The World Service

The BBC World Service is 80 years old today (Given that it's February 29th, that means it's only had 20 actual birthdays, I presume).  Anyway, in a slight diversion from the usual matter of this blog (ie periods of nothingness interspersed with incoherent rants about stuff that bothers me in small town Romania), I thought I would mark this milestone by saying how great the BBC World Service is, and how many years I spent in which my short wave radio was my most prized possession.  It genuinely was one of the things I had to check anytime I went anywhere - money, ticket, passport, radio - that was the list.

Anyway, I listened for years to the BBC World Service (and the fact that I can download things like Analysis and From Our Own Correspondent on podcasts now is somehow not the same thing. They're still good radio programmes but something about the medium and the vehicle of the radio clutched to the ear, with the elaborate wires and things attached to the aerial to try and enhance reception, is just something that I'll never forget, and I think always miss a little bit).  The fact that I can have news from anywhere in the world at my fingertips at any time in various different formats these days is just ... not the same.  (In other forgotten methods of obtaining news from home, does anyone remember Reuters teleprinters that you could find in the lobbies of expensive hotels?  They were brilliant too, though not quite up to the standards of the BBC World Service)

Anyway, just as with the internet, much of my dedication to my shortwave radio came with the need to keep up with English football.  Every Saturday afternoon (or whatever time of day English Saturday afternoon was in whichever country I was in) you could find me twiddling the dial, fine tuning the signal as I listened to comforting snatches of home telling me about the driving rain at Portman Road or the advertising hoardings at Ibrox.

My most vivid memory though was in a tent just outside the Masai Mara in Kenya listening to the 1994 World Cup Final from California at about 3am. I had headphones so as not to wake my girlfriend, but the signal kept drifting in and out. Despite the fact that the match was terrible (I am told), I could not go to bed - this was the World Cup final after all.  At one point through the crackle I heard this almighty roar, which was clearly not from the crowd, but from outside the tent.  I decided staying put was possibly the best idea (and anyway if I'd gone outside Sod's Law dictates that I'd probably have missed a goal).   In the morning I learned that a lion had wandered through the campsite in the night.

(A much more amusing anecdote about the World Service from my friend Ken Wilson, can be found here)

Picking a team

At this time every 4 years I like to hunker down and gorge myself on as much football as possible. I've never exactly been a fan of England despite that being my country of origin, but then I've never been much of a one for any sort of national identity anyway. The fact that many of the England team are quite obviously utter wankers is not terribly helpful in convincing me otherwise.

Also, Romania, my chosen home are not there because they are utterly rubbish at the moment, and neither are Hungary, who at least would garner local interest were they there, but they've been shit ever since the 50s.

So, who should I support? Here is a site which has some complex formula to tell you which country ought to get your support (Ghana, apparently). I would be very happy were an African team to win, and Ghana are the most likely to do OK, it would seem.

But I have to have arbitrary criteria. Algeria have one good thing going for them - the presence in their squad of ex-Sheffield Wednesday defender Madjid Bougherra. But the best option is Honduras. Yes, they did have a very dodgy coup last year, which is not exactly what one looks for in a nation (I'm not sure how they come 3rd in that site above given that to be honest), but there are some reasons to support them (these may not convince you but bear with me)

1. I have seen them play. I have only seen 3 international matches in my life, so this is something that sets them apart - two when I was working as a steward at Wembley and saw England play Scotland and then Columbia three days later in something called the Rous Cup, and the other as a paying customer in Washington DC in a World Cup qualifier a good few years ago - The USA vs Honduras. It was a great day out and Honduras surprisingly won 3-2 with a great performance. I distinguished myself by chanting "You're not singing any more" in the face of a baffled and rather initimidated teenage girl, which is not exactly my finest moment.
2. Their captain is called "Guevara". Need I say more?
3. They wear blue and white stripes. There is no better footballing strip than the classic blue and white stripe. And this is objectively and unargaubly true. But Argentina's light blue and white doesn't cut it. You need royal blue.

So support Honduras. They won't win, but they will deserve to.

Once they get knocked out though, I'm going for Spain. Don't think they'll win either, but I'd like them too.

My International Football Career

I am, to put it mildly, not one of the world's greatest footballers. As a child I would be one of the last people picked in playground matches, and as an adult this record has not improved much since (a) I don't play that often, and (b) I'm still crap. But, for two brief years I was, and I say this with a fair degree of certainty, one of the best players in the country in which I resided. (There is a topical point to this post, so bear with me)

For this we have to go back over ten years now to 1996 (cue twilight-zone-esque music and the wibbly wobbly blurring of the screen as the universal indicator of the flashback). I was living and working in Pohnpei, the capital island of one of the world's lesser known countries, the Federated States of Micronesia. Every evening just before sunset I'd meet up with a few people at PICS Field, which was the only football pitch in Kolonia, the main city, and play a match. Most of us were foreigners of various origins, though there were one or two high school kids who joined us. Among the regulars were a Ugandan guy named Charles Musana, and a wily veteran Ghanaian called Thomas who was over 70 and who could still play a midfield anchor role, standing near the centre circle spraying passes around with unerring accuracy. Other nationalities typically represented included Japanese, Fijian, French, Australian and US American. On one occasion we organised an island wide tournament on a weekend, and we had 5 teams that got together - three high school teams, a team of Fijians, and my team of expats, originally called "The Internationals". For reasons that I can no longer remember, we decided to organise the tournament in such a way that we started off with two first round matches (with one team getting a bye to the semis), followed by one semi final and another bye, and then a final. The flaw in this plan became obvious when we were drawn to play in the second first round match, which we won, followed by the semi final, which we also won. Meaning that we, a team of players almost none of whom were younger than 30 and some of whom, like Thomas, were much older, had to play three matches in a row in the intense strength-sapping 100% humidity that was not really conducive to running around. And to make matters worse we were facing teams of 17 and 18 year olds, who were actually getting a break between matches. However, despite our totally exhausted state we managed to eke out a final win against the Seventh Day Adventist team (the SDA school had some enthusiastic American teachers who actually trained the kids, so they were always seen as potential winners).

