Monkey Business: Paradise Lost

I wrote another article for the Monkey Business' last issue of the season - this time about the season as a whole. It's more to highlight the ups and downs of Hartlepool United's season from my perspective. Click on the images for bigger versions of the Bizz's front cover and my published article!


For the first time in seven years, I’m experiencing a close of season where Pools don’t seem to have anything to play for.

And regardless of my view at the beginning of the season that a mid-table finish would be perfect for Pools’ re-establishment in League One, I can’t help but feel a little cheated.

A sequence of events early in the season should have told us all what to expect. After a convincing 4-2 win at table toppers Leyton Orient gave us a great starting position in the league, we then fell apart in a disastrous display at home to then-bottom Walsall.

Surely our cup performances would give us some early season fun, maybe a little money? After an inspired performance by Foley away to Scunthorpe, we had all of about 1.3 shots on target at Hillsborough in a 2-1 defeat that was more comprehensive than the need for extra time suggested.



At least there was always the Paint Pot Trophy to have a crack at. Great away wins at Chesterfield and Lincoln gave us hope, but then we lose at home to Conference fodder Morecambe. What was worse was that Carlisle, Donny and Leeds also went out, leaving a possible choice of Stockport, Grimsby or Bury. Christ.

At least we had a patsy with Gainsborough in the FA Cup though, with an easy ticket to the second round after slapping them about 6-0 in Lincolnshire - no Havant & Waterlooville dream for them, that was for sure. A draw to Hereford gave us hope for a real team in the third round, but that went out of the window after a thorough pants-down spanking at Edgar Street.

We could focus on the league though , yeah? Well maybe, if we hadn’t already been three games into a drought that would see us pick up two points from a possible 36 away from home.

It was at about this time that Wilson’s job was in question. Granted, he was near messianic last season in his near-perfect season, sticking to the tradition of foregoing the silverware in the last few games. We were too good for that, anyway.

His choices were questionable though and for so long too, only choosing what many regard to be our strongest XI with ten games to go. Monkhouse disappeared from the face of the earth after an alleged falling out with Wilson (and getting his longest game on Soccer AM’s Crossbar Challenge); Porter was behind Barker, the king of penalties; and McCunnie was replaced with cardboard cut-outs from month-long loans in the likes of Danny Coles.

Oh, and some fella called Budtz was in goal all the time. Remember him? I’m still trying to forget.



Even our great new signing seemed to have the odds stacked against him. The mention of Collins’ name would regularly get “who hell he?” responses from fans who barely got to see him before an extended four match ban for a relatively innocuous challenge.

Still, it seems that Pools have completely changed in the space of a season. After leaving the comfort of League Two, we’re without a consistent defence and goalkeeper - two things that were hardly ever criticised before. Scoring goals just isn’t the problem - we’re top scorers at home, and a top five team for overall, but even the likes of Admiral Nelson would agree that their performance was somewhat lacklustre this year.

And after a surprising run of three wins, Pools showed how poor League One was. From being five points from relegation, we were then 7 points from the playoffs. Now neither seems achievable. With Luton and Bournemouth seeing administration and Port Vale doing a lower league impersonation of Derby, it’s down to two or three other teams to scrap it out until the final game - and it doesn’t look like Pools are one of them.

For me, it’s paradise lost as a Pools fan. Not so long ago, we were at the top of a poll for overly-optimistic fans in our league. Over-expectation was not an issue this year though - we COULD have done it. Had the true starting XI been picked every game, we may have. If the players could remember how to pass from game to game, we may have. If Budtz was a goalkeeper, we may have. Who knows?

I’m just a bit shell-shocked that I don’t feel the need to care over the last few games of the season - so many other fans feel the same.

But, for all his mismanagement, I want Wilson to stay. I like the bloke. I think he’s finally learned from his mistakes. And luckily, statistics don’t lie - after a bit of reading up and some shopping, I can see us fighting for promotion again.

Please, Danny. Make it happen.

Atomic Sports Media: The FA Cupset

This is due to be posted on Atomic Sports Media but I thought I would post it here while it's still fresh (and before the semi-finals), so here I give you an account of the amazing FA Cup we've had in England (and Wales) this year.


What is a Cupset, you may ask? Well, it happens to be the most overused word in sport over here in Britain, as we face possibly the strangest outcome to the FA Cup in modern times.

