Sofa so good for new pundit Hartson

The most impressive performance of this weekend? No, not Scott Parker at Upton Park; nor Ben Foster at Wembley; and certainly not Mark Clattenburg’s lenient interpretation of what constitutes violent conduct - apparently it’s not deliberately smashing your forearm into someone’s face. No, the best performance of the weekend was on the Match of the Day 2 sofa, and it came from John Hartson.

Hartson during his Celtic days

Hartson has been increasing his appearances in front of the cameras following his retirement from the game and successful fight against cancer, and on Sunday night he joined Mark Bright on the sofa as part of what many might have thought a weak team of pundits. And yet, Hartson’s eloquent but passionate performance put many seasoned pundits - Bright included - to shame.

He had that rare quality in a football pundit of being able to combine genuine views with decipherable delivery. As a result he came across as someone who not only had something to say, but could actually say it in a way that people at home could understand. Bright must have been marvelling at Big John’s technique; feeling his own combination of idiocy and unintelligible stuttering had suddenly become woefully inadequate.

Hartson was measured throughout, yet his knowledge of the game always shone through. Whilst analysing the West Ham v Liverpool game, he picked out not the standard issue inspirational performance from Scott Parker, or the surprisingly poor display from Steven Gerrard, but the tireless running and defending from the front of Demba Ba and Frederick Picquionne. It showed an eye for detail that most newer pundits - many of whom are given their debuts on the Match of the Day 2 sofa - don’t possess either initially or ever at all.

It remains to be seen whether Hartson earns a permanent place on the Saturday night Match of the Day line-up, or in the newly non-sexist studio of Sky. What will hold him back if he doesn’t will be the fact that most of his career was spent away from England’s top four: that his delivery is excellent, he is passionate about the game without talking in clichés and isn’t afraid to offer an alternative opinion to the mainstream will matter not unfortunately. Pat Nevin suffers the same fate, despite being far better in the studio than Shearer, Hoddle, Redknapp and many others.

Hartson is someone for whom it’s difficult not to have a huge amount of respect for. He has battled cancer bravely and won, and has since continued to talk freely about his devastating experiences to raise awareness about the disease. I’ve heard interviews with him that were sometimes difficult for the listener given the frankness of their content; he pulled no punches and left audiences in no doubt of either the size of the challenge he faced or the pain he went through.

It’s changed my opinion of him: during his career and especially his time at West Ham, I felt there was a top class player just waiting to get out, only for a lack of motivation to hold him back. Too often he would score a great goal and disappear from games having felt his work was done; once ahead of an FA Cup tie against his beloved Swansea, he told the press that he hoped a chance didn’t fall to him as he didn’t want to score against his boyhood heroes. He also spent the best years of his career in the SPL with Celtic, when maybe with a little more application he could have been scoring hatfuls in England’s top four. 

But that’s not what Hartson wanted from life. He managed to play a very good level of football whilst still enjoying himself off the pitch, and his career saw him become one of the last members of Arsenal’s famed drinking club, whilst still managing to play Champions League football with Celtic. 

I remember reading an interview with Hartson where he spoke of Dennis Bergkamp’s shock at Arsenal’s drinking culture in the mid-90s before Arsene Wenger came along. Bergkamp was apparently bemused as to why someone would want to spend all day on Sunday in the pub with a copy of the News of the World - as Hartson was known to do at the time and many of you probably did yesterday.

Rather than express regret that he had wasted his talent or draw on hindsight to speculate what he might have achieved with more application, Hartson still maintained he loved his Sundays at the pub and wouldn’t have changed a thing. 

This attitude won’t gain praise from conditionists or even today’s press, but as fans, there is something in this that we should applaud. It shows that Hartson never once forgot his roots and remained a fan throughout his career, and may even go some way to explaining his effectiveness as a pundit. 

Given that he so nearly lost his life, the fact that Hartson got exactly what he wanted out of the game, not what others expected of him, should earn him praise and not criticism. Maybe we were wrong and there is more to life than football?

