Sheffield United fans and the bogus cult of 'knowing'.

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Oh dear! Seems the O/P retains the right to be very opinionated himself, but he objects to everyone else having their own opinions (unless, presumably, those opinions happen to co-incide with his own).

Chill out, mate. It's nowt to do with "knowing", it's just people asserting their own opinions. Just like they always have (even before the days of social media & wall-to-wall TV coverage). IMO, of course.
 
Conjecture said:
I’m quite reluctant to wade into the debate about whether He should stay or He should go. As someone who strongly disagrees with the sacking culture at the club and the way it has been run in the last ten years, it's depressing to see so many people possibly enabling a chairman (chairmen? Chairprince?) who appears to have so little foresight that it's genuinely possible to speculate that he runs this club by use of an iPhone app (I wonder if he will regret those late night extra credits he bought to sign John Brayford when his next phonebill comes though. Is Jose Baxter the bastard child of a delayed flight to Brussels and a bored, lonely scotch at the wetherspoons at Gatwick airport?).


Anyway, banging on about the inadequacy of Kevin McCabe is far too easy and, whilst it is my first post and I might want to 'play it safe', a line must be drawn between that and pointing out the blindingly obvious. I'm more interested in the reaction of many fans to our team's, and Adkins', disappointments, which I believe are corrosive and symptomatic of a wider theme that now runs through football.


It is in vogue to 'know'. When I've heard people talking united in the stands the interchange is less a discussion and more a series of a bold statements about tactics, players and how to be a coach. Statements more reliant on tonal rhetoric and logical fallacies - nobody seems that interested in changing their mind. The image of 20,000 people bellowing their own point with such self belief and vehemence that nobody is actually listening is undoubtedly pregnant with existentialism, but it ain't gunna stop us dropping points to Fleetwood Town in the 92nd minute.


Perhaps it just seems that I have only just discovered that many people blindly follow their own egos, and essentially this is what this phenomena is, but I think the roots of this modern incarnation can be arguably traced to the rise of the 'super-pundit'. Perhaps you can see a semblance of what we have today in Alan Hanson's 'you can't win anything with kids', but after that was so spectacularly proved wrong he was largely ridiculed and, let's face it, Alan Hanson was sort of a sideshow anyway. The early advent of interactive television in which the viewers had the option of either listening to him forcibly observe things we had all just observed, to try to work out whether his slurring was due to his accent or liquor, or to speculate about the scar on his head (where is the perpetrator today? Haaland, you have no idea).


Things are rather different now. Whereas Hanson stood out amongst the conjecture (I promised myself I wouldn't use that word) his modern day (more self-loathing) equivalent, Grahame Souness, isn't even wheeled out for the big games. "Football experts" have far more airtime than the sport itself, before and after the games. Not just former players, either. Sports writers now have their own celebrity, and have even started crossing over to television. These people have become the language of football and, unfortunately, that is not the language of humility in the face of uncertainty and complication.


I don't want to completely disregard pundits and commentators, and when I say they don't know what they're on about, I mean it in the nicest possible way. Of course, nobody does. The closest anybody in game has come to really 'knowing', was when the Dons at Juventus were playing Godfather. I find that one of the great joys of life is having long wandering conversations about football - full of self-contradictions and arguments based on wild assumptions. It's almost like a strange form of group meditation. And that is all these pundits are, professional people championing the act of talking about football, something you can't really predict - just for the fun of it. Their personal experience can certainly make their observations more interesting (although must congratulate Micheal Owen on his Herculian efforts to prove that this is not always the case), but deep down they know that they have absolutely no idea what's going on.


My personal favorite it Paul Scholes. Not so much for the points he makes, but more for the way his eyes wander as some demented lunatic like Jamie Redknapp jabbers on about 'what you just can't do at this level'. It's almost like he his having an existential crisis live on the television...What is all this? Who are all these people? Have we all gone completely insane?


Not that I blame them...I think this is a fair interpretation of the whole situation:


If people do not watch them, or read their work, they will not be paid. If they admit that they don't know what they're talking about, people are likely to divert their attention towards somebody who appears that they do. They do not have the power to make people agree with whatever they believe, so a Frankenstein's monster of popular opinion (normally the more reactionary opinions) is presented, one that many people will already agree with, and the argument is delivered with stirring passion and conviction designed to get people all worked up. "It's alive". Now, with social media and the huge presence of the watching viewers on sports TV themselves (twitter-time), the viewers are more involved than ever. They can play 'football expert'.


