Sitting Orders

The Brandywell is the national league’s only Premier Division ground. But it struck me as I trudged away from the goalless draw against ten-man Bohs the Saturday before last that if we don’t find somebody soon to half-fill Liam Coyle’s boots, we might have a stadium that would swank it over the Bernabeau for all the good it would do us.

Not that the Brandywell is swanky. But it is the only ground in the league with one of these new “Premier Division” Uefa licences without which clubs won’t be allowed into European competition – a factor with possibly interesting significance for such as Shels and Bohs come the autumn. It’s possible, too, though – I put it no higher – that Derry won’t qualify for Europe this year. Which gives us the luxury of being able to contemplate at leisure what general benefits the Uefa accolade confers.
Key to the Uefa conditions is that stadia must be all-seater, which the Brandywell isn’t. Unfazed, City chiefs ordered the closure of the Lone Moor Road side. So now we have a solidly-filled seated side looking across at an expanse of empty terracing.
Those of us who have stood at the same spot on the Lone Moor Road side since our return from the undead 19 seasons ago have been booted unceremoniously across to an alien region, and instructed to fold ourselves into unfeasible toy plastic chairs. For a lithe lad like myself, this is no great problem, albeit I still resent the imposition. But for bulky arthritics who haven’t been my age since we hit 25, the experience can be something of an ordeal.
I blame Margaret Thatcher, who came from Grantham. The only other famous person associated with Grantham is Martin O’Neill, the Lincolnshire town having been the location of the Kilrea man’s first managerial position. Not as many people know that as you’d think.
Thatcher responded to the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 by appointing a judge called Taylor to advise on the future of football. Taylor knew as little about football as the average judge knows about the lives of the people up before him. His main recommendation was all-seater stadia. This made no sense. It wasn’t the fact that they’d been standing which caused the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans but the fact that the South Yorkshire police, with the organisational competence and level of concern for the public typical of police forces everywhere, funnelled 19,000 people into a fenced area with a maximum capacity of 11,000.
But that didn’t matter. Thatcher, then the FA, then Uefa, used the disaster as an excuse not to make football safer for fans but to make it more congenial for the class of customer the marketing wallahs wanted to substitute for the proles who had kept the game going for more than a hundred years. The changes at the Brandywell are part of the yuppification of football.
This, in itself, is a good enough reason to launch a campaign for the abolition of the new Uefa dictat.
As a tolerant person, I don’t object to provision being made for those sufficiently naff to want to sit at football matches. The current regime has been in place across the water for more than a decade. There are some in Ireland whose experience of live football consists of travelling over over six times a season for English Premiership games. Watching football from a sedentary position seems “natural” to them. They are Thatcher’s mutants, like the repllcants of Epsilon Alpha blissfully unaware of their own inauthenticity.
You can’t jump up in the air yowling from a sitting position. You can’t turn your back to the pitch moaning and holding your head in your hands. You can’t amble across to exchange analyses with other qualified aficionadoes at half time and wander back to you own spot for the restart. Sitting down at a football match is contemptuous of tradition and, pace the replicants, contrary to the natural order of things. Mark my words. No good will come of it.

The abortive Tyco theft trial in New York has received sadly scant coverage on this side of the Atlantic. Sadly, because the details of the case offer a brightly-coloured picture of the sort of corruption which is typical of Irish capitalism, too, but which Irish ex-Taoisigh, telecommunications moguls, newspaper magnates and other local scoundrels don’t carry off with quite the same crude chutzpah.
Former Tyco executives Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz are accused of the theft of $600 million of investors’ money. The scam was simple. Persuade your pals in the media to lie that Tyco shares are a snip. Then seize the money the dupes invest in the company and put it into your personal bank account, having entered a note saying “business expenses” in the company accounts and hired a team of bent accountants to certify that everything’s on the up and up.
The trial lasted six months. It emerged, and wasn’t denied, that Kozlowksi had, for example, entered as business expenses a $6,000 shower curtain, a $5 million diamond ring and a $2 million birthday party for his wife. Few observers doubted that the dodgy duo would go down.
Kozlowski and Swartz had media profiles in Manhattan to match the presentation here of any number of Irish crooks. Great men altogether for the Yankees or a day at the track, personally friendly with leading politicians, widely admired for their innovative dynamism. Also graceless vulgarians driven by greed.
The centrepiece of the Greek island birthday blow-out which Kozlowksi organised for his wife with stolen money was a full-sized ice-sculpture replica of Michaelangelo’s David, pissing vodka.
People sometimes ask me why the rich are so disgusting. I suppose it is that no amount of money will give you a sense of social propriety if the way you’ve gotten rich is by stealing from the poor, which is true, of course, of, oh, say, 99 percent of the useless fucking parasites.

I’d forgotten about the plot to murder Gadafi until David Shayler reminded me. He’s the MI5 whistle-blower who was sentenced to six months in 2002 for breach of the Official Secrets Act.
Shayler had been the agency’s Libyan desk officer in 1997 when he happened on a plot to have Gadafi killed. MI6 had paid Al Qaida £100,000 stg. to carry out the assassination. The Al Qaida cell entrusted with the job did manage to mount an ambush on Gadafi as he travelled in Libya but succeeded only in killing a number of uninvolved civilians.
Shayler is no left-winger. He accounts himself a British patriot. His objection to the death plot was that it was illegal: under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, MI6 officers are licenced to kill only if they have specific government sanction for the killing they have in mind. Which they didn’t in this instance.
Is it not remarkable, amidst the massive coverage of Blair’s visit to Tripoli last month, and the welter of comment on Lockerbie and speculation as to whether the Libyans were going to admit to the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, that there wasn’t a mention of the fact that Britain had paid Osama bin Laden’s organisation to murder the Libyan leader? I suppose not.