play-off winners failed to make the cut.

Curiously though the lack of success in holding onto a place in the Premiership is another crucial ingredient in the play-offs success. Like the publicity generated by Willy-Wonka’s golden ticket promotion the furore around the spectacle of the play-offs only serves to add to the mystique and allure of the top league and even if its winners find themselves unceremoniously booted out almost instantly they can at least return to their hum-drum lives with memories of rubbing shoulders with the stars.

A Season with Merthyr Tydfil (part 4)

Part four of my attempt to travel back in time to save Merthyr Tydfil FC by travelling back in time to the 1994-1995 season. With the pre-season over its time to get serious….. 

The Merthyr bus is on the road

And it starts at Huish Park, in Yeovil getting off to a dream start as Merthyr rush to a 2-0 lead, the goals scored by Tucker, a player who wasn’t wasn’t even meant to be in the starting line-up; in Premier Manager 3 unless you reset the line-up manually you automatically start with the team you finished the last game with so if you bring a sub on he stays in the line-up for the next match, but if I’m worried that this mistake means I can’t really take any credit for this piece of good fortune Yeovil make it academic by grabbing an equaliser in the second half. Still an away point isn’t bad. The pink bus can drive back to South Wales happy.

Back in the office the fax machine spits out some stats to help me make some sense of the game. I haven’t got an analyst on the pay roll so I can only guess there’s some intern lurking round Penydarren eking out an existence on discarded match-day pork-pies. What I’ve got isn’t quite Opta, but its message is simple and clear, my passing is awful: out of 63 passes only 28 were ‘good’, whereas Yeovil managed a more respectable 43 ‘good’ from a total of 69.

I’m not panicking yet, despite losing both my next two games; my first home game against Southport and a close 1-0 defeat to early pace-setters Stafford Rangers, but worryingly Merthyr are sliding down the table to 21^st place. As it is only the champions who get promoted a good start to the season is crucial. I badly need a win to avoid dropping out of contention before the season has properly got underway. Some relief comes in my very next match against Telford. After going a goal down two second half strikes see Merthyr record their first win of the season, finally we’re moving the right way up the table to 15th, but I need to sign some quality players to keep the momentum going.

A 1-1 draw with Welling is followed by a 2-1 defeat to Bath and it’s looking like my win was just a blip. With the next game against another table-topping side, Bromsgrove, things aren’t looking good.  I decide to spend some time getting my tactics right. I decide on an uncompromising approach, setting all tackling to ‘hard’ and  I switch my defenders from zonal marking to man marking at the same time increasing my wide-men’s percentage of running over passing, but I have to confess that  I don’t know what I’m doing.

It seems however,  I must have done something right as despite going a goal down early the Hutch equalises just before half-time and Tucker then goes on to snatch a late winner. It finishes 2-1 for my second win. I’ve also managed to sign my first player a reasonable – though not remarkable –  young striker, Penney, from Crewe Alexandra who has an overal rating of  ’Good *’. He costs me £48k and I give him his debut in the final 15 minutes of the Bromsgrove game. I’m still a long way from the squad I want though and continue to receive rejections from clubs and players alike.

In frustration I call Bournemouth and make a loan offer for a midfielder, Robinson. I’ve no idea what he’s like as I’ve not scouted him, but at this point I’m past caring.  My first approach is for 12 weeks which Bournemouth reject as being too long – agree on 6 weeks. Know nothing about him, just trying it to see what I get. He’s twice as good as what I’ve got with a passing rating of 44 – I now have my playmaker. Emboldened I get straight on the phone to Birmingham City making a loan offer for Steve Claridge and am turned down flat. Sights adjusted accordingly I persuade Bradford City to part with their third choice ‘keeper for nine weeks.

Next however, comes a truly bizarre, and slightly surreal turn of events. Having decided to appoint a new captain and vice-captain I carefully sift through the player ratings which seem most relevant. The top candidate is a defender, Gorman. With a high morale and aggression rating I reason that Gorman will be the perfect kind of grafting, battling and experienced leader to take on the robust rigours of the Conference. Fully confident I’ve made a great choice I click the mouse button to make him my new captain. The players response to this honor  A fax comes through just before the next match, an FA cup game against Third Division Hereford informing me that Gorman has for some reason best known to himself decided at this moment to take early retirement to to the Costa Del Sol.

I immediately hand the armband to my vice-captain Hutchinson and appoint tough-tackling defensive midfielder Benbow as his deputy. Fortunately the captaincy shenanigans have no effect on the team who record the best result of the season. Robinson scores on his debut and Tucker gets two goals. A late consolation from Hereford makes it 3-1 at full-time but I’m delighted with the giant killing. I know it’s only Hereford, but then I’m only Merthyr so it’s all relative.

Robinson is beginning to look like a great signing. Inspiring the side with a man-of-the-match performance he scores again in the next game against Farnborough with another goal from the new captain Hutchinson sealing a 2-1 win. Next up Merthyr beat Gateshead 2-0 a result which moves the team up to seventh in the table – only six points behind the leaders Kettering Town. Things are looking good indeed. If Merthyr can keep it up we’ll be challenging for the top spot.