(I've clearly gone a bit too far with this point - people aren't that malleable and this is not a completely new phenomena. However, I do think there is enough truth in some elements of argument for me to go on, so I will...)


Neil Warnock was divisive, and deservedly so, but his greatest triumphs were built when he cultivated a belief that we were all in this together. His own technique in doing this was basically to publicly state that the players were rubbish, or, more accurately - they lacked in ability but were special because of their belief and spirit. They were in it together, and this is an important part, in the face of adversity. Jose did it with Chelsea by turning the referees into the enemy, Leicester are doing it this year by trolling the elite, and Neil 'one last job' Warnock is using his old trick down the road. Obviously the subsequent lack of success for Warnock and Jose is evidence that this is not the simple recipe to success, but it does tell us something about the spirit of success. Perhaps people disagree but I vividly remember that, in the 03 season, the promotion season and the premiership season, people moaned, complained and roared with frustration when the team were flat or players (Montgomery) misplaced a pass, but there was a general level of subordination amongst the fans that isn't there anymore. I don't mean subordination of the fans to the manager, the players, or even the club. Just the subordination of the fans to the frustrating, unpredictable intangibility of football itself.


And it might be some of these factors that have created such a corrosive situation at our club and led to our pathetic demise on the field. The trajectory of our plight can be plotted by clear examples of mistakes by Kevin McCabe and the board. Perhaps the most obvious display of incompetence was sacking Wilson solely on the hunch that Morgan might stamp his feet hard enough to get us through the playoffs. For me one of the most offensively poor decisions was to back Blackwell through an entire pre-season before sacking him after only two games, destabilizing the team and starting in motion a chain of events (in which other glaring errors were made) that got us relegated. From a solely footballing standpoint, McCabe is very short-sighted and seems to have absolutely no plan. As earlier mentioned, there seems to be no clear footballing recipe for success - only to try to search for it earnestly. Sacking managers to alleviate fan pressure and deflect attention from your catalogue of failures is cowardice.


Football managers will come under fan pressure and take criticism that they do not deserve. There is a mountain of evidence for this. Sheffield united do not have the wrong plan, or the wrong direction. They don't have anything. All the club has to show for the last ten years is a litany of poor decisions made at the boardroom level, and an attitude amongst the fans that cultivates a belief that they have the ability to really change things at the club themselves. The cult of 'the expert' in the football media and the empowered role of the fan has created a situation in which people are led to believe that they really have the power to change things on the pitch...and it's true, to an extent...

Fans have the ability to stop something from happening.

They have the ability to destabilize something.

They have the ability to help create something positive.

The fans, however, will never have the ability to start something on the pitch.

And neither does Kevin McCabe, unless he gets lucky. But that's okay. The club is clearly in a bit of a mess, but as long as he keeps satiating the fans' impatient urge for success, he can rely on the speculation of a new manager and the promise of better things to come to provide an adequate smokescreen to allow him to slink away.


Who do you think our next manager should be?
Click to expand...

A like for the first, third , seventh, ninth and twelfth paragraphs.
No likes for the second, fifth, tenth and thirteenth paragraphs.
No judgement either way on the fourth, sixth, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth to the twentieth paragraphs.
So, on balance, you should be one like in credit, but I can't give it to you because I haven't a clue what the f**k you're on about. :)
 
Conjecture said:
I’m quite reluctant to wade into the debate about whether He should stay or He should go. As someone who strongly disagrees with the sacking culture at the club and the way it has been run in the last ten years, it's depressing to see so many people possibly enabling a chairman (chairmen? Chairprince?) who appears to have so little foresight that it's genuinely possible to speculate that he runs this club by use of an iPhone app (I wonder if he will regret those late night extra credits he bought to sign John Brayford when his next phonebill comes though. Is Jose Baxter the bastard child of a delayed flight to Brussels and a bored, lonely scotch at the wetherspoons at Gatwick airport?).


Anyway, banging on about the inadequacy of Kevin McCabe is far too easy and, whilst it is my first post and I might want to 'play it safe', a line must be drawn between that and pointing out the blindingly obvious. I'm more interested in the reaction of many fans to our team's, and Adkins', disappointments, which I believe are corrosive and symptomatic of a wider theme that now runs through football.


