SPFL Tier 2, The Rock, 12/3/16.

We wuz robbed!

This is the perennial cry of the frustrated Scottish football fan but I haven’t used it here before as far as I recall.

I wasn’t at the game but of course caught it via the medium of BBC Alba. Twice we had the ball in the net only to have the goal chalked off for offside. Both times the TV replay showed that nobody in a Dumbarton shirt capable of interfering with play was in an offside positon. In the case of the first not only was Christian Nade not beyond the last defender he wasn’t beyond the ball either.

Falkirk started more brightly and we had Jamie Ewings to thank for a magnificent one-handed save to keep us level early on. Falkirk continued to look threatening but didn’t really force another save. I thought we looked pretty comfortable for the rest of the half.

The second followed the same pattern until the penalty. Harsh? Maybe, what can you do with your hands when you’re falling over? I’d have shouted for it at the other end though. The sending-off may be the letter of the law but it was undoubtedly harsh.

It seemed to spur us on though. I thought after the second “offside” goal we were going to get nothing but the boys kept plugging away. No doubt about our penalty, Danny Rogers totally cleaned Nade out. He might have been sent off for it as well as his knees got Nade in the back.

I wasn’t confident of scoring it as it was Danny Rogers in goal and he had a good penalty saving record when he was with us last season but Garry Fleming did the business.

At kick-off I’d have taken the point but this result better not be the one that means we miss 8th place by a point or two…..

SPFL Tier2, The Rock, 8/3/16.

A welcome win and Christian Nade scored a hat-trick!

Had this game gone on last week I had thought of travelling through but of course it was postponed. Domestic circumtances this week precluded a trip to the west.

Slight fly in the ointment was Jon Routledge’s red card. But he was out for the Hibs game and didn’t get back in the team for Saturday’s debacle at Livingston.

Let’s hope the team that showed up against Hibs rather than the (same strating) side who misfired at Livi is the one that turns uo against Falkirk on Saturday tea-time. Yes, it’s a BBC Alba kick-off time.

Not only Astronomy Picture of the Day and the Daily Galaxy but also the BBC News majored today on the first detection of gravitational waves.

I first heard of such waves while I was still at University back in the long ago when a Physics Prof at Glasgow University came along to the Alchemists’ Club (as the post-grad Chemists association was called) to tell us all about his research, so it’s been a long time coming.

The discovery is a major confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity certainly but can it really be the opening of a new window onto the universe akin to Galileo’s pointing of a telescope at Jupiter as the TV news had it? Given that the signals are so hard to detect as a result of the disturbances to matter being so small surely the technique cannot become as routine as results from electromagnetic instruments are?

I can just about remember when Terry Wogan wasn’t a fixture of British public life but that memory was fading. In recent years he had himself receded a little from the public eye, retiring from his braekfast show and from commentating on the Eurovision Song Contest but he still popped up with an intermittent weekly radio show on Radio 2 and the annual Children in Need telethons (all in a good cause certainly but usually so laced with embarassing performances that I found it difficult to watch so I hadn’t done so for years.)

Despite his failure to appear on last year’s Children in Need in November due to illness – a warning sign as it turned out – it was still a shock to wake up to the news today that he had died.

I also noticed there were retrospective clip shows from his thrice-weekly 80s chat show on in the afternoon in the run-up to Christmas 2015. Maybe there was a hint there too.

I wasn’t one of his listeners in the 60s – or indeed in the 70s – but in later life I found his breakfast radio show congenial listening in the short interval between being woken by the alarm clock and actually getting out of bed. Perhaps it took reaching a certain age to appreciate his charms.

He always seemd perfectly genial – a great trick to pull off in the early morning – but by all accounts this was simply him; there was apparently no difference between his public and private persona.

The world feels diminished by his death. I fervently hope it doesn’t turn out he had feet of clay (as others of his vintage had) but if all that has been said of him is true there may be no need to fear.

Michael Terence “Terry” Wogan; 3/8/1938 – 31/1/2016. So it goes.

I noticed that Radio 2’s news on Saturday evening referred to William McIlvanney as a crime writer. That is a gross over-simplification. Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties may have featured a detective but they were primarily novels. And there were seven more novels to add the account, as well as his poetry and journalism.

This link is to his obituary in the Guardian.

FA Cup Round 2, Moor Lane Stadium, 4/12/15.

I posted about Hartlepool United this time last year at the same stage of the competition and again when the club miraculously retained its football league status in April.

So once again Pools were on live television courtesy of the BBC and its FA Cup coverage but apart from converting a penalty weren’t much in the game first half where Salford had much more possession and looked more threatening especially with the dead ball – culminating in a goal when their player reacted quickly in a second ball situation from a free kick.

Second half there was an improvement by Pools perhaps catalysed by the wonderfully named sub Rakish Bingham who looked very lively. Unfortunately he missed a header from five yards as did Scott Fenwick both of which would have removed the necessity for a replay. Salford also had their chances but couldn’t get past Trevor Carson in Pools’ goal.

