The big game of the day at Moor Lane, Salford against high flying Chorley FC. I’ll admit, I was more there to see Chorley (my home town team) than Salford, my local non-league side. Chorley, under the leadership of Rovers legend Garry Flitcroft, have started the season with a bang. Two games in, two wins, 12 (twelve) goals. Top of the league. Off to Salford for their first game in the FA Cup this year. FA Cup Preliminary Round, in August. Terrific.

The Main Stand at Moor Lane - half time coaching on the pitch

I made it to Moor Lane with about ten minutes left of the first half, with the score at 0-0. Unfortunately (well for me at least) Matt Jansen was out injured. Oh yes, Flitcroft has taken Jansen to Victory Park with him. Chorley were on top, but there were few real chance before the break. Over half time I had a wander around the ground, and found all the bits that make non-league football great. The portakabin with a buffet in it. The tea bar with a queue a mile long. Kids teams having a training session on the pitch. I settled on a spot on the touchline by the Salford goal, facing the main stand.

The second half had everything. Chorley’s Jamie Vermiglio brought down a Salford winger in the box, penalty. Saved by Aaron Grundy. Salford’s first goal came in bizzare fashion. An inocuous enough free kick lofted into the box, which the Chorley keeper caught as standard. Then stepped back over the line. 1-0. Yet Chorley came back, and put together some fluid wing play. From a cleared corner the ball dropped to Jack Dorney, who looks like a cracking player, who smashed a half-volley into the top corner. Great goal.

Jack Dorney drifting through for Chorley

Then from the kick-off Chorley were reduced to 10 men. In the 90th minute the home side bagged a winner, and that was Chorley’s FA Cup dream over for another year. Chatting with a few away fans on the way out there was an opinion that losing in the cup might not have been a bad thing, as the team probably needed bringing back down to earth after their opening league games. It seems to have worked, they won their next home game against Radcliffe Borough 4-1. Oh, and Jack Dorney scored two of the goals, bringing his tally for the season to 12.

I had a brilliant time at this game, and am looking forward to heading to Stalybridge Celtic’s Bower Fold on Saturday for Non-League Day. Watching Premier League football every week makes you forget just how much fun going to non-league games is. There is much more spirit about the game at this level, and I’m looking forward to getting into it more this season. Saturday certainly wasn’t the last time I’m going to report on Chorley this year…

Find your nearest non-league club here, follow Non League Day on Twitter @non_league_day and go see your local club this weekend.

On Tuesday we knocked Norwich City out of the Carling Cup, with Mame Diouf putting in a match winning performance and bagging himself a hat trick in the process. None of them were stunners, but he was there. He put the ball in the net. This is something that we are really in need of, a player who can be in the right place, at the right time, and manage to stick the ball in the net. Admittedly, Mame’s goals owed a lot to the contribution of Morten Gamst Pedersen, who is gaining in confidence all the time at the moment. It is good to see him getting back to his best, as he has the potential to take over the playmaker role in my opinion.

Diouf no.2 = Goals

Skip forward to Saturday, and Diouf had held his place in the starting line-up playing on the right wing, with his namesake El-Hadji starting on the left, Niko Kalinic down the middle. Vince Grella also came back in for his first league start in ages, and looked like the player he’s always been – solid, dependable, not quite fit, a cool head. Arsenal started stronger than us, with Theo Walcott quite evidently the player who was going to cause us problems all day. Gael Givet tried to employ two different strategies to deal with Walcott, neither of which worked.

Givet struggles with Walcott

Knowing that he didn’t have the pace to keep up with him, Givet started the game by giving Walcott two yards, so that he was starting closer to the goal than the Gunners man. Whilst this was a good idea in terms of catching him, it also meant that he always had time to get the ball under control, and work out where he was getting past Givet. When it became clear this wasn’t working, he tried getting tight, which just led to Walcott turning him and pacing away. Unfortunately for me, my new season ticket seat is bang in line with this flank, so I spent the first half watching this struggle – and the first goal which I called about 25 seconds before it happened as Walcott was standing absolutely open as our whole team shifted to the right.

Yet it wasn’t the end. No, Rovers came back at Arsenal, with an Arsenal-esque goal. One media outlet did suggest that had our goal come from Arsenal it would have been goal of the month. A terrific run from El-Hadji Diouf, who put in the best 45 minutes I have ever seen from him in a Blackburn shirt, in which he showed skill, a bit of pace, and real strength to get past his man led to a little cut-back to Mame Diouf who knocked it home for his fourth goal in two games. An exciting prospect.

