Where the streets have no name

This is meant to be a regular blog, but of late, dear readers, it has been little more than a weekly (if that) look at the world.

What are the reasons for that? Well firstly work is keeping me overly busy. Banking has never been the easiest of jobs but of late it has demanded most of my brain power so that by the time I get to sit down and could put a blog together my head is full of scrambled egg. Yes I know it seems strange but I do put some thought into this!

Secondly, I have an eldest son with glandular fever which also has meant that at weekends my time has been focused on him. He's doing well but it is a rollercoaster of an illness so we have some steps backwards but overall he's heading in the right direction.

Thirdly, I've found twitter has enabled me to mini blog. You would think 140 characters wouldn't be enough but it's amazing what you can get across.

Anyway I hope that this will be a more regular blog in the future, but I have said that before.

I'm writing this watching U2 on Sky 1 and the opening riff of "where the streets have no name" will always make me feel a slightly better person for hearing it.

You’re gone

I have just deleted both the Daily Mail and Southern evening Echo websites from my favourites and plan not to read them anymore. I also won't be buying the papers either.

There are two main reasons that I've done this.

With the Mail it's the Lord Triesman story that has "broken the camel's back". On last Sunday they published a story about Lord T, the then Chair of the FA and the England 2018 World Cup bid, who had allegedly said in a private conversation things about the Russian FA & the Spanish FA colluding over World Cup refereeing and hosting the 2018 competition. The conversation was recorded and the Mail obtained a copy. Now the Mail at that point had a choice. Firstly they could have gone to the FA and said "you have a problem, sort it out" and told the informant where to go. That you might say would be the right thing to do and as a British newspaper, the supportive thing to do.

They however chose to do the other thing. That was publishing the story that brings the England World cup bid to the attention of the worlds press in a very bad light. Yes Lord T shouldn't have said what he said to anyone, but it was a private conversation and he wasn't told by the young lady involved that she was recording it. It seems to me to be very doubtful that this was "in the public interest". Whether or not this saga will have long term repercussions on the2018 World cup bid remains to be seen but the Mail had a choice and they chose the wrong one.

The Echo banishment is over their publishing stories about Alan Pardew, the Saints manager, and how he was allegedly "fighting to keep his job" Their source for this story was "a national newspaper" which it turns out was the Daily Mail! The Mail had a small piece about how the Saints Chairman wasn't happy with the clubs performance after the money given to Pardew in the January transfer window. This in itself appeared to be a "retread" of an old story from March time and was dismissed by the Saints at that time.

The Echo also said that a "clear the air" meeting between the Chairman and Pardew expected to take place on a Wednesday had been postponed to the Thursday.

On the Thursday morning the Saints web site published a long article by the Saints chairman that basically said that he and Pardew were working closely together, having fun doing it and that comments by both ex players and the local paper were not helping. So clearly they had met! The Echo published a new story reporting the article and that the Chairman had criticised ex players. No mention of the stinging broadside aimed at the Echo at all. Unbelievable! The comments from fans below the article were numerous and the main theme was this very point, that the paper had completely failed to acknowledge its part in the "non-story". If that is the level of reporting that they think is acceptable then good luck to them, I for one don't need them.

Dance on a volcano

So now that the dust has settled (or at least drifted away) from the Icelandic volcano and most people are back from where ever they were stranded, what was the travel chaos all about?

Was the ash ever seriously in danger of turning jet aircraft into gliders or was the whole thing an over-reaction? Certainly when it kicked off, various "experts" were on the media saying that it wasn't safe to fly and everything was grounded. Then for the best part of a week the skies remained empty, and herculean tasks were undertaken for people to get back from places that they had only taken 2 hours or so to fly to at the start of their holidays.

Then financial meltdown for the Airline industry started to get discussed (although to my mind if your aircraft's not flying, you're not paying for fuel or landing duties?) and compensation was muted and hey ho "it's a much less dense a cloud than we first thought". Cue planes flying and everyone's happy.

