Archive for January 2003
Mahindra Rides On Damasio Brace
Posted January 30, 2003
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Mahindra rides on Damasio brace
CHENNAI
JAN. 29.
Brazilian Ednei Jose Damasio only recently joined Mahindra United and he could well be the lucky charm for this Mumbai squad which has an enviable collection of players but for long had been struggling for results. With two goals, one in the first minute and the other in the last, Damasio carved out Mahindra’s first win in three months, a 2-0 win verdict over Indian Bank in a low-key Oil-PSU National Football League match at the Nehru Stadium on Wednesday.
“We have to win and we will win” was Mahindra Coach Harish Rao prophesy on the eve of the match and the message to his players was clear: “go all out’.
But even they would not have expected the chance that Indian Bank placed before them on a platter in the very first minute. All it required was for Tapan Ghosh to float a long diagonal. The aerial ball hoodwinked the Bank defence to think it had Damasio, who was eyeing the trajectory, in an off side trap. The Brazilian, who has come to the country with the reputation of having played for champion club Botafogo and also along with Ronaldo, was not one to look the gift horse in the mouth. The deception that he showed in remaining on side and stretch his right leg to get the ball to bounce in front of him was enough to send panic waves in the Indian Bank defence. In a flash Damasio headed in over the hapless goalkeeper Edward Felix.
A Kasun Nadika shot on the run in the very first minute on resumption reflected the changed mood of Indian Bank. But not before another overcoming another survival test when Damasio’s free kick from 20 yards nearly got past Felix, who got to the ball, dropped it and only a desperate dive saved the blushes. From there on Indian Bank suddenly changed gear, thriving mostly on counter-attacks, which certainly had Mahindra in a spot of bother.
The arrival of Basheer Ahmed added to the Bank’s enterprise. Once Sabir Pasha and Basheer did a one-two only to see Akhtar get a hand to the latter’s open-heeled essay. Harish thereafter misdirected from inside the box. Few more such situations where Kasun also joined in raised hopes of a possible Bank recovery. Akhtar also showed a touch of susceptibility to queer the pitch. But Damasio had the last laugh as he nudged in a James Singh flag kick almost at the end of time to seal Indian Bank’s fate.
“We had our chances but failed, instead allowed the rival to get into winning ways”, said a dejected Coach Sathyan as Indian Bank suffered its second defeat in a row, to remain on 11 points (ten matches), still one point ahead of Mahindra (10 points from ten matches). Our Special Correspondent
Hindu On Net
MELAKA Jan 23 – Melaka must overcome their weaknesses in several departments particularly the defence to be successful in this year’s Division One League, State FA Chief Datuk Ibrahim Durum said.
The newly-formed squad should also focus on their striking capacity, he said after the Melaka FA Diamond Jubilee Tournament match between Melaka and Brunei last night at Hang Tuah Stadium here.
“They wasted several golden opportunities to score while the defence appeared to be negligent and there seemed to be no understanding in checking enemy advance.”
Melaka edged Brunei 3-2 in the match.
He also said the Melaka FA were looking for sponsors to bring in Iranian coach Bahman Foroutan, 55, and two players from Nigeria.
In another match Pahang won 2-1 against Singapore Under-23.
However Pahang coach Ralf Broges Ferreira was not satisfied.
Much more would have to be done to strengthen the squad as some of the players including guest stars failed to implement the planned strategies on the pitch, he said.
“I am particularly disappointed with defender Frank Van Eljs for failing to lead the department effectively … we should not have allowed the Singapore goal,” Ferreira said.
Utusan Malaysia
Picking The Best
Posted January 18, 2003
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Picking the best
BRIAN GLANVILLE
“DO you think George Best was the best footballer ever?” asked the radioman from Best’s native city, Belfast. “No,” I replied. “But he was probably in the top five.” When the Times magazine asked me to make up my list of the best 100 footballers of all time, I put Pele, as I told the Belfast reporter, top, Alfredo di Stefano second. Diego Maradona, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff all had abundant claims to a high place; as indeed did Best himself.
