Friday night lights - the weekend starts here

And lo, the FA saw sense and moved their European representative's weekend league game to a Friday evening, allowing them an extra day to prepare for their important Champions League tie. Alas I'm not talking about the English FA, the organisation that decided that the best way to beat the corrupt FIFA World Cup committee members was to bribe them with handbags. I mean Italy (and others). Napoli's Serie A game prior to the first leg of the Chelsea tie was moved, and led to a 3-1 win.

Chelsea have seen something here, and have reportedly lobbied the FA to move their FA Cup semi-final from Saturday to Friday, assuming they defeat Portuguese minnows (and former European champions) Benfica. Needless to say, it's highly unlikely. English football's real decision makers, telly and the Police, wouldn't be happy at something already set. But it also gives Chelsea the perfect excuse should they lose in the semi-finals to Barcelona or AC Milan.

But maybe they've touched on a good idea, something not often seen in the top flight, Friday Night Football. TFI Friday.

Ginger bastard (with Man Utd shirt in background) annoys millions

It makes sense really, in some ways more than others. Arsenal played twice on Friday nights in the 2003/04 season, beating Liverpool and Leeds United. Both played in the spring, balmy conditions, and a bonus - a free weekend for the fans. Imagine the die-hards, who go home and away, experiencing the joys of the weekend shop or DIY.

There were rumours not long ago that Arsenal lobbied to have more games on Friday nights, in conjunction with Transport for London. The constant engineering works at a weekend cause havoc across the capital, and a solution was proposed. Unfortunately it didn't really pan out, as the Police didn't like the idea. I imagine Sky also didn't want most of their target audience already out in pubs, not watching indoors. There was even a suggestion that, as part of playing the FA Cup final on a full league programme, there would be some Friday night games, but it appears not to be the case.

Paul Robinson was thinking more of TGI Fridays smokin' hot jumbo meals

There is a long-standing tradition of Friday night games lower down the league however. Tranmere Rovers are in the unenviable position of being the third wheel on Merseyside, between Liverpool and Everton. In an attempt to ensure their own crowds, and maybe even to pinch some of the others who may be at a loose end, Prenton Park hosted a large amount of matches down the years.

Again an advert for regional divisions in the lower leagues, the more Southern teams refused to play on a Friday, citing inconvenience for fans. But with smaller clubs struggling more than ever to attract youngsters in the era of Premier League overload, surely every idea and advantage should be taken?

Tranmere struggled to attract crowds on Saturdays

ESPN seem to have pushed the envelope this season, showing a number of their FA Cup ties on Friday nights, with no real disruption to attendances. People reporting that it's better than a Friday night at the disco is a good sign, but are people really that averse to change?

With English representation in the latter stages of Europe this season equalling the team currently struggling in fifth place, perhaps we should seek to take every advantage out there. And if we're playing games on Good Friday and Easter Sunday this season, it's not like we can say that nothing is sacred any more.

Is Athletic Bilbao the new Wire? Indeed.

Football is like any other cultural phenomenon. These days, with footage of almost every major game available online within minutes, the race to be the pioneer has never been so keen. People are desperate to discover the next big thing, or to be the bloke down the pub (or more likely on Twitter) to say "oh yeah, I saw them years ago playing in a pub league, I knew they had potential". An acquaintance of mine was a living example when the Arctic Monkeys first appeared in 2005, having claimed to have seen them several times, and denouncing them the minute they dared to become mainstream by going straight to number one.

A similar trend appears to be emerging with football teams, and the fad at the moment is Athletic Bilbao. Now they are more popularly associated with knocking Manchester United out of the Europa League, both games on terrestrial television, the name is everywhere. Twitter almost combusted during the United tie, exploding into a rainbow of how wonderful they were, if only everyone played like them and so on. People who need to be the cutting edge of opinion declared undying love, and the non-believers were cast as the enemy.

The Bilbao substitutes were keeping a close eye on proceedings

While the title of this blog is something of a tenuous link, it certainly inspires comparison. Without aiming to cross over into reviewing television, here is a quick rundown. The Wire was an HBO show in the early 2000s, and largely ignored on these shores despite featuring a large number of British actors. It suddenly exploded, and was championed by the Guardian as the best thing since sliced bread, sliced bread having being invented the previous season (credit Abe Simpson). If you'd never seen the Wire, you were some sort of philistine. Quotes along the lines of "I wish I'd never seen it, so I could watch it again for the first time" were widespread.

