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E’ ormai imminente la composizione dei calendari della stagione 2009/2010 relativa ai campionati inglesi e scozzesi. Pubblichiamo al riguardo un articolo della “BBC” che si sofferma sulle modalità di compilazione degli stessi e sui criteri con cui essi vengono stilati. Una delle novità più attese della “Premier League” del prossimo anno sarà il ritorno del derby di Birmingham fra il City e l’ Aston Villa ( foto repertorio ) ma andranno seguiti attentamente anche alcuni incontri di un’ altra neopromossa dalla tifoseria piuttosto ruvida come il Burnley. Ad esempio, sarà da segnare con attenzione la sfida tra i “Clarets” ed il Tottenham. Ovviamente l’ attenzione degli sportivi cadrà anche sulle stracittadine londinesi e sulle sfidae incrociate tra Liverpool, Man U e Chelsea. Ha destato abbastanza scalpore la morte di un talebano, deceduto in Afghanistan in un conflitto a fuoco con le truppe alleate, sul cui corpo era stato tatuato lo stemma dell’ Aston Villa. Il fatto consente di ipotizzare la provenienza dal Regno Unito di alcuni dei miliziani musulmani coinvolti negli scontri ed alcuni fans proprio dei “Villans”, soldati delle forze NATO, si sono detti “shockati” per la sparatoria con un tifoso del loro stesso club. Infine proponiamo la bizzarra storia di un supporter del Taunton Town, un club minore, il quale è stato soggetto a bando dal club dopo che il presidente lo aveva apostrofato con termini come “ass” e “smart alec”. Il sostenitori ha chiesto, anche in forma scritta, alla dirigenza chiedendo ulteriori spiegazioni ma non le ha ottenute. Non stanno mancando gli interventi di soggetti terzi e di associazioni per la tutela dei diritti dei tifosi che hanno giustamente sottolineato come il divieto di accedere agli spalti non possa essere erogato a soggetti semplicemente indesiderati ma esclusivamente a chi si sia macchiato di episodi di violenza o comunque potenzialmente lesivi dell’ ordine pubblico.
Secrets of the fixture computer
“Ever wondered why you have had to travel the length of the country on a wet Tuesday night to watch your team in action?Or you haven’t played at home on Boxing Day for the last three years?Like me, you’ve probably just blamed the fixture computer, that mythical piece of technology that determines where you will be and when throughout the football season.I have always imagined it to be some great beast of a machine like bertha, firing out tickertape full of fixtures while some overworked scientist desperately tries to make sense of the information spewing forth.The fixtures for the 2009-2010 season are released at 1000 BST on Wednesday and last week I spoke to some of the key people involved in the formation of the schedule.Putting the fixture list together is incredibly complex – with a whole series of factors ensuring it is an increasingly difficult task.Just to give you one example; every club is paired with another in regard to when they play their home and away fixtures. This is done for a number of reasons, one being so that clubs like Everton and Liverpool do not play at home on the same weekend.West Ham, it turns out, are paired with Dagenham and Redbridge. But for reasons of revenue Southend request they do not play at home on the same day as the Hammers as they believe it impacts upon their attendance.
I wanted to find out exactly how the fixture list is put together and just how difficult a job it is. Needless to say, I spent a large chunk of last weekend in a dark and cool room as my brain tried to come to terms with its most serious case of information overload since I asked my wife to point out my most obvious flaws.
