Clive Davis

THE RIGHT TEAM WON

Deep gloom among the true-blue Davis teens after last night's Champions' League semi-final. But, like Stephen, I'm happy. Although West Ham are my team, I've had a soft spot for Chelsea ever since that epic 1970 Cup Final against Leeds. (The replay was the first game I ever saw on colour TV.) My Mum also adored Bobby Tambling because he  was a Jehovah's Witness, but that's another story. So when did my ardour dim? On the afternoon in the Ruud Gullit era when I took my two older boys to the Stamford Bridge superstore to see the newly won FA Cup, on display in a case. I was planning to take a photo of them standing next to it. But when I tried, a security guard stopped me, saying we'd have to pay £25 to pose in a computer-generated shot of the team celebrating at Wembley. Lots of fans were willing to pay up and queue. We weren't. Maybe other leading clubs have the same policy, but I thought a team that had just arrived in the top tier of the game should have known better. As one of the Five Live callers put it the other night: Chelsea are a small club with lots of money.

[Sorry, this item went AWOL earlier in the day. I was distracted while cross-posting to my new site.]

BALL PLAY

Time was so short last week that I never got round to posting anything on the death of Alan Ball. I feel as if a part of my childhood just crumbled away. More Than Mind Games has a video montage of some of the great man's finest moments. Evertonians should be warned that he's wearing a red shirt. (I mean Arsenal, not England circa '66).

A sign that the game may be going transatlantic again... As 101 Great Goals points out Time magazine has just run a long article on soccer finance. (BTW, I'd never seen that clip of Diana Ross's penalty kick before. It's a lot more fun than any of her recent albums.)

CHANGING ROOM TALES

Goalkeeper David James is in danger of putting a lot of soccer columnists out of business...  Another fine piece in the Observer, this time on the invisibility of gay footballers. [Via Iain Dale].

ON THE MAT, UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Somewhere on the Sky satellite dial there is a channel which shows old wrestling bouts from the long-lost days of World of Sport. A place where Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo are forever crushing an opponent in a half-nelson while grannies scream from the ring-side. Poignant stuff, really, but at least those two troupers made it onto national TV. The youths in Mark Kreidler's book on amateur wrestling probably never will:

It is a sport, Mark Kreidler writes in this extraordinary look at several months in the singular culture of Iowa wrestling, where teenagers "pound their bodies until they scream, and sweat out boxes worth of salt; they push their muscles somewhere beyond whatever they may have imagined as the snapping point." He adds, "And they do all of this, or at least most of it, absent the expectation that anyone in particular will applaud or even really notice."... The wrestlers in "Four Days to Glory" will not achieve fame outside their state, or fortune, at least not from looking to pin opponents. But they are as captivating — if not nearly as outrageous and absurd — as if they were seeking toeholds and takedowns inside a steel cage at Madison Square Garden instead of gymnasiums in eastern Iowa.

A FOOTBALL MANAGER SPEAKS

Football today lacks the personalities of twenty or thirty years ago. This, I think, is true of all games, and the reason for it is a fine psychological study. The life which we live is so different: the pace, the excitement, and the sensationalism which we crave are new factors which have had a disturbing influence. They have upset the old balance mentally as well as physically, and they have made football different to play as well as to watch. And they have set up new values. The change has, in fact, been so violent that I do not think the past, the players and the game, can fairly be compared with the present.

Not Mourinho or Wenger, but the fabled Arsenal manager, Herbert Chapman (1878-1934), in part of a series of quotes exhumed by sports psychologist and blogger James Hamilton (who also has a clip of what's said to be the oldest football footage in existence.) One point Hamilton is trying to make is that, whatever era you live in, the golden age is always about thirty years in the past. Unless you happen to be a Bath City fan, in which case you tend to think in terms of millennia.