The goals we fell in love with

Combining technique, agility, bravery and that little bit of luck; Wayne Rooney’s goal in the weekend’s Manchester derby had everything, and will quite rightly be held up as one of the greatest the game has seen. But can a distinction be drawn between the best goal we have seen, and our favourite goal of all time?

Across the live coverage on Sky and the highlights package on BBC, commentators struggled to find the superlatives to do Rooney’s strike justice. But that is the key to witnessing a truly stunning goal live; there should be no words that adequately describe what you feel the moment you see the net bulge.

We all have our own opinions on what the greatest goal ever scored is: some say Maradona against England in 1986; others suggest Van Basten’s against the USSR in 1988; and many of you will suggest more leftfield choices such as Arie Haan for Holland in the 1978 World Cup or Dennis Bergkamp’s exquisite pirouette against Newcastle. But as football fans, it’s unlikely that any of these will feature in your favourite goals of all time.

Our favourite goals are the ones that still take our breath away in the way that Rooney’s goal did, but they have that personal attachment that means they will always make your heart beat that little bit faster whenever you see them replayed.

They are not always the 30 yarder from your inspirational midfielder; sometimes they are your two yard tap-in from your versatility man. Think Lee Martin in the 1990 FA Cup final replay for Manchester United, or Michael Thomas for Arsenal against Liverpool in 1989. These were by no means the greatest goals ever scored, but their significance is such that they left fans at the time, and even still now, weak with emotion.

It may surprise you to know that many a great goal has been scored at Upton Park, and not always by the opposition. Paolo Di Canio’s scissor volley against Wimbledon ranks amongst the best the Premier League has ever seen, and I once witnessed Trevor Sinclair acrobatically volley home a move involving Di Canio and Joe Cole where the ball was juggled between all three without touching the floor once. Scott Parker is also rapidly developing a fine portfolio of impressive strikes, whilst Julian Dicks could be relied upon to send the odd thunderbolt past opposition goalkeepers from distance.

But my favourite goal is one scored whilst West Ham were outside of the Premier League. Its scorer is a man who up until last season, was much maligned by most football fans despite being an honest professional with a better than average goalscoring record. My favourite goal is a scrappy side foot finish from Bobby Zamora in the 2005 Championship play off final in Cardiff. I've tried hard but I cannot think of another that stirred such emotion at the time, and still brings back only good memories.

The goal itself is nothing special: Matthew Etherington sent over a hardly venomous cross that Zamora swung a leg at, before the ball slowly found its way into the net. It was enough to give West Ham a 1-0 win over Preston, and sent the club back to the Premier League. It wasn’t a great goal; it wasn’t even a good one, but it brought utter joy and just as much relief to the thousands of West Ham fans watching at the ground and at home.

There is a standard cycle of actions that fans perform following the scoring of a goal: stand up; cheer; punch the air; clap; sit down. When goals are scored like Zamora’s, and you will all have memories of similar occasions for your own clubs, the cycle goes out of the window. Emotion takes over and you barely remember where you are. You cheer constantly, not because that’s what you think you're supposed to do, but because you physically cannot stop; your heart won’t let you. Often, you find yourself still cheering whilst play has already restarted, but it doesn’t matter because you know you want to saviour that moment for as long as possible.

With Rooney’s goal settling the game in a tense Manchester derby, it’s more than likely that the thousands of fans there on Saturday will forever remember that strike as their favourite of all time. Others will recall more mundane efforts in equally or more important situations; a relegation-saving tap in, or a later headed equaliser at the home of your deadly rivals.

They will all be different goals, but will all share one quality: for one reason or another, they will have a place in the heart of the individual forever.

What’s your favourite goal of all time?

Olympic Stadium row nears conclusion

I turn my back for five minutes and what happens? The whole bloody football world goes crazy, that’s what happens.

In the short break since the last CBM post, football has dominated headlines on both the front and back pages of the nation’s newspapers, and it’s clear that much has changed in our sometimes beautiful game. 