A portmanteau of “cup” and “upset”, the description couldn’t be any closer to the reality. With the semi-finals announced, only one of the four teams remaining is in the Premiership - and it’s none of the Big Four (Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool), but Portsmouth. The other 3 teams may be little-known to your average non-Brit, with West Bromwich Albion, Barnsley and Cardiff City representing the second-tier of the Football League, the Championship.

What happened?

Well, we must address what is commonly known as “the magic of the FA Cup”. Hundreds of football clubs, big and small, enter to try and make the best of what they have - as long as they have a suitable ground, of course. This year a record breaking 731 teams entered, which automatically includes all 92 Football League teams (from the Premier League, the Championship and Leagues One and Two).

Most of these will be eliminated by the First Round Proper in preliminary rounds. After this, League One and Two teams are entered (including my team, Hartlepool United). By round three the Premiership and Championship teams begin, which is when the fun begins…

Just to make it clear, each team gets 40% of ticket sales, with 20% going to the FA. This means that if a small team gets an away game at a huge club with thousands of fans, they’ll be swimming in money.

The early rounds showcase little-known teams who make it through the qualifying rounds. Although many other small outfits had great runs, this year it was two teams in particular - Chasetown and Havant & Waterlooville - that stunned even the most passive of football fans.

Chasetown after beating Port Vale in the second round

Both having quite easy opening fixtures against similar small teams, Chasetown made it all the way to the Third Round Proper, going out to a Cardiff City side that could only manage 3 goals against them, even if the Welsh team made up for it by staying in the competition until now.

Havant & Waterlooville, however, had a fairytale ascent to fame. Having beaten the League One leaders Swansea City 4-2 in the Third Round Proper, their next tie was to come away at Liverpool, who were Champions League finalists last year and winners in 2005. Liverpool’s home ground of Anfield, with a 45,000 capacity, was far from H&W’s West Leigh Park, that barely held a tenth of that.

The game was a foregone conclusion really - it was just a matter of how many goals Liverpool would score. Funny isn’t it then, that in front of millions watching on BBC TV, Havant went 1-0 up.

But Liverpool pulled one back.

Then Havant scored a second.

Havant & Waterlooville clash with Liverpool in front of 45,000 at Anfield

Regardless of the 5-2 final score to Liverpool, it certainly brings about a collective emotion of those watching the match, particularly when you consider that the H&W players were part-timers, holding down ‘real’ jobs such as window cleaning, bricklaying and garbage collection. Liverpool players are getting paid anything from £20,000 to £80,000 - one of their lowest-paid footballers could cover the entire Havant & Waterlooville budget per week. Twice.

And, of course, the lower league minnows got 40% of the gate receipts, giving them a tidy sum to probably push them up another couple of leagues.

This fairytale ending also took the limelight away from other results that would ultimately shape the upcoming final four. Premiership teams were dropping left, right and centre. Many were drawn against each other - Aston Villa, Tottenham Hotspur and ‘Big Four’ club Arsenal all fell to Manchester United, Everton fell to League One side Oldham Athletic, and other teams such as West Ham United and Manchester City just… disappeared into obscurity.

Bristol Rovers' Danny Coles scoring his team's second against Premiership team Fulham

Another shock came from newly-promoted League One team Bristol Rovers as they went on a rampage, making it all the way to the Sixth Round Proper (or Quarter-Finals) with the scalps of Fulham, Barnet and Southampton.

But the later stages were all about Barnsley FC, a medium-sized club from South Yorkshire who narrowly avoided relegation to League One last season. They became legends of English football - so much so that many want them to win the FA Cup out of sheer worthiness, doing something most (if not all) Premiership clubs fail to do - beating both Liverpool and Chelsea in back-to-back rounds.

It was not so long ago that my team, Hartlepool United, were playing Barnsley in our league. They’re alright, I suppose. Nothing special. But the magic of the FA Cup being what it is, well…

Anyway, the Liverpool game was just hilarious. It was 1-1 with about two minutes left on the clock. The Kop - made up of Liverpool’s finest fans - was already spitting blood at the fact that their team couldn’t even get a narrow win. Then Brian Howard, the Barnsley captain, recovered from a cast-iron penalty that was never given to power the ball home into the bottom corner. 2-1. Pubs were cheering all over the country.

Captain Brian Howard celebrates his Barnsley team's 2-1 victory over Liverpool at Anfield

Apart from Liverpool, of course. Most of them were on fire.

Barnsley had the (bad) luck of the draw afterwards, lining up Chelsea, one of only two ‘Big Four’ clubs left (alongside Manchester United). And as said before, Barnsley deserved it - a strong header from Odejayi in the second half nailed down a 1-0 win in front of thousands of home fans at a packed Oakwell.

