Conor McAinsh's Football Meta channel did this interesting piece last week on the increasing trend for taking shots from outside the box. (He concentrates particularly on the strong upward blip in the numbers in the early part of this season, but it feels to me like we were starting to see it last season as well, and certainly in the World Cup. [He does mention that the percentage of the tournament's goals coming from long-distance shots was twice as high this summer as in the Qatar tournament.])
He suggests that it appears to be essentially a response to the increasing prevalence of the low-block (shooting from outside the box may be the only way to pierce a compact defence) and also probably a consequence of ever more vigorous high pressing (high turnovers may briefly encounter enticing gaps to take a shot, and/or to shoot through, as players back-pedal to recover their defensive formation after losing the ball in their own back third).
He also notes that the phenomenon is not quite universal (a few leading teams actually seem to be seeing a downturn in their long-range shooting: Arsenal are currently finding it difficult to manufacture scoring chances in any area of the pitch, and Manchester City, naturally enough, prefer to concentrate on trying to create chances in the box for Haaland), and there's also a high variance in the success rate different teams have been achieving with the tactic (some teams seem to have been shooting from distance in desperation, and have not been getting anything out of it [Manchester United and Spurs come to mind!], while others [notably Brighton and Villa] have been making a successful speciality out of it so far). It's also worth keeping in mind that the total number of successful shots-from-distance is still relatively small, and we're still very early in the season - so, the current figures might well be distorted by statistical anomaly.
Although Conor doesn't touch on this, I suspect that there's a potential for strong secondary opportunities from long-range shots, which may ultimately produce more goals than the shots directly. Fiercely hit shots from a long way out are difficult for the goalkeeper to hold or may quite often come back off the woodwork - hence potentially creating moments of chaos in the penalty box when the ball rebounds unpredictably in a dangerous area. This, however, is the kind of thing that stats often fail to track (or that you have to dig very deep to find any useful data on...).
I think this issue also raises a problem with xG statistics. It seems probable that because of the greater focus on attempting shots from outside the box now, all teams will ultimately get better at them (and the most effective teams in this approach are better at them already), and their success rate will improve substantially. And I'm not convinced that shots from distance have ever deserved the niggardly xG ratings of between 0.1 and 0.01 that they have typically been assigned. But... does this mean that xG algorithms will be adjusted, to take account of this shifting reality? And if so, when? It's a bit of a Catch-22 for the stats companies, because their data needs to have a consistency of methodology behind it to give it cross-compatibility with previous seasons; but changes surely have to be made from time to time, otherwise metrics like 'expected goals' could become wildly untethered from the real world, and suffer from a diminishing reliability or relevance. It's a metric I've always felt is of very dubious 'accuracy'; but there is a danger that its usefulness could be further undermined by changes in shooting habits and finishing efficiency in the game.
Simon Jeffes' Penguin Cafe Orchestra was a thing of pure joy. I've always found this quirky, zestful quasi-classical 'fusion' music to be utterly irresistible. This is one of my favourite pieces, the playfully demented Music for a Found Harmonium. (You might not recognise Jeffes' name or the name of his group, but you'll almost certainly recognise the music. It has thoroughly insinuated its way into popular culture over the past 40-odd years, probably gaining more frequent inclusion in film soundtracks than just about any other contemporary composition.)
Fate sundered me from all of my PCO albums on vinyl long since, and for the past 25 or 30 years my only ready access to this music has been through a CD of 'Still Life' at The Penguin Cafe (a 1988 short ballet suite, adapted by Jeffes from several of his most popular pieces), played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Because I've listened to this so many times over the years, it has 'the comfort of the familiar' about it now and has become my preferred version.
Sadly, Simon Jeffes died in 1997 of a brain tumour, at only 48 years of age. He'd given an awful lot of pleasure to the world in such a comparatively short time.
Some years later, his son Arthur gathered together some of the musicians his father had worked with over the years on PCO recordings, re-forming the project as Penguin Cafe, originally, I think, just to keep Simon's music alive; but they soon began to record new pieces in a similar style. This is an interesting interview & performance segment with them from BBC Breakfast News sometime back in the Noughties. [And here are some clips of the concerts they were probably promoting in this, at the Royal Albert Hall - interspersed with some entertaining bits of chat from Arthur Jeffes. Several years later, they did one of NPR's 'Tiny Desk concerts'.]