This epic achievement still ranks as my finest moment on a football pitch, and possibly (and without too much exaggeration) in life. A little later in my Micronesian football career, I caught my foot in a divot while playing and ended up breaking my leg, which was not such a great high point of my life, though I do like to play up the story where I limped around my house for an evening, and then drove to the doctor's the next day, before discovering that I had broken it, and being gently advised not to drive home since the pain I felt on accelerating and breaking was almost certainly caused by the fact that I had a broken leg)

Anyway, why this story and now? Well, I happened upon this story this week, which rather took me back as you can imagine. References to my former colleague and teammate Charles, "an expat from Ghana" and all the things I remember (especially the barefoot approach favoured by the kids). Good luck to the new coaches. I suspect the (obviously tongue in cheek) hope for eventual world domination in football mentioned in the last sentence maybe a little optimistic, but they might beat Chuuk one day.

Bobby Robson

When I was an English teacher in Porto (many years ago), me and another English teaching friend rang up FC Porto and asked if we could bring our football-mad teenage students to meet Bobby Robson, who was then managing the club. Obviously we fully expected a no, but to our surprise, the club put us through to his office and he picked up and agreed right off the bat. We got to see a closed training session in the Antas Stadium itself (the old one), and then we went down to the offices and he sat and chatted and answered all of their questions for close to an hour, before taking us on a tour of the trophy room. He just seemed genuinely happy to offer whatever he could to us.

A smashing bloke and a real gentleman. RIP

Dan the Man

(note: Football post follows. Just so you know)

Yesterday was a day I'd rather forget for rather painful/uncomfortable reasons. I won't divulge them here as (a) it wouldn't be exactly edifying; (b) it's still too raw (in a number of ways); and (c) there are some things that are best left unspoken/unblogged

So, instead, to take my mind off my current discomfort, I need to report on the shock winners of the Romanian football league this year. The town of Urziceni (Err - zee - chen) is a small dusty piece of nothingness sort of north east of Bucharest. I have driven through it a couple of times on my way to the coast, and really it's not exactly the must buzzing metropolis on the planet. It even makes Csikszereda look quite attractive and lively, and believe me, that's a difficult thing to do. The population of the town is 17,000, and it's one of those southern Romanian towns in which every lamppost is plastered with posters advertising agricultural labouring jobs in Spain and Italy. In short, it's the sort of place that people leave as soon as they can.

But miraculously, incredibly, its football team Unirea Urziceni (which roughly translates as Urziceni United) have just become champions of Romania. They've achieved this without any real star name players and without importing vast quantities of South Americans as most of their rivals have done. The town will, I think, be by far the smallest ever to host Champion's League football (well when I say host, the ground is too small, so they'll play their games in Bucharest, so it won't really exactly host CL football, but you know what I mean)

The manager who has worked this miracle is none other than Dan Petrescu, who is famous the world over for playing his football for the mighty Sheffield Wednesday (he did also play for some other minor teams, but it was his time at Wednesday which will have been the pinnacle of his career). Indeed, he hasn't yet reportedly said, but I am pretty sure he has it on the tip of his tongue "Winning the Romanian league with Unirea is the proudest moment of my career since the day I signed for the great Sheffield Wednesday". (So successful was his time in England at Wednesday and another lesser club whose name escapes me, that he had a popular TV show named after him)

Anyway, it's a remarkable achievement, and it adds to the highly amusing recent denial of any trophies or any kind of success whatsoever to Bucharest teams. Last year CFR Cluj did the double, and this year Urziceni have won the league and the cup final (this weekend) will be contested between CFR Cluj and FC Timisoara. In addition the second Champions League spot has gone to FC Timisoara after they (yesterday) got their 6 points back from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (and thus pushed Dinamo down into third place). So, all in all, ha ha Bucharest. Sadly Steaua just scraped into the last spot for the "Europa League" (the new UEFA Cup).

In other good news for Romanian football (and Romanian football managers), Mircea Lucescu led Shakhtor Donetsk to the UEFA Cup, László Bölöni won the Belgian league with Standard Liege, and little known local Csaba László (from Udvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc just down the road) took Hearts to a very creditable third place in Scotland. And Mircea's lad Razvan is now the new coach of the Romanian national team about which I feel very positive as I think he's an excellent coach and has to be an improvement over the rubbish, and now sacked, Victor Piţurcă. South Africa 2010 is well out of reach, but it could be a brighter future for the national team.

Sign of the Times

Setting: The playground in the local park. A 10-year old boy has just heard me speaking English to my daughter and has bravely approached me to practice his language skills

Kid: Are you English?
Me: Yes I am.
Me: (Knowing the answer but wanting to encourage this active learner) What about you?
Kid: I'm from here.
(pause)
Kid: Do you like football?
Me: Yes - and you?
Kid: Of course. Which team do you support?
Me: (Knowing that the next utterance is about to be met with a blank look) Sheffield Wednesday
Kid (blank look)
(pause)
Me:(helpfully) They're in the second division.
Kid: (blank look)
Pause
Kid: But which of the four big teams do you support?
Me: (unhelpfully because I know very well what he means, I just can't bring myself to let this go) Which four big teams?
Kid: Chelsea, Man United, Arsenal and Liverpool
Me: (honestly) None of them.
Kid: (blank look). (Decides to press on regardless) No, which one of them do you like?
Me: None of them. In fact I dislike all of them.
Kid: What about in the Champions' League. Which one of them do you want to win?
Me: None of them. I want all of them to lose.
Kid: (slightly puzzled) But you're English.
Me: (Thinks: Well I loathe Arsenal with every fibre of my being. I deeply detest Chelsea. I despise Liverpool and I abhor Man United. But I don't think this will be understood and at this age he probably doesn't actually need to know a bunch of synonyms for "hate") I suppose the one I hate least is Man United.
Kid: You like Man United?
Me: Well no, but if they play Arsenal or Chelsea or Liverpool I'd want them to not lose. (Realising this is just making life much too confusing and is only going to dissuade kid from speaking English at all. Plus at 10 he doesn't need to know that being a football fan is actually all about misery, despair, and hatred. Decides instead to slightly change subject) Which one do you support?
Kid: Chelsea. I hope they win the Champion's League this year.
Me: Good luck with that. I hope Porto do.
Kid: (Blank look)