The Belfast radio man had contacted me because, at their annual Sports Personality of the Year, BBC TV had decided to give Best, now so sadly and pitifully reduced by alcoholism and a most delicate liver transplant which blessedly seems to be working, a Lifetime Award. Previously presented only to the Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson.
I readily agreed that George deserved it. “If I’d been born ugly,” he once somewhat immodestly said, “You’d never have heard of Pele.” By sharp and severe contrast with the multi-millionaire David Beckham, his successor on Manchester United’s right wing, who has made the best of limited abilities, George could do everything and anything. He has indeed a bit tactlessly stressed the difference between Beckham and himself, alleging, with some basis, that the English international has no real pace, so cannot beat his man, no left foot, and cannot head the ball. George could do all these things and more, yet even he never remotely made the fortune Beckham has made. TV money rules these days.
Recently Brian Clough, the ever abrasive, ever controversial ex-manager of Derby County and Nottingham Forest whom he so brilliantly managed to two consecutive European Cup victories has revealed his own best ever team. Like Clough himself it is both unusual and somewhat perverse. Let us look at it and use it as a side, so to speak, to play off; to suggest a best ever team of our own.
In the first place, it doesn’t include Alfredo Di Stefano, which makes it seriously suspect. How to deny the amazing, protean talents of the Argentinean centre-forward, the tireless inspiration of the Real Madrid team which won five the first five European Cups in a row? Di Stefano was surely playing Total Football long before anyone had thought of it. There is reason to think that he was more versatile than Pele who, a glorious attacking player, a superlative technician, an acrobat, a juggler, a dribbler, fantastically dangerous in the air for so small a man, full of sudden surprises, a clever passer of the ball, never covered as much ground as Pele.
You might think that just as the Olympic Games are the true test of the great athlete I think of Australia’s runner Ron Clarke who broke record after record but never had the finishing kick to win Olympic gold then so is the World Cup as far as football is concerned. But neither Di Stefano nor Best ever played in the World Cup finals. Best because in his time for all his prowess Northern Ireland never got there. Di Stefano because as a young River Plate star he took off for Bogota to make money with the Millonatios club at a time when Colombia were not in FIFA, and from there went straight to Spain to play for Real: who managed to acquire him when Barcelona had equal rights to his services. True Di Stefano then proceeded to be naturalised and play for Spain but he didn’t actually play in the 1962 Finals in Chile. Officially he was injured. I remember going down to Vina del Mar and the Spanish team’s hotel, where Alfredo’s elderly father told me he had brought liniment, which he swore to his son, would cure him! But the word was that Alfredo had no intention of playing for Helenio Herera, then manager of Spain and a fellow Argentine with an ego as big as his own!
Clough chooses British players whose claims seem suspect. Jimmy Greaves was beyond doubt one of the finest attacking players of his British generation. He even scored nine goals in double quick time in his brief spell with Milan in 1961 in just 10 games. But for all his acceleration, ball skills, finishing powers, he failed badly in the World Cup in Chile, and was controversially dropped from the 1966 World Cup team by Alf Ramsey in 1966. By the same token, Scotland’s wing-half Dave Mackay was a crucial, potent figure in the Tottenham Hotspur team of the early 1960s, equally effective when though somewhat reduced in energy he joined Derby County, a major figure in Scotland’s team, but hardly on the level of the best of all time. Which reminds me that Clough omits Diego Maradona, a figure for Argentina in no fewer than four World Cups, the inspiration of their success in Mexico in 1986 when he scored two astounding solo goals at the Azteca stadium. How to leave him out?
Clough has Gerd Muller as one of his strikers. The West German centre forward was astonishingly prolific, a fantastic opportunist, scorer of the clinching goal in the World Cup Final in Munich of 1974. But his work was done almost exclusively in and around the goal area, even if one could never go as far as the jealous girl athlete Heidi Rosendahl, who declared that all Muller ever did was score goals!
