Things i’ve grown to dislike…

Every year I go through a process of working out the best albums of the year. Obviously this process is fairly subjective but as I’ve spent many years trying to broaden my horizons in the search of the best albums, I think I am well placed to make some sort of judgement on the topic.

2006: Last year I came to the conclusion that the best album was “Moo you bloody choir” by Augie March.

2005: I couldn’t split my decision between Lemon Jelly’s “64-95″ and Kings of Leon’s “Aha Shake Heartbreak”.

So what of this year so far?

Well a few albums have caught my eye:

Razorlight - Razorlight
The Futureheads - The Futureheads
The Chemical Brothers - We are the night
Peter, Bjorn and John - Writers Bloc
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
The Flaming Lips - At war with the mystics
Guillemots - Through the window pane (could be last year)
Midnight Juggernauts - Secrets of the Universe

In what’s becoming a twice yearly ritual, I attended a Roos match at Subiaco oval, accompanying Richard in what can only be described as a bizarre combination of pride and self loathing.

I’ve not seen such mixed emotions in support of a team since… well since the Dockers and Connolly.

Roos fans are understandably enamoured by the success of their club. Once a proud and successful club that overshadowed the Eagles with their success in the 90s to be the ‘Club of the 90s’ they have since seen scandal rock the club and then a slow decline to the bottom half of the table.

Laidley then took over the reigns and proved to only consolidate what most people thought, that he was a limited coach who would never bring success to the club. That was until this season where the Roos have been largely successful and sit 3rd on the ladder (one win off second).

There have even been claims in papers as reputable as the West Australian that Laidley is in contention for the Freo job vacated only yesterday.

I however think that would be folly for the Fremantle club.

Connolly was tactically and techincally inept and I distinctly remember saying that they should get rid of him only a week before going on a 9 game unbeaten run to make the finals of 2006. Because of that everyone was a fan of Connolly again, but not me.

He had no game plan, instead he played to his opponents each week. That is NOT the sign of a strong leader and a strong team. His claims that he had a team full of players who were desperate for success and worked hard for it just begs the question about his coaching. Motivating players to want to win is half the battle, so if as he claims, the players were motivated, does not the blame lie with the coach? To take it one step further, after losing by 4 points to the Roos in what was a rather bland game lacking any real spark from either side, he laid the blame on poor skills and decision making… yet these are the things that are well within his control.

However, to suggest that Laidley be a candidate to replace him are laughable. Laidleys career has resembled that of Connolly, tactically inept, his team has succeeded only because they move the ball quickly and kick long to counter the trend by other teams to play posession football, inevitably this means you will only win against inaccurate teams and will lead to wins by small margins which has been a trademark of the Roos season. To suddenly laud Laidley as a brilliant coach is faintly ridiculous. If he stays on at the roos they will be back down the bottom of the ladder next season.

So you can see why some Roos fans love winning but hate Laidley.

It begs the question about why so many people fall for the hype, and not just in this instance. The call for Michael Voss and Nathan Buckley to take up coaching without any prior coaching experience is another issue that has been doing the rounds of late.

I can only surmise that it comes down to few people knowing anything about coaching tactics and technical skills and what it entails to be a coach.

Football (Soccer) fans are often heard quoting that a team should go to another formation, always formations, it’s like the Football fans favourite keyword. But anyone with an ounce of coaching knowledge knows that formation is nothing without the right personel and without the right instructions for each of your players within that formation. A simple change in formation is no guarantee for a team that is playing poor football to suddenly play good football. The best teams play numerous formations but they have an innate knowledge of their roles in the team and have spent a long time developing their technical and tactical abilities.

Footy is no different and I would suggest that, being such a fan based sport with a large minority having not ever competitively played the game as opposed to other sports, that they know even less about the subtleties of coaching and thus will fall for the latest successful coach.

You need look no further than the Eagles who have planned their rise to the top on excellent recruitment of young backmen and midfield players,often to the detriment of depth in forwards and ruckmen. However it fits in with their well developed game plan that has made it hard for teams to beat them when they are at full or even 3/4 strength. Woosha is a tactically astute coach and has obviously spent long hours coaching his players to get numbers in and around the balls and how to win the ball from stoppages better than any other team. It’s also enabled them to sustain their form without key players in the team because everyone knows their roles inside out.

The same cannot be said for Freo who are a different proposition from week to week. The claim is often laid on freo that they are weak. I don’t think thats fair, trying harder doesn’t guarantee success. To me, when they get beaten its because their game plan doesn’t work and the players don’t know what to do so they stop trying. Pavlich for example, looked poor on the weekend but he was being double teamed most of the time and the delivery to him was poor, if he is told to continue to play the same way when getting so obviously beaten, how is he to feel.

People need to stop and analyse what it is these coaches are actually doing before they heap praise on them.

Daniher spent years yo-yoing up and down the ladder, Laidley has been largely poor in winning and losing, Connolly whilst taking the Dockers to a level where they weren’t such an embarrassment has been unable to gather any form of consistency in 6 years at the helm. Robert Walls has shown that he is just mad and knows nothing about footy.

The good coaches are easy to spot because their teams are consistently good and play good football. Woosha, Neil Craig, Paul Roos, Leigh Mathews and dare I say it Mark Williams.

Working at a new and significantly busier job has precluded me from entering any new blog entries of late.

Additionally with the advent of this bizarre push for web ownership by the computer illiterate masses in the form of Facebook, Bebo, My Space and the many other incarnations of what are effectively are personal home pages for dummies, I’ve not really had time to concentrate on my blog at all.

It’s slightly galling for me that it’s now so easy to make your own web space, admittedly restricted by whatever system you use but nonetheless, there used to be a day where putting together a personal web page was a skill, and developing one that looked good and had good content was an art form.

With the advent of all these user friendly tools, any man and his dog can put together a space and decorate it with any number of ridiculous applications and skinning engines, often with no thought to design or style.

Frankly I’m appalled by the look of some spaces and it seems that we’re undergoing the same issues that we had with the advent of web development at the end of the 90s which for the uninitiated consisted of a multitude of excessively long web pages covered in animated gif’s and midi music.

So why do I use it, well partly to stop the incessant mail from Bebo or Facebook asking me to join. what I failed to realise however, was that I was merely exchanging those emails for a whole new set of emails informing me of the latest actions of my increasingly large Facebook friends list.

I do not however subscribe to the adding of friends whom I do not know. Online friendships don’t sit well with me. To me it seems like a society with increasing issues of identity and self esteem looking for ways to connect without the feeling of insecurity of the real world. I point to World of Warcraft as a prime example.

Are people too scared to be themselves in real life for fear of persecution thus forcing them to turn to an online identity to express themselves?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this but I’ve spent alot of time trying to overcome my own insecurities and I think that you’ve got to get out there and meet people in real life. The fact that people have enough time to update their online profiles makes me wonder if people shouldn’t go and find other things to do.

On the other hand maybe I spend too much time playing and coaching Soccer… but then at least I’m getting out there and meeting people.

It seems to me that these online profile applications merely package up existing functionality in bright new funky packaging.

To give you an example, all these funky new phones that keep coming out with new features that you’ll supposedly want. I’ve lost count of the amount of people who will trade in a perfectly good relatively new phone for a brand new one with all the latest gadgets. At the end of the day a phone is a phone, you use it to call people (with the exception of the iPhone on which you can listen to music), I wont be trading my phone in for a while yet, it’s got an FM radio which is enough to keep me entertained on my walks to work.

Its the same with Facebook, Bebo etc.

I get comments, personal messages and a multitude of other messages that could just as easily be sent in an email, I do after all have access to my email for the large majority of every day.