And if you're starting to get into this stuff,.... here are three more short pieces from a 1984 appearance (still led by Simon) on the wonderful BBC2 programme The Old Grey Whistle Test (and if you don't know about that, go and look it up; simply the best music show on television ever, an absolute treasure-chest of astonishing live performances).
And more treats too: a complete performance of the 1988 ballet 'Still Life' at the Penguin Cafe; a half-hour 'Live at the BBC' concert from 1989; and, best of all, an entire episode (50 minutes) of 1980s ITV arts programme The South Bank Show devoted to Simon Jeffes and the group.
Damn, that was quite a rabbit-hole I just fell down. I fear the poor Algorithm is going to be unable to think of anything but Simon and Arthur Jeffes to recommend to me for weeks now!
I've never had much time for Halloween parties and such. (It's just not a thing in England; or at least, it wasn't in the time of my childhood...) But over the past several years I have become a big fan of the zestful Spanish cover band Broken Peach (as soon as you see them, you think they're a band you'd like to hire for a private party!). And they've made it a tradition over the past dozen or so years to put out a special video every Halloween, in which they all don the kind of ghoulish skeletal costume and make-up associated with the Mexican Día de los Muertos (two days after Halloween, on Monday), and perform eerily frenetic and jerky dance routines while playing a classic song (I suspect there must be a little bit of video trickery involved in enhancing this effect, because it just doesn't seem humanly possible to do such rapid and such precise twitches!). This year they've finally got around to producing a hard rock version of Michael Jackson's Thriller. But the one above from a few years ago, a wonderfully manic and snarly rendition of Soft Cell's Tainted Love (with a little bit of a mash-up with Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This by The Eurythmics near the end!) is my favourite of the lot.
I confess, I grew to love Soft Cell's version (although I'm glad I only ever listened to it, rather than having to endlessly endure the rather cringey video that accompanied it). You sort of had to, back in the early '80s, resistance was futile: it was the most massive hit of my college years, remaining the most played song on the jukebox in my college beer cellar for five straight years. Here's a great live version with Jools Holland's Rhythm & Blues Orchestra on the Hootenanny six years ago (a long-running New Year's Eve special of Later with Jools Holland.... the best music show on the BBC, and quite probably in the entire world). And, in my usual spirit of completeness, here's where it all started, the 1964 Motown recording from Gloria Jones.
I recently enjoyed this little profile of Ayyoub Bouaddi on the Daily Dose of Football Youtube channel. Manchester City's new midfield signing - only just turned 19 years old! - caught my eye with his performances for Morocco in the World Cup this summer, but I hadn't known much else about him. So, this introduction was most welcome.
It turns out that he appears to be not only a lovely lad, but extraordinarily bright as well: not just an outstanding 'football intelligence', but a formidable all-around intellect. (He shuns social media, and is more likely to spend his downtime reading books, listening to classical music, or playing chess. It's reassuring to learn that there are still some teenagers who follow such a path.)
Alas, I have serious doubts as to whether City was the right move for him. Daily Dose's creator Lucas Ribeiro suggests here that he might be becoming a first team mainstay in three or four years; but I don't see a ready path to achieving that when more experienced players like Elliot Anderson and Enzo Fernandez are standing in his way. And that's too long for him to wait; he's good enough to be a regular starter straight away. I hope they'll let him go out on loan so he can continue to get regular gametime.
Chopin was my 'gateway drug' into classical music. The majority of my parents' extensive music collection - the stuff I first started listening to on vinyl when I was about four or five years old - was very middle-of-the-road pop singles from the '50s and early '60s (the early days of their marriage, before I came along to spoil things); and most of the LP records they owned were the soundtracks of the big musicals (I am more deeply familiar with the Rogers & Hammerstein songbook than I care to admit...). But my mum had a sneaking soft spot for classical music too, and the first example of this among her records that I discovered and fell in love with was an anthology of some of Chopin's most popular short piano pieces - The Chopin I Love - played by the incomparable Artur Rubinstein. Dear Artur had such a light touch with the Polish maestro, and he naturally became my favourite exponent of his work. And yet I somehow never came across a performance by him of the Preludes - not until many years later, anyway. The first record of that piece I owned and came to love was a wonderful Deutsche Grammophon recording by Maurizio Pollini.