Firstly Andy Gray and Richard Keys have been found to be not just irritatingly smug, but also sexist and embarrassingly childish; the British transfer record has been broken not once, but twice - with Andy Carroll’s move to Liverpool proving that half a good season earns you a place in the top 10 costliest footballers in world football history; and Manchester United are no longer the invincibles in waiting, merely the not-that-great-but-slightly-better-than-the-others.

West Ham's new home?

Some things remain exactly the same though: West Ham are still bottom of the league, are still turning in wildly erratic performances and are seemingly still playing Birmingham City every single week. The row over who gets the Olympic Stadium, Spurs or West Ham, is also continuing to rage on.

The Olympic Stadium saga is a curious case: I am yet to meet a fan of either Tottenham or West Ham who cares passionately about their club moving to the site in Stratford. Most, if not all Tottenham fans seem to be dogged in their determination not to move from White Hart Lane, and Hammers fans are indifferent at best. As far as the fans are concerned, there is no groundswell of support for taking over the stadium from either faction and it appears the voices of the very people expected to take their seats in the stadium at Stratford are the very voices being ignored.

Whilst I don’t feel strongly about upping sticks from Upton Park and moving down the road to Stratford, I find it hard to believe that spending five years and half a billion pounds building a stadium only for it to then be completely knocked down to construct another shortly after - as Spurs are proposing - is a good use of either anyone’s time or money. 

Spurs’ main criticism of the West Ham bid is that the club plans to retain the running track, and the distance that puts between the fans and the pitch will mean extremely poor views for all those in the stands. This is a red herring in my view. 

Firstly, there are hundreds of stadiums across the world that use running tracks, including the homes of Roma/Lazio and Hertha Berlin - big clubs in big, modern European cities. Secondly, what has it got to do with Spurs if West Ham fans can’t see the pitch very well? Seriously, it’s nice of them to care but I really don’t think it’s anything to do with them. And lastly, having watched West Ham struggle in dire circumstances over the last two years, a seat where I can’t quite see just how appalling the team is playing actually sounds pretty good to me.

There is also the issue of geography: should Tottenham be allowed to move into West Ham’s home borough of Newham? Well, the short answer is no, but the long answer is that Newham is not even West Ham’s heartland of support anymore. Fans now travel to the games mainly from Barking and Dagenham and beyond, right out to the Essex coast. The same is true of Tottenham, who draw their support from far further a field  than the surrounding areas of White Hart Lane.

But if anyone is to lay claim to the site as being on their patch, then surely it is West Ham. Tottenham would be moving seven miles away from their current location, and West Ham just three. Tottenham would be crossing borough boundaries, and West Ham would still be in Newham and actually have the local council as partners for their bid. I’m struggling to see any justifiable reason why Tottenham should be awarded the stadium site over West Ham. That is not to say that they won’t get it of course.

But which of the two teams need a new stadium more? There can be no argument that White Hart Lane’s 36,000 capacity is simply insufficient for their level of support - particularly with the club now in the Champions League. Whether the club move to Stratford or manage to finance their own stadium rebuild, they’ll need to find a way of increasing match day revenue if they are to become an established top four club.

With West Ham, the evidence is a little weaker. The club does not sell out every week, and therefore there is an argument that suggests there is no need to move to a 60,000 capacity stadium. But attendances at Upton Park suffer because of the extortionate ticket prices. Should the club be successful in its bid, and make good on its promises to offer more opportunities to local children and young people, ticket prices could be lowered to an acceptable level and therefore more attractive to fans - particularly families. This is something West Ham have vowed to do as part of the bidding process, but it’s likely to be an approach that needs some hard selling to convince the decision makers at Olympic Park Legacy Company.

With the delayed decision rumoured to be made this week, it’s likely to be a very tense few days for both clubs. My own personal view is that a Premier League football club cannot be allowed to move into the home borough of another, and dismantle a publicly funded stadium to build their own. Whether I want the stadium or even think it is a good move for the club is immaterial: if it is a shoot out between West Ham and Tottenham only, it is right that the stadium is awarded to West Ham. If I was a Spurs fan, or it was West Ham looking to relocate to Haringey, I hope I would feel exactly the same way too.