Monthly Archives: August 2011

PRINTED! in R.AGE

Predictions for the season

August 23, 2011 – 3:27 pm

Balotelli's Maserati stinks as much as his attitude now, but City are still my favourites to challenge Man Utd for the trophy.

I really don’t want to write too much about Manchester City. I really don’t.

I was actually going to just do my predictions for the season, but right after my last entry on how City have been gleefully living up to their tag as the rich, noisy neighbours of English football, I read about that prank their players pulled on teammate Mario Balotelli.

Apparently, before leaving for the club’s pre-season tour in the United States, the players planted a bag of dead fish in “Mad” Mario’s £150,000 (RM735,000) Maserati sports car, which reportedly had to be written off because of the terrible, unremovable stench (this is the same car that infamously racked up £10,000/RM49,000 in parking fines).

Seriously, I don’t know how much more they can flaunt their money. That’s like me and my friends playing “My Germs” with a giant Cheesecake Factory cheesecake in front of a group of famished Rwandan orphans, and then having a food fight with it.

That's the kind of sports car stupid, rich footballers wreck as part of a prank - a 150,000 pound Maserati.

The fact that the story was “leaked” by a “source close to the club”, who told the story in quite astonishing detail – including the “revolting” sensation Balotelli had upon smelling his car, his plans for retribution, and the fact that the car was written off (er, did the source follow him to the insurers?) – screams of a desperate attempt by City to portray their dressing room as one where everybody’s chummy with each other.

Don’t be fooled. Balotelli has already thrown darts at youth team players from a balcony in one ill-fated attempt at dressing room games. After this fishy prank, he’ll be dusting off his crossbow and arrows. It won’t be pretty.

But if you asked me, the only thing standing in the way of City pushing Manchester United right to the end for the Premier League title, would be a dressing room implosion along those lines.

I think it’s more or less a given that to win the Premier League this season, you’ll only have to finish above United. They are the clear favourites, and no, that’s not my undying love for the club talking.

It’s going to be all about who pulls away from the chasing pack towards the end of the season, and whether they can rein in United. Unfortunately, Manchester City seem to be the favourites to do that, and could very well end up overtaking United too.

In Vincent Kompany, they have last season’s best central defender in the league. Nemanja Vidic got most of the plaudits, and for good reason, but for me, Kompany just edged it last season. He was, quite simply, sensational. He looked like a combination of Vidic and Rio Ferdinand at times.

In David Silva, City also have probably the best creative midfielder. The guy is pure, effortless class. The closest thing you can get to Xavi or Iniesta.

And in Carlos Tevez, they have the best striker in the league. Pair him with Sergio Aguero, and you have possibly the best strike partnership in the world.

More importantly, unlike the stuttering pack, they have started the season in fantastic form, with Aguero’s magical debut at Swansea followed by an away victory against tough cookies Bolton.

Part of that stuttering pack is Arsenal, who already look out of the title race.

Some might point to United’s 1995 “you’ll never win anything with kids” start to the season, where they lost 3-1 to Aston Villa but recovered to win the Double.

The difference is Alex Ferguson never lost hope in his young charges. Wenger just called his team “young” and “naive”.

Now I’m a huge fan of Wenger’s, but any manager who’s gone six years without a trophy while advocating football from Mars and stubbornly refusing to spend money surely can’t be calling his own players “naive”.

With the wheels coming off the wagon so early, I have a feeling Arsenal won’t even qualify for the Champions League next season.

Arsenal have lost two games, received two red cards, and are on the verge of losing two star players. No wonder he's scratching his head. And they play Manchester United next.

Taking their place in fourth spot, I believe, will be Chelsea. I know, I’m crazy, right?

I just feel that with Fernando Torres around, this Chelsea side will continue to frustrate as they have in their first two games. He seems to be playing for himself, to prove a point about his own ability. He’s been making dribbles when it would be easier to pass.