Transylvania Cliche Watch (3) (and final)

Very poor showing from the headline writers after last night's game. Obviously coming up with something for a 0-0 game is too difficult for the cream of the UK's cliche-wielding hacks. There were one or two "toothless Chelsea" lines (though it wasn't toothless Chelsea so much as outplayed Chelsea). The only real contender for the crown of most badly written report came (surprisingly) from the Independent, with Jason Burt's report entitled "Drogba ankle injury drives stake into Chelsea's season" which is about as melodramatic as anything Stoker could come up with (Oh, woe, poor Chelsea, a player is out injured for a couple of weeks, what will they do with such limited resources?).

For future journalistic reference, writers from Britain need to know the following (all these mistakes have appeared this week):

• Cluj is not west of Bucharest (or at least it is only so in the same way that Edinburgh is west of London).
• The name of the team is not CFR Cluj-Napoca. The official name of the city is Cluj-Napoca, but the team is CFR Cluj (or, if you want to go the whole hog CFR 1907 Cluj). Just as the team owned by Italy's slimeball extremist prime minister is AC Milan, not AC Milano.
• Steaua did not lose to Dinamo on the last day of last season to hand the title to CFR Cluj
• Count Dracula was not a real person
• Vlad "the impaler" Ţepeş did not do his impaling in Transylvania, as he spent almost no time here, being in charge in Wallachia, not Transylvania.
• Maurizio Trombetta is a genius (this is not correcting a mistake, just a statement of fact)
  

Thanks.

[Oh, and by the way, the best written piece on the whole "who are this CFR Cluj team?" question, came unsurprisingly from the best UK football source, When Saturday Comes. No, I didn't write it, in case you're wondering]

Transylvania Cliche Watch (2)

This is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel (or, I suppose, biting the neck of a giraffe), but as the game approaches, the media has struck a rich vein of Dracula references and has sucked upon them wildly. For the match reports I'm going to have a scoring system:
10 points -"XXX drove a stake through the heart of the plucky Transylvanians"
5 points - "Chelsea scented blood", "... sank their teeth into..."
3 points - all bad dracula puns (e.g. "much was at stake", "fangs a lot", "made it count", the fans were going bats", etc etc)
2 points - any mention of garlic, crosses (in a non footballing sense), coffins, stakes, blood, necks, jugulars, vampires, bats and Bela Lugosi.

Some more examples from today's previews:

"We'll put bite on Dracula boys" is the classy headline in the Daily Star, the paper that manages to make The Sun look highbrow. But in a race to the bottom, the Sun reported on the story that Chelsea brought their own food taster and that they won;t eat the food in a five star hotel (what five star hotel? I've never seen one in Cluj) with the headline "We'll Try the Stake" (it's worth clicking on that link, if only for the ridiculous picture of a punctured-neck John Terry trying to beat Dracula in goal. Oh, and the last line of the article).

Outside the British media, things are no better. Fox Sports has "Blues Go For the Jugular in Transylvania", while AFP go with "Chelsea will be hoping to sink their fangs into Cluj's jugular when they travel to Transylvania - the land of horror story icon Dracula."

It may be that CFR have decided to play this overkill up somewhat though, with Sky Sports quoting Juan Culio as telling The Sun "It is true we want to suck the life out of the big clubs. If we beat Chelsea we will all be as famous as Dracula." a quote which they probably made up (it is The Sun, after all). However it is possible that he did say it, since he is pictured in the Romanian press dressed as Dracula and renamed Draculio


And finally, the stuffy and conservative Daily Telegraph finishes its piece with the line "Cluj-Napoca is the third largest city in Romania and the capital of Transylvania, made famous by the gothic horror novel Dracula, and more recently the Cheeky Girls." That will be good news to the people of Cluj, not that they've been made famous by Romania's top university or being the birthplace of Matyas Kiraly/Matei Corvi. No it's all about the Cheeky Girls. Contrast this with the Times, who actually do a decent job of outlining the club's (and the city's) history.

Last update in the series tomorrow (time permitting)

Transylvania Cliche Watch (1)

This week sees the visit of Chelsea FC to Transylvania to take on CFR Cluj in the Champions League (Chelsea aren't actually champions, but that's the nature of UEFA competitions these days and another story about which I could rant for interminable pages. I won't, though). What this visit means though is that there will ample opportunity this week for the notoriously cliche-thirsty British press to repeatedly sink their teeth into the the Dracula vein, since they won't have much else to say about CFR Cluj (I suppose they might bring up the Cheeky Girls too, but I'm guessing it will be lots of blood sucking imagery instead). Anyway, in order to amuse I thought I would keep a watch on this.

First up this week, you might be surprised to learn, are not the tabloids but two bastions of the establishment.

The Sunday Times headlines its article "Chelsea must beware Juan Culio, the new terror of Transylvania: Argentina’s Juan Culio hopes to give the Blues a fright on Wednesday" setting their stall out early, letting you know that the angle they're taking. Then the first paragraph really takes the theme and runs with it:

LIKE all the best stories from Transylvania, the tale of CFR Cluj has a strong sense of mystery, of the unexpected. It also has its moment of shock and, at the end of the first night, even a perturbed heroine. “I didn’t believe it could be as bad as this,” shrieked Rosella Sensi, the president of AS Roma, as if she’d just woken up from a dream in which Bela Lugosi stood poised over her bedside.

Classy stuff you can see, he's really gone to town there, and actually made some serious effort to cram his Transylvanian theme into some kind of order there. Like all good writers, Ian Hawkey, for it is he, returns to his opening theme with his last sentence "Once bitten, twice shy, as they probably say in Transylvania." Ohh, very nice. Hats off to Mr Hawkey.