El-Hadji Diouf in full flow

In the second period we came out swinging, only to see an unexpected response (at least in my eyes) from Arsenal – they soaked it up, then grabbed their winner. No real style. Not much substance. Just a bit of grit, and a couple of pieces of flair. We played well, but lost. Just like we did at Birmingham the week before. I hope this isn’t the beginning of a theme. That said, the players we needed to bring on will be available for our next game. With Kalinic and Mame Diouf withdrawn, Chris Samba was stuck up front. Next time out that role will be filled by Benjani – who I think is a sound signing on a one-year deal. Here’s hoping that he will add that bit more guile up front that will turn these performances into points.

A week later Spurs nicked three points at the Britannia, surviving an injury time ‘goal’ by debutant Jon Walters. Ref Chris Foy was perfectly placed to rule in or out, and after putting whistle to lips, ducked out of awarding anything at all.

Foy gets grilled

A routine League cup win over Shrewsbury was overshadowed by a difference of opinion between manager and reserve goalie Asmir Begovic. After receiving ‘advice’ of an incoming bid from Chelsea, Begovic told Mr. Pulis he wasn’t in the “right frame of mind” to face the Shrews. Right frame of mind = I don’t want to be cup tied in case I get a move to a bigger club who will push for cup honours. The outcome? Veteran stopper Carlo Nash made his second Potters  debut and the following evening 5Live aired a half arsed feature on the rise of player power.

Pulis in action

After well publicised fallouts in the Stoke camp over the past 12 months, the gaffer is being scrutinised by tetchy fans. Some smart at his blind faith in striker Ricardo Fuller and his various misdemeanours (”Ric gets away with murder” Pulis stated last year) and fear favourites like the honest but limited target man Mamady Sidibe and ageing throw flinger Rory Delap are keeping more talented options out of the first eleven, with Turkish forward Tuncay kicking his heels on the bench.

Tuncay contemplates 2010/11

Pulis talks about bringing the ‘right characters’ to the football club, but his recent track record adds doubt to his man management skills. If message board chit-chat is to be believed, next week should see the addition of Marc Wilson (Portsmouth), Cameron Jerome (Birmingham) and the departure of dressing room enigmas Liam Lawrence and Dave Kitson. A welcome shake-up, but with no points on the board new signings won’t have time to bed in – it’s straight into the fight for another season of survival.

Blackwell - was he really a failure?

However this is where the club found themselves after last Saturday’s humiliating 3 0 defeat to QPR, with Warnock delivering an ironic coup de grace to Blackwell’s two and a half year stay as manager in his own right. He leaves behind a reasonably strong, if thin on the ground, squad of players, a win ratio among the best in the club’s history, but most importantly the club exactly where he found them in terms of league status.

Blackwell’s main failure seemed to be the inability to get the team to reproduce the exciting winning football of his first three months in charge when the team, heading for a relegation battle after performing in totally uninspiring fashion under Robson, charged up the league with a series of battling and positive performances, marking a return to the all action style with an often ignored element of quality football that had taken the team to the Premier League two years earlier and very nearly kept them there. The following season, with promotion now the expectation, Blackwell’s demeanour changed almost overnight, having come across as warm and confident there was now a nervous and abrasive side that led him to be seen as a petty, wining version of Warnock. It showed in the team, who at crucial moments through the season simply bottled it, most notably in allowing our city rivals to do a historic double, which bought unavoidable discontent from the terraces, and of course at Wembley where the team again failed to turn up in a playoff final. Blackwell tendered his resignation after that game, only for Mcabe, understandably viewing the team’s third place finish as a success, to reject it.

In light of recent events that looks a very bad move indeed, with cost cutting and injuries decimating Blackwell’s resources the class of 2009/10 were never going to match the previous year. In  a poor division though  the failure to reach the top six was unacceptable and put the focus back on the performances where negative percentage football had been the norm for two seasons now. Without the results of the previous one Blackwell was horribly exposed and the abject surrender of the QPR match sealed his fate, Mcabe, unable to put any more money into the club, simply cannot afford to see fans drift away in frustration at the quality of football on offer and the promise of a change buys time to put our house in order.

Gordon tells his midfielders how many The Blades are playing across the middle with ease...

Step forward Gary Speed, accepted for now as a decent appointment by the majority of supporters and entering the fray amidst a blaze of goodwill from the many admirers of Speed the player within the game. The motivational skills of Speed the manager need to come to the fore quickly as shown by the totally limp wristed show against Middleborough last weekend which must go down as one of the worst games ever shown television. If he can get the players going again it will be an ideal first job in management for him at a club with good support on a reasonable financial footing, anyone with the club close to their heart though knows deep down this is a definite one step back, two steps forward situation, in football there is not often time for that.