Instantly transferable to Bilbao? Sure they play pleasing football, a move away from the risk-free game we see so often, and with an impressive, if borderline illegal, policy of only playing Basque players. It is worth considering if perhaps the pundits in Spain are quite so enamoured with Swansea, or is it just that the Swans play football in such a European way that it isn't novel to them? Perhaps Leon Britton will be seen as the next Pirlo or Xavi...

Llorente always wanted to play with Bendtner for Sunderland

Maybe I'm being harsh, and I should be able to admire Bilbao in the same way I loved the Wire. Having read an article recently on the rivalry between Athletic and Barcelona in the 1980s, it was nice to see a piece which wasn't completely full of praise (lots of mentions of assassinations, dictatorships, and introducing Maradona to cocaine), and there is a worry that like many clubs in Europe, coming to such a wide focus will lead to their best players ending up in Real Madrid's reserves by next season. Maybe one day someone will tell me they hated the Wire, and I'll respect the opinion.

With an manager like Bielsa in charge, you're always likely to get entertainment (see his Chile side at the 2010 World Cup). But if he were to move on, could I propose Clay Davis as Bilbao coach? Even just for the post-match interviews… What's shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit in Spanish?

You think I'm gonna be a scapegoat for the whole damn machine?

Who's the greatest - Messi, Pele or Eboue?

It was inevitable. Lionel Messi scored a hat-trick this week against Granada, taking him top of Barcelona's all-time goalscoring charts. The media/Twitter/fan love-in began in earnest, praising him as the greatest footballer of all time. The media/Twitter/hater hate-in sparked in response, claiming that he's nothing - he hasn't won the World Cup, and that anyone could score countless goals with a midfield like Barca's supplying passes...

As a current player, the method (as adjudged by FIFA) for deciding the best player in the World is to invite national coaches to vote for their top three, on a preference style vote (they're not allowed to vote for their compatriots), although it isn't foolproof because for example Paul Scholes has never received a vote, and yet Xavi almost won it? (Note sarcasm)

The Daily Mail in anti-foreigner shock

But is there a foolproof formula to decide on who is the best player of them all? Football by it's nature is cyclical, and it's rare for more than a couple of elite players playing at the same time. You could almost have a timeline from Pele, to Cruyff, to Maradona, Van Basten, Baggio, Zidane, Messi. Almost.

Like the arguments of "Who would win in a fight, Superman or Mighty Mouse?" The minute you say Zidane, you'll be met by cries of Bergkamp! (fat) Ronaldo! Nedved! With any subjective discussion, someone is always right, and won't hear otherwise. You could resort to Football Manager stats, but that's no fun.

The question is a goldmine for football magazines when doing interviews, asking former pros, key figures and journalists who would be in their dream team?

Marco couldn't let go of the past and tried to sneak into shot

While it was almost universally accepted by fans across the world that Pele was the greatest of all, would we think differently if Maradona wasn't so flawed? The Pele brand seems to carry on, via Puma endorsements and erectile dysfunction, while Diego has become something of a parody of himself, a far cry from his amazing achievements with Argentina and Napoli. Do we finally have another contender? Or will (thin) Ronaldo continue trying to out-do the little Argentine?

We will never know - the nay-sayers will continue to claim that Messi won't be truly great until he wins a World Cup, but even he will need to hope that his colleagues get it right soon, football being a team game and all, something we forget in all the hype.

And until then, we'll always have Eboue...

Emmanuel was winning the race for the Ballon D'Or

Get your mascot off the pitch

If you believe Premier League chairman Dave Richards last week on his (apparently off duty) rant in Qatar, football was invented in England. Working class backgrounds, factory workers and the such. He also claimed that the sport has been stolen from the Isles. The rights and wrong of his arguments are not a topic for this blog, but should he look closer to home?

We look at football these days and see the supposed "Americanisation" of the game. Music played after goals, cheerleaders and PA announcers who think they're celebrities all feature heavily on a Saturday afternoon, but what about those large creatures which float around the pitch, waving at children and generally being a menace? Not stewards or members of John Terry's family, but mascots.