Next up is the BBC, who have provided a handy click through biography of the club under the heading "Who are Cluj" (by the way, that click through thing is absolutely not handy at all, is it? It's much more irritating to have to open page after page of the thing than read it all in one go, surely? Or am I hopelessly behind the web-architecture-times here?). Anyway, the scene is set with the use of a picture of Christopher Lee as Dracula on the front page, and then the second paragraph

The club hail from the city of Cluj-Napoca - the third largest city in Romania - situated in the province of Transylvania, home to the famous nocturnal blood-sucker Count Dracula, some 300 miles west of the capital Bucharest.

Now I suspect the Beeb are trying to be a bit knowing here rather than jumping completely unironically aboard the Dracula bandwagon, but that doesn't really excuse the geographically challenged nature of the positioning of the city. West of Bucharest? North would be closer, Northwest closer still. Plus it's got to be more than 400km from Bucharest. 300km west of Bucharest is somewhere like Belgrade.

Anyway, I'll be keeping an eye on the theme this week and letting you know how much Dracula (and the whole horror theme in general) gets mentioned.

The Curious Case of (The Football Team From) Timisioara

Over the last few years a very strange story has been played out as regards the main football team in Timisoara. I'd give you their name, but it's all a bit confused and confusing. They are currently playing under the name FC Timisoara, but half of the problem surrounds the name, so it may not be that for much longer. But rather than be cryptic, let me try and sum it up/explain it as best I can (and given that there are bits of the story that confuse me too, that may not be that well).

A football team called Politechnica Timisoara were founded in 1921 and over the years they had a reasonably successful history, winning the Romanian cup on a couple of occasions, playing in Europe and winning games against Celtic and Atletico Madrid amongst others. In the 90s, like all Romanian football teams they ceased to be a nationalised entity and entered the marketplace. No longer linked with the Polytechnic itself, they retained the name (just as the other clubs did - CFR Cluj are not actually owned by the state railway company for example).

In the middle of the 90s they went down to the second division and in about 2000 the club was bought by an Italian businessman named Claudio Zambon (The city of Timisoara seems to have very close ties with Italy). It got relegated again, and then again to languish in the 4th division (county level in Romanian football). It was in 2001 (or 2002, stories conflict) that this story gets bizarre and confusing. Zambon, having fallen out with the local authorities and media, and who had lost all rights to the club and the name (this bit is disputed) decided to up sticks and move the club away from Timisoara all together and relocate it to a village just outside Bucharest. In the meanwhile, a former Romanian international player named Anton Dobos who had played for AEK Athens and who had bought a Bucharest based club on his return to Romania, and renamed it AEK Bucharest, decided to move this club to Timisoara, at just the time when they had been promoted to the top flight. The moved club, now called Politechnica AEK Timisoara became the de facto descendant of the original team, and the fans certainly saw it that way. (Dobos was recently in the news again as he survived a horrific car crash which put him in a coma for a while)

The new club, again renamed Politechnica 2002 Timisoara, were authorised by the FRF (Romanian Football Federation) as the official heir of the original club and could inherit the club's records, but then Zambon, who'd left Romania some time before, returned and by some sleight of hand, got this authorisation transferred to his club (still called Politechnica Timisoara even though they were playing 500km away). It seems that basically he tricked the FRF into this, and that the problem now is that the FRF are loathe to admit that they were scammed so they are sticking to their guns. I won't go into all the labyrinthine details, but you can, if you wish get a much longer version here which is written by a fan (so it's obviously a tad partial, but it does give roughly the story I've heard myself from various sources without all the detail, so I think it's fairly close to the truth).

The upshot of all the shenanigans is that Zambon took his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport which upheld his claim (mostly because it is only actually allowed to accept evidence from the national federation which was still covering up its previous errors). The CAS decreed that the Timisoara-based team were no longer entitled to use the club badge, colours, name, and even club songs (that last bit was eventually withdrawn as it was seen to be somewhat unworkable to stop all the fans singing them). FIFA stepped in and demanded that the CAS decision be respected, and thus the club were renamed Politechnica 1921 Stiinta Timisioara (and subsequently, after this was deemed not sufficiently different, FC Timisoara) and the colours changed from white and violet to white, purple and black.

At the beginning of this season FC Timisoara were docked 6 points (by the FRF on the say so of FIFA) for not changing the colours enough (violet to purple was not sufficiently different they felt, even though no-one had specified how much the colours needed to be changed). Despite this (or perhaps because of it) FC Timisoara have had a storming start to the season and would be joint top without the deduction. In the meantime the club that still plays with the name near Bucharest have gone down to the 5th level (I think, again reports conflict) which must be basically a pub league.

It should be made clear that while this case bears some similarities with the AFC Wimbledon vs MK Dons Franchise story, there are many more grey areas. It's clear that Zambon has no feeling for the club and its fans, and that the fans (who I submit are the ultimate arbitrator of which club is "real") have made it clear that they consider FC Timisoara to be the the real club and the owner of the history and the symbols. However, the club (FC Timisoara) was owned by the richest man in Romania, oil tycoon Marian Iancu, until he resigned in order to be able to pursue legal cases against the FRF in regards to the whole situation. So, they are not the small fan-funded heroic underdog fighting against injustice and for football that AFC Wimbledon are, but a slightly less sympathetic entity.

Having said this, I have always had a soft spot for the club as they are the only one in Romania who seem to have genuine fans, who show up to every home game in great numbers and sing and chant and make a show of their fandom, and I wish them every success in regaining their club and it's symbols and heritage (and the 6 points)

An English language blog about "Poli"

Roman Conquest

Blimey. Well that was, errm, unexpected. I've never seen CFR Cluj play that well, not even last season when they won everything. Roma were pretty clueless but even so.

We'll gloss over the more important results of the night in the English second division, but for a minor competition the Champions League made up slightly for the less-than-happy night in real football.