Do any of these players even care? And where are the fans? Is that a high jump over there?

This years lapse was a typical example. Drawn in by God knows what, a desire to visit what has become Sheffield’s third football ground (Don Valley athletics stadium, not as totally unsuited as Brighton’s Withdean, the worst ground I have ever visited, but still not ideal) perhaps. Certainly not the draw of the Blades bunch of uninspiring summer signings, or the glamour of the opposition (Rotherham United!) In any case there I was, ten pounds of my money spent in the hope of a decent afternoon’s entertainment.

Which did not happen in anyway at all. Some shots on target would have been nice, or a few passes strung together. What followed was a ninety minute reminder of the fact that no consequences of the result, a desire on the part of all the players not to get injured and the dysfunctional nature of playing trialists  (I saw three players don the red and white that never will again) and making multiple substitutions leads to something totally unrecognisable from the week-in week-out nature of a league season.

Hang on, there are some fans in this one

So ninety minutes later it was over, the Blades had taken the game 2-0, both camps would see it as “ a good workout,” most of the supporters though seemed to wish they hadn’t bothered and like myself were vowing not to bother with pre season again. At least for a few years.

We aren’t even going to begin to tell you who to be looking out for in this season’s Bundesliga, especially given that Raphael Honigstein has put together this great video on The Guardian website, and a full season preview here. What we want to do is work out which team we should be supporting, and making an effort to see whilst we are out there. If any of you fine folks have any suggestions then please leave a comment below, as we are looking to make the most of a weekend away.

Personally, I want to see 1. FC Köln in action. They are far from the most attractive prospect in the division, having finished 13th last season, and having already set up their aims of consolidating this season. I guess it is something to do with supporting a mid-table club, you can always recognise the plight of a team similar to your own. The Billy Goats main threat is through Lukas Podolski, a player who is generally recognised for his abilities in the colours of the national team and not those of his club. You can only hope that given his performances at the World Cup that he may come back just as ready for action in Cologne. I’m also a fan of their home ground, the RheinEnergieStadion, which was rebuilt in time for the World Cup in Germany in 2006. It is so disimilar to all the new builds you see in England, with part of the planning process being that they wanted it to feel tight like an English stadium. Shame not as much thought goes into stadium design in this country.

I’m sure there will be a lot more to come as Team Mitre fall in love with German football, but for now I’ll leave you with die Hymne, which is the club’s anthem – which doesn’t sound too disimlar to crap Scottish nationalist Runrig…

Never again...

One thing that has stood out to me though is the actions of Paul Robinson and Wes Brown. These two have been on the fringes of the England squad for years, though have been totally overlooked by Mr Capello. For Paul Robinson in particular it was a real shock that he wasn’t selected for the World Cup squad, given that he was actually the most in form English goalkeeper. Being fully aware of his own abilities, Robinson sat and waited for others to make mistakes. Which they did.

So gone are David James and Rob Green from the new look England. Come back Robbo, we knew you were good all along. Well stuff your 4th choice up your three lions. Personally I say well done to Robinson, who has made a decision which reflects the people who have shown faith in him. As a player he was down and out when he left Tottenham, and came into a Blackburn side which had been built around one of the best keepers to play in the Premier League in the past 10 years; big gloves to fill. Two years down the line he is pushing to be captain at Ewood, and has won over the somewhat dubious fans by doing his job. Yes he was dicey on crosses to start with, but with games, and with managers (lest we forget that signing Robinson was one of Paul Ince’s only good moves at Rovers) who kept telling him that he was still good enough, Robinson came good again. He is a rock now. His penalty saves against Chelsea in the Carling Cup wrote him into the history books, and his consistent performances were a key part in the our push for 10th.

Ready for the new season - Robinson in pre-season action for Rovers

So, Robinson is faced with the chance to train with the England squad and not get a game 12 times a season, or hang up his gloves and concentrate on working as hard as he can for a club which has backed him to the hilt. No brainer really. Yet commentators like Graham Taylor still criticise the decision, saying that he is turning down the highest honour available to a footballer and that he is showing a lack of ambition. Did anyone say the same about Alan Shearer or Paul Scholes when they retired to concentrate on playing at the highest level for their clubs? It obviously worked for Scholes, as he found the kind of form that left Capello scrabbling to try and get him on the plane to South Africa.