But then, relatively late in life (18!!) I discovered Vladimir Horowitz - one of those rare performers who've actually given me the shivers. The only other one in the classical field who hit me this hard was the violinist Jascha Heifetz (I find it difficult to listen to anyone else playing the Tchaikovsky concerto - his rendition is definitive for me). With most performances I find myself admiring many different aspects, but still perhaps being aware of one or two things that don't quite chime with me; these guys.... they somehow seem to play it exactly like I think it should sound. That happens very, very rarely; but it is a scary-wonderful feeling when it does.
As so often in my musical history, I remember the serendipitous moment of first discovery quite clearly. My first week or so at college, a secondhand record sale at the student union, turning up a Horowitz album in one of the bins and immediately feeling an eerie, compelling must-have fascination with it. I'd heard the name, obviously, had probably heard some performances of his on Radio 3 (the BBC's classical music station, which had been a mainstay of my teenage years; I definitely leaned more towards the classics than to pop and rock in those days), but he still felt like a stranger to me. Not for long. Schumann's Kreisleriana - mesmerising. When the second side ended, I just sat there dumbstruck for quite a long while, thinking, "Jeez - what was that?" Then I flipped the record back on to Side 1 and played the whole thing again.
Over the next few years, of course, I picked up quite a lot more of his recordings and started to read up on his life story. So, when in 1986 Gorbachev's 'thaw' in the Soviet Union finally allowed him to revisit the country of his birth - for the first time since he'd fled the post-Revolution strife in Russia as a young man just over 60 years earlier - it was a major international event, and one of the most moving memories of my student days. His triumphant return concert in the Moscow Conservatory was televised live on the BBC; of course, I watched it, in rapture. For me, that was a more transcendent, a more indelible moment in my young life than Nelson Mandela's release from prison a few years later. [Luckily, the complete concert is now available on Youtube. I've only just discovered this. I'm not sure I'll be able to watch it one sitting; I'm sure it will make me cry buckets.]
It only just occurred to me that this, Chopin's 'Raindrop' Prelude (Op. 25, No. 15) played by Vladimir Horowitz, might be an apposite selection for this week's 'Music Break' - because we've been having a particularly heavy and protracted finale to the rainy season here in South-East Asia this year, and I've spent far more time than I would have liked over the last several weeks stuck indoors, listening to the rain....
[I first thought of making this addition my musical series a few weeks ago, when the rains were at their height. But I already had a post sorted for the coming Monday, and on the following week I wanted to do something linked to my imminent birthday; so, this piece devoted to Horowitz and the 'Raindrop' Prelude is slightly delayed.
And it is starting to feel as though 'the season' may just have ended. In Cambodia, at least, the pattern of the summer months is that, after a gentle and intermittent build-up from late March or early April through mostly still dry-and-hot April/May, June and July are the peak months of the soggy onslaught. There's usually a little bit of a lull from around the last week of July: sometimes just a week or so, sometimes maybe a few weeks of much lighter rains, perhaps little or no rain at all. And then we get a second phase of rains through August/September, generally rather lighter than the early blast, and often threatening to peter out altogether through September. But then.... there is a last volcanic spasm starting towards the end of September, and reaching its drenching peak in the first week or two of October - a deluge so intense that, although the worst of the rains usually last barely half the month, October generally ranks as one of the rainiest months in the entire year.
