Andy’s Sting In The Tale (23/10/26) "Oh For Some Long Lost Lowry Simplicity"
I’m sitting with the lights on, surviving a dismal, dark, dreich all-day Edinburgh rain storm with 2 windier named storms already queueing up to make next week a proverbial Autumnal challenge.
And to make matters worse is the annual kick in the teeth that is ‘instant evening darkness’ also hits after Sunday’s repeat of the archaic, First-World-War-induced, and still enforced, clock shift.
(2026 thinking, Why not just let any affected businesses or operations just set their own winter seasonal times and timings?)
Anyway, earlier this week I was reading about an LS Lowry exhibition starting at of all places, Milton Keynes, England’s roundabout city with 130 plus. (For the record our Kilby has more).
In 1953 The English FA celebrated their 90th year and combined with the Arts Council for a competition of artists to celebrate the game. (Paintings Win Prizes?)
1700 entries came in for various categories and the overall winner, was L S Lowry, he of Matchstick Men with ‘Going to the Match’, a wonderful painting that I’ve seen for free in the Lowry Museum in Salford.
I was mesmerised and felt so engaged.
Lowry won £250 from the £2000 total prize fund and in 1999 the PFA bought the painting for £1.9 Million, before selling it just 23 years later for £7.8 Million.
Based outside, just before kick-off on a Saturday at Bolton Wanderers, I love the baked-in social history, naivety, camaraderie and sense of purpose against a fast declining industrial landscape with as we know now big
change imminent.
Football, and life, was simpler then.
Kids played free, because they wanted to, in all available spaces, improvised games with mixed age groups and groupings.
There were big clubs in Blighty, for sure but with no European football and minimal media hype there were no ‘mega clubs’ selling their souls.
Saturday afternoons and ordinary fans were sacrosanct and you queued and paid at the gate same as everyone else.
No prawn sandwich brigades anywhere.
Today the world media tail has brought unforeseen riches to some and a 1950s fan would be shocked at how the haves are constantly looking for more of everything at the expense of not just other clubs but the soul of the game and as we all know, willing to cheat and finagle big time to win more.
Football communities have been changed forever and not all for the better.
Football itself at all levels has become a gold rush.
Silly wages mean unfathomable revenues all get spent in quick time, and the old common-good reliance and locale-existence chains have been broken.
For ever.
Football has now found itself in the land of a new conundrum or is it a predicament or perhaps both.
And it intertwined problems the game doesn’t know what to do about.
And they are everywhere from the very top at Fifa all the way down to the base of the SPFL and all the clubs in tomorrow’s Scottish Cup fixtures, in the crazy winds forecast!
The omnipresent starting question every time in the making of every decision for every Chairman/Club/Fan Group/FA is what decision is best for my corner, today.
Football is continually failing us all because ‘Revenue Generation’ for survival is all that matters in our short term post Lowry world.
There are no discussed, adopted and certainly not accepted goals to help better shape the football world and recapture some of what has been lost.
There is no understanding or advocacy of the economics of collective action and actions around the long term benefits of the common good.
It’s all instead about short term wins and survival targets rather than long term economy-wide transformational analysis, real plans and implementation.
That is really what is needed.
It’s an everywhere epidemic, a financially induced free-for-all.
And the Media Industry has sussed that football and other supports will continue to deliver unreachable audiences, but Media is more a “Very Naughty Boy rather than The Messiah”.
Media and its monies may have for now oiled the machine but like Thatcher using oil and engineering privatisation revenues to create her boom there is no real thought about the roots of future issues and even sustainability.
For sure, chaos has been baked-in deeper than the mines in Lowry’s paintings.
Sting in This Week’s Tale
1. Uefa questions Jahnnie Will Ignore
2. A Bad Night No Matter What You Call Them
3. Fans Face the Beaks but Clubs Get Slapped Wrists
1. But They Are on Public Record and a Foundation Stone for Doing ‘Walking Away’
The man is a survivor and has already bribed enough votes but like in The Lord of the Rings there will be a final play.
Questions week ending October 24
UEFA’s key questions regarding FFE are:
• Why was an agreement signed with Thrive Capital granting exclusivity without sign-off from the FIFA Council?
• Who authorised FIFA to enter this agreement and on what basis?
• Why was Thrive selected as a lead investor without any competitive tender process and under conditions of strict confidentiality?