England expects? - Future international Frank Fielding

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of Robinson’s decision over the course of this season, as he hopefully goes from strength to strength for Blackburn. These is also an interesting aside, with Frank Fielding, who has until now been our 4th choice keeper, being drafted into the England squad in his place. He must now be aiming at moving through the ranks at Ewood, rather than going on loan to Rochdale again. Where do Jason Brown and Mark Bunn fit into this picture? If only one of them could play up front like Alan Fettis…

“The idea may not be universally popular, not least at Old Trafford, but US sports giant ESPN has vowed to use its FA Cup deal to persuade clubs to follow the American model and revolutionise the access they give broadcasters.

In the US, where ESPN built its reputation, there is a culture of coaches and players allowing cameras into dressing rooms, being interviewed live during games and even briefing broadcasters on their tactics ahead of a match so they can choose the best camera angles.

The FA recently set up a working group to debate radical changes to the FA Cup in the hope of improving its appeal for clubs and fans. Suggestions include moving matches from weekends to evenings and scrapping replays.

ESPN, which will meet the FA next week ahead of its £60m contract beginning next season, said it would be an enthusiastic contributor to those discussions. But it will also use the FA Cup as a testing ground for its own ideas to get closer to the action, including speaking to managers during matches and gaining more access to dressing rooms and training grounds.”

Whilst most English fans will cringe at the idea of American-style footage of football and immediately think of Soccer AM’s Boston Goals clips and talk of ‘blasting the soccersphere into the goalbasket’, the reality of American sports coverage is actually pretty different – and let’s face it, coverage over here is already appalling.

As a recent convert to NFL, I’ve been incredibly impressed with the coverage that they provide – much of which is made available by the sorts of freedoms that ESPN are asking for. Each week, a star player in the pre-determined ‘game of the week’ wears a microphone, god knows how many weird and wonderful cameras are placed around the stadium and in the skies and a full historical piece on the game is produced – complete with narration and a full account of all the drama of the occassion. Here is the film created of the 2009 Superbowl, and you can still see pieces created in the 1970s giving the league an incredibly rich archive history.

You also get brilliant individual moments recorded, almost by chance. Here is a clip of Peyton Manning, who happened to be mic’ed up for this particular game, flying off the handle at Jeff Saturday. Note that the clip is also taken from a full documentary on their 2007 Superbowl victory – can you imagine how interesting such a detailed documentary being created about Jose Mourinho’s first title win, for example, with full footage and dressing room drama and opinions would be, even now just a few years after the event? Even without the documentary, can you imagine having Craig Bellemy mic’ed up during a rant at team mates or a referee!? Not that I imagine he’d be the first to volunteer.

When Bellemy made post-match comments about John Terry after the handshake affair, it was talked about up and down the country and hailed as a rare moment of honesty and insight. How often has this frankly brilliant Neil Warnock footage been used since it was recorded in 1995? Or Harry Redknapp being hit by a ball in training or Vieira and Keane arguing in the tunnel.

The fact is that there is great thirst for this kind of footage, the insight into what players and managers are thinking, how they motivate themselves, how the minutiae of everyday life at a football club translates onto the pitch. The problem that we have with TV companies being allowed this kind of access is that our own broadcasters tend to do everything so badly (hello ITV). Hopefully if ESPN use their US experience (and I suppose that still is a big ‘if’ – their current football coverage isn’t exactly breaking away from other UK broadcasters) and the initial shock of seeing this kind of footage is overcome, then football coverage in this country could hopefully be massively enhanced.

“I don’t need Malcolm Allison to tell me I am a great player. Pele told me I’m a great player.”

———

Deyna

The late City chairman, who oversaw some of the club’s most profligate spending in the transfer market during Malcolm Allison’s second coming in the late 1970s, was referring to Mecca Bingo, in Sale.

Some of the club’s fans are old enough to remember when players dropped out of the sky. Well, one at least – the amazing goalkeeper Bert Trautmann, a German paratrooper who became a prisoner of war in St Helens.

When Allison’s spending spree led to mounting bills, a joke did the rounds suggesting that City still owed the Third Reich for Bert.

City’s transfer dealings then were chicken feed compared with the current fantasy league outlay made possible by Sheikh Mansour’s investment. But one deal in particular, shortly before Allison’s return, appeared to be a bargain even by City’s standards. That was the signing of Kazimierz Deyna, the 30-year-old captain of Poland’s 1978 World Cup team.

This tale unfolded shortly after the tournament in Argentina, at a time when I was working for The Guardian in Manchester. Asked to check an agency story that Sheffield United were hoping to sign the Argentine World Cup pair, Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa, I was told by United’s manager, Harry Haslam, who was a friend of the former Argentine international Antonio Rattin, that Manchester City were in the frame.