But when that last spasm of the rainy season finishes, it often does so very abruptly: there might have been a week or two of lighter rain, gradually diminishing in frequency, duration, and intensity; or there might have been one last big shower, and then.... suddenly nothing. Either way,.... well, there may be an element of romanticization, of imaginative exaggeration going on in this, but... many people say that there's a feeling you recognise on the first days after the rains have stopped: it's impossible to point to any definitive indicator in that day's weather, or in the pattern of weather in the preceding week, but there's suddenly this blissful sense that this one perfect sunny day is not just an isolated blip in an ongoing pattern of heavy rains but a harbinger of many more such days to come - a long, almost uninterrupted stream of them stretching all across the winter months (and with very slightly cooler temperatures in December/January - it's all relative; it's still generally warmer overnight on a typical January night in Cambodia than it is at noon on a summer's day in the south of England, but it can feel quite 'refreshing' after months and months of 35C daily peaks).
That is a lovely feeling; and I was feeling it yesterday. Although the day had started quite overcast, and there had evidently been a brief but heavy shower at some point in the early hours of the morning, as soon as things had started clearing up by 9am or so, it was feeling like one of those perfect days that heralds the end of the rains.
Alas, I'm not in Cambodia just at the moment. I'm about 150 miles to the north-east, having had to skip across the border into southern Lao for a while on a 'visa run'. There are some local variations in the patterns of the rainy season; but I think, on the whole, Lao, Cambodia, and Thailand tend to be very, very similar. I'm hoping I'm in for a sunny-and-mild (and dry) week while I'm in Don Det; and more of the same when I head back to Siem Reap.]
This little bit of manic silliness usually helps. John Otway has been one of the great joys of my life. I discovered him during my student days, and have been to see him live probably three or four dozen times at least. He's now celebrated as something of a national treasure in England, although his acclaim has grown through 'cult status' rather than any mainstream success: he is the quintessential pub performer - having played thousands of small gigs in the upstairs rooms of music pubs all over the country across five decades.
I gather he is still performing; though I would hope that, at his age (he just turned 74 at the start of this month), he has toned down his stage antics a little. His shows used to be extremely physical (one regular highlight being him building a teetering tower of plastic beer crates at the side of the stage, then climbing to the top and launching himself off it into a flying forward-roll across the floor of the stage), and I would fear for his health if he was still throwing his body around like that.
This is Birthday Boy, from Way & Bar, his early album in collaboration with long-time friend 'Wild' Willy Barrett (in theory, I still own a copy of this, the original 1980 vinyl release - though it has been lodged in a friend's attic for the past 20-odd years, so might have succumbed to the ravages of time by now). It is a good representation of the great man's work, capturing his punkish energy and irresistible good humour. Though in fact his original compositions are fairly few, and his live shows have always been dominated by his quirky repertoire of covers (he once did an entire album of Tom Jones songs): Bowie's Space Oddity rendered in a thick Yorkshire accent ("Ey-up, Planet Earth's blue, An' there's nowt ah can do...."), the American Civil War song Two Little Boys somehow rediscovering a poignancy that most recordings of it miss, and House of the Rising Sun devolving into a raucous call-and-response, as Otway repeatedly feigns forgetting the words, pausing mid-line for audience members to prompt the next lyric by shouting facetious questions ("My mother.... was a tailor...." "Oh, well, that's nice. But what did she ever do for you?" "Well, she sewed my new blue jeans..." "And what about yer dad??").
Memories of Otway shows are one of my happy places. I need those this week.
Adam Clery of ACFC has done a breakdown this week of where things are going wrong for Florian Wirtz at Liverpool at the moment.
It does rather seem as if things have got so bad that he might soon lose his start - and perhaps even be let go by the club in the January transfer window. I am very sorry to see this, since I am a great admirer of Wirtz's talent. We have seen often enough for Germany and at Leverkusen what an exceptional player he can be. Heck, we've even seen it occasionally at Liverpool: there was that brief spell from around November last year when he finally found his groove and was producing very good returns for several weeks - until he picked up another injury. And when he came back from that layoff, he never quite recaptured the magic again. Why not? It is a bit of a mystery.
