The General Football Thread

Half decent these three...

 

If only they were orange

 

Oh em gee and lol, Fats. Orange is sooooo Summer 2019.

 

I’m so much trendier than I thought.... there was me thinking my orange wardrobe was sooooo Summer 1986!

 

Completely agree. University gives people life skills. The bridge between school and adult life. While some are very independent, I know for a fact I would not have coped going straight to work at 18. I think two year courses are a way forward for the non-academic.

 

University v Work job = different horses for different courses.

whatever choice made gives one life skills

My son who is very academic, chose not to go to University and took a degree apprenticeship, so he is working whilst studying. We were shocked at first, but he was determined it was for him and he’s into his second year of the job now and is absolutely loving it. Leaves home at 7am and gets back at 7pm. Thrown himself into it and with hindsight, it was the right decision for him, even though Mum and I always thought Uni was the route for him.

 

I was wearing Transformers pajamas in 1986.

 

What did they turn into?

 

I discovered girls, beer and snooker (not necessarily in that order) when I was 16, so, consequently totally screwed up my A levels and could only get to uni through clearing on a course I really wasn’t keen on. But I went and spent a year going crazy and doing as much “stuff” as i could (whilst playing rugby - it was Wales you know boyo) and then flunked out at the end of the year. 5 months on the dole in Southampton, though, focused my attention a bit and I eventually got myself a post as a trainee accountant and put myself through night school whilst working full time. Funnily enough my boy followed the same path (except he dropped out twice!) and then did an IT degree on day release and evening classes and is pretty successful and working “up the smoke”.
I had a lot of fun at uni, but it’s clear to me that it’s not everything and can leave the wrong people saddled with a ****load of debt for a degree which is meaningless. I used to get annoyed with my bosses who I stared that even the most basic clerical position required a degree - I hired people from the production area who had so much more common sense and work ethic than many of the grads.
People mature at different ages (young men particularly) and I think the option of a gap year is a great one to take advantage and try to learn more about the world. I learned more by going down the dole office every Tuesday, signing on and talking to the older guys there about life than I ever did at uni - and I’ve found it stood me in good steam over my working career as I treated everyone with the same level of respect, whether he was a forklift driver or the MD. They all deserve it as (generally) they work as hard.
Anyway - that’s my 5 penny worth (maybe a quid it so - sorry to go on ....)

 

Ah, common sense! What a massively underrated skill.
Edit: FWIW; I went the apprenticeship route with Pirelli’s. Had 12m at SETA which allowed some degree of life after school initiation before an industrial work environment. Life skills are learnt from all different environments & people. If possible, the more you do/experience the more you’re able to learn, IF you’re open.

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, obviously.

 

Sorry for the copy/paste, but a great article on Marcus R & Sir Alex F.

I believe it was their upbringing that made them. Rather like Maradona. People are what they are because of their past.

“Marcus Rashford and Alex Ferguson team up to stop the poor going hungry

Manchester United’s star striker and legendary former manager talk about growing up in poverty and why they are backing efforts to turn surplus food into meals for those who can’t afford to eat

November 27 2020, The Times

Marcus Rashford is the football superstar and poverty campaigner who at the age of 23 has already forced the government into two U-turns on free school meals and raised millions of pounds for charity while also playing for Manchester United and England.

Sir Alex Ferguson is widely regarded as one of the best British football managers of all time who during his 26 years with Manchester United won a record 38 trophies, including 13 premier league titles and five FA cups.

Rashford was made an MBE last month for services to vulnerable children. Ferguson, who is 78, was knighted in 1999 for his contribution to sport. Both overcame extraordinarily tough backgrounds to reach the top.

They are footballing legends, representing the past and the future of the game. Interviewing them together is like being granted an audience with both the Queen and Prince William. In fact, it is probably of greater interest to more people. After the interview, Rashford tweeted: “I had the best conversation with Sir Alex today. I’m in awe of this man.” By the following morning, his tweet had received more than 100,000 likes.

The two men have come together to support The Times and Sunday Times Christmas appeal which is raising money for the poverty and food waste charity FareShare. We spoke to them on a conference call from their separate lockdown bubbles.

