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City’s sultans of bling dance to different beat in dire straits
Straitened times for the nation, times of strain for football. Not for many seasons has the game entered a new year so beset by uncertainties on and off the field. To the usual fears of relegation have been added wider concerns about the length and effects of a recession. The boom has been out on hold. Only Manchester City appear set to pour money through best canada goose coat for women the transfer window. The rest will buying canada goose jacket online largely borrow rather than buy.
Does buy canada goose jacket australia this strike a chord? “The recession is not confined to this country, it is worldwide and unlikely to be quickly righted. There would not appear to be an economic canada goose coat – hybridge lite rainbow just round the corner. Moreover, if unemployment and the need to economise have broken the habit of attending matches, it is by no means certain that the crowds lost will readily return. Once a social habit is lost it is not easy to recapture. It is therefore likely that clubs will continue to find themselves battling against a downward long-term trend sufficient to make their financial problems more difficult to overcome.”
That was the gloomy conclusion of a Football League inquiry into the structure and finance of the game buy canada goose parka ottawa which reported back in 1983 against a background of economic failure, falling gates, hooliganism and grounds which were at best Spartan and at worst dangerously dilapidated. It took the Hillsborough disaster six years later and the resulting Taylor Report, which spawned modern, safe all-seat stadiums and hastened the advent of the Premier League, to bring English football into line canada goose coat – hybridge lite with the standards of the late 20th century. Now the first economic crisis of the 21st is likely to challenge the game’s ability to see that these are maintained.
The portents are not encouraging. With the odd exception, spectator facilities in the Premier League and elsewhere are barely recognisable beside those of best price for canada goose jacket 30 years ago. However bad the finances may get, slum conditions for the fans will remain a bad memory. But playing standards are something else. England has largely replaced Italy and Spain as the best payer in Europe, even if Andrei Arshavin would have click to accept less than his present £90,000 a week if he joined Arsenal from Zenit St Petersburg. It is a sign of the times when Real Madrid are turned down, for the moment at least, by Jermaine Pennant, a rare first-teamer at Liverpool.
Yet the Premier League clubs are reckoned to be £1.6bn in debt and West Ham, who sold themselves to Iceland, are unlikely to be the only ones facing a financial meltdown. Continued television money will provide a buffer of sorts but the TV companies are not immune from the effects of recession. Already boardrooms must be shivering at what awaits them when the next television contract, due to begin in two seasons’ time, is negotiated.
In the short term football remains a mixture of the marvellous and the mundane, its capacity to delight or dismay undiminished. This season could see Liverpool win their first league title can you buy canada goose jacket online for 19 years provided Rafael Benítez does not fiddle while his team’s hopes burn. Perhaps Steven Gerrard, who entered 2008 an MBE and starts 2009 an MBE on an assault charge, should have joined a Rotary Club. He already plays for one.
So far the contest in the Premier League has been open but average. Manchester United are winning but plodding while at the Russia house Chelsea’s latest manager, Luiz Felipe Scolari, has merely suggested, like his predecessor, Avram Grant, that Jose Mourinho was even more special than the Special One claimed to be. And for all Arsène Wenger’s conspiracy theories, Arsenal are faltering because the defence and goalkeeper he inherited have not been fully replaced while the absence of a midfield anchor of Patrick Vieira’s quality has left the team exposed to the simplest of long through- balls. This is a bad time to be facing relegation from the Champions League.
The success of Hull City, in the top division for the first time, has been a welcome diversion although to judge from recent performances they have begun to look down and may need more than public bollockings from their manager, Phil Brown, canada goose coat – kensington to avoid being dragged into what looks like becoming, at the very least, a 10-club relegation dogfight. That would disappoint romantics already let down by the can i wash my canada goose jacket absence of a duel after Stoke’s Ricardo Fuller had slapped the face of his captain, Andy Griffin. Pistols at dawn? They’d have probably shot wide.