I discovered that Peter Swales was attending a show at a theatre in Altrincham, so I called the booking office, where Peter came to take my call. He told me City were not going to sign Ardiles and Villa (who later went to Spurs) and invited me to meet him at the Bowdon Hotel a few days later.

He told me that City were looking for a midfield player and had been unable to buy Ipswich Town’s Brian Talbot, who later moved to Arsenal. “Do you have any ideas who we could sign, John?” he asked.

I remembered that during the one of the World Cup games I’d seen on television, the BBC’s Barry Davies had made an off-the-cuff comment that Deyna would be interested in playing club football in Western Europe.

“How do we follow that up?” Swales asked me, and I told him I had the home telephone number of the Poland coach, Jacek Gmoch, whom I’d met when he’d visited Manchester United to study training methods.

So I contacted Gmoch, who confirmed Deyna’s interest, saying: “I know Deyna would like to move and Manchester City seems to me to be the kind of club which would suit him. In my opinion, Deyna has enough stamina and ability to be able to offer at least two seasons in highest grade of football anywhere in the world.”

Deyna, a lieutenant in the Polish army, played for the army club Legia Warsaw, for whom he had scored almost 200 goals in nearly 500 games, so City had to enter into a series of complex negotiations with the Polish FA, the Polish government and the Polish army. There was no problem with the translations, however, because City already had one Pole at the club: George Bergier was the head of match-day catering.

The Polish army had to agree to demobilise Deyna, and the Polish FA delayed transferring his registration forms until a train arrived bearing photocopying machines and medical instruments, which were part of the “transfer fee”. The deal cost City around £100,000, comprising machinery, tools and some cash in US dollars, which the Poles used to send their athletes abroad to prepare for the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Deyna arrived at Maine Road in November 1978 and the City manager, Tony Book, immediately pitched him into the first team for a home match against Ipswich Town, the tempo of which was so hectic that the craftsman with 102 international caps to his credit imagined he had been thrust into a pin-ball machine.

After Allison returned to succeed Book, Deyna found himself playing mainly in the reserves, even though the new manager conceded that he had immense ability. “City play ping-pong football,” was Deyna’s response. “I don’t need Malcolm Allison to tell me I am a great player. Pele told me I’m a great player.”

Although Deyna outlasted Allison, who left Maine Road in 1980, the next manager, John Bond, also rejected his talents. After one of Deyna’s rare first team appearances, at Stoke City, the Stoke manager, Alan Durban summerised the situation thus: “The problem is, Deyna’s on a different wavelength. He’s tuned to Radio Four, and the others are on Radio Luxembourg.”

Deyna was sold to the San Diego Sockers in January 1981 and continued to play professionally until 1987, then became a coach in the United States until his tragically premature death in a car crash in California in 1989.

Blackburn Rovers have never, in my lifetime at least, been a club with any kind of aggressive fan element. Yet over the past 12 months it has been noticeable that elements of aggression on the terraces have been on the rise. From where I sit in the Blackburn End you can sometimes pick up a sense of something more than just frustration at playing with one up front. I don’t know where it has come from, and I don’t understand it, but it has to be wiped out.

I don’t want to sound like a condescending liberal, but it appears that the small town mentality of blue wkd, racism and aggression is creeping out of the town centre on a Friday night and into football grounds on a Saturday. Whilst incidents have not been seen at Ewood, it is worse away from home. At Villa I was sat in front of two fairly respectable looking lads in their late-teens/early-20s who spent the whole game shouting racist abuse at Villa’s players, players who one would presume they would have no qualms with if they played a role in England winning the World Cup in the summer. Even worse could be heard elsewhere, with racist chants directed towards our own players, whilst those who complained were goaded.

Some have suggested that this ‘hardcore’ element at away games is a result of expected restrictions on tickets for the away fixture at Turf Moor. I, like many other Rovers fans, will not even attempt getting a ticket for this game. The fear now for the club, and for the majority of our fans, is that those who do travel will let Blackburn Rovers down. Burnley’s fans were impeccable at Ewood earlier in the season, supporting their team up the final whistle, and ‘enjoyed’ their day out even in defeat. If the conduct of sections of our support don’t wake up after this incident and see the consequences of their attitude then I doubt the same will be said of those who visit Burnley in blue and white.

For the love of our club, for the love of the game, and for the memory of John Taylor I hope that things will improve.

RIP John Taylor – 1979-2010