It is in vogue to 'know'. When I've heard people talking united in the stands the interchange is less a discussion and more a series of a bold statements about tactics, players and how to be a coach. Statements more reliant on tonal rhetoric and logical fallacies - nobody seems that interested in changing their mind. The image of 20,000 people bellowing their own point with such self belief and vehemence that nobody is actually listening is undoubtedly pregnant with existentialism, but it ain't gunna stop us dropping points to Fleetwood Town in the 92nd minute.


Perhaps it just seems that I have only just discovered that many people blindly follow their own egos, and essentially this is what this phenomena is, but I think the roots of this modern incarnation can be arguably traced to the rise of the 'super-pundit'. Perhaps you can see a semblance of what we have today in Alan Hanson's 'you can't win anything with kids', but after that was so spectacularly proved wrong he was largely ridiculed and, let's face it, Alan Hanson was sort of a sideshow anyway. The early advent of interactive television in which the viewers had the option of either listening to him forcibly observe things we had all just observed, to try to work out whether his slurring was due to his accent or liquor, or to speculate about the scar on his head (where is the perpetrator today? Haaland, you have no idea).


Things are rather different now. Whereas Hanson stood out amongst the conjecture (I promised myself I wouldn't use that word) his modern day (more self-loathing) equivalent, Grahame Souness, isn't even wheeled out for the big games. "Football experts" have far more airtime than the sport itself, before and after the games. Not just former players, either. Sports writers now have their own celebrity, and have even started crossing over to television. These people have become the language of football and, unfortunately, that is not the language of humility in the face of uncertainty and complication.


I don't want to completely disregard pundits and commentators, and when I say they don't know what they're on about, I mean it in the nicest possible way. Of course, nobody does. The closest anybody in game has come to really 'knowing', was when the Dons at Juventus were playing Godfather. I find that one of the great joys of life is having long wandering conversations about football - full of self-contradictions and arguments based on wild assumptions. It's almost like a strange form of group meditation. And that is all these pundits are, professional people championing the act of talking about football, something you can't really predict - just for the fun of it. Their personal experience can certainly make their observations more interesting (although must congratulate Micheal Owen on his Herculian efforts to prove that this is not always the case), but deep down they know that they have absolutely no idea what's going on.


My personal favorite it Paul Scholes. Not so much for the points he makes, but more for the way his eyes wander as some demented lunatic like Jamie Redknapp jabbers on about 'what you just can't do at this level'. It's almost like he his having an existential crisis live on the television...What is all this? Who are all these people? Have we all gone completely insane?


Not that I blame them...I think this is a fair interpretation of the whole situation:


If people do not watch them, or read their work, they will not be paid. If they admit that they don't know what they're talking about, people are likely to divert their attention towards somebody who appears that they do. They do not have the power to make people agree with whatever they believe, so a Frankenstein's monster of popular opinion (normally the more reactionary opinions) is presented, one that many people will already agree with, and the argument is delivered with stirring passion and conviction designed to get people all worked up. "It's alive". Now, with social media and the huge presence of the watching viewers on sports TV themselves (twitter-time), the viewers are more involved than ever. They can play 'football expert'.


(I've clearly gone a bit too far with this point - people aren't that malleable and this is not a completely new phenomena. However, I do think there is enough truth in some elements of argument for me to go on, so I will...)


Neil Warnock was divisive, and deservedly so, but his greatest triumphs were built when he cultivated a belief that we were all in this together. His own technique in doing this was basically to publicly state that the players were rubbish, or, more accurately - they lacked in ability but were special because of their belief and spirit. They were in it together, and this is an important part, in the face of adversity. Jose did it with Chelsea by turning the referees into the enemy, Leicester are doing it this year by trolling the elite, and Neil 'one last job' Warnock is using his old trick down the road. Obviously the subsequent lack of success for Warnock and Jose is evidence that this is not the simple recipe to success, but it does tell us something about the spirit of success. Perhaps people disagree but I vividly remember that, in the 03 season, the promotion season and the premiership season, people moaned, complained and roared with frustration when the team were flat or players (Montgomery) misplaced a pass, but there was a general level of subordination amongst the fans that isn't there anymore. I don't mean subordination of the fans to the manager, the players, or even the club. Just the subordination of the fans to the frustrating, unpredictable intangibility of football itself.