Clough’s goalkeeper is another controversial choice. Of English keepers he prefers Peter Shilton to his predecessor and fellow Leicester City star, Gordon Banks, the man whose amazing one handed save from Pele’s point blank header in the 1970 World Cup in Guadalajara is still rated as probably the finest ever seen in that tournament. Shilton won more caps than Banks, 125 in all; he also, for all his abilities, made more mistakes. Of course Clough will still be grateful to him for all he did for Nottingham Forest, especially in the European Cup Final against Hamburg and Kevin Keegan, when his saves won the match.
It’s always hard to choose best ever teams, since football changes so much in speed, stamina and skills across the years. I’d suggest that any such team should include Pele, Di Stefano, Banks, Maradona, Beckenbauer, Best and that wonderful Brazilian right winger, so much more than that in the 1962 World Cup, Garrincha. That leaves four places to fill. I’d not quarrel with Clough in his preference for Italy’s Paolo Maldini, still playing, at left back, nor of England’s Tom Finney as a winger. Two Italian centre forwards, World Cup stars of the 1930s, Silvio Piola and Peppino Meazza, have claims. So has Johan Neeskens, a true Total Footballer for Holland and Ajax. But it’s hard to establish objective criteria.
Hindu On Net
Billy Wright Or Wrong?
Posted January 18, 2003
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Billy Wright or wrong?
BRIAN GLANVILLE
BILLY WRIGHT was the first player to win 100 England caps, which eventually rose to 105. A biography of sorts of him by Norman Giller is subtitled: A Hero For All Seasons, which tells you what kind of a book it must be. A hagiography in other words, and a long way off from the greatly improved soccer biographies, which are now blessed beginning to appear. None better than Leo McKinstry’s book on the Charlton brothers. But Billy’s life as well as his career is an interesting one for a variety of reasons, several of which escape his so-called biographer. For, the book consists in large part of an endless series of Billy’s recollection of the salient games in which he has played. As the poet put it, “Of old far off, forgotten things, and battles long ago.” Mostly long since forgotten.
Billy Wright was born in the West Midlands in the little town of Ironbridge and joined nearby Wolverhampton Wanderers as a teenager. That flamboyant, often ruthless, manager Major Frank Buckley once reduced him to tears by telling him he was too small ever to succeed as a professional footballer, but Wright grew though never tall and proved Buckley very wrong indeed. Blond and sturdily built, originally an inside-left, he was destined to become a permanent member at wing half of the England team, and its captain. Was he, people now ask me as one who followed his career right the way through, initially as a school boy myself worth those 105 caps? It’s a tricky question. There is no doubt that Wright owed much, in terms of consistent international selection, to the fact that his face fitted. There was a hierarchy. At the top of it, the huge, highly authoritative, even autocratic, Stanley Rous, then Secretary and chief executive of the Football Association. Next, in order of descent, the England team manager and the FA director of coaching Walter Winterbottom, who stayed in office for 16 almost incredible years despite shattering defeats by the USA in the 1950 World Cup and Hungary.
Next came Billy Wright; to evoke an old expression, the white hen who never laid a stray. The schoolboy hero, ebullient, dedicated, decent and loyal to the point of naivet . A player, who never gave up, who led by example. A strong tackler, though no great ball player or distributor of the ball.
I’d agree that as wing half Wright was probably capped more often then he deserved, but the discourse changes when you think of him later in his career as a centre half, a star of two World Cups. In 1954, England went to the World Cup finals in Switzerland their tails between their legs after a crushing 7-1 defeat in Budapest by the Hungarians. Centre half was, in that third back formation, a fearful problem. Syd Omen of Luton was clearly not equipped for the job. So, with a rare piece of good sense, in Switzerland, the selectors and Winterbottom gave the job to Wright.
He was a colossal success, and this would be his future role for Wolves, his one and only club, and England. He was just as impressive in Sweden in the 1958 World Cup, when, eventually asked to choose my best team of the tournament, Wright was my pick for centre half, even above big Mel Charles who was the “official” nominee.
Wright went on filling the role till his pace had gone and one remembers with some embarrassment watching his humiliation at Stamford Bridge when Jimmy Greaves, when playing for Chelsea, ran past him time and again to score.