Catch up on the Merthyr Tydfil story; If you haven’t already seen them parts one, two and three can be found here

Riverside Park: Theatre of Dreams

Today I found myself here; Riverside park. I’ve played on these pitches countless times, but it’s been years and years since I’ve played proper 11-a-side. Maybe it’s seeing the 1990s team photo round-up in the Daily Echo Sports Pink earlier this afternoon, but I’ve got a ball with me – albeit a very under-inflated one so what else is there to do, but have a go at re-living past glories.  I stroll over to the right hand side of the penalty area and try to curl the ball into the net. My first attempt is high and curves sweetly. The wind catches it just as I intended, but I’d put slightly too much on it and it eases well-clear of the top right corner. My second attempt, from ever-so slightly closer, has a lower trajectory. Truth be told it’s a bit of a mishit, but it goes straight in the middle of the goal.  Had there been a ‘keeper it would have been a routine save, but I’m happy, particularly with the way the net ripples. I can kid myself that I’ve still got it. My confidence rising like the tide on the Itchen I walk to the very edge of the area. I step back and take a short run up. My trainer scuffs the wet ground and I drag the ball wide – ahhhh those were the days.

Why football clubs go bust

Back when Aldershot Town went bust in 1992, it was big news. The relative rarity of a football club being liquidated enough to generate items on the national news where comparisons were made with the last club to suffer the same fate – Accrington Stanley in 1962, but these days football clubs hitting the financial skids is hardly news at all, more a regular occurrence that all supporters can expect to experience at least once in their lifetimes.

The strange thing is that although it’s stagnated of late English football has been on a fairly dramatic and long-term upswing since the mid 1980s with rising attendances, better, safer grounds,  and a growing global profile not to mention a record TV deal in the billions, yet this successful period has actually seen more clubs encounter financial problems than the long years of post-war decline.

The reason for this is that strangely a club going bust is not, as you would think, the result of failure, but of success. At least by my reading of some economic theories which seek to explain financial boom-bust cycles.

In the book dealing with the economic crisis, Capitalism 4.0, Anatole Kaletsky summarises the theories of Hyman Minsky an American economist who he says:

argued in the 1960s that long periods of economic stability would lead to conditions of financial overconfidence that would, in turn, promote leverage and exaggerate risk-taking and increase debt burdens throughout society.

But, whilst this may explain the banking crisis, what does it say about football? The key point is that banks are more likely to lend and that football clubs are more likely to take on debt not when times are bad, but when the times are good – as they have been for over two decades. This explains how clubs became increasingly leveraged. Certainly a deal such as that which brought the Glazer’s to Manchester United would have been unthinkable at a time when the fortunes of the game were dwindling rather than at a time when there a the not unreasonable expectation that fans will keep on paying more for tickets and television revenues will keep on increasing.

Though such predilection for increased debt and greater risk on the part of clubs and banks do not necessarily risk the whole game collapsing – for now – such behaviors can nevertheless prove highly damaging to individual clubs caught up in an environment of over-exuberance. Another theory outlined by Kaletsky, George Soros’s theory of reflexivity. can be used to explains how individual clubs can become caught in a cycle of over-confidence. As Kaletsky explains the theory essentially concerns the two-way interaction between perception and reality:

Imagine that house prices have been rising for a period, perhaps because they are recovering from a previous bust. The rise in prices may encourage overoptimism about future housing demand and make houses appear more attractive to bankers as collateral for mortgage loans. The increased availability of mortgages pushes up house prices, thereby justifying the original optimism about them.

This cycle continues to a point where perception becomes so far divorced from the fundamental reality that it is untenable and a bust occurs  So how can this relate to individual football clubs? The answer is that most clubs, at whatever level, who go bust do so following a recent run of success; Leeds in the Champions League, Portsmouth having won the FA Cup, Southampton having reached the FA Cup final, Bradford reaching the premier league, Truro achieving  five promotions in six seasons, Rushden and Diamonds climbing to League One, Weymouth achieving promotion to the Conference, the list goes on…

It is quite a popular notion that football clubs have a ‘natural’ level. Though I have argued elsewhere this is changing, for the time being at least a clubs fortunes are generally  linked to the level of support it receives from its surrounding area, not just fans paying to watch games, but also sponsorship from business in that area. Population is therefore usually a good indicator of a clubs ‘natural’ level in that most top sides are from major urban areas with a large population.

If we accept that each club has a level then this is in effect the fundamental reality. Like the example of house prices a club may have a particularly good season, achieving promotion. This may be for a number of reasons: because the club is below it’s level and simply rising to it’s rightful level, a particularly good manager, or even luck. The problem is then if this success is misinterpreted as a shift in the fundamentals resulting in the cycle of over-optimism. So Bradford City who had achieved Premier League status by a narrow margin become seen as a ‘big’ club leading to more investment,  loans and financing.  This may even produce further success which in turn reinforces the cycle, but all the while sustainability is being stretched to beyond the point it can be supported by the fundamentals which simply cannot afford a player on £40 000 a week, so it is with some inevitability that the over-inflated club will at some point come crashing back to earth.