And it might be some of these factors that have created such a corrosive situation at our club and led to our pathetic demise on the field. The trajectory of our plight can be plotted by clear examples of mistakes by Kevin McCabe and the board. Perhaps the most obvious display of incompetence was sacking Wilson solely on the hunch that Morgan might stamp his feet hard enough to get us through the playoffs. For me one of the most offensively poor decisions was to back Blackwell through an entire pre-season before sacking him after only two games, destabilizing the team and starting in motion a chain of events (in which other glaring errors were made) that got us relegated. From a solely footballing standpoint, McCabe is very short-sighted and seems to have absolutely no plan. As earlier mentioned, there seems to be no clear footballing recipe for success - only to try to search for it earnestly. Sacking managers to alleviate fan pressure and deflect attention from your catalogue of failures is cowardice.


Football managers will come under fan pressure and take criticism that they do not deserve. There is a mountain of evidence for this. Sheffield united do not have the wrong plan, or the wrong direction. They don't have anything. All the club has to show for the last ten years is a litany of poor decisions made at the boardroom level, and an attitude amongst the fans that cultivates a belief that they have the ability to really change things at the club themselves. The cult of 'the expert' in the football media and the empowered role of the fan has created a situation in which people are led to believe that they really have the power to change things on the pitch...and it's true, to an extent...

Fans have the ability to stop something from happening.

They have the ability to destabilize something.

They have the ability to help create something positive.

The fans, however, will never have the ability to start something on the pitch.

And neither does Kevin McCabe, unless he gets lucky. But that's okay. The club is clearly in a bit of a mess, but as long as he keeps satiating the fans' impatient urge for success, he can rely on the speculation of a new manager and the promise of better things to come to provide an adequate smokescreen to allow him to slink away.


Who do you think our next manager should be?
Click to expand...

Best debut since Vass Borbokis. I agree with every word. For that tricky second post I'd like you to muse on the psychology of folk who bellow "their own point with such self belief and vehemence that nobody is actually listening".

The apotheosis of this caricature actually posts on this message board. Maybe you could meet up and use him as a case study? There's probably a book in it.
 
Conjecture said:
I’m quite reluctant to wade into the debate about whether He should stay or He should go. As someone who strongly disagrees with the sacking culture at the club and the way it has been run in the last ten years, it's depressing to see so many people possibly enabling a chairman (chairmen? Chairprince?) who appears to have so little foresight that it's genuinely possible to speculate that he runs this club by use of an iPhone app (I wonder if he will regret those late night extra credits he bought to sign John Brayford when his next phonebill comes though. Is Jose Baxter the bastard child of a delayed flight to Brussels and a bored, lonely scotch at the wetherspoons at Gatwick airport?).


Anyway, banging on about the inadequacy of Kevin McCabe is far too easy and, whilst it is my first post and I might want to 'play it safe', a line must be drawn between that and pointing out the blindingly obvious. I'm more interested in the reaction of many fans to our team's, and Adkins', disappointments, which I believe are corrosive and symptomatic of a wider theme that now runs through football.


It is in vogue to 'know'. When I've heard people talking united in the stands the interchange is less a discussion and more a series of a bold statements about tactics, players and how to be a coach. Statements more reliant on tonal rhetoric and logical fallacies - nobody seems that interested in changing their mind. The image of 20,000 people bellowing their own point with such self belief and vehemence that nobody is actually listening is undoubtedly pregnant with existentialism, but it ain't gunna stop us dropping points to Fleetwood Town in the 92nd minute.


Perhaps it just seems that I have only just discovered that many people blindly follow their own egos, and essentially this is what this phenomena is, but I think the roots of this modern incarnation can be arguably traced to the rise of the 'super-pundit'. Perhaps you can see a semblance of what we have today in Alan Hanson's 'you can't win anything with kids', but after that was so spectacularly proved wrong he was largely ridiculed and, let's face it, Alan Hanson was sort of a sideshow anyway. The early advent of interactive television in which the viewers had the option of either listening to him forcibly observe things we had all just observed, to try to work out whether his slurring was due to his accent or liquor, or to speculate about the scar on his head (where is the perpetrator today? Haaland, you have no idea).


Things are rather different now. Whereas Hanson stood out amongst the conjecture (I promised myself I wouldn't use that word) his modern day (more self-loathing) equivalent, Grahame Souness, isn't even wheeled out for the big games. "Football experts" have far more airtime than the sport itself, before and after the games. Not just former players, either. Sports writers now have their own celebrity, and have even started crossing over to television. These people have become the language of football and, unfortunately, that is not the language of humility in the face of uncertainty and complication.