The only downside is that I now have a "Gangster's Paradise" earworm

Grandstand

Time for a short Transylvanian sporting update.

Starting, obviously, with Ice Hockey, since that's what Csikszereda lives, breathes, and gets vaguely enthused by. After two seasons in which Sport Club Miercurea Ciuc have taken part in both the Romanian and Hungarian leagues, and one season in which the other team, HC Csikszereda, did the same, it became clear to everyone that Romanian teams participating in the Hungarian league got much better from the increased competition, and so to be competitive you therefore had to be taking part in Hungary too. An invitation had been on the table for the other big club in Romania, Steaua Bucharest, to join up too, but they'd always refused. This year however, having failed to qualify for the league final for the first time since ice was invented (by Gunther Eis, an Austrian physicist, in 1902), Steaua realised that they needed to be in it. However, somehow they managed to convince everyone else to turn the league into a combined Hungarian Romanian league.

With me so far? Good, because now it gets really confusing.

So there is a league (the MOL League) comprising ten teams - 6 from Hungary and 4 from Romania - as well as the three mentioned above, Romania's fourth representative are Progym Hargita Gyöngye, from Gyergyószentmiklós (Gheorgheni) (another town in Harghita County). There is still some kind of rump Hungarian league in which the 6 Hungarian teams will participate in after this league has finished, and which will be based in some way on the league positions obtained here. I'm not really sure. As for the Romanian league, I have no idea. I can't find information about any plans whatsoever, so perhaps this league will be it. There doesn't seem to have been a cup this year either, and normally the season opens with the Romanian Cup. Just to complicate matters still further, one of the Hungarian teams in the league is the reserve team of Alba Volan who actually now play in the Austrian league.

Flushed with excitement at all these incomprehensible rule changes, the Romanian clubs have gone out and brought in players of a calibre not previously seen in this part of the world. There are Swedes playing for both of the teams here, and they are supposed to be good. I haven't actually seen any obviously Swedish people walking around with broken noses - the sign of a hockey player - but I presume they are here somewhere. I'd guess they were living it up in some gated community of millionaires and celebrities, but this is Csikszereda and we don't have one. Steaua have gone one better and brought in a Canadian who once played in the NHL (the first former NHL player to have ever been signed by a Romanian team). I'm not quite sure how much this bloke played in the NHL, and possibly it was just once for five minutes at the end of the game his team was winning 7-0 at the time, but still. It's all very high powered (I'm told). The season has already begun (another sign of encroaching winter) and the Romanian teams are already all at the top of the league (albeit after only two games).

Meanwhile in football, this evening sees the debut of CFR Cluj in the Champion's League, which since I'm nominally a CFR fan, I ought to be excited about, but I'm not really. they're going to get seriously bulldozed by all three teams in the group and it's just going to be fuel for the likes of Becali and the compliant Romanian media to rail against anything that doesn't come from Bucharest. Broadly speaking football in the country (at least in terms of the media) is Steaua (with some attention given to Rapid and Dinamo, and everybody else merely obstacles between those three and each other). it's really dull, and CFR Cluj's rubbish start to the season (they've already sacked the manager who got them the league and cup double last year) means that this will be a disaster. (I ought to point out that Gigi Becali, the main reason I despise Steaua with such passion, is not in any way associated with the ice hockey team of the same name, so they are in no way as abhorrent as Steaua the football team)

Meanwhile, the League is currently being led by a bunch of upstarts from a scruffy little town (Urziceni) which is on the road towards the beach. They are managed by Dan Petrescu who used to play for Sheffield Wednesday, and so, in the absence of the "Dirty Hungarians" of Cluj ((C) the repugnant Becali family), having them at the top is the next best thing. Anyone but Steaua really.

Sporting update

A couple of pieces of sporting news to report today.

Most relevant to Csikszereda is the news that Steaua Bucharest ice hockey team (not to be confused with the football team of the same name - they are not linked as far as I can tell) has decided to next year play in the Hungarian league. The invitation to participate in that league has been open ever since Sport Cloub from here decided to join it two years ago, but Steaua previously decided not to go down that route. Having watched the Romanian league title be contested by the two Csikszereda teams (Sport Club and Hochei Club) this year, squeezing Steaua out of the championship game for the first time since the 50s, they have obviously realised that the only way to stay competitive is to be in Hungary as well. I think it's good in many ways that they have decided to do this - partly because if it were just the "Hungarian" teams from Romania that took part it would all look a bit nationalistic, partly because I think the more competitive the league the better, and partly because I just don't think it can do any harm to have what will essentially become a Hungary-Romania league in a sport (there will be 4 Romanian teams and 7 Hungarian teams in this league next year)

More intriguing from an external perspective is the ongoing saga of the football league. This is going down to the wire with the last games being played on Wednesday this week. The last time I wrote about football here, CFR Cluj were well ahead but I feared a comeback by Steaua, which duly came to pass, thanks partly to some wobbling by CFR and some very suspiciously dodgy decisions and moments in Steaua's games (including one game against Rapid in which they were 1-0 down, but the ref called off the match gifting Steaua a 3-0 win). A good summary is here from Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian.

Anyway, last night, Dinamo beat Steaua 2-1 to leave CFR one point clear at the top. They only need to win their last game to take the title. It's just that this last game is against city rivals U Cluj. And U Cluj's fans hate CFR passionately. And while U are already relegated, I assume the players will do their utmost to knock CFR off so that they can give something back to the fans who've watched them through a very bad season. And who knows what pressures the ref will have come under.

If Becali, the most vile man in Romania, gets his way and Steaua win the league, I'm giving up on football in this country. It's corrupt beyond belief. So come on CFR. Please.

A different perspective on CFR

Actually this has nothing to with my previous post on CFR.

Every now and again I feel compelled by some strange force of habit/cultural upbringing/personal interest to make a post about football. This is one of them (though it does have a bit of politics thrown in), so if you are football-averse or even football-uninterested, feel free to stop reading now and go and do something more productive with your time.

