The Layman

Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (who was kind of a 19^th century, German version of Sun Tzu) once observed, in a nutshell, that no plan survives contact with the enemy. As football is merely war played out without the killing, this quote is more than apt for this situation.

Liverpool’s pursuit of a new manager has now reached that stage in the film where the protagonist has been stringing along two different people for a while now, accidentally arranging dinner dates with them both at the SAME time, mixing up the gifts he was meant to send so that the kooky, experimental vegan gets a “1001 things you can do with beef” cookbook and the slightly uptight office worker gets some saucy underwear and other hilarious escapades.

This week, we’ve already covered two other decidedly attacker-heavy, in terms of quality, squad announcements from Germany and Holland and, carrying on theme among many of the favourites for the tournament, France and Portugal have similarly shown where their qualities lie.

It was Mark Twain (or Benjamin Disraeli or someone else entirely) that coined the term “there are three kind of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics”.

Many people far wiser than myself have extolled the virtues of keeping politics and sport separate. The only issue being that its right up there with “We can do that but it’s just sex and nothing else, ok?” as a sentence that is often much easier to say than it is to do.

When a vote is held on an issue and the overwhelming majority vote in favour of change, it begs the question of why the bloody hell it took so long for the vote to be held in the first place, particularly when the issue itself is caused by a blindingly obvious problem. Yesterday’s amendment to the way youth football is run in England is a case in point.

With Joachim Low announcing his German squad for Euro 2012 this afternoon, the three favourites for the competition have all now shown their hands to their opponents; not that their hand was much of a secret anyway what with scouting and television coverage and all that.

Forever in football the view on the horizon has as much attention paid to it as the event currently occurring; “sure Manchester City won the Premier League this season, but what are they doing to consolidate their position at the top of the tree?”  commentators ask.