1-1 at the end. At least I’m not a televisual jinx.

Manager Ronnie Moore was scathing about the performance after the match. His assessment was spot on. If Pools play for 90 mins in the replay they ought to get through.

Despite a winning start to the season Pools still lurk towards the bottom of League Two. I’m still nervous about that.

This award is supported by Creative Scotland.

This year’s winner and the Saltire Scottish Fiction Book of the Year surprised me.

It was The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (whose name Sally Magnusson on Reporting Scotland pronounced as Michael. Is that how he does so?)

My review of it is here.

I missed Andrew Neil’s rant against Daesh (Isis/Isil) on the BBC’s This Week last night as I was on the computer but the good lady didn’t and told me about it.

It is however available on You Tube and so I have now been able to hear it:-

Neil is certainly right in his assessment of civilisation as against nihilism and on the achievements of French culture but I think he is probably out by at least a factor of ten in his statement that in a thousand years Daesh will be dust. I suspect that will happen in many less than one hundred.

The curious echo that struck me on hearing Neil’s rant, though, was of a certain similarity to Norwegian football commentator Bjørge Lillelien’s famous list:-

SPFL Tier 2, The Rock, 22/8/15.

OK. I admit it. It’s me. I’m the jinx.*

The three games we’ve won this season I’ve not been at. The three we haven’t won, I have. (Though this was the first time I’ve seen us beaten over 90 minutes.) And Queen of the South also kept their record of never having lost a goal at the Rock.

Queens were also more than a cut above either Queen’s Park or East Fife. They never looked in danger of losing said goal. I’ve just looked at the stats and they pretty much confirmed my impression. We only threatened with a Willie Gibson free-kick which the keeper pushed round the post.

Their first goal came when Mark Docherty got done by their wide man. The cross wasn’t cut out, came right across the goal and former Son Ian Russell did what he always does against us.

The second goal killed it (but to be fair, the first one had.) We switched off at a corner kick, allowing it to be played short and a cross to come in. Keeper Mark Brown was left exposed to try to contest the ball with their forward. Brown missed, the forward didn’t.

After that it was only a case of would they increase their lead? We never looked like reducing it. Debutant loanee Scott Brown came on but didn’t have much time to influence things, plus had a few wayward passes. Maybe when he’s had time to integrate with the squad. Midfielder Jon Routledge was given Sonstrust MOM. I couldn’t disagree. But he and Kevin Cawley were the only bright sparks. Garry Fleming just doesn’t look like a centre forward. He and strike partner Steven Craig never got into the game. From what I’ve seen of us so far this season it seems we’re going to struggle to score goals apart from set pieces. We got precious few set pieces today.

The main reason I went today was to try to buy a home top from the club shop. The queue before kick-off was so long I’d have missed some of the game. There was a steward blocking access at half time. At full time there was a sign up saying the shop was shut. I came home with no new top.

*I’m thinking of giving the game at Falkirk on Friday a miss. But it’s on BBC Alba. Will watching it on the TV make a difference?

PS:- I’m sad to see from the club website that three season stalwart Andy Graham has left “by mutual consent.” I think it’s fair to say new boss Stevie Aitken didn’t fancy him as first choice centre half. Sons fans will have fond memories of Andy. In particular his performance at Pittodrie in the cup quarter-final in season 2013-4 was immense.

In an article in Friday’s Guardian, Nicholas Tucker put forward the thesis that “naughty” words could be got away with in more innocent days.

The trigger for this was the change of name of one of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons from Titty to Tatty in a new BBC adaptation of the books, Titty being of course too (err…) tittersome for these days.

He mentions the innocent use in bygone times of “intercourse,” “screw”, “ejaculate” and, in the case of Dr Seuss, “Boners.”

However, the quotation he gives for his next example “cock” – as in a fairground giant cockerel which a maiden aunt of Just William mounts on a merry-go-round – undermines his thesis as the text goes on to say, “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce.”

For what is the purpose of that word “blameless”? It seems to me to be present precisely to signal exactly that knowledge which Tucker claims to be absent. Otherwise why include it? If the point was the one Tucker is making then the phrasing, “a joy that all her life so far had failed to produce,” would make it far more effectively, and poignantly.

Tucker then uses the same word to describe Just William’s author, Richmal Crompton, saying she was a blameless ex-classics teacher. But are not the classics – of which she therefore must have had extensive knowledge – full of instances of sexual mayhem? (The Rape of the Sabine Women for one. In case this may be thought to be an egregious example unlikely to be mentioned in school, this incident was one of those encountered by the good lady in her Latin class.)

Tucker says a similar fairground cockerel also appears in an Angela Thirkell story and adduces for her innocence of any double entendre that she was a distinctly snobbish granddaughter of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. As if artists (and particularly the pre-Raphaelites) were entirely free of sexual knowledge and/or shenanigans. Moreover a glance at Thirkell’s life story might suggest rather a lack of innocence.