SPORTING LIFE

My day began with a wet morning on the touchline, watching the 13 year-old's team win 5-3, thus clinching promotion. Rain, rain, mud and not a cup of Bovril in sight. The poor referee hardly had a moment's peace from the opposition side's endlessly aggrieved parents. Then it was back home to read Portsmouth goalie David James in the Observer. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating. Not content with musing on the idea of reimbursing his team's fans for a sub-standard performance, he has swapped his German gas-guzzler for something more environmentally-friendly:

... I've gone for a rapeseed oil conversion. Sounds odd, I know. It's basically a conversion on my diesel engine to enable it to run on rapeseed oil, which is a carbon-neutral fuel. You get a pump and a tank of the stuff installed at your house and if you run out of rapeseed halfway up the M4 you can always put diesel in as usual. It's as efficient as diesel and works out to around 91p per litre. The whole thing cost me £2,500. Now I've just got to convince Harry [Redknapp] and the lads to get a tank installed at the training ground

Over at 101 Great Goals, they're discussing the dearth of black managers, while Jim White has written another of his heartening pieces about the role of sport in education. This time he's been taking to the headmaster of a rugby-playing school in the heart of football-mad Dagenham:

When Grant took over as head in 1997, it wasn't like this. "We called it Stalingrad," he says. "Every day was a siege that you felt lucky to come out of alive." His first task was to conduct an audit of the pupils: he reckoned of the 1,200 enrolled, 400 were out of control. To re-establish discipline he excluded hundreds, causing a furore locally. But the thing that made an immediate difference was rugby. There was a bunch of 13-year-olds causing mayhem. Since they liked a scrap, they were formed into a rugby team and pitched into competitive matches.

"I never signed up to the agenda that competitive sport is bad," says Grant. "It was an essential vehicle for us. Nobody ever praised these boys. They were white, working class, everyone told them they were scum. Through rugby we could change the script, say to them, 'you know what lads, you're great'."

What happened next sounds like a Hollywood teen movie. Through winning matches and cups, the bad boys became ambassadors. The lessons of discipline and application learnt in rugby fed through into Maths, English, Science. Soon they were achieving academically as well as on the pitch, providing a completely new role model. Sport changed not just them, but the school.

BETWEEN THE POSTS

Yes, Andrew, that is the greatest try of all time. If anyone still needs cheering up after watching Gareth Edwards score against the All Blacks, I recommend this tremendous interview with another giant from the past, ex-England forward Andy Ripley, now facing the ultimate challenge against prostate cancer. What an extraordinary guy:

He is intelligent, funny, charming, eccentric, a terrible show-off, numerically brilliant, huge, fit, a world record veteran indoor rowing champion, 59 and, possibly, dying...Ripley doesn't have taboos. He will talk about anything. Love, death, sex, God and penile dysfunction. Thanks to the hormone treatment he is on, monthly injections of Zoladex to drastically lower his testosterone, he has discovered his feminine side.

"I love shopping now. And what about washing? You get a pile of dirty clothes, put them in, put the thing in [he means washing powder], don't forget the fabric softener and they come out clean. It's great." "You haven't started wearing your wife's shoes as well, have you," I ask suspiciously. "No, I'm not a cross-dresser. Plus my feet are size 13."

His thoughts on the professionalization of rugby - and sport generally - are also worth reflecting on. Has something been lost along the way? Definitely:

I've had such a privileged life. I did sport when it was a window on a great world but not the only world you inhabited. They wouldn't want me to, but I feel a huge sympathy for professional sportsmen now. It seems such a narrow and narrowing life. It makes them fascists because they're special, they're continually being told they're special and mainly because they are so single-minded they have no room for compassion. They have to be like that because professional sport is about 'one-nil'. All the other stuff is just noise.

INK & PERSPIRATION

James Hamilton, proprietor of that fine sports psychology blog, More Than A Game, is compiling a reading list that ranges from from Daniel Dennett to Charles Buchan and John McEnroe. (The video clip attached to the post, recalling the Ali vs Dunn non-fight, is compelling stuff too.) On the boxing side of things, two titles that I'd add to his selection are Thomas Hauser's The Black Lights and George Plimpton's gentlemanly collection, Shadow Box. In fact, most of Plimpton's sporting books are a must-read, especially Paper Tiger. I thought I had  lots of football ideas too, but my mind's a blank all of a sudden.