On the other hand, when the Chelsea vintage are all on the pitch – Lampard, Drogba, Terry, Anelka, even Kalou – they all play for each other. The one-touch passing becomes breath-taking, even if it only happens in spurts these days. Torres is just cramping their style.

But Roman Abramovich will, as usual, pressure the manager to play his new £50mil toy, and when it doesn’t work, he’ll fire him. It’s a ticking time-bomb, and Andre Villas-Boas has got to cut the right wire – take Torres out of the equation, show Abramovich that the Chelsea old guard can still win, and then only try to shoehorn Torres and the other youngsters in.

He shoots... and he misses! Torres has looked livelier in the first two games, but still seems to be playing for himself. AVB has a call to make to save Chelsea's season.

AVB’s been talking about bringing in a player who can play between the lines of midfield and attack like Luka Modric or Juan Mata as if it’d be the final piece of the puzzle, but I think one such player won’t make much of a difference. It’s all about the system.

So with the two bickering Manchester neighbours most likely finishing first and second, Chelsea in fourth and Arsenal completely out of the picture, my prediction for the club that will complete the top three is Liverpool.

They used to be a team that revolved around a few good players – Torres, Gerrard, Xabi Alonso – but now they are finally a formidable squad of players.

Kenny Dalglish has invested wisely in the summer, giving them a stronger squad than Chelsea, and with a much better mentality.

I think Villas-Boas’ dry, factual style with the media will be reflected in their style on the pitch, and ultimately their season – drab and uninspiring.

But Dalglish knows how to throw caution to the wind, to play with adventure, and that’s what a sleeping giant like Liverpool need – to forget about the past and play in the present.

So there you have it, my predictions for the season, for what it’s worth.

Some of them are highly unlikely, but since football predictions are a rubbish business anyway, I thought I might as well take a few long punts and hope I end up looking smart if it actually happens. All I want is for Manchester United to win anyway.

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PRINTED! in R.AGE

The inception of City

August 19, 2011 – 8:08 am

IT IS perhaps a testament to Alex Ferguson’s Sun Tzu-like mastery of the art of psychological warfare that Manchester City are still being referred to as the “noisy neighbours”.

The pundits were talking about it before last Sunday’s Community Shield, the football websites were referencing it after, and you can bet it’ll pop up again over the next week in pretty much every football talk show that touches on the match.

It makes me wonder why it was so darn hard for Leonardo DiCaprio. If Fergie was in Inception, the movie would’ve been over in 10 minutes. He’d hold a press conference and bingo. Idea planted. Case closed. No sequels. Simples.

Unfortunately for City, that idea seems to be festering, multiplying as quickly as Piers Morgan’s ego with every vain, self-absorbed yet fawning episode of Piers Morgan Tonight. As much as I was impressed with the Arsenal fans at the club’s open training session in Malaysia, singing all the players’ songs and showing genuine passion for the club, I couldn’t help but think – these people support the same club as Piers freakin’ Morgan? Unfortunate.

While Arsenal have built a reputation for themselves as the football purists’ choice thanks to Arsene Wenger’s unyielding faith in his philosophy, City’s reputation has been forged for them by Ferguson’s careful positioning – nay, inception – of two words in the minds’ of the public – Noisy Neighbours. It’s even an alliteration (two words that start with the same consonant)! Did Fergie think that through or what?

Now, every player that signs for Man City, every player that puts on the sky blue shirt – heck, even the tea lady at Eastlands – knows they would be pre-conceived and judged by everyone else as the noisy neighbours.

It eats away at the soul of the club, even one with the tradition and support base of Manchester City.

When Jose Mourinho arrived at Chelsea, he couldn’t be bothered planting any ideas about other clubs. It was all about planting ideas about himself, about creating that aura of invincibility surrounding the Special One, which coupled with unlimited financial resources and an already promising squad turned out to be quite the recipe for success.

Manchester City have the latter two ingredients, but again, thanks to Fergie, they are also saddled with a reputation as a club that makes plenty of noise over potential marquee signings, flaunts their new-found riches, and promises much but delivers little.