I don't want to completely disregard pundits and commentators, and when I say they don't know what they're on about, I mean it in the nicest possible way. Of course, nobody does. The closest anybody in game has come to really 'knowing', was when the Dons at Juventus were playing Godfather. I find that one of the great joys of life is having long wandering conversations about football - full of self-contradictions and arguments based on wild assumptions. It's almost like a strange form of group meditation. And that is all these pundits are, professional people championing the act of talking about football, something you can't really predict - just for the fun of it. Their personal experience can certainly make their observations more interesting (although must congratulate Micheal Owen on his Herculian efforts to prove that this is not always the case), but deep down they know that they have absolutely no idea what's going on.


My personal favorite it Paul Scholes. Not so much for the points he makes, but more for the way his eyes wander as some demented lunatic like Jamie Redknapp jabbers on about 'what you just can't do at this level'. It's almost like he his having an existential crisis live on the television...What is all this? Who are all these people? Have we all gone completely insane?


Not that I blame them...I think this is a fair interpretation of the whole situation:


If people do not watch them, or read their work, they will not be paid. If they admit that they don't know what they're talking about, people are likely to divert their attention towards somebody who appears that they do. They do not have the power to make people agree with whatever they believe, so a Frankenstein's monster of popular opinion (normally the more reactionary opinions) is presented, one that many people will already agree with, and the argument is delivered with stirring passion and conviction designed to get people all worked up. "It's alive". Now, with social media and the huge presence of the watching viewers on sports TV themselves (twitter-time), the viewers are more involved than ever. They can play 'football expert'.


(I've clearly gone a bit too far with this point - people aren't that malleable and this is not a completely new phenomena. However, I do think there is enough truth in some elements of argument for me to go on, so I will...)


Neil Warnock was divisive, and deservedly so, but his greatest triumphs were built when he cultivated a belief that we were all in this together. His own technique in doing this was basically to publicly state that the players were rubbish, or, more accurately - they lacked in ability but were special because of their belief and spirit. They were in it together, and this is an important part, in the face of adversity. Jose did it with Chelsea by turning the referees into the enemy, Leicester are doing it this year by trolling the elite, and Neil 'one last job' Warnock is using his old trick down the road. Obviously the subsequent lack of success for Warnock and Jose is evidence that this is not the simple recipe to success, but it does tell us something about the spirit of success. Perhaps people disagree but I vividly remember that, in the 03 season, the promotion season and the premiership season, people moaned, complained and roared with frustration when the team were flat or players (Montgomery) misplaced a pass, but there was a general level of subordination amongst the fans that isn't there anymore. I don't mean subordination of the fans to the manager, the players, or even the club. Just the subordination of the fans to the frustrating, unpredictable intangibility of football itself.


And it might be some of these factors that have created such a corrosive situation at our club and led to our pathetic demise on the field. The trajectory of our plight can be plotted by clear examples of mistakes by Kevin McCabe and the board. Perhaps the most obvious display of incompetence was sacking Wilson solely on the hunch that Morgan might stamp his feet hard enough to get us through the playoffs. For me one of the most offensively poor decisions was to back Blackwell through an entire pre-season before sacking him after only two games, destabilizing the team and starting in motion a chain of events (in which other glaring errors were made) that got us relegated. From a solely footballing standpoint, McCabe is very short-sighted and seems to have absolutely no plan. As earlier mentioned, there seems to be no clear footballing recipe for success - only to try to search for it earnestly. Sacking managers to alleviate fan pressure and deflect attention from your catalogue of failures is cowardice.


Football managers will come under fan pressure and take criticism that they do not deserve. There is a mountain of evidence for this. Sheffield united do not have the wrong plan, or the wrong direction. They don't have anything. All the club has to show for the last ten years is a litany of poor decisions made at the boardroom level, and an attitude amongst the fans that cultivates a belief that they have the ability to really change things at the club themselves. The cult of 'the expert' in the football media and the empowered role of the fan has created a situation in which people are led to believe that they really have the power to change things on the pitch...and it's true, to an extent...

Fans have the ability to stop something from happening.

They have the ability to destabilize something.

They have the ability to help create something positive.

The fans, however, will never have the ability to start something on the pitch.