Rashford still remembers the first time he saw his hero when he was a young boy in the Manchester United Academy. “We were watching the first team doing a gym session. He was stood up on the balcony and he told us to make sure we were watching and learning. I must have been about ten years old.” Ferguson spotted Rashford as soon as he joined the club at the age of seven. “He was what we would consider one of the better potentials coming through the system.”

What has impressed the former manager most is the striker’s commitment to the vulnerable. Rashford’s campaigning has already helped FareShare to provide two million meals a week to those in need. Now, inspired by this achievement, Ferguson and his friend Sir Michael Moritz, the billionaire philanthropist, are pledging £2 million to “match fund” donations that are made to the charity in the run-up to Christmas, meaning any money that Times readers give will be doubled.

“You have to be shocked at the number of people who are in need of food,” Ferguson says. “Marcus has opened the eyes of everyone in Britain. The work he’s done has been fantastic and we’re all so proud of him because of that.”

Rashford’s impact this year has been phenomenal. While some Premier League players spend their millions on fast cars and designer clothes, he has used his celebrity to raise public awareness of deprivation in Britain. Some Tory MPs accused him of “virtue-signalling on Twitter” and complained that he should stick to football but one recent poll found that more people think that Rashford has been an effective leader during the pandemic than either the prime minister or the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer. “It’s not political at all, it’s just about what’s best for kids and, looking forward, what you would change from your own childhood,” he says.

When Rashford got a back injury in January, instead of distracting himself playing video games he decided to take up this cause. “I had time to think about what’s the best way possible of helping these kids and giving families a chance of becoming successful and living their dreams,” he explains. “I went into it, finding out the facts and figures about how many people are in need.”

The campaign really stepped up in June, when the government refused to give food vouchers over the summer holidays to those on free school meals. Eventually, under pressure from Rashford, Boris Johnson backed down. The footballer then called for meals to be provided over the October half-term.

More than a million people signed a petition and again the government caved in. Even Rashford seems slightly surprised by how effective he has been. “It was my dream to become a footballer and you don’t think about the fame and the people that would listen to you just because you played football so I wouldn’t say I expected it,” he says, modestly.

Ferguson wishes more sporting figures would follow Rashford’s example. “Footballers in Britain are certainly high profile. There’s no reason why they can’t use that profile in a good way,” he says. “What Marcus has done is he’s led the way . . . People will say, ‘That boy he’s only 23 years of age’. People who are in their later ages . . . should be saying, ‘I can do something’.”

Like many in his generation, Rashford is more comfortable on Twitter than in a town hall. “Everybody can think that social media is a bad place, but this is just one example where it’s been used for good,” he says. Thousands of businesses, councils and individuals have flooded his timeline with offers of food for hungry children. “It definitely showed that people have an ambition to stop the problem.”

FareShare tackles both poverty and food waste by taking surplus food that would otherwise be discarded by farms, factories, restaurants and retailers. FareShare then distributes it to charities that turn it into meals for those who cannot afford to eat, helping needy children and adults at school breakfast clubs, homeless shelters, lunch clubs for older people and women’s refuges. Normally, unsold or “wonky” crops are ploughed back into the earth, surplus meat and dairy products are consigned to landfill and mis-labelled packaged goods are thrown out. FareShare helps producers with a contribution towards the cost of harvesting or saving the food.

For both Rashford and Ferguson this is personal. Rashford can still remember the feeling of going hungry as a child when he was growing up in the Wythenshawe district of Manchester. His mother, Melanie, had five children to feed and there was very little money. “I know what the feeling is like of going hungry and I don’t want anyone else to experience it,” he says.

“I’m probably one of the more privileged ones because I had something else to focus on. I wanted to become a footballer and every day I would be out practising so my mind was occupied on something else. But I know that for some other people whatever they dream of being is so out of reach they can’t actually do anything day-to-day so it’s always at the front of their mind.” Football was his way to escape. “It’s when I moved out of my house I realised how bad a position we were in . . . it was like a fresh start for me.”

It infuriates him that there is still a sense of shame about being on free school meals. “I was lucky in my community,” he says. “There were a lot of children that were in a similar situation so I met a lot of friends through things like after-school clubs and breakfast clubs, but I feel like there is stigma in a lot of cases. People feel embarrassed and ashamed to have to go to those types of programmes.”