For a time, Wright successfully managed the England youth team which was a perfect function for him; dealing with aspiring youngsters who would happily look up to him. But when he became manager of Arsenal in the early 60s, it all went wrong. He had neither the guide nor the authority to make things work and he reacted almost childishly to criticism. Norman Giller tells us he was too “nice” to succeed, which is a tactful way of putting it. I was never too sure how “nice” he was, recalling as I do sitting next to him in Bush House at a BBC World Service programme when, huffing and puffing over my criticisms, he informed me that he had made his displeasure known to my then proprietor of the Sunday Times, Roy Thomson, who fortunately knew and cared nothing about football.
It was surely no shame to Billy that he failed at Highbury. Two other blond England stars also failed as managers; Bobby Charlton at Preston and that ideal skipper Bobby Moore, who never got beyond little Southend United. Billy then went into commercial television in Birmingham and did very well, meanwhile having married the eldest, Joy, of that glutinously coy singing trio, the Beverley Sisters.
What truly shocked me when, after Billy’s death, I learned about it and not from the book was the fact that he had become an alcoholic. Billy Wright? The schoolboy hero? The cheerful, clean living paragon? How could it possibly happen? Giller doesn’t tell us, though he pussyfoots around the subject.
First assuring us that he has no intention of delving into this sad epilogue to a career, next describing how Billy at a dinner function would down drink after drink, before going back to his lonely room Joy was then living in London to carry on drinking. Then hinting at episodes too embarrassing to be recounted.
With help from wife and friends, Billy did, in the end, emerge from affliction, yet there is a dreadful pathos about it, and you wonder what miseries assailed him to make such a former paragon take refuge in drink. In a word, why was he so bitterly unhappy? It could surely not be a mere matter of loneliness.
Inevitably he was sacked as the manager of Arsenal. Giller thinks it was unfair and cited the numerous young players Billy brought through, who would do so much for the club in the future.
The implication of which surely is that Billy was at his best with youngsters and according to the American Peter Principle, was promoted a rung above his capabilities. Though I felt at the time he had to go I thought the way it was done was cruel.
The late Arsenal Chairman, Denis Hill Wood, long defended him, even cried, “Wright must stay!” when supporters on station platforms cried, “Wright must go!” only to sack him just the same.
I suppose you might say this was just another sample of the curse of the club Chairman’s vote of confidence, but the way it was done left an unpleasant residue. I’d like, had I been able, to have drawn a cartoon: Hill Wood plunging a dagger into Billy’s back with the words, “I’m backing Billy Wright up to the hilt!”
Hindu On Net
Nuclear Command Authority comes into being
By C. Raja Mohan
NEW DELHI
Jan. 4.
More than four-and-a-half years after declaring itself a nuclear weapon power, India today made public a set of political principles and administrative arrangements to manage its arsenal of atomic weapons.
Maximum restraint in the use of nuclear weapons, absolute political control over decision-making and an effective interface between civilian and military leaders in the management of its atomic quiver are at the heart of an announcement by the Government after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS).
The CCS met today to review progress in implementing India’s nuclear doctrine, the state of readiness of its strategic forces and the procedures for their command and control.
The significance of the CCS statement lies in the Government’s decision to share information on some key aspects of its nuclear weapons management with the Indian public and the world. Although the broad outline of India’s nuclear doctrine was known for a while, the nature of its command and control over the atomic arsenal had remained unclear.
The Government filled that gap today by revealing that a two-layered structure, called the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA), was responsible for the management of its weapons. The NCA comprised a Political Council and an Executive Council. The Political Council was chaired by the Prime Minister and “is the sole body which can authorise the use of nuclear weapons”, the CCS said. The Executive Council, chaired by the National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister, “provides inputs for decision making by the NCA and executes the directives given to it by the Political Council”.
The CCS also approved the appointment of a “Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Forces Command”, who would be responsible for the administration of the nuclear forces. A senior officer of the Air Force is expected to be nominated to the post. Taken together, these administrative arrangements form the crucial link between the civilian and military leadership on nuclear decisions and their execution.