Southend, though, are in Essex, as are Colchester, so they cannot play together on the same weekend. Colchester share stewards with Ipswich so those two clubs also request they do not play home games on the same weekend. Transport links dictate Ipswich and Norwich do not play together on the same weekend either. In other words, when West Ham play at home can have an impact on when a club as far away as Norwich (108.8 miles) play their home fixtures. And there are 12 other professional clubs in London….Confused? Read on and I guarantee you will be.The compilation of the fixture list is done jointly between the Premier League and the Football League. The whole process starts upwards of a year in advance when Fifa and Uefa release their match calendars but work starts in earnest in the final months of the previous season.The Football League, for example, sends out a questionnaire to all their clubs in March. This is a club’s opportunity to request specific dates they would like to avoid and what other team they would like to be paired with. The questionnaire is jointly signed off by the police and also reflects their concerns – issues such as ensuring high-profile matches do not clash with big events in a city.During this time the main man in the process – Glenn Thompson of Atos Origin, an international IT services company, – starts the process he describes as sequencing.For most of the year Glenn works as an IT professional in Scotland but he has been compiling the fixtures since the 1993-94 season and describes the task both as an enormous puzzle and his summer job. He is the man who owns the laptop that is the fixture computer.Sequencing involves mapping out on what days all the fixtures will take place and the pattern of home and away games that a team will play.There are rules governing sequencing – for example clubs will play no more than two home games consecutively and, with one eye on the financial situation at lower league clubs, the games either side of an FA Cup fixture should not both be away from home.But slotting all the fixtures into the calendar is becoming more and more difficult.Paul Snellgrove is the Football League fixtures officer. I get the impression he is a very amiable man but mention the fixture calendar and it quickly becomes obvious this is a complicating factor in his life.The increase in European club competition fixtures – with the inaugural Europa League next season – is eating into the available space; as are international friendlies and World Cup qualifiers. Next season is followed by the World Cup so the campaign ends early. The Champions League final next season takes place on a Saturday, eating into another weekend when Premier League fixtures cannot be played.Out of necessity, next season’s play-off finals are split across two weekends, with the Championship finale taking place on the same day as the Champions League final.There are 10 rounds of midweek Championship fixtures to squeeze in, six for League One and League Two and four in the Premier League. Then you have the FA Cup, the Carling Cup and the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy.The process of sequencing took Thompson 10 days this year – and once the season finished he plotted his pairings into a grid and started wading through the lists of requests from the clubs and the police. Snellgrove estimated there were about 90 this year from the Premier and Football League clubs, while on average Thompson reckons about 80% of the home and away requests are accommodated.He also manually creates the fixtures for Boxing Day and 28 December to try to minimise the travelling distance for fans. As Thompson readily admits, the computer has no concept of the distance between grounds.Once the sequencing and plotting was finished – are you still with me here? – Thompson fed all the information into the programme on his laptop. The methodology was created in 1982 and was updated a decade ago. Way back when the computer was a desktop based in Wilmslow and compiling a division’s fixtures was an overnight job. These days it can knock out a division in 5-10 minutes.Five days after the Championship play-off final Thompson produced his first draft of the fixtures. From that moment onwards it was all a case of refinement, refinement, refinement, with Thompson returning to his computer 30-40 times to try to improve his list.These might include issues such as potentially sensitive fixtures being played on the opening or final weekends of the season and derby fixtures taking place in midweek.As Snellgrove puts it: “There is a huge amount of information crunched – by the time the fixtures actually come out the original list has been changed goodness knows how many times.”At this stage only Thompson sees the list, as he adjusts and tweaks it until he comes up with a calendar that he is happy to take to the Premier League and the Football League.Last Wednesday, Thompson headed to Preston where he met with both the governing bodies – and a further process of refinement took place over the following days.
Thompson reckons he does the job because he enjoys it and derives great satisfaction from producing a body of work that has a very tangible end product. But it must be an agonising, head-scratching process that slowly strips you of the will to live.
For instance, every time a fixture is changed it affects at least seven other fixtures and can easily impact on as many as 48.
Ian Todd is the president of the Football Supporters’ Federation and sits on the fixtures working party that meets to discuss Thompson’s list. One year he objected to Morecambe playing at Dagenham and Redbridge in midweek. They tried to alter the fixture but found out that it would negatively impact on so many other games that what Todd calls “the least worst option” was to maintain the status quo.The fixtures working party met last Saturday to discuss this year’s calendar. In addition to Todd, Thompson and Snellgrove, the Premier League and Football Association are represented as well as people from the top flight, Championship, League One and League Two clubs.