I have suspected from time to time that he maybe just isn't quite physically robust enough - or 'brave' enough, or assertive enough - to prosper in the exceptionally intense environment of our Premier League; he doesn't seem to win many duels, and often gets dispossessed rather cheaply. But then, he does seem to be quick, strong, athletic, eager in the press; and the Bundesliga can be quite physical too. There may be something in this 'physical fragility' argument, but I don't think it's the whole story. Perhaps the pressure of the Anfield crowd, combined with the responsibility of being brought into the side as a successor to Salah, the intended creative linchpin around whom a new team would be built, was just too much for him. And of course it can't have helped that Slot's second season spiralled so badly out of control on so many fronts, with the dreadful results and the manager's deteriorating relationship with the departing Salah. But.... things seem to be even worse now under Iraola. He's lost all confidence and fluency; his decision-making seems to have deserted him; he doesn't appear to have any rapport with his teammates.
If Wirtz does 'fail' in our league, I feel that would be a very sad outcome to a move that promised so much. I said at the beginning of last season that, although I worried it might take him quite a while to settle in, I was confident that his class would eventually shine through. That's never really quite happened.
And I confess, I did have a punt on Wirtz in my initial squad this season. I felt that Liverpool might quickly turn the corner under Iraola, and I thought Wirtz, if he could rediscover that form he'd briefly shown in the middle of his debut season, would be their most valuable player for FPL. That was probably another instance of my recurring fault of taking a few too many chances in my initial selection,... and trusting too much in my admiration of raw talent. Rather too often, I'll have a little gamble on a player because I believe in their capacity for excellence... without waiting to see if they're actually showing signs of realising that capacity in the current season. Safe-and-steady is usually the way to go with initial squad picks - unless you want to start off the new campaign in the bottom half of the global rankings!!
So, is it all over for Florian? I do hope not. I suspect that, with a player of this class, with a player who's cost this much money, Iraola will have to persist with him for a bit longer. And maybe he's a shrewd enough coach to identify the player's problems - whether physical, or purely mental - and help him overcome them.
I imagine he's going to start for at least one more week, anyway - a fortuitous by-product of Ryan Gravenberch's sending-off against City last weekend. Gravenberch is now suspended for the next game against Brentford, which surely means that Szoboszlai will have to play in central midfield alongside Macallister. If Gravenberch had been available, there would have been an enormous temptation to deploy the Hungarian - consistently Liverpool's best and most dangerous-looking player in almost every single game - as the No. 10, instead of Wirtz. (And damn, yes, if that starts happening, Szoboszlai will immediately become a much more appealing FPL asset....)
I was not, in general, much of a fan of the tsunami of synth which engulfed the English music scene in the first half of the 1980s (my high school and university days - so, I was listening to a lot of music around then). But there were a number of honourable exceptions, and Matt Johnson's project, The The, was certainly one of them (though partly because they didn't lean into the synths exclusively, still used a bit of guitar here and there, and plenty of live percussion). This is Infected, the blistering title track from the group's 1985 second album - a long-time 'Play Loud' favourite of mine!
I was happy to stumble upon this the other day, a lecture delivered by John Cleese in 1991 on the theme of 'Creativity'.
Although the talk naturally includes a lot of jokes, it is fundamentally quite a serious exploration of the topic, and includes a lot of useful practical advice.
Cleese distinguishes two mental attitudes, 'open' and 'closed'. The latter is not entirely a bad thing: it's actually very useful for staying focused on task completion. But it is hopeless for more original thinking and problem-solving; for that, you need to work on recognising and cultivating the 'open' attitude.
This really is one of the best sets of tips I've ever found for improving creative thinking - whether that is going to be directed towards writing, painting, launching a new business,... or picking an FPL squad. Well worth 35 minuts of your time.
Some of my happiest musical discoveries have come about by the strangest chance.
Back in the early 1990s, I was doing a round-the-world backpacking year. During a month or so I spent in Fiji, I fell in with a couple of young American guys who were on a summer break before starting at grad school the following Fall. We kept in touch a little thereafter (this was back in the days when people still wrote letters!), and a couple of years later they mailed me a CD of 'Missa Luba', a recording of an African setting of the Catholic Mass, accompanied by some other traditional religious and folk songs from Kenya, performed by that country's Muungano National Choir(about whom there seems to be remarkably little online these days, apart from the fact that the group was supposedly founded in the late '70s by one Boniface Mganga; although there is at least a brief discography, and you can also apparently find some of their recordings on Spotify).
