Complete Tosh.com

I’m horrified to see, via our own Newsblog, that Swindon has been included in the new Idler book of crap holidays. What could be a better place to spend a weekend than this fine railway town? The author simply lacked the imagination to deal with this town of contrasts.

Arrive Saturday AM, and go shopping in the outlet village, where designer labels go cheap, and which remains one of the few retail environments that doesn’t send me into a deep, irretrievable bad mood. It’s Europe’s largest covered retail outlet village, you know, and railway buffs will love the Great Western museum next door.

Afternoon arrives and the mighty Swindon Town FC beckons, when they’re at home – and the County Ground really is the home of football (we’re about to sign someone called Ricky Shakes, you know). A few hours later, hoarse but happy, get changed and head out to the homely, but excellent, Waterfall Chinese Restaurant (still haven’t found anywhere as good in London). Wrap the day up with a taste of the excellent Arkell’s 3B, or the Summer Ale, at the GW Hotel just down the road (say hello to Keith, the landlord, from me).

Then, in the morning, head up to the Cotsworld Water Park, or over to the Old Bell in Malmesbury for a fantastic Sunday lunch (great suet puddings, btw).

Whaddya mean that doesn’t sound good?

Wonderful news this week for those of us in that most un-crowded of demographics: Swindon Town-supporting Scotsmen. For mighty, not to say Super, Sam Parkin has been called up to the Scottish "Future" squad to face Austria next Tuesday in Mattersburg. He’s been in sensational form for Town this season, racking up 23 goals (and damned unlucky not to make it 24, even 25 against Bristol City midweek), so you’d be bound to say the call-up’s not before time, especially given a decent League 1 side could happily hold its own against most SPL fodder.

It does, of course, mean Parkin will be buggering off to a Championship side in the summer, but I’m sure he’ll go with most Town fans’ best wishes. He’s been a star for Town since Andy King plucked him from the obscurity of Chelsea’s reserve reserves a few seasons back, and deserves a stab at a higher level.

Here’s hoping he nets on Tuesday night – with Scotland’s current dearth of talent, especially up front, a hard working, skillful and 6ft 2in forward who can find the net without the aid of map and compass might cause a pleasant surprise or two up Hampden way.

Gary Younge writes up the Eason Jordan affair in this morning’s Guardian.

"Jordan’s demise may be
much more significant than it first appears. In particular, it has been
hailed as a victory of new technology over the old. "The moral of the
story," writes Captain’s Quarters on his blog, [is that] "the media
can’t just cover up the truth and expect to get away with it – and
journalists can’t just toss around allegations without substantiation
and expect people to believe them any more."

A salute is in order, tonight, to a young footballer you’ve never heard of. Here’s a story that’s a million miles away from your Premiership tantrums and snorting disgraces, and a million times more uplifting for it. It concerns no multimillionaire pop culture icon, but a young pro who earns less in a year than Chelsea captain John Terry trousers in a week.
Continue Reading →

The New York Times endorsement of John Kerry, in yesterday’s leader, is a powerful read, even if it is appearing in a paper whose standing has been badly diminished by scandal, aloofness and other mistakes since the last Presidential contest.

The piece, unusually for the NYT, is both comprehensive and to the point, and it is also damning of President Bush.

“We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It’s on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.”

A highly recommended read, even if such pieces do little to the final result.

Terrible things happen to sporting championships when you start messing around with the format.

Just ask the Scottish Premier League or – sorry – the Scottish Premierleague – whoops, no – the SPL. Back in the 90s, not content with being unfairly branded a “Mickey Mouse league” by anyone south of the border, Scottish football’s finest minds set about proving their tournament was a farce. They changed names. They changed the size of the league. They changed the size of the league again. They abandoned relegation for teams called Aberdeen. This year’s wheeze: they told a perfectly good side they couldn’t, after all, get promoted – but only at the end of the season, once they’d actually won their championship.

Short of demanding players donned big ears and talked in squeaky voices, they couldn’t have done much more – although they did get the refs’ and linos’ shirts sponsored by Specsavers. Really. They did. No shit.

So it’s with some dismay I read about Brian Mawhinny’s plan to “rebrand” the English football league – the league which, thanks to the mighty Robins, I have most emotional investment. Great news! It looks like we’re going up to the first division anyway, despite our play-off misery. Or, rather, up to League One.

Not that we’re really going anywhere. Every other club jumps one division too, in the name of appealing “to our core audience” and “also to a new generation of youngsters on the brink of discovering the game”. That’s a curious point; a “new generation” simply used to be taken along to a game by their dad, and would – on emerging onto the terrace/stand – instantly fall in love with the whole shebang, dodgy mutton pies, stinking toilets et al. Why doesn’t this work any more? Maybe even kids spot the league’s graceless decent down a slippery slope first embarked upon when “Wimbledon” upped sticks and moved their franchise to Milton Keynes.

Mawhinny continues. “We also want a commercial audience to be encouraged to re-evaluate its perception of the League.” Which, basically, means that by calling the first division “the championship” some second tier brand, with a desperate desire to attach its sugary drink or fattening food, or a first tier brand that simply wants to own everything going in order to promote its sugary drink or carb-packed food. Welcome to the era of the Coca-Cola Championship, or the Pringles League One.

