You sing if you want to. Lee Carsley is not for singing.
It obviously doesn’t matter whether the England manager the national anthem
Aston Villa have been auditioning for a while. Finally, the starring role is theirs.
Champions League football has arrived at Villa Park, and with it comes the culmination of two years of unwavering disregard for supporters. The cheapest Champions League match ticket for an adult without a season ticket is £85.
That’s £85 to watch a team resolutely sticking with gambling sponsorships irrespective of the conduct or UK legality of the partners in question.
£85 to enjoy increasingly grubby environs and concourse facilities generally agreed to be both limited and deteriorating, and to look in on the monied queue-jumpers in the despised Terrace View section.
£85 on top of a Claret Membership you didn’t know had been switched to auto-renew, with the only way to reverse it being a call to the club or chancing your arm with the online chat function on the membership website.
£85 to cheer on a side wearing a badge with drop shadow on it in the year twenty twenty four, one season on from two badges – neither one of them still in use today – operating at once.
Still, at least you’re not a season ticket holder. They might get £15 off for the Champions League but you haven’t had to worry about your seat being gouged out to make way for fancy hospitality.
As well as things have been going on the pitch for Villa lately, the commercial drive elsewhere has for some time been disproportionately affecting the supporters who should be the last to bear the burden of progress.
Or, as I like to call them, the supporters who were there when the Villa weren’t worth watching.
Even among their number are the usual few who like to justify these decisions on the basis that Premier League clubs need to buy players. They’re always the ones who can still attend or never would. Isn’t that funny.
This isn’t about buying Ian Maatsen. It’s a fundamental issue of target audience. If proper football supporters in England were capable of any kind of unity we wouldn’t fucking stand for it.
Don’t miss this week’s Beefy Bites!
You sing if you want to. Lee Carsley is not for singing.
Lee Carsley had taken charge of precisely zero England fixtures as the interim national team manager before the parasites of the tabloid press turned against him.
It seems like just weeks ago that their tributes to Sven-Göran Eriksson rang hollow. The pillorying of Carsley before his first match is the reason why, all played out in real time for everyone to see. We might have guessed that Jeff Powell and the rancid Daily Mail would blink first.
It's become difficult to tell which senseless beliefs are sincerely held and which are dog whistles in their embarrassing culture war, so let's just settle on the simple fact that the Daily Mail is a propaganda comic for the gullible and aimlessly angry, and that Powell is as much a journalist as I am a Birmingham City-supporting dragon from Neptune.
The argument, such that it was, was that Carsley “cannot expect to be England manager” if he won't sing the national anthem. I'll say it again. Carsley cannot expect to be England manager if he won't sing the national anthem.
P0 W0 D0 L0.
The relationship between the England manager and the English press has been reflected upon at length since Eriksson died. This pathetic collective diatribe isn't really about the England manager at all, but a symptom of the right-wing media – and let's face facts, that's almost all of it – and its fundamentally broken relationship with national identity.
Carsley's first match being against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin made the silly uproar possible. Carsley played his international football for Ireland and all it takes for bad actors to trick people who want to be furious is a tiny trigger like the imagined suggestion of divided national loyalties.
The way England gave lie to the bullshit was beautiful. The job of the England manager is to win. This England manager went into his adopted former footballing home and won 2-0 thanks to goals from former Irish internationals Declan Rice and Jack Grealish. It's almost as if the national anthem had no effect at all.
That might be funny in its own right. I couldn't possibly say. But it immediately skewered the jingoistic caterwauling of the Daily Mail and exposed it for the vacuous, football-adjacent chest-beating that it was.
To his credit, Carsley was having none of it. His explanation swerved politics entirely and truthfully, revealing instead the slightly obsessive pre-match routine of your common or garden football player.
“National anthems are something that I always struggled with when I was playing for Ireland,” he said when addressing a topic that really shouldn’t have needed to be addressed on the eve of his first game as England boss.
“The gap between your warm-up, your coming on to the pitch and the delay with the anthems. It’s something I’ve never done. I was always really focused on the game and my first actions of the game. In that period I was wary of my mind wandering off.”
I saw a comment on the weekend of his first England match from someone who’d worked among the backroom staff at one of the clubs Carsley represented as a player. It was the same back then – focus, routine and melon balls in yoghurt.
Melon balls have nothing to do with patriotism. The fact that sections of the English media have and will vilify someone I understand to be a decent man because he makes a personal choice based on his performance needs and superstitions says a lot more about them than it does about him.
Powell and the Daily Mail aren’t alone in skirting the line between honest delusion and malicious manipulation of public opinion. It’s the basic modus operandi of the press, not least in the grey area where news desks get involved in football matters.
Their role is to inspire rage, fear and hatred in order to sell rage, fear and hatred. English nationalism plays rather well in that context. It makes for easy copy and it taps into a long-standing foundation of performative patriotism.
These are serious sociopolitical subjects that transcend football culture. That’s why they seem so destructive when they fasten themselves to football and distract from everything that’s good about the game.
Football is social and political by its very nature – a cultural construct of its size cannot be any other way – but it’s jarring when they clash on the front pages.
At the heart of all this is the idea of Englishness, thus the national team becomes a fertile ideological battleground. The more reactionary fringes of English identity are burdened by insecurity and reflexive defensiveness, albeit not uniquely so.
The result is the sort of impotent nationalism that latches on to trivial displays – performed or declined – of English pride. It can’t express itself in a healthy way so it demands conformity. It expects allegiance to the flag. The national anthem must be sung.
It goes without saying that this is all incredibly dull. Its only material relevance to football is the unnecessary distraction from Carsley’s work as England’s interim manager. The ludicrous requirements of cartoon nationalism interfere with football from the outside and it’s one of the most tedious things the average football supporter has to tolerate.
By coincidence, Carsley’s first opponents also had a new head coach. Heimir Hallgrímsson is from Iceland and didn’t sing the Irish national anthem.
What are the rules here? Are foreign managers exempt from the mandatory singing of the national anthem? In the eyes of the tabloid press, are we back to the days of foreign England managers being off-limits unless they acquiesce to the expectations of the press?
Don’t answer that.
My suspicion is that Carsley’s treatment is in fact specific to his circumstances. An Irish-born Irishman in temporary charge of England wouldn’t face the same scrutiny and neither would an English-born former England international who elected not to join in with the pageantry.
Both would face questions. Neither would be told they can’t expect the job based on their decision. Carsley shouldn’t either.
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Salty beef extracts
(£) Johan Cruyff's diplomatic mission to the North American Soccer League (High Protein Beef Paste)
Villa's thoughtless Champions League ticket prices are a pisstake of the highest order (House of V)
What the Heck, Chris? (Lion Rampant)
At what point do fans start to give up on Premier League football in droves? (Unexpected Delirium)
I respect Lee Carsley more for not singing England’s national anthem (i)
The fairytale revival of York City (i)
A different goal: how women’s football is changing the beautiful game (The Guardian)
This was the grubbiest transfer window ever - and that's saying something (Game Within The Game)
A Football Renaissance In Tokyo’s Brazil: Go Koruda Tactics At Machida Zelvia 2024 – Tactical Analysis (Total Football Analysis)
“We continue to advocate for enhanced compulsory recruitment and employment regulations and practices, removing the barriers of informality in the game’s employment market that act to limit the career progression of individuals from under-represented groups.”
Richard Bevan, the chief executive of the League Managers’ Association, comments on the organisation’s call to tackle persistent recruitment bias and a lack of diversity in professional manager appointments in England.
Dessert
The Nike Air Force 1 Low Dance in Volt green. I’m nearly 40 years old. But you’d better believe I would.
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Have a week.