His mother worked as hard as she could, but it was still impossible to make ends meet. “Everybody feels protective towards their mum,” Rashford says.

“I’ve obviously seen her go through things that children shouldn’t really see, but it’s turned me into a stronger person and I’m definitely closer to her. If it was tough for me and my brothers and my sisters, I just can’t imagine the stress that was on her at the time. And honestly she did so well to hide it because she was always happy when we were at home.”

Often, she would go hungry so that the children could eat. “When I look back there were a lot of times when me and my brothers and my sisters would be waiting for her to finish work and then when she [got] home she would make the food and we would ask her, ‘Are you not going to eat?’ and she would say, ‘No’. I was obviously young at the time. I thought maybe she ate when she was out but a lot of the time she used to give us the meals that she should have been eating.

“For someone who was working from 9 [in the morning] until 8 or 9 o’clock at night every day to not be eating isn’t good for her own wellbeing so it was a tough situation that we were in. But now that we are on the other side of that I think it’s important — and she’s passionate about it as well — to try and help people who are in the same situation.”

Ferguson’s childhood was equally hard. He grew up in a tenement block in the Govan district of Glasgow. There were nine families in a three-storey house with a zinc bath in the kitchen, but he remembers fondly the strong sense community. “My mother and father worked all their life in order for us to progress, my brother and I . . . Sometimes I wish I could rewind and go back again because that was a special time,” he says. “My parents taught me many things that have stayed with me all my life — don’t lie, don’t be late, work hard, respect your elders. With nine families you were so close. No one locked their doors because they trusted each other, it was more of a big, big family. There were some families with eight, nine kids . . . It was a fantastic period for me.”

His life now is very different but he never wants to put his childhood behind him. “You can’t forget your upbringing because that’s what’s made me,” he says. “I remember reading in a newspaper article, ‘Alex Ferguson’s done well despite coming from Govan’. It’s because I came from Govan that I did well. It’s because the family I had made sure the food was on the table . . . I’m sitting here in my nice house and I don’t have to struggle for anything but I think it’s good to have a struggle. It’s good to fight for something to get out of. People who came from these working-class areas of Glasgow had to work hard to get out of it.”

Ferguson thinks the bad times he had as a child fuelled the drive that carried him forward in later years. “I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my life, I’m proud of my sons and my grandchildren how they’ve progressed and developed,” he says. “That all goes back to how I was brought up and the background I had and the success I’ve had is a lot to do with that.”

Rashford is also convinced that early struggles made him a better person. “When I was younger I knew I wanted to be a footballer purely for the love of the game but if there was another reason it was to get my family out of the situation that we were in.” Now that commitment to his family has grown into a determination to show other children that there is a way out. “I want them to understand that there’s no reason why they can’t do [something] just because of where they come from.”

We ask Ferguson what advice he would give Rashford. “He should be giving me some advice because what he’s doing at 23 is fantastic for a young person,” he replies. “I’ve no need to tell Marcus because I think there’s humility in the way he lives his life. His feet are on the ground. These are great qualities to carry you through life. Football hasn’t changed him. There is a danger in football that it can change people, money can change people, stardom can change people. Getting a celebrity position in life can sometimes be a problem because not everyone can carry success well. And at the moment Marcus is doing that very, very well.”

 

Anyone else watched ‘Diego Maradona’ the movie? It’s from the same guy who did ‘Senna’ - and it’s brilliant.

Perfect portrayal of the highs, the lows and the controversies of his career and how Napoli was both brilliant and utterly devastating for him. Really fascinating.

If you haven’t seen it but want to, Channel 4 have made it available to watch for free on their All 4 service for a limited time.

 

It is an incredible piece. I watched about an NIR again with my wife last night. She was shocked at what he had to cope with in those early years. Of course we are old, so we had to go to be and she will watch the rest on catch-up. I took my then 18 year old lad to see it at the cinema last year when it came out. One of those pieces of his life education a Dad has to do; let him understand how good Maradona was and why he was so troubled.

I’d made him watch the 66 World Cup Final a couple of years before that.

It’s not all about football though... it started when he was four, with Episode IV: A New Hope.

 

Watched it last night. Feel like a complete twat for what I said the other day now.

 

Well said Tom.

 

Ex Saint Ben Reeves scored a cracker for The Janners yesterday...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/football/55117107