Mother London | SFTW | The Paszport! Issue

The Paszport! Issue

14.06.2012

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Editor

By Mother and The Rig Out

To welcome in Euro 2012 Mother, along with our friends The Rig-Out, have created a one-off football fanzine called Paszport! With creative support from some of Britain’s best creative talent, our intention was ‘to celebrate the spirit of the game’. So in the hope that SFTW readers would share in the romance of normal kids from normal estates and towns, becoming aware of the big wide world through the spirit of football; and that you might even want your own copy of Paszport!, in this issue we share a couple of extracts. A tease to the physical format. Read about; The most influential coach, who would win the Euros based on footwear and of course, Joey.Fucking.Barton.!

The Biggest Team in Football

Ladies and Gentlemen, with Euro 2012 in full swing, please give your usual lukewarm and vaguely contemptuous welcome back to the true stars of summers past: The Travelling Fans. Seriously.

Spare a thought. You should. Because whilst most of us will be sitting at home watching the lack-of-action unfold on 48-inch widescreens, these fine, brave young men will be out there on the barren frontlines of

Eastern Europe taking one for the team.

By ‘the team’ we mean, of course, the team that watches at home or down the boozer. The biggest team in football and one that would have no reason to exist without the bi-annually derided foot soldiers that are The Travelling Fans

Imagine 48 matches played out in eerily empty stadiums.

Yet what thanks do these heroes, the irregular beating heart of the international game, get from the rest of us? None. And as if it isn’t bad enough that their service goes unrecognized, to add insult to injury, they are even mocked and looked down upon some. Their loyalty and costly service flung back in

their sun burnt faces by a particularly ungrateful section of society.

This patronizing tone is invariably heard from the type of twat that thinks spending two weeks a year in the Costas with a phrasebook and a bum bag makes them Alan Wicker: The Professional Tourist. They’d never admit it but your Professional Tourist could learn alot from the Travelling Fan.

Written by Paul Mason, find out more about why we should spare a thought for the travelling fans with your own copy of Paszport!.

The Most Influential Coach. Ever.

An average player with Rochdale, Burnley and Fulham he became known as ‘the Parson’ for his studious, puritanical disposition. After one match for Burnley, in which he had dribbled through a number of challenges to create an opportunity only to shoot disappointingly over the bar, Hogan asked his manager, Spen Whittaker, what had gone wrong? Whittaker was dismissive, telling him just to keep trying rather than offering technical advice. ‘From that day I began to fathom things out for myself,’ he said. ‘I coupled this with seeking advice from the truly great players. It was through my constant delving into matters that I became a coach later in life. It seemed the obvious thing, for I had coached myself as quite a young professional.’

In 1909, aged 28, Hogan accepted an offer to become coach of Dordrecht in the Netherlands. He found players eager to learn, unspoiled by the anti-intellectualism of the English game, and had great success, eventually being invited to coach the Dutch national side for a game against Germany.

After training the Austrian Olympic team for a game that never happened because of the war, Hogan went on to work with Budapest where he was hugely successful, winning the championship in 1916-17 with a team that played, he said, in ‘an intelligent, constructive and progressive, on-the-carpet manner’ and laying the foundations of a side that would
dominate Hungarian football for nine years.

After the war, and being mocked by the FA who he never forgave, Hogan embarked on a tour of central Europe where he prioritized ball control and insisted on the primacy of the intelligent pass – he was not ‘a short-ball or a longball coach,’ he said; he was a ‘right-ball coach’.

Although in Germany he was initially greeted with suspicion, he went on to work with the German team and lead them to their victory shortly after his death. The then secretary of the German Football Federation (DFB), Hans Passlack, wrote to Hogan’s son, Frank, saying that Hogan was the founder of ‘modern football’ in not only Germany but also the Grandfather of the Brazilian game as he taught Dori Kürschner, who, fleeing anti-Semitism in 1937 moved to Rio de Janeiro and is widely credited as the man who implanted sophisticated tactical ideas in Brazil and so is hugely significant in the development of the South American game.

Written by Jonathan Wilson. Learn more about the magic of the most influential coach with your issue of Paszport!.

Who wins the Euros Based on Footwear?

Using the nations from the upcoming football fiesta, I carried out a comprehensive, scientific analysis of how a shoe-based UEFA ‘Euro 2012’ would pan-out. It was not a wholly un-biased analysis as, much as I expect Spain to emerge as winners in the football, I was even clearer on my favourite to take the shoe title.

The wise amongst you would do well to take heed of the result as shoe-based predictions could be this year’s Paul the octopus.

Extensive and exhaustive research suggests that the group stages of the tournament would see Russia, Poland, Ireland, Greece, Ukraine, Sweden, Croatia and the Czech Republic eliminated due to a complete lack of evidence of any nice shoes made in their countries.

I spent a good 20 minutes on Google and found nothing beyond Russia’s Ralf Ringer (That’s Ralf Ringer) brand and a message on the Greek ‘governments’ website reading ‘Fuck off and leave us alone’.