My American friends had conceived of a project to see if they could send the CD around the world back to themselves in a 'Six Degrees of Separation' kind of chain, each recipient forwarding it to another friend (not known to the previous sender). I can't recall what mechanism they'd devised for ensuring that it eventually found its way back to them. I think their address, and the detail of them having started the chain, was to be included in an accompanying letter with each new mailing, and when the music eventually got back to the States, the first recipient there was asked to send it back to them. Apparently, they didn't know anyone in Greenland or Iceland or Ireland, so I was its first port-of-call; and I didn't really know anyone less far away than China - so, we'd got it more than half-way home in just two hops! I never heard if the CD successfully completed its circumnavigation, or if it went astray - like poor Amelia Earhart - somewhere over the vast Pacific.
Anyhow, I played it a few times before I posted it on, and was so enchanted by it that I sought out my own copy at HMV. This piece, Kaung'a Yachee, is apparently a religious song - praying for strength to resist the influence of Sin in the world. You really can't tell: it has such an irresistibly joyous lilt to it. (This Youtube upload appears to be a concert performance rather than the original studio recording I owned on the CD.)
Whenever I fancy listening to some music with a spiritual dimension to it, this is one of the first albums I always think of. It has been a 'mellow Sunday morning' staple of mine for nearly three decades now. [It's the kind of music I'd like to have played at my funeral, to stop anyone feeling glum.]
I've mentioned on here a few times before that I really fell in love with footballwatching Pelé's Brazil in the 1970 World Cup.
Almost continuously now for the past 70 or more years, Brazil has been something extra-special, the one country that almost always looks likely to be a World Cup contender - and often the favourites! - in each successive tournament, the one country universally admired and beloved around the world, the one country other than your own that almost any football fan from anywhere in the world will root for.
They tend to play a free-flowing, inventive style of game that is irresistibly entertaining. And they have skill to spare: even their defenders often look as if they could dribble past four or five opponents. While most countries count themselves lucky if they turn up one or two exceptional talents like Yamal or Musiala or Palmer every decade. Brazil regularly seems to have so many that a lot of them may get overlooked by the national squad; not just one or two, but ten or twenty breathtakingly skillful players at any given time (and dozens or hundreds more seemingly always waiting in the wings). I said a while ago that Cristiano Ronaldo would not get into my 'Top 50' of greatest players of all time - even if I limited the rest of the field to Brazilians; and I wasn't joking. The depth of talent in Brazil's player pool is just ridiculous: they are just so absurdly bloody good.
But why are the Brazilians so good at football?? Well, the answers collected in this short film I recently discovered from Youtuber Arneeb Ahmed aren't particularly surprising, but this is nevertheless a neat summation - and celebration - of the phenomenon. And I find it a nice bit of spiritual uplift during this long, bleak suspension of Premier League action.
Paul Heaton is one of the great English songwriters of my lifetime - not only a crafter of clever, quirky, memorable lyrics, but a composer of some startlingly beautiful melodies too; and a master of many different styles and moods. (We are of rather similar age; but he's done something with his life.)
He must be loving the footie this year, as Hull is his adopted home, and he famously insisted on naming his first group's debut album London 0 - Hull 4, a joking assertion that his group The Housemartins were only then the fourth best band in Hull, but still better than anything London had to offer.
This track, one of my particular favourites, a celebration of the glorious indulgence of the lie-in, is From Under The Covers, the third song on Welcome to The Beautiful South, the superb debut album from his second band, The Beautiful South.
Many of the songs from these two bands of his were particularly dear to my heart during a period from the late '80s to the mid-'90s. I happened to hear a performance of his memorably macabre The Woman In The Wall at an open mic event recently (it was supposed to be a celebration of Van Morrison's birthday, but they'd run out of Van's songs to cover, so threw in this one of Heaton's towards the end); and it brought back a flood of memories.
Now that we have almost three weeks off before our next dose of Premier League action (and Fantasy Premier League vexation....), we should all try to make the best of the unaccustomed downtime.
There is no better soundtrack to studied indolence and carefree loafing than this - So, Relax from the inimitable Leon Redbone. This live rendition from a 1992 concert in Paris is even more deliciously soporific than the original studio recording above.
