Sticks and stones

It's not often that the Pope and Mick McCarthy appear in the same sentence. After all, one is the revered figurehead of a powerful organisation, and the other is some old German dude. But this post deals with them both. Bear with me.

So, the Pope is touring Britain at the moment. You may not have been aware of this, as they've kept it fairly quiet. Anyway, he was giving an address at Holyroodhouse earlier (was there a shortage of spaces when they named that place?) and made some interesting remarks which appeared to be associating atheism with Nazism.

Well, I say "interesting". I must admit, my instinctive reaction was "Fuck off", but this very quickly transformed into utter give-a-shit indifference. The Pope is completely irrelevant to me and my beliefs, in the same way that he is irrelevant to the vast majority of Britons, including much of our ever-dwindling Christian population, most of whom aren't actually Catholics.

The only aspect of his little jaunt that is somewhat relevant is the cost of policing and organising it, which admittedly sounds steep but seems less significant when you think of the millions that have been spunked up the wall by Governments on pointless projects over the years.

As someone who was brought up a Christian only to abandon it, I certainly don't feel like a Nazi. I've never tried to force my Godless views onto anybody else, as I've experienced the positive influence that faith has on peoples' lives first-hand. When ol' Benedict talks about these "aggressive forms of secularism" whose wish is  to "eradicate God from society", he is presumably talking about Richard Dawkins and his fiery pro-Science ilk, who of course are as bloody-minded in their views as any defenders of religious faith.

But who is better? There's only one way to find out..... (fill in the rest yourself).

I’ve been far more put out lately by the growing criticism of my beloved Wolves FC. Essentially the charge is that we are a filthy bunch of cloggers who resort to kicking opposition players out of the game because we are unable to play “proper” football.

It would be fruitless to pretend that Wolves are a free-flowing, silky passing side. Halfway through last season, Mick McCarthy sussed that we were losing most games without scoring many goals, so he switched from 4-4-2 to 4-5-1, fielding up to seven defenders at times, and we ground our way to survival. Ugly, but effective. This season we have reverted to 4-4-2 and perhaps because of the loss of a defensive player the physicality has markedly increased.

The most noticeable manifestation of this was our treatment of Joey Barton, again something which can’t really be defended despite the excuse of “the little twat deserved it” having the benefit of being true. Our defensive midfielder (oh alright, even-more-defensive-than-the-others midfielder) Karl Henry (left) was the chief perpetrator, and unfortunately his perfectly fair tackle on Bobby Zamora in our next game left the Fulham striker with a nasty broken leg.

There being no such thing as “coincidence” to many football fans, coupled with the somewhat distorted coverage of the Newcastle game on Match of the Day (they gave as good as they got, by all accounts) has made Henry public enemy number one in some quarters. Plus, we managed to pick up another shedload of bookings against Fulham, and Jody Cradock managed to injure Stoke’s Kenwyne Jones in our opening game, so now we are officially a “disgrace to the Premier League”, according to the Fulham fans last weekend at least. And I thought they were such nice boys :-(

Ultimately, this criticism is unfair. All of our bookings at Craven Cottage were for niggly fouls - Christophe Berra got sent off for two obstructions, and Michael Mancienne was yellowed for a shirt pull. Frankly though, Fulham are a better team than us. We’ve been in the Prem for just over a season and don’t have the resources to compete with established sides yet, so spoiler tactics are a sad necessity. The alternative is to play nicey-nicey, tippy-tappy West Brom style football and get relegated ignominiously.

There’s still a world of difference between this type of cynical play (though I prefer to call it realism) and going out to deliberately crock the opposition. I don’t care if this sounds like sour grapes. I’m a football fan. You insult my team, you insult me. And then I write a pointless blog entry about it.

You’ll think twice about doing this again in future, won't you?