This leaves a quarter-final line-up featuring many of the traditional heavyweights represented by England (Clarks), France (Mephisto), Denmark (Jacoform), Germany (Finn Comfort), Portugal (Weaver), Spain (Vera), Italy (Casbia) and Holland (Cruijff). Making the swiftest exit would be the Dutch. Despite sharing the name of the coolest European footballer ever, they produce unapologetic tat. Comprehensively defeated, and featuring a couple of own goals, the Dutch are gonners. Hubris, as ever, is the Italians downfall. Poor colour choice, weak sole and a leather finish more scouse WAG than Dolce Vita.

The least surprising quarter final departure would see Denmark bow-out, although the loser’s line-up would contain a shock in the form of perennial favourites Germany. Some, particularly and peculiarly, Northern men have

a fondness for the orthopaedic offerings from Denmark and Germany in the form of Jacoform and Finn Comfort respectively.

Traditional favourites amongst the acid-rambling community both have heritage, functionality and comfort but would fail to get past the Quarter-finals due to sheer unforgiving, brutal ugliness.

All that action would leave a formidable looking semifinal line-up of England, Spain, Portugal and France (predicted) results of which are all gloriously envisioned in the fanzine.

Get your Paszport! to the Euros.

By Michael Richardson

The Somewhat Saddening Homogenisation of Goal Posts

The homogenization of football has been, one might argue, over documented in the past decade - the power of the player, the middle classes hi-jacking the game, the mawkishness and sentimentality that has somehow seeped over from reality television (Muamba and Petrov), the price of tickets, the hangers on, the money, the identikit grounds, you know, the stuff every good on-line ‘lad culture’ message board pumps out regularly, to the point that it becomes totally pointless.

None of these things are going away, they are here to stay, get over it. There is one thing, however, that I reserve my personal right to still mourn and miss from my

childhood obsession with the match and that’s the goals. I’m not talking about scoring them, I’m talking about the net and posts, and more specifically – the shape of them.Visit any ground nowadays (certainly in the top 2 divisions) and the continent, and you’ll find the same box shape goal, no station, pulled back by wire so the net seems to float in mid air, pristine netting pulled taught, they’re everywhere, faceless, characterless, representative of the corporate obsession of wringing all personality from the game. This of course, was not always the case, back in the 70s and 80s, every ground had it’s own particular goal, with it’s own nuances and behavioral traits.

Those fans of West Ham, Luton, QPR or Southampton will remember their goals in the late 70s, which seemed incapable of keeping the ball in the net it was so shallow as opposed to the goals at Arsenal, Hampden, Bolton, Wembley and Chelsea, they had huge space behind the goal line, net held up by a metal bar that seemed to go back for miles.

Man City, Newcastle, Everton, Ipswich had goals with the hairpin sanction attached to the top quarter of the post, the type that Trevor Brooking managed to get the ball stuck in he wellied it so hard, whilst scoring in Budapest for England in 1981 live on telly, when games weren’t ever live on the telly.

Anyway, goals ‘aint what they used to be.

Written by Andy Bird.

Joey. Fucking. Barton

A name that had been spat, shakingly from the grimaced gobs of the faithful since April 20th 2023. Joey Fucking Barton. A name barked with a unique passion reserved for a man. No. Not a man. A curse. A curse whose brutal touch raped the beautiful game. April 20th 2023. Manchester City have just secured their 7th title on the trot. Every Premiership club is now either Russian owned or Arab owned.

The Sheikhs and Oligarchs grandstand in their boxes come 3pm. Proud as cocks. And the impassive crowds murmur beneath them, faces tired with inevitability. 4.23pm. Loftus Road. A passionless silence is broken. As Joey Barton’s studs stamp through the skull of Villa’s right-back. Three reds appear. Card, blood and mist.

The ears and eyes of the world prick up and tune in. New markets interested. Old markets reinvigorated. Trending topped. Online hits tripled. And the faces of the Oligarchs and Sheikhs fill not with horror, but with palpable fascination.

No-one knew which Sheikh or Oligarch had the idea. No-one knew the inspiration. Many said it was Uday Hussein’s torture of the Iraqi national team. Or the dying well of Gladiatorial Rome. But few could question its similarity with Ulama, the deadliest Mayan ball game. And few could question its simplicity.

Win or die.

From 2114-15 the position you finished correlated to the number of contracts you must cancel at the end of the season. Finish 20th and you must cancel 20 contracts.

Finish 15th, 15 contracts. And so on. The fortunate Champions only had to cancel 1 contract. The players whose contracts were

cancelled was decided by the fans on social media. A 23rd century version of fan’s players of the season. It had democracy. Accountability. Purpose. Passion. Every game mattered. Every position a life worth fighting for. May 14th 2188. The final final day. Wide-eyed men gather around screens and one man is found by The Board in a smoke-filled purring Bentley.A dead Chelsea midfielder. Three simple words were scrawled on the suicide note.

Joey. Fucking. Barton.

By Mother’s Paddy Fraser.

About the Author

The Rig Out is a biannual men’s magazine from Glen Kitson, Neil Bedford and Andy Bird. It’s ace.

Previous Mother project’s around the bi-yearly football tournaments have included a short film and even making a toy – remember the diving footballer?

http://therigout.com/

Credits

All images from Paszport.