At least you can still taste failure in the sugar-coated, trans-fat filled world we’re moving into – unlike the SPL. But, equally, isn’t the joy of winning the league going to be somewhat tempered by the fact you’re lifting the Dunkin Doghnuts League Two Trophy?

But I haven’t been this anxious about a football match since I was a boy. The Swindon Evening Advertiser’s Jon Ritson writes a good piece explaining what this little football club has been through in the last two years (my first blog, dormant now I live in London, documented the events of that time).

Another piece, in today’s Sunday Times does a very good job of showing the depths from which this club has risen.

IT WAS almost 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night when Andy King, the Swindon manager, and Bob Holt, a club director, walked out of Griffin Park to a pub across the road and ordered two pints. A 2-0 defeat against Brentford was the least of their sorrows.

“Bob said, ‘That’s it. We’re gone in the morning.’ The club was going under,” King recounted on Friday. “Wally Downes, the Brentford boss, walked in, sat down with us and sympathised and ended up having to pay for not only his pint but both of ours. We didn’t have enough money.”

So what we face now is not nasty, stomach tightening nerves – more the nerves born from a hope that the team puts on a good show. From a purely sentimental point of view – and I get very sentimental about such things – Town’s squad of youngsters seeking a second chance, and veterans looking for a last hurrah, deserve a big day out in Cardiff. Assembled for next to nothing, and paid poorly compared to their less able, but more fortuitous predecessors, the current side’s season of toil merits acknowledgment on a bigger stage.

And, whatever happens, I hope a few of the capacity crowd today resolve to come back for more next season.

The home crowd is often bitterly divided on him, the divisions usually coming to the fore just after he’s made yet another tactical gaffe. But, all things considered, I’m a big fan of Andy King, Swindon Town’s manager. He’s got one of the keenest eyes for young talent in the country, and he has talked quite a few players into coming to Town on a free transfer when, realistically, they could have probably gone to earn more money, in front of bigger crowds, in a higher division.

He also does an amazing interview, almost always. Win, lose or draw, he’s liable to say something so remarkably candid, you wonder what on earth he’s up to. As his motormouth slips into fifth gear, you can see the concrete wall approaching. And then he sails straight through. Take this from yesterday’s Evening Advertiser – and this is praise for a player:

“The money isn’t there but to me, Jerel Ifil, leaving aside his faults, is the quickest, strongest defender in this division.”

The italics are mine.

Swindonlog.com is no longer being updated.

After two fine years updating this weblog, recording some traumatic times and some wonderful ones at the County Ground and around the country, I have decided to call it a day. I’m moving away from the town, and simply won’t be able to consume the media, and catch the gossip, which helped fill these pages over the last two years.

The archives will remain, a chronicle of two amazing years. And I’ll still be coming back to the County Ground on Saturdays. It’s a place which, at the time of writing, looks set for some happier times very soon, and there’s no way I’d miss out on those.

Many thanks to all the readers who made writing Swindonlog so worthwhile, for all the comments (and the criticism when I got it wrong ). I look forward to continuing to argue with you all over at the TrustSTFC website or at MyOnlySwindon.com, and seeing a few of you at the games.

The end of the season approaches, and I’m pretty certain I’ll have a tear in my eye at the end of tomorrow’s match. Not because Danny’s off, you understand, although I’m sure quite a few folk will be sorry to see him leave, remembering some of the fine performances he’s put in, and forgetting a few of the others…

No, I’ll be getting all emotional because I’m moving away from Swindon in a couple of months, and this will likely be my last game as a season ticket holder. I’ve had an wonderful, infuriating, exciting and despair-filled few years following Town, and don’t intend to abandon the team – I’ll be living in London, so hopefully catching a few away games and the odd match at the County Ground. It just wouldn’t be sensible to buy a season ticket, especially now there are no shift tickets, as I won’t get up the M4 enough. But you don’t go through the mill that we’ve all been through in the last few seasons without developing a lasting bond with the side, even if you are, like me, not a local.

But it does raise a question about what I do with Swindonlog. What started out as a way to learn how to build a weblog for a piece I was writing, and indulge my new-found love for all things Swindon Town, has turned into something of an obsession. To my surprise, it has also become pretty popular, with hundreds of people looking in every week. I’ve even had complaints when I’ve not written anything, or irritated readers by saying something particularly daft.

But it relies on me being around Swindon, catching the gossip, reading the paper and listening to the radio. It’s going to be hard to do all that from sarf London. Should I just give up, and close the site down?

I’d rather try some other, more innovative, ideas first. So: I know there’s at least one person who might want to contribute to Swindonlog. Are there any others? Who knows: if we could get half a dozen people together, we could keep it going and maybe even turn it into something more democractic and active than it is now. It would be easy to set up the system to get a few Town fans contributing, if the volunteers thought they could keep it going for the whole season. All you’d need is a little time in front of a net-connected PC two or three days a week (if there’s a few of us, it’ll be easier) and a love for Swindon Town.

I’ve long thought football clubs should be run by their fans: perhaps I should put the theory of fan power to the test by seeing if any fans would be willing to form a mysterious cabal, and take this site on. Hey, it’s not going to be like running Swindon Town itself, but it’ll be a hell of a lot cheaper. Any interest?