Expressing “satisfaction with the overall preparedness” of its arsenal, the CCS reiterated the decision to limit India’s capability to a “credible minimum deterrent” and the commitment to use nuclear weapons only in retaliation. India also reaffirmed that it would not use the weapons against non-nuclear weapon powers. Against nuclear weapon powers, its strategy would remain one of “No-first use”.
While India has consciously chosen not to use nuclear weapons first, it warned potential adversaries that the “nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage”. It also emphasised strict control over the export of sensitive technologies and materials, readiness to join multilateral arms control agreements, continued observance of the moratorium on tests and a commitment to global disarmament.
This broad framework was affirmed in the draft nuclear doctrine prepared by the National Security Advisory Board set up after the May 1998 tests. The draft doctrine was released by the NSAB in August 1999. Today’s announcement confirmed the essence of that draft as official policy. The only new element in the doctrine is the interesting caveat it has introduced to its “No-first use” posture. India said its arsenal aimed to deter threats not just from nuclear weapons but also those from chemical and biological weapons. “In the event of a major attack against India, or Indian forces anywhere, by biological or chemical weapons, India will retain the option of retaliating with nuclear weapons,” the CCS said.
The United States has retained a similar option to prevent nations with chemical and biological weapons from assuming that the use of these weapons of mass destruction will not invite a nuclear response.
The CCS, however, does not tell all. Missing from its statement is the actual composition of the NCA at its Political and Executive levels. The Government also mentions that it has “reviewed and approved the arrangements for alternate chains of command for retaliatory nuclear strikes in all eventualities”. This is a reference to a situation in which the Prime Minister may be incapacitated during a crisis. But the CCS did not reveal how the power to press the nuclear button will move down the political chain in the event of such a contingency.
HIGHLIGHTS
Building and maintaining a credible minimum deterrent;
A posture of “no-first use” ;
Retaliatory attacks can only be authorised by the civilian political leadership through the NCA;
Non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states;
In the event of a major attack against India or Indian forces anywhere, by biological or chemical weapons, India will retain the option of retaliating with nuclear weapons;
A continuance of controls on export of nuclear and missile-related materials and technologies, participation in the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty negotiations, and observance of the moratorium on nuclear tests.
Hindu On Net
What Price Winterbottom?
Posted January 4, 2003
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What price Winterbottom?
BRIAN GLANVILLE
RECENTLY, a memorial service was held for the late Sir Walter Winterbottom. There were sincere eulogies, not least from Sir Bobby Robson, himself, like Walter, an England team manager. How heartily I agree with Sir Bobby that it was a great shame that in 1962 Walter did not succeed his mentor, Sir Stanley Rous, as the Secretary of the Football Association. It would surely have been an ideal role for him, but more of that later. But let us concentrate first on his joint Football Association roles as England team manager and Director of Coaching of which, very significantly, he once told me he thought the latter the more important.
Bobby, perhaps, was somewhat carried away in his oration. As the Romans said, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, speak nothing but good of the dead. But when Bobby praised Walter for “using language everyone could understand,” he was going just a little too far. I remember Jim Wilson, who used to be in charge of the Army representative team when, given the existence then of conscription, it was full of rising young stars, telling me of how Bobby Charlton, then a soldier, said to him, “Walter gave us a lovely talk. I don’t know what he meant.”
Another anecdote comes to mind. Of the England team in training on the lush pastures of the Bank of England ground at Roehampton. “I want you five forwards,” said Walter, “to go down the field inter-passing, then when you reach the penalty area, just put the ball into the goal.”
That brilliant maverick inside-forward Len Shackleton, alias the Clown Prince of Soccer, looked up wearily from the ground where he lay. “Which side of the goal Mr. Winterbottom?” he languidly inquired.
I knew Walter pretty well for many years and always found him greatly likeable, a charming, intelligent man. But as the first-ever full time manager of the England team, and one who amazingly lasted 16 years, he was scarcely ideal. During those years, I was wont to write, Walter was like a civil servant, who remained in office while governments fell. True, for much of that time he was in the absurd position of having to field teams picked for him by a selection committee, consisting largely of the chairmen of professional clubs. And it was Len Shackleton who put the cat among the pigeons in his Clown Prince autobiography, with a one-page chapter headed, The Average Director’s Knowledge Of Football. The page was blank.