And neither does Kevin McCabe, unless he gets lucky. But that's okay. The club is clearly in a bit of a mess, but as long as he keeps satiating the fans' impatient urge for success, he can rely on the speculation of a new manager and the promise of better things to come to provide an adequate smokescreen to allow him to slink away.


Who do you think our next manager should be?
Click to expand...

I prefer Doug's version

 
Conjecture said:
I’m quite reluctant to wade into the debate about whether He should stay or He should go
Click to expand...

Let me know when you're not reluctant and me and the Chinese, a great set o' lads, will book a day or two off.

Welcome aboard.
 
Bert said:
Bert has no idea of what John Harris thought about anything, in fact he never once heard him speak. All Bert knew was that he was the manager and he wore a tie and beige cardy.
Click to expand...

Please Bert tell me he didn't wear that cardy over his shoulders.
 

WorkingtonBlade said:
You spelled spelt wrong.
Click to expand...

Don't know if this is a serious point but here goes anyway:

In American English, spelt primarily refers to the hardy wheat grown mostly in Europe, and the verb spell makes spelled in the past tense and as a past participle. In all other main varieties of English, spelt and spelled both work as the past tense and past participle ofspell, at least where spell means to form words letter by letter or (with out) to make clear. Outside the U.S., the two forms are interchangeable in these uses, and both are common.

But when spell carries the sense to temporarily relieve (someone) from work, spelled is the preferred form throughout the English-speaking world. This is a minor point, though, as this sense of spell is rarely used outside the U.S., where it is most common.

Spelled is not a recent Americanism, as many people assume (including some who have commented on this post). Both spelled and spelt are old, and examples of each are easily found in historical Google Books searches covering the 17th and 18th centuries. It is true, however, that spelt was ascendant everywhere through most of the 19th century. This ended when Americans permanently settled on spelled around 1900.

(Fwiw it looks like learned and learnt are interchangeable. Earned and earnt - earnt is not really used.)

http://grammarist.com/spelling/spelled-spelt/
 
Sorry conjecture find most of what you are saying is confused analogies?
Fans are paying supporters, mostly paying. Clubs may wish to call them customers. Some would call them stakeholders. Supporters now don't provide the majority of income, but supporters spend a considerable amount of their income on following their club. Supporters shout and sing positively to help their team on the pitch perform better. Physiologically this audience participation has been shown conclusively to improve the performance of their players and the result of the match.Supporters shout and sing at the opposition team and the match officials this too has influence and effect.

The club encourage and appreciate this crowd participation. However. should the club not care and or involve the supporters in liking/supporting/agreeing with the manager's actions such as player recruitment and selection; match day selection; tactics ; substitutions; player discipline; fitness regimes.
By and large most club supporters are patient and give the manager and players time to display what they can do.

However if one is paying a contribution towards team success, results and entertainment the supporters in the past had few real communication avenues to complain about a "service" .or the "product" the players and coaching staff were serving up on the pitch stage.

Club Boards and team management are heading for a supporter rebellion if they now these days take a attitude "we know what is best"

These last 5 seasons Blades have shown remarkable home and away attendance records and patience with the team in every season. The club has not delivered the results and entertainment craved for, Nigel Adkins and current season players have failed miserably and are way off targets and expectations. Fans deserve to have a say in the club


Conjecture said:
I’m quite reluctant to wade into the debate about whether He should stay or He should go. As someone who strongly disagrees with the sacking culture at the club and the way it has been run in the last ten years, it's depressing to see so many people possibly enabling a chairman (chairmen? Chairprince?) who appears to have so little foresight that it's genuinely possible to speculate that he runs this club by use of an iPhone app (I wonder if he will regret those late night extra credits he bought to sign John Brayford when his next phonebill comes though. Is Jose Baxter the bastard child of a delayed flight to Brussels and a bored, lonely scotch at the wetherspoons at Gatwick airport?).


Anyway, banging on about the inadequacy of Kevin McCabe is far too easy and, whilst it is my first post and I might want to 'play it safe', a line must be drawn between that and pointing out the blindingly obvious. I'm more interested in the reaction of many fans to our team's, and Adkins', disappointments, which I believe are corrosive and symptomatic of a wider theme that now runs through football.


It is in vogue to 'know'. When I've heard people talking united in the stands the interchange is less a discussion and more a series of a bold statements about tactics, players and how to be a coach. Statements more reliant on tonal rhetoric and logical fallacies - nobody seems that interested in changing their mind. The image of 20,000 people bellowing their own point with such self belief and vehemence that nobody is actually listening is undoubtedly pregnant with existentialism, but it ain't gunna stop us dropping points to Fleetwood Town in the 92nd minute.