Do any of you know of a band called UB40? They were pretty awful. But their famous reggae ‘classic’, Red Red Wine, was applied to Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s manager, after a 1-0 home loss to Portsmouth which had every other football fan in the country laughing - hard - at a prime piece of divine justice.

Referees were scared at Manchester United’s home ground, Old Trafford. No penalty decisions ever went against the Reds, nor did any key decisions for that matter. Two of these never-before-seen moments happened - United were denied an obvious penalty, and then Portsmouth were given one - with United’s only keeper, Tomasz Kuszczak, sent off for the foul in the process.

Muntari scoring Portsmouth's winning goal past Manchester United temporary goalkeeper Rio Ferdinand

To Portsmouth’s credit, they defended admirably - but Sir Alex did not see it that way, which is where his Red Red Whine speech started. He blamed it on referee Martin Atkinson’s ineptitude, stating that he ought to be refereed himself (implying that referees‘ chief Keith Hackett also couldn‘t, well, hack it). Well done to Alex, who is now being hauled up in front of the FA for his comments. Finally.

So now we have Portsmouth, Barnsley, Cardiff City and West Bromwich Albion. The latter two did nothing too amazing to get there, but are still deserving of semi-finalist status.

The winner gets the trophy, plenty of money and an automatic entry into the UEFA Cup to challenge other European teams - unless you’re Cardiff of course. Given their Welsh status, the FA are having to change their rulings to allow Cardiff the chance to compete as an English team should they win through.

The odds favour Portsmouth for many reasons, not least that they’re the only Premiership team left. But remember the magic, and the Cupsets. It could be absolutely any one of them.

One thing’s for sure: it’s been the most exciting FA Cup for decades, and there won’t be another one like it for a long, long time…

The Latest: Is mainstream media technophobic?

Here is my most recent offering as posted on The-Latest.com. Read it below, or go directly to my blog there by clicking here!

I know what I want for my birthday - a computer from Crime Scene Investigation.

From what seems like a normal computer terminal that would cost little over £400, American detectives have somehow engineered the finest graphics on slick programs that allow faultless transparent windows, wild colour schemes and processing power that can fly through the database of Las Vegas’ entire criminal population for a match in no more than five seconds.

They seem to lack Windows Vista, XP, Linux, Ubuntu, Solaris or any recognisable operating system - windows appear and disappear almost by thought alone, each with the exact data asked for (without prompting). I am also yet to see a computer crash, or Gil Grissom kick the tower in a fit of rage.

The only qualification it seems you need to work these phenomenally easy tests is a lack of epilepsy.

Of course, computers just aren’t like that at all. Yet it seems that in most portrayals of technology in television, we are having the wool pulled over our eyes.

CSI of course uses their cutting edge technology (which is probably just a Flash-based animation) only to push the storyline through. If it had been a real PC being used, viewers would fall asleep at the dull black-on-white text displays, and results would need 6-8 weeks to be processed.

But in other more rational television shows, computers are portrayed falsely, and for no apparent reason.

Case in point: on an episode of Horizon, a woman is sat on a train watching a report on her laptop, before it fully cuts to the footage. The angle and screen could not possibly show the filming camera what she was watching, and it was very obvious that the display she was watching was added in later production.

In effect, she was staring at a blank screen and nodding in agreement. It was like watching Space Jam, but how it would have looked in the studio - Michael Jordan playing basketball with himself.

My favourite is probably when watching the MPAA anti-piracy adverts at the beginning of DVDs or at the cinema - they display a 15 year old girl staring at a screen with “FEATURE FILMS” and a nice big green button saying “DOWNLOAD!”. She duly clicks, and the download progress bar is filled within 10 seconds.

Now either she has the US Military’s internet speed, or the unspecified movie she’s downloading is ten seconds long.

This may sound like a stream of consciousness from a ranting nerd, but it displays something about society that I think is important: even though most of us now use computers, the powers that be don’t think we understand them at all. Ironically, their portrayal of them makes this worse.

Maybe it’s good for one thing though. In an homage to the late Arthur C. Clarke and his space-based predictions through 2001: A Space Odyssey, these computer programs that don’t exist could spark designers to create something for our noble house-bound PCs that reflects what we are seeing now - a perfect universal program that encapsulates everything we need, at top speeds, without any problems.

I just hope it’s soon - my computer crashed twice while writing this.

