Johnny Dixon RIP.

Today sees the passing of a true Villa legend; Johnny Dixon. A winger and inside-forward (remember when there were such positions as 'inside-forward'? I don't!) who signed for Aston Villa in 1944 and spent seventeen years at Villa Park as a player, and a further six as a youth team coach. He will always be remembered by the claret-and-blue half of Brum as the captain of the F.A. cup winning team of 1957 (where we beat Manchester United's Busby Babes 2-1; albeit by flattening their goalkeeper!) which, sadly, was the last time we lifted the cup. Hopefully, we can win it this year as a tribute to the great man.
(Actually, winning anything would be nice! We've got as good a chance as we've had a very long time this season, though.)
So long Johnny, thanks for your contribution to the history of the mighty Aston Villa!

Egg-chucking.

I know this isn't exactly topical, with it all being finished last week (I've been a busy boy), but I'm glad the rugby world cup is over.
I know there's a lot of rugby fans out there. I can understand the appeal, it's a fast, violent sport, and I was pleased England got as far as they did (which pissed off my Scottish girlfriend. Sport's always good for rubbing the sweaty socks' noses in it) and was genuinely disappointed when they didn't win it.
What really pisses me off is the response to the tournament in the newspaper's letters pages that I've read in the last week. It's all been the same old "our football players could learn a lot from our rugby players" cobblers that was being spouted after the last rugby world cup. (These same letters pages were all saying the opposite at the beginning of the tournament, when England were playing shite.) Football , (or 'soccer' if you're from across the pond. I hate that term) is Britain's most popular sport. Always has been. Always will be. Rugby Union may be popular for the next fortnight or so, but it'll soon fade, just as it did four years ago, and that was when we actually won something!
I know a lot of Premier League players misbehave. I also know a lot more of them do loads of charity work and support a lot of schemes helping their clubs' local communities. I also know that, because of football's position as the number one sport, these players are under a lot more scrutiny than their egg-chucking counterparts, so any bad behaviour by a football player is going to turn up immediately in the papers. In fact, I seem to remember Lawrence Dallaglio making the papers for an alleged cocaine scandal, and Will Carling's various alleged trysts with women who weren't his wife, one of whom was the wife of the future king of England. (There goes the knighthood, eh, Will?) so, the paragons of virtues that are rugby union players aren't exactly that pearly white, are they?
And this is what pisses me off. All this moaning about our football players is just downright snobbery. Professional footballers are generally working class men who piss some people off because they make lots of money. (which is only right, in my opinion. I've never believed that footballers shouldn't make a lot of money. They are part of an entetainment industry, which in itself makes a lot of money. It's only right they should see some of the profits, as they're the ones punters are paying to see, and it is a very short career. I don't blame them for trying to make as much money as they can when they can. Hardly anyone moans about Tom Cruise making twenty million dollars a movie, which I think is more abhorrent. Have you seen Days Of Thunder?!)
Rugby players are, on the other hand, mostly middle-class. Until recently, they weren't even paid for playing rugger as they all had posh jobs like being accountants or quantity surveyors or company directors during the week. It seems to me that it's okay for rugby players to get pissed up (with members of the royal family, no less! I think I might join the army, if it's anything like Prince Harry's time in the forces, you get to get pissed as much as you like, go to swanky nightclubs and big sporting events all the time, and not actually do any fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan.), as it's just high spirits. If footballers do the same,(especially after losing an important match) it's another indictment of the sorry state of our national sport. It's just out-and-out snobbery and it shows that the class system is alive and well in our country, despite protestations to the contrary.
Right. I'm off to get pissed, now.

Just not cricket.

I hate cricket. It's a stupid game. It's so bloody middle class. All that guff about cricket on the village green and stopping for tea harks back to an England that never existed. Not for me, anyway.
My local county cricket club, in Edgbaston (a resolutely middle-class suburb), is Warwickshire, a county Birmingham is no longer part of, and hasn't been part of for at least as long as I've been alive. If there was a West Midlands County cricket club, I still wouldn't support them. It might be different in other counties, but they're isn't really a West Midlands identity. Maybe it's because it's a relatively new county, but there isn't as much pride in being a West Midlander as, say, a Yorkshireman has in his county, nor do we have a county stereotype like Essex has.
Brummies couldn't give a fuck about Coventry, or Wolverhampton, or Walsall, and neither could they give a reciprocal fuck about Birmingham. That's why football is better. When you go to a footie match, there's a real sense of belonging to your community.(Unless you're a Man Utd. supporter, in which case you could be from anywhere! Glory hunting bastards.)
The game of cricket itself is stupid. They play in the summer but wear jumpers. They stop for tea. They can play a game for five days and still draw. Commentators say stuff like 'silly mid-off'
and 'gully' and expect you to know what they're on about, and they don't want to explain it to oiks like me in case I get interested and want to take my working-class arse into Edgbaston.It's such a snobby game! I mean, it's only been in the last few years that women could go into Lord's club.
The snobbery reared its head in the recent Andrew/Freddie Flintoff 'falling off a pedalo pissed' incident. There were a couple of people saying it was a disgrace, but generally the consensus was that "he's been a bit of a silly boy, but boys will be boys, let him get on with his cricket" (which I kind of agree with. The most exciting sportsmen, generally, are the pissheads- Alex Higgins, Maradona, Botham, Gazza, Paul Merson, George Best, Greavsie-the list goes on and on...) but if you imagine that if it was an English footballer at a World Cup that fell off a pedalo whilst pissed up the reaction would be 'SEND THIS DRUNKEN YOB HOME!!', because football is still seen as a game for oiks (although, lately, it's priced out of this particular oik's price range), and is played by mostly working class men, and if we do things like get drunk, it's an outrage, but if a cricketer does it, it's just horseplay.
The recent suspicious death of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer ( whose name sounds a lot like a local Central TV newsreader; I initially thought Bob Warman had been killed suspiciously!) and the Cronje match-fixing scandal shows that cricket is totally corrupt and is probably as fixed as wrestling is. (Although, recent events in Italy show us that football isn't squeaky clean either.)

Cricket is a throwback to the empire, and we should leave it the past, and it's kind of ironic that the countries we once lorded over keep beating us at it. I can't wait for this cricket world cup to finish.