Perhaps it just seems that I have only just discovered that many people blindly follow their own egos, and essentially this is what this phenomena is, but I think the roots of this modern incarnation can be arguably traced to the rise of the 'super-pundit'. Perhaps you can see a semblance of what we have today in Alan Hanson's 'you can't win anything with kids', but after that was so spectacularly proved wrong he was largely ridiculed and, let's face it, Alan Hanson was sort of a sideshow anyway. The early advent of interactive television in which the viewers had the option of either listening to him forcibly observe things we had all just observed, to try to work out whether his slurring was due to his accent or liquor, or to speculate about the scar on his head (where is the perpetrator today? Haaland, you have no idea).


Things are rather different now. Whereas Hanson stood out amongst the conjecture (I promised myself I wouldn't use that word) his modern day (more self-loathing) equivalent, Grahame Souness, isn't even wheeled out for the big games. "Football experts" have far more airtime than the sport itself, before and after the games. Not just former players, either. Sports writers now have their own celebrity, and have even started crossing over to television. These people have become the language of football and, unfortunately, that is not the language of humility in the face of uncertainty and complication.


I don't want to completely disregard pundits and commentators, and when I say they don't know what they're on about, I mean it in the nicest possible way. Of course, nobody does. The closest anybody in game has come to really 'knowing', was when the Dons at Juventus were playing Godfather. I find that one of the great joys of life is having long wandering conversations about football - full of self-contradictions and arguments based on wild assumptions. It's almost like a strange form of group meditation. And that is all these pundits are, professional people championing the act of talking about football, something you can't really predict - just for the fun of it. Their personal experience can certainly make their observations more interesting (although must congratulate Micheal Owen on his Herculian efforts to prove that this is not always the case), but deep down they know that they have absolutely no idea what's going on.


My personal favorite it Paul Scholes. Not so much for the points he makes, but more for the way his eyes wander as some demented lunatic like Jamie Redknapp jabbers on about 'what you just can't do at this level'. It's almost like he his having an existential crisis live on the television...What is all this? Who are all these people? Have we all gone completely insane?


Not that I blame them...I think this is a fair interpretation of the whole situation:


If people do not watch them, or read their work, they will not be paid. If they admit that they don't know what they're talking about, people are likely to divert their attention towards somebody who appears that they do. They do not have the power to make people agree with whatever they believe, so a Frankenstein's monster of popular opinion (normally the more reactionary opinions) is presented, one that many people will already agree with, and the argument is delivered with stirring passion and conviction designed to get people all worked up. "It's alive". Now, with social media and the huge presence of the watching viewers on sports TV themselves (twitter-time), the viewers are more involved than ever. They can play 'football expert'.


(I've clearly gone a bit too far with this point - people aren't that malleable and this is not a completely new phenomena. However, I do think there is enough truth in some elements of argument for me to go on, so I will...)


Neil Warnock was divisive, and deservedly so, but his greatest triumphs were built when he cultivated a belief that we were all in this together. His own technique in doing this was basically to publicly state that the players were rubbish, or, more accurately - they lacked in ability but were special because of their belief and spirit. They were in it together, and this is an important part, in the face of adversity. Jose did it with Chelsea by turning the referees into the enemy, Leicester are doing it this year by trolling the elite, and Neil 'one last job' Warnock is using his old trick down the road. Obviously the subsequent lack of success for Warnock and Jose is evidence that this is not the simple recipe to success, but it does tell us something about the spirit of success. Perhaps people disagree but I vividly remember that, in the 03 season, the promotion season and the premiership season, people moaned, complained and roared with frustration when the team were flat or players (Montgomery) misplaced a pass, but there was a general level of subordination amongst the fans that isn't there anymore. I don't mean subordination of the fans to the manager, the players, or even the club. Just the subordination of the fans to the frustrating, unpredictable intangibility of football itself.