Incidentally, another common tag that Manchester City have now is that of the nouveau riche of the Premier League, a term used to describe the newly rich, mostly in a derogatory sense – those from a lower social standing who have recently come to money, and therefore tend to spend it gauchely.

Quite similarly, City can boast loudly, for instance, over the ridiculous amounts of money they spend on players like Sergio Aguero, but in terms of their true status in football, they will remain pariahs in the eyes of the neutrals, at least in the foreseeable future.

Players like Mario Balotelli will still see City as just a stepping stone – and retirement plan, perhaps – towards playing for his dream team AC Milan.

And for all the money in the world they throw at him, Carlos Tevez, their own captain, is still not convinced enough about the project to want to stay.

Those unwanted tags will also leave every player who decides to join Manchester City having to deal with being called mercenaries, even though most of them (I believe) had genuinely joined for footballing reasons.

And it panned out much the same way in the Community Shield. City made some noise at first, with their fans singing and doing that silly hop with their backs facing the pitch (which effectively means they’re all staring at each others’ arses) at half-time because they had gone two goals up.

It didn’t matter that in terms of football they had just been given a lesson in passing and possession, and were genuinely quite fortunate to have scored.

United promptly emerged in the second half to show them some real class, winning with a combination of skill, attacking endeavour and good old fashioned determination, bagging three goals while fielding youngsters like Tom Cleverly, Danny Welbeck, Phil Jones, Chris Smalling and Fabio.

So this season – while Manchester United continue to draw compliments that winning is “in their DNA”, Chelsea retain that aura of impenetrability established by Mourinho, Arsenal rake in the plaudits for their seemingly never-ending pursuit of footballing perfection and equilibrium, and Liverpool hang on to the promise of being a sleeping giant – Manchester City will simply remain in the minds of most as the Noisy Neighbours. Even if they end up winning the title.

Sometimes, you just gotta hand it to Fergie.

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PRINTED! in R.AGE

Chasing Chelsea

August 19, 2011 – 8:02 am

On paper, I’d like to say I should have better things to do than spend the better part of a week chasing a bunch of guys who kick balls and wear shorts for a living all over town.

Having just realised how wrong that last line sounded, let me set the record straight (pun truly intended) – I was assigned to cover Chelsea Football Club’s recent tour stop in Kuala Lumpur – their arrival, the press conferences, meet and greets, community projects, training, the friendly game against Malaysia and most importantly, the interviews.

So yeah, since those guys in shorts included Premier League living legends like Frank Lampard, Fernando Torres and Didier Drogba, I didn’t mind so much.

Nothing truly prepares you for the mania that surrounds an English Premier League team coming to Asia. You’d find grown men waiting desperately outside the team hotel just to catch a glimpse of their favourite footballers. I assume these are the same people who complain about K-Pop fans being silly.

Come to think of it, I’ve interviewed Lady Gaga, rock heroes Incubus and MTV World Stage hit Neon Trees in the past two weeks as well, and none of them got anything close to the kind of reception Chelsea got.

Okay, so Gaga had a handful of teenage fans waiting downstairs at the lobby of the Marina Bay Sands. Chelsea turned the lobby of the One World Hotel into a sea of blue.

Well Gaga’s just one person right? Maybe Chelsea got a bigger crowd because they themselves are a bigger crowd? Wrong.

Manchester United sent just ONE player – an ex-player, actually – to KL three weeks ago when Edwin van der Sar came with the Champions Trophy Tour, and I had to literally claw my way through the crowd to get into that interview room; and even there, I was made to sweat for it. Three other colleagues of mine were there, and none of them managed to get an interview.

As for Incubus, after our interview the guys went lounging by the hotel pool, and it seemed nobody recognised them at all! Now tell me Torres or Drogba could have enjoyed that same anonymity.

At all the Chelsea events, there would be a throng of reporters, photographers, videographers and sportscasters from not just around the region, but also from Britain, desperate to get some face time with any of the players. It was mayhem. Everyone was restless.