Todd estimates he has between 30-45 minutes to scan the fixtures and point out any concerns that might impact negatively on supporters.Monday involves a meeting with various police chiefs and the British Transport Police. Again, there are potential issues here that had never crossed my mind. They look at potential logistical problems such as whether there will be too many fans from different clubs all heading to one train station in London for a particular set of fixtures on any given weekend.On Tuesday the list will be signed off and on Wednesday morning we will all see the fruits of a lot of hard work.Not everyone will be happy but Snellgrove is confident that if certain clubs’ requests have not been accommodated then at least he will be able to explain why Thompson sometimes has nightmares about the job but always hopes to produce a list that is balanced and neutral. He reckons this year’s list will not be the best they have produced but will be far from the worst.The story doesn’t end there.Over the following week Snellgrove will deal with requests by clubs to switch days. Clubs cannot move a game away from an allocated weekend but they can switch the day of the match. Cheltenham, for example, often play a home game on a Friday when there is a clash with the horse racing festival.Thompson will start dealing with reserve fixtures, academy games and feeder leagues to the Blue Square Premier.This year when I see some ridiculous fixtures my club have been asked to play I hope I show a little bit more understanding. Though I seriously doubt it.The 2009-2010 Premier League, Football League and Scottish fixtures will be available on the BBC website from 1000 BST on Wednesday.”
(BBC Sport )
Killed, a ‘Brummie’ Taliban fighter with an Aston Villa tattoo
“Allied troops fighting in Afghanistan have long suspected that their Taliban opponents include British-born Muslims.Thick Midlands and Mancunian accents have been picked up from enemy radio signals in the war zone.But now there is fresh evidence that some of the Taliban were raised in the UK with the revelation that one fighter killed in a battle had an Aston Villa football club tattoo on his body.A military source said: ‘It was a shock to hear that the guys we were fighting against supported the same football clubs as us, and maybe even grew up on the same streets as us.’The source said the body of the unidentified Muslim insurgent was found with the AVFC tattoo following clashes with the Nato-led International Security Assistance Forces.The discovery adds to fears the Taliban is successfully recruiting hundreds of radicalised British nationals to fight against the country of their birth.Tory MP Patrick Mercer, a former infantry commander, said the presence of a tattoo of an English football club suggests the insurgent had at one point been a well-integrated member of UK society who identified with his home culture, but was radicalised nevertheless.Allied spy planes have previously picked up Birmingham and Manchester accents among Taliban radio chatter, while in April it emerged that a Briton had been identified as a Taliban bombmaker after his fingerprints were found on an unexploded roadside device in Helmand”
Football Fan Banned For Being ‘A Smart Alec‘
“I appreciate this is not about Manchester City but it is another offering from the FSF and in my thinking it shows just how crazy football has become and how much power people seem to think they have…at any level!Taunton Town Football Club fan Paul Chandler, has been banned from his own team’s ground for being an ‘ass’ and ‘a smart Alec’ according to the club’s chairman.The story began last year when Taunton Town’s board met with the Supporters’ Club who 55-year-old Paul was then chairman of. Town’s fans had fears over the way their club was being run and raised these legitimate queries with the board who responded by declaring the Supporters’ Club a ‘disgrace’ who had no right to ask any questions!Following this the board announced the Supports’ Club had been disbanded – something they had absolutely no right or authority to do. The Supporters’ Club carried on as usual.Paul has been refused entry ever since. The club have never replied to his letters or given any explanation whatsoever, even in the letter telling him he was banned – that is until the Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) stepped in.Ken Malley, chair of the FSF’s South West and South Wales Division attended the Football Club’s AGM. Despite questions from Ken and other supporters the board refused to clarify why Paul had been banned. The board would not even allow Paul entry to discuss himself!
Following the AGM the FSF wrote to the club again on Paul’s behalf asking for a reason for the ban and the right to appeal.At last the club wrote back to the FSF branding Paul an ‘ass’ and ‘a smart Alec’ – as the club have still refused to give any other specific reasons for the banning we can only presume this is it!
Paul Chandler, former chair of Taunton Town FC’s Supporters’ Club, said:’All I wanted from the club was the chance to defend myself. If I’m banned they should at least tell me why and give me the right to appeal. If that makes me an ‘ass’ and ‘a smart Alec’ then who knows what it makes the legal system in the UK where this is a fundamental point of principle!‘
Ken Malley, chair of the FSF’s South West and South Wales Division, said:Fans should only be banned for reasons of disorder or violence – not for asking awkward questions to their team’s board. Paul’s crime was so heinous the club won’t even tell him what he’s done. What a joke.‘The Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) is the national supporters’ organisation for all football fans from England and Wales comprising more than 142,000 individual fans and members of local supporters’ organisations from every club in the professional structure and many from the pyramid.”
( Vitalfootball.co.uk )