The two theories together therefore explain why the majority of football clubs go bust; Firstly the growth of the game over the past two decades has resulted in a greater availability loans and finance and an increase in the number of risky transactions. This has in turn facilitated  bubbles whereby some clubs taking advantage of the availability of finance become caught in a cycle of drastically over-extending themselves far beyond a level which their fundamentals can sustain.

Winchester City vs Cirencester Town; Southern League South & West Division

I don’t come to Winchester often. That’s why half an hour before kick off I’m frantically power-walking back down the road I’ve just walked up. It was my sheer arrogance to think that some hazy memories of the area from years back coupled with the most cursory of glances at a map the night before would be enough to help me locate the Denplan City ground, home of Winchester City. In short I’ve come badly unstuck and am starting to think that my whole coming here was a mistake. If I can’t find the ground the day will be a write-off; I tell myself that I should have gone to see Totton and Eling instead…

Match action

And whatsmore I did have a big feeling of unease about today. There is something ghoulish about going to see a club in what very may well be its death throes, but in my defence I’ve been meaning to see Winchester City for a while, and well, there might not be much longer. I think about asking for directions, but wonder what the chances are of anyone knowing that Winchester even had a football team, let alone where the ground is. See, that’s Winchester City’s problem, Winchester is just not a football place..

I know this as I’ve just been in the library. With some time to kill, or so I then thought, I wondered if there’s any books in the local history section about the club. There isn’t. There are books on Southampton FC and there is also a history of the local rugby club, but such is the impact of the local football team – founded in 1884 – on the City that the only trace of it on the library shelves is a passing of mention within the pages of a History of the Hampshire league.

The Denplan City ground

Winchester have in fact spent most of their history in the Hampshire league with the occasional brief sojurn into the Southern League. These have never lasted long and don’t seem to end too well. Last time in 2008/09 the club finished 20^th in the Southern League South and West table, but were deducted three points for fielding an ineligible player. This meant the club then finished bottom and after a failed appeal were duly relegated.

Cirencester went into the dressing rooms at half time, only to come straight back out spending half-time huddled in the dug-out.

This time round though things seem even worse. Bottom of the table the club are safe from relegation due to Sholing’s withdrawal from the league, but relegation is right now the least of Winchester City’s worries. Only six players turned up to a recent training session, the electric company has pulled the plug and I heard mentioned, though I can’t confirm this, that there’s no running water in the toilets.

No hotdogs or burgers today.

When I eventually reach the ground a generator is spluttering away doing it’s best to provide power to the dressing rooms and another is powering the kitchen where a woman is preparing the post-match buffet. The club house bar is open, but it’s rather dark and the TVs fixed to the wall are blank. On the walls I spot a picture of Andy Forbes holding the FA Vase with another player. In the picture the sun is shining and both players have wide grins. Elsewhere is a picture of the 1991-92 Hampshire League Div 2 winning squad and another wall houses a framed certificate celebrating the clubs centenary in 1984.

Tumbleweed just out of shot. It was a depressed afternoon at Winchester City

Outside the clubhouse the scene is more like a post-apocalyptic wasteland than a football ground. The tea-hut/snack-bar is closed, with some sorry looking plastic chairs sat forlornly outside, while the club shop, a battered old caravan which puts me in mind of a John Salt painting, is shackled shut. A few people mill about and one peers through the window of the closed club shop. I see James Taylor, Winchester player-manager, looking serious whilst leaving the pitch carrying some warm-up cones and wonder what his thoughts are on the state of things at the club.

The Club Shop. Shut.

Soon enough Taylor is back out with the rest of his team and the sun is also making an appearance for the kick-off, but the temptation to see this as any kind of omen is cast aside by Cirencester Town who arrive in this Mad-max style town like a biker-gang intent on making life difficult for the inhabitants; all revving engines, testosterone and cold, hard stares. Crushing Winchester underfoot like an empty can of lager they ride out again with four goals and three points in what is the most one-sided encounter I’ve seen this season. Winchester’s only highlight is a saved penalty in the second half which sees the Cirencester number nine seething in frustration – The ill-feeling spilling over as soon play restarts with brawl involving the majority of both teams and one player from each side receiving a red card.

No chance of getting a matchday programme here.

During the game Winchester rarely look like a team and one player loudly criticises the others calling out “so lazy, every time, so lazy” in frustration at his colleagues after conceding the third goal. Rarely, if ever, does the side display any sense of being anything approaching a functioning unit – hardly surprising in the circumstances. Somewhat strangely nestling in my satchel is a book I picked up in a second hand book shop earlier in the day. Called ‘Flight to Arras’ it was written by a French airman, Saint-Exupery and is about a hazardous, but ultimately pointless reconnaissance mission over occupied France during the early stages of WWII. In it he says:

 Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is the house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom, and above all of futility.

Winchester, sadly, are right now a defeated club. Hopefully they can resolve their issues and get their electricity supply back by the 16^th April when they have a mid-week match against Tiverton Town otherwise the future indeed looks bleak.