Postmodern Jukebox started off as a hobby project by American pianist Scott Bradlee around 15 years ago, where he'd occasionally assemble a few of his musician friends to showcase his penchant for crafting novel arrangements of recent pop hits in more retro styles like Motown or Big Band Jazz. But before long it would explode in popularity and grow steadily to become one of the biggest music channels on Youtube, with more than 6.5 million subscribers today. (He still runs his own much smaller self-named channel, where he mostly posts solo piano performances.) PMJ, indeed, is now a global brand, with many dozens of amazing vocalists and musicians acting as regular or occasional collaborators on the project, and multiple touring groups performing its most popular creations live all around the world. And new videos continue to drop around once a month. (They were more like twice a month in the early days, perhaps even weekly for a while; there are now just over 500 videos posted on the channel. I shall probably be returning to them often for inspiration in this new weekly series of mine of musical asides.)
I happened upon the PMJ phenomenon mid-way through its history, about 7 or 8 years ago; and I made it one of my 'Covid projects' to work my way through the channel's entire back-catalogue (which probably makes me one of a fairly small percentage of their millions of fans who've actually heard every single thing they've done). This is one of my absolute favourites, a reimagining of Lady Gaga's mega-hit Bad Romance as a 1920s jazz number, performed by the fabulous cabaret singer Ariana Savalas (daughter of the popular Greek-American actor, Telly, best known as the titular detective in the long-running 1970s cop show Kojak) - with one of the best whistling solos I have ever heard,.... and the additional bonus of some spirited tap-dance breaks from the effervescent Sarah Reich. Pure joy.
But damn, FPL is a classic bad romance, isn't it? We devote so much effort to it, we give it all of our attention, we want so desperately to gain its favour,.... for it to be nice to us. And again and again it spurns us, dismisses us, slights our efforts, makes us feel wretched and worthless. We come to hate the thing we love; and yet, somehow, we still love it.
I always say that the only 'experts' I would look to for assistance with my Fantasy squad decisions are tactical analysts who talk about the real-world game of football, rather than just the nuances of FPL. And I compiled a list of my favourites last year.
I recently discovered another young analyst on Youtube, Lucas Sutherland, who looks as though he has some very worthwhile content. He approaches match analysis from a coaching perspective, and this latest video of his suggests a series of different lenses through which to approach trying to break down and understand key game incidents.
A couple of his earliest videos provide a very nice basic introduction to developing some useful habits for closer in-game analysis, here and here (the second, longer one has some particularly interesting insights on how Chelsea managed to get the better of Manchester City in the 2021 Champions League Final).
Austrian keyboard-player and experimental composer Joe Zawinul was playing a kind of 'Fantasy Football' with musicians when he founded his electronic jazz-pop band Weather Report at the beginning of the 1970s, filling the constantly evolving lineup with a series of outrageous talents: saxophonist Wayne Shorter was a long-time mainstay, but at various times the group also included fantastic drummers like Chester Thompson, Alex Acuña and Omar Hakim, and the legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius - here plucking out the opening melody on his favourite fretless bass. This is their best-known piece, Birdland, the exuberant extended instrumental which opened their 1977 album 'Heavy Weather'.
I once saw a cartoon strip that joked that it was simply impossible to remain depressed while listening to this piece of music. Unfortunately, I can't now track that down online; but I wholeheartedly agree. I discovered this band when I was at college during the 1980s, and this track soon became a regular go-to adrenalin jolt for me whenever I needed to shake myself out of the mood doldrums, or just get myself energised for an early start to the day after a heavy night-before.
The video above is a live performance from a 1978 concert at the Stadthalle Offenbach in Offenbach am Main, Germany (unfortunately, there is one annoying skip in it, near the end). The original album version - purportedly recorded (at least according to Jaco's later recollection) in a single take - can be found here.
If you like this, Youtube currently has a complete recording of the band's 1976 appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
If you've just had another wretched gameweek in FPL,.... this is just what you need to blow the cobwebs out of your head and send you into the new week in a more upbeat frame-of-mind.