This season's Romanian football championship has become a vector for nationalist sentiment thanks, in the main, to the patron of Steaua - arch scumbag Gigi Becali. This is because the league is being led by CFR Cluj who threaten to take the title away from Bucharest for the first time in 14 years and away from Wallachia for the first time in about 40 years. You can read some of the background to this story in this pdf file of an article in the February edition of When Saturday Comes magazine (you may recognise the writing style of the author of that piece)

Anyway, the nationalist rhetoric I mentioned there has not abated, with Becali and his odious kin ( a couple of cousins are also involved with football in various shady-ish ways) carrying on about stopping the Dirty Hungarians from winning the title. These would be the dirty Hungarians of CFR Cluj, a squad made up of (at the current time) 5 Argentinians, 2 Brazilians, 1 Canadian, 1 Frenchman, 1 Nigerian, 7 Portuguese, 7 Romanians (all of whom are ethnically Romanian), and 2 Swedes. Though maybe a club calling themselves CFR 1907 Cluj (which is the full name) is subtly (perhaps) highlighting the fact that they weren't born in Romania. It's a bit of a stretch though.

Anyway, at the start of the season I didn't have much of an opinion about who I wanted to win the league (other than knowing I didn't want Steaua to win it purely because of Becali, who is quite possibly the vilest, most repulsive man in Romania, and having a soft spot for Unirea Urziceni because they are coached by former Sheffield Wedenesday player Dan Petrescu). Now, after the waves of anti-Hungarian rehtoric launched by Becali and co, I am firmly behind CFR and hope they win the title by a street (and that Steaua don't even finish second and get a Champions League spot).

Current standings (22 games played out of 34)
CFR Cluj 52 points
Rapid Bucharest 44
Steaua 44
Poli Timisoara 42
Unirea Urziceni 41
Dinamo Bucharest 39

Haide CFR! (By which I mean the team, not the railway, though I would like that to improve too)

Most famous Hungarian dies

RIP Puskás Ferenc. To most non-Hungarians I know, Puskás was almost synonymous with the nation, and for most outsiders (from footballing nations - ie most of them) he would be the first person they would mention if asked to name a famous Hungarian.

Nothing much more to add. Here's his Wiki-entry

Star Wars

On Sunday night Real Madrid arrived at Otopeni airport. This event was trumpeted like they were ...well, I was going to say royalty, but if it had been Juan Carlos showing up, for example, there would have been much less fanfare. Like gods maybe. The TV stations all had someone stationed in the presidential lounge of the airport where the team would appear (why in the presidential lounge I have no idea, why they couldn't come through passport control and customs and baggage reclaim like the rest of us is beyond me, but you know these are overpaid and overhyped celebrities we're talking about), and the sports sections of all the Sunday evening news shows were all taken up with exciting trivia such as whether Posh Spice would be on the plane and what exact route the bus was likely to take from Otopeni to the Marriot Hotel. Two stations even elected to cover the arrival and subsequent bus journey live in all its detail. Really, I swear I'm not making any of this up.

The excitement continued to build on Monday with press conferences being covered in full, training ground action and various sundry bits of information. Then yesterday came the reason that this exalted bunch had deigned to touch down on Romanian soil and bless us all with their presence. The match against Steaua. ["Star Wars" as one channel oh so cleverly billed it - you see Madrid are all stars and Steaua means star. Oh ho.] Sadly, for Romanian football fans, many of whom had travelled across the country to watch this game, and who had played vast amounts for a ticket, Steaua had seemingly been watching too much awestruck breathless TV coverage themselves, and they too seemed to feel unworthy of being on the same pitch as the wealthy has-beens from the Bernabeu, capitulating miserably and losing 4-1.

Still, the upside of that result is that we won't have to endure weeks of Gigi Becali crowing on TV with the compliant Romanian media hanging on his every word. Even more pleasingly the killer third goal was scored by black Brazilian forward Robinho, thus being one in the eye for the bigot Becali and the racists who seem to make up a reasonable proportion of Steaua's fan base.

I have to say that the fawning arselicking of the Real team and their presence in Romania did the nation as a whole no favours. They're not messiahs, they're just overrated footballers. Steaua deserved to be in the Champions League group stages (much as it pains me to say it), and Romania is just as much part of Europe as anywhere else. This media-led prostration at their feet is pathetic. It's at times like these when I feel an understanding of those who can't stand football.

World Cup Fever

The first ever blog I did, before I even knew there was such a thing as a blog, or even that such a word existed (and in truth, it may not have existed at that time) was in 1998. It was called something like "Ramblings of a disenfranchised football fan", and it recounted the amusing(ish) details of my life as a football fan living in the Federated States of Micronesia, attempting to follow the 1998 World Cup, which was not televised in that country (almost uniquely I was led to believe). I suspect it has vanihsed into the periodic clean-ups of a server somewhere (it was on Geocities before Geocities was bought up by Yahoo). I certainly can't find it via any search engine.

Now, however, eight years later, I live in a country that televises every game and which does so in a very convenient time zone for TV-based match watching. And hence World Cup fever has come to our living room. Sadly there is no Romania or Hungary to cheer on, so we have to make do with spotting players with Hungarian names (yesterday's red-carded Czech defender Ujfalusi being the most obvious). The World Cup for me is all about cheering on good football and hoping that the team playing the best football wins. Hence, I am not really that patriotic, since the last time England played good football in the finals of a major championship was ten years ago now, and even then it was only one match. So far, honours in the "great football" stake have been taken by Argentina and Spain, and long may they continue to prosper (Spain will, of course, get no further that the quarter finals, because they never do).

I'll spare you all my commentary on every game, since you can read such things in about a billion other places on the Internet, but I may just pop on from time to time to rave about a performance or criticise a ref (such as the horribly biased one who handed Holland an undeserved win over the Ivory Coast). I have learned, though, through the miracle of football, that Cote D'Ivoire is "Elefántcsontpart in Hungarian, which translates, I believe, as "Elephant bone coast". Either the Hungarians took the bits that were left after the other European countries had taken all the ivory, or there is a serious misunderstanding as to what ivory actually is.