No offense to the Neon Trees, who were really cool, but there was no such clamouring at their press event.

Arrival

The mayhem began when the team arrived at the One World Hotel in Petaling Jaya, Selangor. A crowd had built up even though it was the middle of a working day (I’d like to think it was because we tweeted it out on twitter.com/thestar_rage – shameless plug), and you could see quite a lot of them, in office wear, clutching Chelsea jerseys.

I was there because there was going to be a press conference with new Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas and two players, who turned out to be Frank Lampard and Branislav Ivanovic.

And no, I didn’t get the chance to see if Frank remembers me from our London interview =(
Villas-Boas, now often referred to as AVB, seems like a pretty serious guy. We had another chance to talk to him after the 1-0 victory over Malaysia (it was NOT a goal, by the way. I was sitting right along the goal line), and his tone was more or less the same – very business-like.

One thing I noticed about him is that he never gives a straight answer. It’s never yes or no. It’s always a convoluted answer with lots of disclaimers and many layers of logic which prevent him from being caught out by the media.

When asked about Torres’ form, he answered by questioning the media’s “obsession” with Torres not scoring, and then moved on to talk about the importance of the “collective”, the competitiveness within his squad, and the objectives of pre-season training. It would’ve been easier to just say “no, I’m not worried about it”; but that’s not AVB’s style, I guess.

But he did show a “soft side”, so to speak, when talking about pre-season training camps.

“You can do in Asia, in Europe, in America or in other countries, but it’s always important to touch the people who loves us, but are far away from us,” he said.

Player interviews

I think the most fun I had that week was asking Ashley Cole about, y’know, his “personal life”.

The England left-back has had a hat-trick of secret lovers reveal themselves after news broke that he was getting back together with ex-wife Cheryl Cole, the ex-X-Factor judge, who also almost became Ashley’s ex-ex-wife, and c’mon – you can’t possibly expect me not to ask about that, right?

So when the time came for the interview, I got all the questions I wanted to ask out of the way – what do you do on tour in your spare time, does the new young manager relate better with you personally, and then bam! I hit him with the big one – how do you handle the speculation surrounding your personal life?

“I don’t talk about that,” he muttered, immediately looking away, while the Chelsea press secretary stepped in to remind us that it was a “Chelsea event” and we should only talk about football.

Well I thought I phrased that question pretty innocuously, but I guess from his point of view, there’s really nothing he could say that wouldn’t be construed negatively. It was a no-win situation.

So instead, I’m left with quotes like these:

“A lot of (the players) just sleep to be honest (during pre-season tours). There are a few people who’re of course on the X-Box, but most people go sleep and relax and chill out.

“We train in the morning, we have lunch, we have a few hours’ sleep, and we train again. So there’s not really much we can do,” he said.

Really, Ashley? Do you really JUST sleep? – see? No win situation.

But to be fair, he seemed a nice enough guy. He was polite, he answered all our other questions patiently, and he took as many photos and signed as many autographs as he could. Luckily I got mine BEFORE the interview.

I had to get my picture with Ashley BEFORE the interview, of course... =P

The other interview I got to be part of was with former Arsenal, Real Madrid and France striker Nicolas Anelka. He was pretty cool too.

I asked if he felt he’s changed from his earlier days as the infamous “Le Sulk”, and he candidly replied: “I’m still the same. Nobody really knows me because I don’t speak a lot in the newspapers.

“But you know, it’s my way. I like to be simple outside of football, and on the pitch. The most important for me is to play football, enjoy on the pitch and I’ve tried to do this since I started and now, like you said, I’m at the end, and I’m pleased with everything I did in my career.”

In the end, I didn’t get the interviews I was hoping for with the big four – Lampard, Drogba, Terry and Torres – but it was a good way to end a crazy fortnight. Up next for me, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Hong Kong. Fingers crossed, I get an interview with one of those four. Wish me luck!

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