• When was the idea of FFE first explored, by whom and with what objective? Who within FIFA authorised the development of the project?
• What happened between 17 July, when it was intended that the FFE proposal would be brought to the FIFA Council, and 28 July, when Mas were asked to support the proposal… and why was the FIFA Council not consulted?
• At the FIFA Council supposedly independent lawyers presented the proposal as an “independent review”. But all the lawyers were paid by FIFA or FIFA proxies – how is this ‘independent’?
• Can FIFA confirm whether individuals involved in the development and decision making process were interviewed as part of this review, and, if not, why not?
You’ll find more online if you Google.
Why would any small nation think the overhaul of Fifa and its corrupt leader was more important than taking the money and shushing.
Uefa have to shut off Jahnnie’s Magic Money Fountain from it’s European base.
Won’t happen without a real stand off and a skirmish or three.
2. Three Results That Say a Lot
First, Celtic 7- Hearts 1
Then an expected Trabzonspor 2 Hearts 0
But a Parkhead disaster night followed, Celtic 1 Celta Vigo 2
I was shocked at the result last Sunday.
I expected Hearts to rally but come home with nothing.
But the highly financed economy that is Celtic could have and should have delivered more.
But not good enough because our league is not good enough.
So, one afterthought and a Wee BBC Niggle.
Both had 4 Scots in their starting line ups, so 7 financial mercenaries each showing we did better when we had a system that delivered kids who were good enough.
(Reserve football, Schools football, kick abouts and more, all long gone and never replaced).
Reading about Bournemouth’s wonderful win over Milan there are lessons their too.
Their best two players on the night were real Scots, Ben Doak and Ryan Christie.
Ben went south by personal choice to break through.
Ryan sort of established at ICT but then Celtic didn’t think he was good enough till he had been on loan at Aberdeen.
Then he took control and left them.
And on to the BBC guy interviewing some Galician fans in Glasgow but not listening very hard.
They spoke about the BBC Scotland version of Celta with the hard C that the local fans call it.
So why do we then get only the BBC presenters soft C version right through all presentations.
Glasgow, if the locals call Celta (Kelta) so should you!
It’s like when we all ignorantly called Ajax after the Unilever toilet cleaner back in the 70s rather than what they called themselves.
3. Fans In Front of Beaks
First Jordan Hadden gets 16 Months for trying to organise a real end to end attack and then picks on a polis and throws a bottle from 3 or 4 yards.
Lucky boy because it could have been much worse.
Soon Marc Spence of Lanark, an ex-coach of Glenbuck ‘2016, now sacked, for physically invading the pitch and attacking Celtic Staff at the same match.
First offender so who knows.
When will fans suss we’re united by football first and foremost.
When will clubs be strictly liable?
Hurting clubs has to be part of the rise needed in fan self-policing.
Sting is: A weekly blog from a Scottish lifelong fan not scared to question why our game seems to be in terminal, albeit slow decline.
I’m chair of the Scottish Football Union a fan group for all fans fighting your corners every day.
And well done to our Cerebral Palsy team at the World Cup in the Usa and in the 5th place play off.
Self-funded because of a lack of support from Hampden.
Shame on all of you.
Have a look at us and what we do.
We’re not and never will be a mud-slinging organisation but fight a lot of corners the right way.
Collaboratively.
Andy’s Album of the Week on a very Wet Friday:
Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells III
I loved this Ibiza club scene influenced album as it broke away from his early formula and most of all because it also introduced me to the wonderful voice that is Dungiven’s Cara Dillon. (Hard C in Cara like it should be in Celta Vigo, BBC)
Her collaborative track, ‘Man in the Rain’ sums up my local trip into Morningside by foot earlier today when a bloody white delivery van drove at 40 mph in between two sets of very close-up sets of lights in the deluge, hit a massive pot hole puddle and soaked about 5 of us!
Wanker.
Anyway this album has matured amazingly and is better than ever.
Taking on the Spanish clubby theme and dropping the procession of instruments that was on T.B.1 but then repeated and too obvious and unnecessary on T.B. 2. Where more great tracks like Weightless and Sentinel would have made it even better
Back to T.B.3.
It is just one long track of inspired and inspiring music.
If it wasn’t still pissing down I could be back on the island.
I’m still a huge Mike fan, when the mood takes me.
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