We now see almost every sporting event as an excuse to create an alien or animal with which to bombard marketing campaigns, scare kids and to make a buck. The World Cup has seen some splendidly retro ones, my favourites being Pique (Mexico '86) and Ciao (Italia '90), no coincidence that they were the two first World Cups I remember as a child. The first World Cup mascot? World Cup Willie, 1966. English. The root of the problem, leading to the seediest, laziest stereotypical symbol of them all...

Juanito - missing a hammock and a cerveza

Juanito is almost a relic, the one time bedpan that looks like a work of art on the Antiques Roadshow. How can we make a game of men kicking each other seem friendly to children? Stick a sombrero on a cartoon Mexican (having recently watched the Uruguay v Brazil semi-final of that game, it was a brutal experience). But I'd rather have a boring Eton-attending caricature in a silly hat than the crazy offerings for this summer's Olympics...

Which brings me onto the main idea behind this blog. The mascots at league grounds. The sometimes smiley face with which to emblazon kid membership packs. The comic relief at half-time when the fixture list provides humorous match-ups (see the fight between Bristol City's Three Little Pigs when they met Wolfie of Wolverhampton below).

I'll huff, and I'll puff...

Of the more infamous variety, two names feature heavily. For more traditional reasons, the first is Cyril the Swan, of Swansea. Notorious amongst fans for being an obnoxious bird, he has caused mayhem for his antics. They include removing the head of Millwall's Zampa the Lion, and giving a quote to Dutch TV that he told Zampa "Don't fuck with the Swans". He received a £1,000 fine for that... He even featured in a wedding at the Vetch Field to Cybil the Swan, although rumours that they now run a hotel in Torquay are wide of the mark.

The other mascot of note is Gunnersaurus. The imaginatively named dinosaur representing Arsenal was fairly controversy free, until April 2011 before a match at the Emirates between his club and Liverpool, on a poignant afternoon remembering the Hillsborough tragedy.

A minute's silence was about to commence, and the two teams lined up on the centre circle, as is tradition. The crowd bowed their heads, the referee blew the whistle, and millions of television viewers got to see this...

Didn't even take his hat off

Needless to say he didn't vanish with his tail between his legs. He is still very much the face of the club's junior fans, whereas perhaps after that episode, extinction should be very much on the cards.

We have all the time in the world - Timekeeping

Monday night at Emirates Stadium. Two of the standout players of the season so far came to blows in the sixth minute of second half injury time. One, Newcastle goalkeeper Tim Krul, had just conceded a second goal, while the other, Arsenal captain Robin van Persie, had seemingly led his team to another victory after going behind. Krul had spent most of the game making the most of his time with the ball, moving the ball from one side to the other for goal kicks, and delaying his normally fast, efficient distribution.

In previous blogs, I've touched on some of the astronomical prices that fans pay to watch elite football, Arsenal fans being victims in chief. Some top games cost over £100 per ticket including fees, and that's more than a pound per minute. But is it? If you look at the Opta stats for last season, in the Premier League, the ball was only in play for an average of 62.39 minutes (Serie A - 65.15, La Liga 61.48, Bundesliga 61.22), just over two thirds of the ninety. Hardly value for money.

Hardly football's most romantic moment

In other sports, notably the big American games, and closer to home rugby, there are independent time-keepers, who watch the clock, and pause it for every break in play. You just need to sit through an NFL game to see the negative side, where a televised match could last as long as four hours, with the various breaks, as well as the need for advert breaks during the play.

What benefits could we see? When a foul is given, or a substitution made, we can rely on the time-keeper to stop the clock, so the crowd know that when the departing player takes his time, it's not going to allow the clock to run down. No more players taking four or five rolls to hold up play.

Sergio was playing peekaboo with the fourth official

Another benefit to the independent timekeeper would be the end of the legendary Fergie Time - would he know where in the stadium the clock-watcher would be in order to point and stare?

Would television allow halves of football to last possibly twice as long to include stoppages, without the extra chance for advertising? With the urban myths that FIFA considered advert breaks during the games, or changing matches to three periods of thirty minutes, you just know that every substitution will be met with a quick teaser for a payday loan or the new Johnny Depp film...

What time is Match of the Day on tonight?

The idea of providing a product that is better value for money for fans? Surely low on FIFA's agenda. Ignite the TV companies with a chance to sell more ads? Now you're talking Sepp!