Nasal Octopus

This has been a bad couple of weeks healthwise. Bogi came down with mumps (conveniently "mumpsz" in Hungarian) while I was away. This weekend, having sat out the requisite two weeks at home we noticed that she was not hearing very well. A visit to the ENT doctor on Monday confirmed that there was a problem - that she had a large octopus in her nose. So yesterday she went to have it surgically removed (obviously having an octopus in your nose is not especially healthy nor does it make it easy to breathe). All is well now, though and there are no more octopi or any other form of squid or cuttlefish clogging up her nasal passages as far as we know.

OK, OK, it wasn't actually an octopus. It was a polyp. However, the Hungarian word for octopus and the Hungarian word for polyp are one and the same (polip). So, like a true dad I have been amusing myself all week referring to it as an octopus. In my defence, it has made her laugh too, and helped her reach the operation with at least a couple of laughs to punctuate the pervading sense of fear.

She now has some spots which may or may not be the onset of rubella, another childhood disease which is also very popular at the moment in Csikszereda. Rubella when I was growing up was the best disease going - a week off school with no ill effects barring a couple of non-irritating spots. Of course in those days rubella was called German Measles for reasons I'm not sure of. Was it like Spanish flu in that it seemingly originated in Germany? Or were there more xenophobic reasons? Perhaps it was seen as very efficient form of measles - in and out in a few days without causing much fuss. Who knows? In other etymology-of-spotty-childhood-illnesses, chicken pox may be so called because it's like a rubbish version of small pox (see also "chicken feed") or because the spots look like chick peas. Not like any chick peas I've ever eaten, I have to say.

To top that off, I have a raging flu, though not of the avian variety. (Although I learned recently that all strains of flu originated in birds). Still, such is life.

Falling Star

Last night, contrary to my usual form, I found myself cheering on an English club in European competition (It's not unheard of, but it's fairly rare. I certainly won't be doing it in the upcoming Champion's League final). This is because of my overriding hatred of Steaua - and especially Gigi Becali. However, I had been slightly swept up by the seeming unitedness of the nation behind them (though this may have been a media invention) and thought it might be nice if they got to the final (and then got humiliatingly thrashed).

At half past ten Romania time last night, the game was all over. Steaua were three nil up on aggregate (effectively 3½-0 up because they had scored away goals) and there was only an hour left to play. At half time, even though Middlesboro had pulled one back, there was actually a discussion of the possibility that Steaua would get to play Barcelona in the European Super Cup final, and so relive the EC final of 1986. I thought that it was a bit premature, though I did assume that they would at least get to the UEFA Cup final.

The rest, as they say, is history. A stunning fightback by Middlesboro (for the second time in two rounds), and Steaua crashed out at the death, beaten 4-2 on the night. I was happy and still buzzing from seeing such an incredible game of football. But then as I flicked round the TV channels, the shock and dismay of everyone told its own story. This was a match that a lot of Romania wanted Steaua to win so they could represent the nation on a European stage. I don't really understand that level of national feeling for a club side (I'll be very very happy if both Arsenal and Middlesboro lose the two finals to come), but I could see that it was there. I'm sure there were hardcore Dinamo and Rapid fans who were happy that Steaua had lost, but most of the country it seems was shell shocked. I started feeling sorry for those Romanians who had willed the team on and seen them crash out in such unbelievable circumstances, so close to the finish line. As channel after channel wheeled their best pundits on to try and make sense of this national calamity, I began to wish that Steaua had indeed clung on to get to the final.

Then one channel cut to live footage of Gigi Becali leaving the stadium. He was so gaunt, so haggard, so white, and for the first time ever didn't look like he was enjoying being on TV, and in fact remained tight lipped and silent. He looked utterly broken and almost like he was about to burst into tears. At that point my heart lifted and my spirit soared and I remembered why I wanted Middlesboro to win in the first place. Grazie mille, Maccarone.

Sorry Romania - you deserve to have something to cheer, but not led by that cretinous oaf. Rapid in the final? Now that would have really been great.

Football Fever

Football fever is gripping the nation. This is because both Rapid (hooray) and Steaua (boo, hiss) have reached the quarter finals of the UEFA Cup. However, in a cruel twist of fate, the two have been drawn to play each other in the quarter final, meaning that rather than an exciting European away trip to Gelsenkirchen or St Petersburg or, errrm, Middlesboro, they don’t even get to leave Bucharest to play the tie. On the one hand this means that there will be at least one Romanian team in the semi final, so there is that advantage, but on the other it means that the excitement of European football is heavily diluted.

All the TV channels have been wall to wall football since even before the games last week in which Rapid (hooray) put out Hamburg, and Steaua (boo, hiss) put out Betis. Following the two wins, though and the subsequent quarter final draw, it has been never ending. I presume this will go on at least until the semi-finals, and should one of them actually make it to the final the networks will implode in an orgy of happiness and self-congratulation. It’s got to be rough if you don’t like football. Or possibly worse still if you support Dinamo. Basescu has been in on the act, showing up to watch a couple of the games in person, and then at the weekend inviting all the players to the Cotroceni Palace for a little get together.

Now, I have to say that the apparent interest and national feeling for Steaua baffles me. Even now, they are taking the lion’s share of the media coverage, and it seems from what I can gather that they are supported by most Romanians. Yet, when you look at their past (and even their present) it’s a wonder that they are not utterly despised by most of the country. To explain: Steaua were the team patronised by Ceausescu. They won most of the championships during his rule, got all the good players, and presumably got the benefit of a surprisingly large amount of refereeing decisions. (Romanians may be interested to learn that there are two things non-Romanian football fans know about Steaua – the European Cup win of 1984, and the whole Ceausescu/Securitate* connection). If I were Romanian I would hate Steaua passionately, and no amount of fawning media coverage would make me change my mind. Indeed, I do hate Steaua passionately, and I’m not even Romanian and didn’t know life under Ceausescu.