THE GREATEST, 65 TODAY

There's a touching birthday tribute in the Telegraph.

I keep this picture on the staircase leading to my study.

He'd be in the middle of a speech, and someone would shout out "N****r draft-dodger" or something like that. And it upset him. Finally, he told me. "I ain't gonna do that no more." And I said to him, "Brother, all you gotta do is fight fire with fire. Next time you get up there and someone heckles you like that, put him own." And sure enough, we were speaking at Syracuse University, and somebody in the audience called him a draft-dodging n****r. And Ali said, "Ladies and gentlemen, you know, a long time ago when I was a little boy, I used to throw rocks at this donkey. And my grandma would say, 'Cassius, quit throwing rocks at that donkey.' I'd ask, 'Why, grandma?' And she'd say, 'Cause some day that donkey is gonna die and come back and haunt you.' " Then Ali stopped and looked out at the audience and told them, "Ladies and gentlemen, I know that my grandma was right, because I believe that ass is in here tonight." It brought down the house.

Belinda Ali, in Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser.

THE REAL MEANING OF FOOTBALL

An antidote to all those tedious stories about Beckham, Abramovich and their billions... A profile of Abdullah Ben Kmayal - known to the locals as "Ben" - the driving force behind a coaching project in one of London's most violent districts:

Earlier this season, Ben learnt that he would be unable to call on the services of the central midfielder of his under-18 team, a talented footballer he had earmarked to train up as a coach to help develop the young players. The lad had been ambushed by a local gang, shot 16 times, machine-gunned in the street...Gang culture is corroding the fabric of the place, leeching the life out of every tower block and stairwell. It was here last year that local gangsters burst in on a christening party and shot a woman dead even as she cradled the baby who had just been christened. The youth who pulled the trigger was 17 years old.

Nelson Mandela once remarked that "sport can change the world, it has the power to inspire in a way that little else does". Nowhere in this country can sport have quite as big a challenge to inspire as it does in North Peckham. Yet, thanks to Ben and Greenhouse Bethwin, here of all places it seems to be working its magic.

EXTRA TIME: The little boy in Thursday's photo is now the big lad on the terraces. That's my eldest, just below the word "sport", after  Wycombe Wanderers scored their equalizer against all-conquering Chelsea in this week's Carling Cup semi-final. He's managed to get a ticket for the second leg, too. Until just over a year ago, I used to allow him to flit past me occasionally when we played in the park. Now I'm like an elderly part-timer confronting Christiano Ronaldo.

Talking of quixotic tasks, Dave Hill gamely defends Becks:

Judged for what he is rather than for what he's not, he passes many tests that others fail. Compared with, say, Ashley Cole, his quest for wealth and hunger for acclaim have been marked by a genial graciousness.

Finally, the magnificent Harry Redknapp, celebrating his thousandth game as a manager, looks back to yesteryear:

There have been a million changes. We used to train twice as long. There were no fitness coaches or dieticians and the physio was an ex-player. I remember in the medical room at Bournemouth the old physio was Arthur Cunliffe, who played for England, and we got a new ultrasound machine. In those days you had nothing and he kept rubbing it on the players' legs. I looked at the machine and said, "I think there is supposed to be a light coming on." He didn't realise it hadn't been switched on and he'd been using it on the players for three days. They were coming out, saying "that's better". That was how it was.

There wasn't anything about diet, you ate anything. When I played they would have crates of beer on the train after matches and even when I went back as manager at West Ham...

Average players can earn a fortune now. At the end of the season you used to be two minutes in the manager's office, he'd give you £5 a week rise and you were happy. Now it drags on for months and the players have all got agents. Managers don't get involved with that side of it. Djimi Traoré signed this week, he goes to meet the chief executive, Peter Storrie, and I couldn't even tell you what his wages are.

PS: I don't know how I overlooked it before, but James Hamilton's sports blog More Than Mind Games is a beauty. Lots of thoughtful soccerisms. And don't miss the quaint Wimbledon tournament footage from the Sixties.