I'm left with two thoughts. Firstly we've a long way to go on climate change, if the number of flights we take for an Easter break, are anything to go by. Secondly, if the volcano's big brother goes off, will that create dense clouds of ash that will put everything back on the ground??

It’s over

So Saints will get the chance to defend the JPT next season, as today Huddersfield went to Stockport and won 6-0. As a result of this, Saints cannot now get in the playoffs and therefore we will be in league 1 again next season.

It's too easy to say that the 10 point deduction is the reason that we will not get the chance to go back up to the Championship and that may be true, but in reality having got this close, the real chance was lost when we had such a slow start to the season.

Anyway it's been a great season and we did something that few fans will get to do in going to Wembley and winning a trophy.

Next season the pressure really starts, no point's deduction and much more expectation.

Extraordinary thing

I think that the lowest point was about 9 months ago when it looked like there was a real chance that Saints wouldn't find a buyer and the Administrator was talking about "winding up orders" and similar nasty legal arrangements.

Then into the spotlight stepped Markus Liebherr and his big bag of cash and since then to paraphrase Yazz "the only way's been up".

This has involved appointing Alan Pardew as manager and funding the purchase of some better players, including Rickie Lambert, who at £1m was a bargain. We have climbed the table and now sit outside the top six but close enough that with the correct combination of results we could still end up in the end of season play offs. If we did and won the first two games then the play off Final is at Wembley in May and we've already know what going there and winning feels like, because that's what we did last week-end!

Sunday March 28^th, saw 44,400 Saints fans travel up from the south coast to see their team play Carlisle Utd in the final of the Johnstones Paint Trophy Final. As regular readers of this blog will know, my sons and I went to Wembley in August 2008 to watch an England game, so the oohh factor had already been experienced, but seeing your team play there was a whole new ball game. We travelled up with my friend Paul (cheers mate!) and his son Joe, to Ruislip, where our friends Adrian (Norm) and Dawn had prepared a fantastic brunch for us. Kick off was 1.30 pm so we had left Southampton at 8.30 for brunch at 10 am and then fully fed walked to the tube to arrive at the stadium at about midday. We had already had texts from other friends telling us that the atmosphere was spine tingling and indeed as we left the tube stadium the wave of emotion that hit me was fantastic. I have walked up Wembley way before but when it's your team badge on the side of the stadium it makes it a whole new experience. Around the stadium was a sea of red and white (and some blue and white for Carlisle, but we outnumbered them by 2:1) and while it was very busy everyone was singing and waving flags and generally making a lot of noise.

The tickets had arrived a week before and while I had asked for seats in one corner, somehow we ended up in the top tier but on the half way line. So it was an escalator ride to the top and then we stepped out to see the whole of one end (and in places a bit more) covered in red and white, again a truly remarkable sight. While the JPT final may not have the status of even the Carling Cup final, one thing it does allow is for both clubs to fill half the stadium (if they have enough fans). We do have enough and due to the fact that other finals have to give tickets to county associations and the like, I can't think of another occasion when a club side will take as many fans to Wembley as we did (44,400).

The game itself went better than can be expected with Carlisle deciding to give us a head start by one of their central defenders palming away a cross, with Lambert putting the resultant penalty into the top right hand corner of the goal. Then just before half time we got out the Stoke City play book and a long throw was headed on to the far post where Lallana rose to head home, 2-0.
After half time we went 3-0 up when a Carlisle defender hesitated before trying to clear a cross, in stepped Antonio to shoot at goal which hit the keeper and then rose up for Papa Waigo to head into an empty net. Cue mass celebration.

The final goal came when Antonio picked the ball up outside the box, moved it to the left and then put it past the keeper with his left foot. Best goal of the game.
Thereafter the game faded and we even allowed Carlisle to get one back, but the final score showed we had won 4-1 and yet more celebration followed the presentation of the cup and the obligatory fireworks on the pitch.

Seeing your team at the royal box being presented with a trophy is something all fans dream of, but only a few are so lucky, whatever the competition.

An amazing game and an amazing day finished with the reverse journey home, by now in pouring rain.