OK, you might be saying, Ceausescu’s dead, Steaua must be allowed to have a clean slate and be judged on their present day merits. Well, you might be right, but Steaua are now owned by today’s most repulsive man in Romania, Gigi Becali. He’s not Ceausescu, I’ll grant you, but given enough power I reckon he’d do a similar job. Why do I feel such disgust towards this man? Well he’s a fundamentalist bigot for a start (he once said that he had nothing against Jews as long as they converted to Christianity), and an egomaniac of the highest order (last year he commissioned a painting of the Last Supper with the Steaua team replacing the disciples and him in the Jesus spot). His money comes from dodgy dealings with the army (ie he buys stuff off them cheap, and sells stuff to them expensively – like a small scale Dick Cheney). He is on TV all the time, and for some reason then media seem to love him. He has openly expressed support for an extremist right wing Romanian organisation called Noua Dreapte, which is in favour of a return to the years between 1941 and 1944 when Romania was ruled by the fascist Antonescu* and his Iron Guard.

So, I, and any other neutral football fan from outside Romania, will obviously be supporting Rapid. They are the third club of Bucharest, and are so very definitely an underdog. They have a nice manager, Razvan Lucescu, who always comes across as an affable good bloke whenever I see him interviewed. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching them and willing them on as they have surprisingly beaten Feyenoord, Rennes, Shakhtar Donetsk, Hamburg and others. But above all, their hardcore fans are less obnoxious than Steaua’s, they are not owned by Gigi Becali, and it would make Nic and Elena turn over in their graves. Go Rapid!

PS One of the rumours surrounding the Ceausescu years is that after the 1984 European Cup final which Steaua won on penalties from Barcelona, the goalkeeper Ducadam refused to hand over the car that he won for being man of the match to Ceausescu’s son. In return for this act of defiance, the securitate broke his hands (obviously a big deal for a goalkeeper), and he never played top level football again. The official story is that he contracted some kind of blood disorder, and that is why he retired from the game. I have no idea which of these two stories is true, but the very fact that the first one exists and is believed by many will give you some idea of the way this country used to be run.

* Note that a number of factual errors have been pointed out to me in the comments below.

Football article

Well, it's an exciting time for me, as I've just had an article published in When Saturday Comes, the only good football magazine in the UK. It came out at the weekend, I'm told (my copy won't arrive for another couple of weeks yet). I wrote about the farcical recent Romania vs Nigeria friendly international, and well, you can read it yourself as I have reproduced it in full below. On the off chance that you have a copy of the magazine and this is not exactly the same it's because they've employed a sub-editor to make it readable and stuff. Anyway, enjoy.

~~~
We’ve all seen it happen. A match is organised, there is confusion among the participants as to whether it will actually take place, no-one is quite sure when it kicks off, and finally the visiting team show up late without enough players to make up a team and have to borrow a local or two to make up the numbers.

In this case though, rather than a couple of estate cars overstuffed with slightly portly and sheepish looking blokes drawing up and wondering if they could borrow a couple of players, the whole comedy of embarrassment was played out on Romanian TV, as the Romania vs. Nigeria friendly descended rapidly into utter farce.

The signs were there as much as a week in advance when the Nigerian Football Association Chairman, Ibrahim Galadina, informed the media in Nigeria that the game had been cancelled at the request of Romania. They even, it seems, managed to arrange another friendly with Oman to make up the gap. But, in fact, the match hadn’t been cancelled at all, and was still scheduled to go ahead. The NFA finally contacted its players on the Monday, 48 hours before the game, to let them know they had been selected and would they mind going to Bucharest. Realising the late notification may be a problem, they took the unusual step of inviting 40 players to the game in the hope that some of them at least would show up. In the circumstances it’s hardly surprising that most of the names in the Nigerian side chose not to.

By lunchtime on the day of the match, due to start at 5pm, precisely 3 Nigerian players had made it to Romania. Just after 2pm a plane arrived carrying a further 7 players (protesting that the match was supposed to start at 8, and saying “Let us rest. We’re dying of hunger”) and the remainder of the “delegation”, which consisted of one official from the NFA, assistant-to-the-normal-assistant-coach Daniel Amokachi, and the goalkeeping coach (the team’s manager Augustine Eguavoen had decided to go to Morocco instead to watch the second leg of the CAF Confederation Cup).

With the players at the hotel attempting to grab a hasty nap to recover from the long flight, the officials were seen in one of Bucharest’s shopping centres, getting names and numbers printed onto the shirts. By this time an eleventh player had been identified, FC National Bucharest’s Agumbiade Abiodun. Apparently he played a couple of games for the U17 Nigerian Team back when he was (presumably) under 17, but since then had not been close to the squad. Still, he was available and in the country. Interviewed on TV when they located him (by this time the “game” was big news and it seemed like the media had taken over the business of trying to make it go ahead), he was asked if he knew Amokachi. “Oh yes, I know him very well, I just don’t think he knows me.” Yet more Nigerians were located, seven in all, players for second division FC Targoviste, but they were deemed surplus to requirements – after all by now a twelfth player, Benedict Agwuegbu (a man who even had some previous caps), had arrived from Austria.

Finally, in front of a massive crowd of 300, and a Nigerian bench of one sub, but still live on TV, the match kicked off at 6.20pm. For the record, what amounted to Romania B beat Nigeria D 3-0. The real question, aside from whatever recriminations go on in Lagos, is why on earth this game was arranged in the first place. Romania don’t have another competitive match until the qualifiers for Euro 2008 begin, and having already played Cote D’Ivoire the Saturday before, they’d presumably got whatever practice they needed against West African opposition (in preparation for the remote possibility of meeting another in the group stages of WC2010?). For Nigeria, it was billed as a warm-up game for the upcoming African Nations Cup. But with none of the first choice team playing, and the coach not even showing up to watch, it’s debatable what kind of a warm-up it actually was. Still, if nothing else, at least Abiodun, Brentford’s Sam Sodje, and a whole bunch of other previously uncapped players have stories to tell their grandkids about how they ended up playing for Nigeria.