During those years Walter survived the cataclysmic 1-0 defeat of the England in the 1950 World Cup in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, by a rag, tag and bobtail USA team. The 6-3 humiliation by the Hungarians at Wembley in November,1953: the first ever defeat at home for England by a team from outside the British Isles. The subsequent 7-1 route by the Hungarians in Budapest, the following May.
Even if those England teams were picked by the selectors and the one which went down 7-1 had some odd choices Walter’s tactics still in retrospect seem woefully inadequate. A few years ago, I spoke to him about the defeat at Wembley, largely engineered by the Hungarians’ deep lying centre-forward Nandor Hidegkuti who scored the first goal in 90 seconds and went on to get a couple more. Why had he been given the freedom of the park?
Winterbottom told me that he had asked his centre-half, Harry Johnston, how he wanted to play Hidegkuti: would he close mark him or stand off him. Johnston said he’d prefer to stand off. All well and good, but surely this implied that someone would look after Hidegkuti. It didn’t happen. Nandor was largely left alone to wreak havoc.
What a contrast with what had happened in Budapest a mere fortnight earlier, when Sweden held Hungary to a 2-2 draw. Another, very different, English manager was in charge of the Swedish team: the little Yorkshireman George Raynor.
Raynor told me, when I got to know him well in Rome as manager of Lazio, how he’d planned to nullify Hidegkuti. Having promised his players, “If we win, I’ll paint Stalin’s moustache (on his statue) red!” What he did was to depute a player to shadow Hidegkuti in each half; his inside-left in the first-half, his centre-forward in the second. It worked. Sweden forced a gallant 2-2 draw. In his latter years, Walter tried to denigrate that achievement for one reason or another. But results are results and the 7-1 thrashing in Budapest cannot easily be explained away.
Surely by then, whatever the team he was given, Walter should have learned enough about Hungary and Hidegkuti at least to avoid humiliation. A policy of containment should have been mandatory. Packed defence, breakaway attacks where possible. Raynor and Sweden had shown the way; Winterbottom and inept England didn’t follow it.
I never blamed Walter for the defeat by the USA. Those wise after the traumatising event have blamed England and the then sole selector, Arthur Drewry for not picking Stanley Matthews, that gloriously elusive outside-right. But this was an England team full of glittering stars: Wilf Mannion, Tom Finney, Stan Mortenson. It should have overwhelmed an American team without a single-known player. That it didn’t, provided surely the greatest shock in any World Cup tournament, and I’m not forgetting North Korea’s 1-0 defeat of Italy in 1966 at Middlesbrough.
So how, in the name of logic, did Walter survive so long, where for years now any England manager who enters a bad streak look now at Sven Goran Eriksson comes under withering fire? Answer: Stanley Rous. The all-powerful, authoritarian Secretary of the F.A. Walter was his protege; some said even his poodle. The football Press then was far less abrasive and confrontational than now. And Walter did at least get his England team to the World Cup finals of 1950, 1954, 1958 and 1962.
What of his coaching scheme? He once told me that coaching was simply a matter of “showing how to practice.” But though it unquestionably schooled outstanding future manager-coaches such as Ron Greenwood, famous at West Ham, the scheme became an orthodoxy, ridden with jargon: “peripheral vision,” “environmental awareness,” and what not, ultimately begetting a department which promoted the sterility of long ball football, at the expense of true skills.
Walter should certainly have succeeded Rous as F.A. Secretary but was sabotaged by the scheming Professor Harold Thompson, an F.A. vice-President who hated Rous, who’d always stamped hard on the late Thompson’s machinations. But Thompson managed to convince the appointing committee to prefer Danis Follows; whom he could later drive into a heart-attack, with his constant pressures and plotting. Walter became a senior sporting bureaucrat, but, in the role of F.A. Secretary, there was so much he could have done for the game. More, one feels, than he ever could as coach and as a bizarrely long-serving England team manager.
Hindu On Net