And it might be some of these factors that have created such a corrosive situation at our club and led to our pathetic demise on the field. The trajectory of our plight can be plotted by clear examples of mistakes by Kevin McCabe and the board. Perhaps the most obvious display of incompetence was sacking Wilson solely on the hunch that Morgan might stamp his feet hard enough to get us through the playoffs. For me one of the most offensively poor decisions was to back Blackwell through an entire pre-season before sacking him after only two games, destabilizing the team and starting in motion a chain of events (in which other glaring errors were made) that got us relegated. From a solely footballing standpoint, McCabe is very short-sighted and seems to have absolutely no plan. As earlier mentioned, there seems to be no clear footballing recipe for success - only to try to search for it earnestly. Sacking managers to alleviate fan pressure and deflect attention from your catalogue of failures is cowardice.


Football managers will come under fan pressure and take criticism that they do not deserve. There is a mountain of evidence for this. Sheffield united do not have the wrong plan, or the wrong direction. They don't have anything. All the club has to show for the last ten years is a litany of poor decisions made at the boardroom level, and an attitude amongst the fans that cultivates a belief that they have the ability to really change things at the club themselves. The cult of 'the expert' in the football media and the empowered role of the fan has created a situation in which people are led to believe that they really have the power to change things on the pitch...and it's true, to an extent...

Fans have the ability to stop something from happening.

They have the ability to destabilize something.

They have the ability to help create something positive.

The fans, however, will never have the ability to start something on the pitch.

And neither does Kevin McCabe, unless he gets lucky. But that's okay. The club is clearly in a bit of a mess, but as long as he keeps satiating the fans' impatient urge for success, he can rely on the speculation of a new manager and the promise of better things to come to provide an adequate smokescreen to allow him to slink away.


Who do you think our next manager should be?
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William Henry Foulkes said:
Don't know if this is a serious point but here goes anyway:

In American English, spelt primarily refers to the hardy wheat grown mostly in Europe, and the verb spell makes spelled in the past tense and as a past participle. In all other main varieties of English, spelt and spelled both work as the past tense and past participle ofspell, at least where spell means to form words letter by letter or (with out) to make clear. Outside the U.S., the two forms are interchangeable in these uses, and both are common.

But when spell carries the sense to temporarily relieve (someone) from work, spelled is the preferred form throughout the English-speaking world. This is a minor point, though, as this sense of spell is rarely used outside the U.S., where it is most common.

Spelled is not a recent Americanism, as many people assume (including some who have commented on this post). Both spelled and spelt are old, and examples of each are easily found in historical Google Books searches covering the 17th and 18th centuries. It is true, however, that spelt was ascendant everywhere through most of the 19th century. This ended when Americans permanently settled on spelled around 1900.

(Fwiw it looks like learned and learnt are interchangeable. Earned and earnt - earnt is not really used.)

http://grammarist.com/spelling/spelled-spelt/
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I made the same point in fewer words.

I am a barely coherent Blades Mad refugee who struggles to tie up his own shoelaces though.
 
Grecian2000 said:
Couldn't agree more to the OP.

Watching football on TV has become more than tedious, primarily due to a bunch of fuckwits going over the possibilities (pre-match/half time) and endless debate about the outcome (afterwards).
What the fuck happened to MOTD? Once upon a time old Kenny "some people are on the pitch" Wolstenhome would rock up, say "here I am at Anfield/Old Trafford" (for he almost always was), commentate over the action, then wish you "good night" and fuck off again. No tedious explanation of how the special way Bobby Charlton tied his boots meant he could hit the ball quite hard toward the net, no thought to how many pints Jimmy Greaves had put away that lunch time and still managed to pop in a brace. No, just hello, ACTION, goodbye.
We knew enough about the game to realise if it was good/shite/indifferent, didn't need an "expert" to pontificate the fucking life out of it. Didn't even need any of the players to tell us what it was like to score or a manager if it was a result he was happy with.
These days there must be 20 minutes bullshit for every 5 minutes play (certainly seems that way). Why did we become so obsessed with what other people think about the game rather than form an opinion about it ourselves? Lack of confidence or a basic lack of knowing what the game is about?

Even on here, we spend (well, some do) more time analysing what Adkins thought about the game than discussing what has actually gone off (see how many replies a "Nigel said" thread gets as opposed to Deadbats "report"). It doesn't matter, it's only an opinion. Watch the game and make your own mind up, don't wait for someone with an inflated opinion of their own opinion drag you down.

Pundits/Experts? Fuck 'em, they know bollock all really.
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Now that's a post
 
PeteBlade said:
I made the same point in fewer words.

I am a barely coherent Blades Mad refugee who struggles to tie up his own shoelaces though.
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