The 110th Percent

As the 2014/15 football season approaches, it’s worth re-visiting an infamous opening day blunder. ‘It only takes one tree to make a thousand matches, but it only takes one match to burn a thousand trees’. While Alan Hansen was a fine Scottish footballer and is a fine football pundit, his good work is largely undone by two high profile mistakes. In the case of Alan Hansen, it was two matches that burned a thousand trees. Despite his reputation as a solid defender in a successful Liverpool side, he is often remembered as the player who committed the decisive blooper in Scotland’s 1982 World Cup loss to the Soviet Union. And despite his established reputation as a pundit, he is largely remembered for, and haunted by, his 1995 comment regarding the title prospects of the Manchester United squad: “you’ll win nothing with kids”. Amidst the mockery from his fellow analysts, three words constantly run through my mind: HANSEN WAS RIGHT. Well, sort of. I agree with Alan Hansen. I agre...

To the tune of ‘Deck The Halls’, junior school children of my age would mockingly sing: Man United are short-sighted, never scored a goal in history. My admiration for the rhyming of ‘Man United’ with ‘short-sighted’ outweighs the slightly bizarre doubts cast upon the team’s vision. Yet the idea that the reigning champions of England had ‘never scored a goal in history’ would prove difficult to substantiate. Oddly, the a-historical nature of the poem did not stop us from singing. Often in sports, the truth refuses to match the reputation we give it. Yet rarely does the truth prevent us from believing the things we choose to be convinced of. In the months leading up to the first Ashes Test of 2013, Ian Bell had been struggling for runs. I am tempted to say that he struggled for form, yet he seldom looks short of form irrespective of how many runs he scores. He is the reverse of Paul Collingwood, who looked permanently short of form whilst scoring big runs. Following Be...