Now let's just hope we can go back again in May.

My friend Paul has produced a wonderful video of the day you can find it here

Here is the News

As Private Eye would call it, "The Street of shame" has had a couple of potentially major developments this week.

Firstly News International announced that they would put the Times & the Sunday Times behind a pay wall. This means that in May they will re-launch the papers websites and that you will need to register thereafter to access them. Then in June you will need to pay for your registration to work, either £1 per day or £2 for a week. They also hinted that their other two publications namely the Sun & the News of the World might follow in due course.

Rupert Murdoch firmly believes that putting papers behind a pay wall is the future, others such as Emily Bell, the Guardian news and media Director of digital content, strongly disagree. In reality only time will tell, but my instinct is that Emily Bell is more likely to be proved correct than Murdoch. My reasons for this are that firstly my surfing habits are such that I view the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times and the Daily Mail websites most days in addition to my homepage which is the BBC. In addition, I increasingly use other media outlets such as Twitter and Google. A newspaper, as the name suggests, should initially tell you the news and in this age I can find that in number of places, so the loss of the Times will be disappointing, but not sufficient to make me pay for the content that I shall lose. I used to buy the Times newspaper most days until about 18 months ago, now I find the news via Twitter on my phone at lunch time.

Secondly there will be add-ons to the Times digital content, such as an e-paper and no doubt an iTunes app on which to access it, ahead of the launch of the iPad in April/May. But there is already an excellent Guardian app, which ok you have to pay a one off fee for, but thereafter the content is free. It's so good that my eldest son said he wanted an iPod touch just to be able to access it! There are others too and with free content as well. In April the BBC News will also launch its iTunes app. The Times will be an expensive offering in an otherwise free marketplace.

Finally, the Times does have great writers that readers do follow and they hope that they will be a significant factor in people paying to be able to continue to do this. This may work, but will it be able to stop other sites allowing access to this content through other ways, i.e. is the pay wall security going keep the content behind it? It may well at the outset but for how long? And if those writers audience reduces by 95%*, will they be happy to stay behind the pay wall? I know that they will still be read in the actual paper, but the bigger potential audience is now via the web and if that reduces....

The second potential development is Alexander Lebedev buying the Independent and Independent on Sunday for £1. He previously bought the Evening Standard for £1 and then re-launched it as a free paper. Word on the street is that Lebedev may do the same with the Independent, although that could be harder to pull off. Will super markets, for example, stock a free paper alongside ones that they make money on? On the plus side, if you had a free copy of the Independent to read rather than the Metro, would you happily put it under your arm at the station? I guess the big question is would you read a free Independent over the Times or the Telegraph that you still have to pay for? It could be of course that giving away a free paper copy becomes increasingly irrelevant, as the digital version will, in probably a shorter space of time than we expect, become the version of the publication that we read more frequently. Which takes us back to the Times....

*Business models for pay walls work on the basis that a 5% take up is good enough to make a profit.

White blank page

This week I was 51 which when you write it down sounds old, but I still feel 25 so that's all right. (Yes before you comment, I know I look 75)

On Thursday night, I went with my sons to see Rob Bell speak. He's probably the best communicator I've ever seen, using both words, his physical body, pictures and video to support his point. He spoke for two hours but the time flew by and we all came away with a real sense of inner peace. The evening was titled "Drops like's stars" which comes from his 3 year old nephew staring at rain drops hitting a deck outside his window and shouting "stars, stars, stars" as they hit the ground. He didn't see rain drops he saw stars. To do the talk justice would need pages, so Google him, read the "Drops like stars" book or when the DVD comes out see that, you won't be sorry. Oh by the way he's an American preacher but in no way like any preconceptions you have of any other American preacher. To me his style is closet to Steve Jobs with jokes.

Musically I've discovered Mumford & Sons and "Explosions in the Sky", the latter courtesy I think of Rob Bell's iPod that was playing the music before he came on stage. We asked the road crew who it was it was playing! Check them out on Spotify; you do have Spotify don't you?