FPL always used to aim to confirm all match details (sometimes tweaking the BPS numbers or reallocating contested assists and whatnot) and finalize everyone's scores and league rankings within an hour or two of the gameweek's last match finishing.
But this year they've switched to not confirming everything until 9am the following morning (UK time). And that might be only a guideline, a 'good intention', a hopeful target: last week, it appeared to be quite a bit later than that. (I wonder if the Lords of FPL Towers are just too tight-fisted to pay staff overtime for all-night working any more??)
This means that in my timezone (East Asia, currently UTC+6) we perhaps won't be getting the gameweek's details straight until quite late the following afternoon. It is a little bit of a pain-in-the-behind.
But it did remind me of this song.... Lonely Boy by Ohio indie rock duo, The Black Keys. I confess I had always thought it was called 'I got a love that keeps me waiting' - which is the more powerful hook.
I wouldn't necessarily call this a major favourite of mine. It sounds great, and the hook is enormous - but I feel it kind of fails to deliver on that promise: it's like a placeholder lyric that is never developed into anything. Though there's something intriguingly meta in a song about frustration being itself inherently frustrating! The video plays into that a bit as well: whoever thought of having a dance video that doesn't properly show the dancing (no feet?!)?? Ah, so often mere irritation is a key part of a song's earworm quality....
Coincidentally, this band is on tour in the UK at the moment - three more gigs over the next few days.
Music is one of the great passions of my life; an even greater one than football, in fact! And I have dropped a few favourite songs here on the blog before. I've been thinking for a while of making that more of a feature - so, this is the beginning of a projected regular series of musical pick-me-ups to start the week.
We must seek uplift and inspiration from every possible source.
Last week, I stumbled upon this Rolling Stone interview with Matthew McConaughey, talking about his lifelong love of music and listing some of his favourite songs. The man is passionate, articulate, funny, self-effacing - and has a diverse taste in music. And while many waste the riches of stardom on huge houses and fancy cars, it turns out that McConaughey is more likely to use his privileged position in the world to.... just drop everything and take an impulsive trip to Africa on the off-chance of being able to meet a musician he admires. What a legend.
There aren't many people I look at and think, "Wow - I wish I could have lived their life." McConaughey might be one of the few.
I shall be attempting, a little later today, to put together a few thoughts on this season's initial FPL selection dilemmas.
But I'm still buzzing from that really fantastic World Cup we enjoyed last month, and wanted to revisit one of its outstanding moments: Cabo Verde's stunning extra-time equaliser against Argentina in the 'Round of 16', an absolute pinger from their young full-back, Sidny Lopes Cabral - subsequently voted the 'Goal of the Tournament'. [FIFA seem to be churlishly blocking embedded video of their highlights - at least in certain territories - but I think this should still work for everyone if you click the 'Watch on Youtube' button (though you might have to watch the full highlights, rather than being taken straight to the Lopes Cabral screamer).]
That was a goal celebrated by the whole world (yes, even Argentinians should have been able to appreciate it, should have relished being made to work so hard for their progression). It's good to have the occasional thing like this that can bring us all together.
Around this time last year, I shared this video from the Philosophy Coded Youtube channel, on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's analysis of 'wilful ignorance' as a mass phenomenon (Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, famously martyred for his opposition to the Nazis; so, he was probably thinking particularly of the Germans' complacency in accepting Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s).
The other week I discovered another interesting discussion of Bonhoeffer's ideas on this topic from Jonny Thompson of the Big Think channel in the video above. (Apparently there's an extended version of this talk, although I haven't yet had the chance to watch that to see what more it adds.) Thompson observes that there was a similar concept - 'amathia' (ἀμαθία, the rejection of learning or understanding) - in Ancient Greek philosophy. Unfortunately, we do see rather a lot of this 'sticking one's head in the sand' in the realm of FPL; managers cling to their superstitions and prejudices in defiance of reason, they follow the promptings of supposed 'experts' or just fall in with the herd - rather than taking the trouble to think for themselves. Like the gadfly Socrates, I am always trying to goad people into original thought - and it makes me very unpopular on many of the forums!
And if that hasn't got you depressed enough about humanity,.... Philosophy Coded has a follow-up video on Bonhoeffer's ideas.