The Latest: Manhunt 2 subject to 'lazy journalism'

After watching BBC News last night I felt compelled to write this piece. I'm sure many of you may understand why! You can visit The-Latest.com by clicking here, or view my article directly by clicking here.

Maybe it was a slow news day, or that the BBC lacked the capacity to research their topic, but Friday night’s Six O’Clock News contained a needlessly scare-mongering report on the BBFC’s defeat to Rockstar Games over the release of their graphically violent game, Manhunt 2.

The original Manhunt, released in November 2003, was a ground-breaking game. Using the Grand Theft Auto 3 engine, the main character, James Earl Cash, does not receive the lethal injection for his death row crime. Sedated instead, Cash awakens to find that a director of underground “snuff” films has given him a second chance at life, with his aim to guide Cash through murder-based trials on camera.

The game was ultimately blamed for the death of 14-year-old Stefan Pakeera, whose murderer, Warren Leblanc, 17, had lured him into a park and stabbed him with a claw hammer. Strangely, the game was in Pakeera’s possession, not Leblanc’s.

Regardless, the media swooped on this opportunity to start Fox News-esque ‘reports’ on the dangers of video gaming and their awful effects on the minds of the children who played them, neglecting the fact that the game had an 18 rating.

For instance, the original title’s release had the BBC et al implying that those who the player-controlled ‘protagonist’ murdered were actually innocent people - far from it. Although it is not a great excuse for escaping criticism, targets included white supremacists, insane murderers and frenzied occultists.

Sadly, these broadcasts also gave Leblanc credit in almost implying that a lack of Manhunt would have resulted in a lack of murder - but surely all Leblanc needed was a trigger? There are many more violent films, TV programmes and even books that could have served as ‘blame’ for the terrible act that he committed.

By 2007, it all pointed to a repetition of this lazy journalism when Rockstar announced a sequel in 2007.

What became apparent again is that virtually every media outlet that does not review games approaches the market with a level of condescension.

This is all too understandable, given that the generation that truly understands the evolution of gaming on a personal level - my generation - is only just getting into the working world, and as such cannot yet advise these reporters as to the real truth around what is a genuinely important cultural phenomenon. To many of them, it is a glorified toy.

Their lack of research has led them to make some painful assumptions with the new game, which brings me back to Friday night. The BBC reported that the BBFC’s original ruling against Manhunt 2 was overturned, and that the game would be released - without any censorship - with an 18 certificate.

Funny really, given that Rockstar Games had to completely review their murder sequences after most countries banned Manhunt 2’s release outright.

IGN, one of the most respected game reviewers on the internet, had this to say:

“Speaking of the animations, it's somewhat disappointing to see the kills as censored as they are in this game. The first title was spectacular because of its brutality and its over the top nature. When you have a character that walks around with a pig's head on and his genitals hanging out on top of the bloody or violent kills, you've got something that is literally ground breaking. Manhunt 2 doesn't get nearly as over the top. No character is like Piggsy, and every kill, from a Hasty strike to a harsh environmental kill, has its color bleached out, akin to "The Punisher" game that came out a few years ago. Even worse, the camera shifts on and off of the action so much that it doesn't even feel as though you're harshly killing enemies. In this manner, the facet that made the title stand out feels somewhat neutered in its presentation.”

Before the BBFC ruling, Manhunt 2 had these sequences presented as you would see them in real life. I have seen the reworking of these cut scenes and, well… I couldn’t make out the weapon. Or who was the victim or murderer. Or anything, really. Trust me - the videos are available, and it makes the killings look like a Picasso-made music video.

But according to the BBC, Telegraph and Daily Mail reporting on the March 14 overruling, the game is as uncut as it was when the media pounced on it back in June, when the BBFC described the true original copy of the game as having “unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing”.

Although this point is no doubt fair to the original copy, the BBC ignored Rockstar’s self-censoring move. And why? Because otherwise, it wouldn’t be a story. It would be a tale of how Rockstar changed its game, the BBFC being irrational and Rockstar rightfully winning a case.

The real issue, however, leapt out at me during the course of two or three weeks of watching Newsnight reviews. A truly violent film was praised by the critics, yet when presented with a Nintendo Wii, their arrogance was in full flow as they remarked that they could get more imagination and fun from a book.

The truth is that the media is afraid of what they do not understand. Gaming is a young person’s lifestyle, yet the media is still full of old people who have been content with the Big Three for decades - film, music and literature. Until mainstream journalism changes, it will continue to be lazy.