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May 22, 2005

A bit of a joke

[Warning: may contain traces of football. If you find football mind-numbingly tedious, you might want to look away now]

I've come close to posting an entry like this for months, and UEFA's current crackpot scheme, which has only just come to my attention, finally swung it. Modern football is rapidly becoming completely insane.

Take the Scottish Premier League. There are 12 teams in the division, and they play each other around 3.5 times a season. After everybody has played 33 games (3 fixtures against each possible opponent), the league is arbitrarily divided into 2 halves, between 6th place and 7th place, and the remaining games are played solely against clubs in your own half of the table. So, it's quite possible for the team in 7th place (Kilmarnock, 49 points) to end up with a better record than the team in 6th place (Motherwell, 48 points), purely by having "easier" matches towards the end of the season. If anyone can tell me why on earth this is considered a good idea, I'd be interested...

Or how about the somewhat ironically named/branded "Champions' League"? The English FA (among others) now gets to enter 4 teams into the competition each year, making it more like a "highly-placed teams league"; perhaps the old name, the European Cup, was more fitting. This season's final will be contested by last season's Italian league champions, AC Milan, and a team which finished 4th in the English league, with 60 points, 15 points short of 3rd place, and 30 short of the league champions. Of course, it's somewhat disingenuous for me to complain about this, since I'm delighted that Everton have qualifed for next season's tournament, but it still seems a bit of a joke.

And then there's the away goals rule, as used in the Champions' League and UEFA Cup. In this season's Champions League semi-final, AC Milan won the first leg, at home, 2-0. In the second leg, away at PSV Eindhoven, they lost 3-1, making the score 3-3 on aggregate. I can't see why this means AC Milan played better, and deserved to go through to the next round, but apparently it does. (Non-football fans may be confused by this — hell, I am. Milan went through because they had scored more of their goals away from home than PSV.) Even more crazily, in the 2003 semi-final between AC Milan and Inter Milan, two clubs which play their home fixtures in the same stadium, AC Milan once again won on away goals, following a 0-0 draw in the leg designated as their "home" leg, and a 1-1 draw in the leg designated "away". Because, you know, that's really sensible. What ever happened to extra time and penalties? (Hmm. Looking at these 2 anecdotes alone, the rule seems to favour teams that are good at not conceding any goals at home. Is that really the intended effect?)

Is football alone in all of this? I don't follow other sports closely enough to see all the big hairy warts in the rules, but my hunch is that any sport which has become heavily dependent on television revenue, and so has its rules partly dictated by the television networks, will have strange, arbitrary seeming rules, intended to enhance the "spectacle" at the expense of sanity. I'd love to hear any examples of this in the comments. I'm also wondering if football has actually always had rules like this, and I've just only noticed the recent ones...

Posted by James at 17:26 | Comments (17)
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May 13, 2005

Gypsy asylum seeker terrorists

Apparently, to apply for a passport in the UK, you need to get 2 identical photographs (so no using those machines that take 4 shots in succession...) of yourself signed by either "a professional person", or someone "of standing in the community", who has known you for 2 or more years. Oh, and they need to sign your form too. For bonus awkwardness points, I can't be related to the person, even as an in-law, nor in a relationship with or living in the same house as them.

Of course, if I was the sort of criminal that wanted to get a dodgy fake passport, I'm sure I could get one of my friends to lie that they'd known me for a bit longer than they have; it's only inconvenient because I'm not willing to break the law. Great security measure there, guys! I'm sure that'll foil those evil arab gypsy asylum seeker terrorists who've come to steal our women/jobs.

Oh, and if you lose your passport, you need to report this to your local police station, however big a waste of your time and theirs you may feel this is.

In other news, if I can get a passport before then, I'm going on holiday on June 2nd! If I can't, I'm, er, not. Tumtetum.

Posted by James at 19:27 | Comments (3)
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May 02, 2005

Dubious at best

Sorry, I lied. I've not been posting at all, because I promised to avoid politics, but it turned out I didn't have a lot else to talk about. So here goes...

So this political campaigning malarkey. I've done my bit, delivering and handing out leaflets for my local Liberal Democrats, (on which more in another entry). I don't agree with everything the Liberal Democrats campaign for, but I can forgive their anti-nuclear stance (implied at the end of their policy briefing on the environment, though they don't explicitly oppose new nuclear build in that), and even their somewhat utopian view that even the highest level of education ought to be free (all over their website). I can forgive these things because in return I get a party that I agree with on immigration, on council tax, on health, and on law and order. I also get to vote for the one major party that opposed the Iraq war (the legality of which is dubious at best).

While I'm on the subject of the Liberal Democrats, I found out recently about LibDemPolicy.com, a Conservative site (Are you drinking what we're drinking?) listing some truly appalling LD policies. For instance, "We will put your taxes up" — hardly shocking news, given that they've been talking about a 50% top band (on earnings over £100k) for years now, and an extra penny on the basic rate before that. Worse still, they would "‘introduce fair benefits for asylum seekers'" — damn these lily livered liberals and their sense of social justice! They'll be opposing mandatory sentencing and giving old people free residential care rather than making them sell their homes, next. Bastards.

Remember folks, whoever you're going to vote for, it's this Thursday, May 5th. Unless you're voting Veritas or UKIP, in which case your nominated voting day this year is May 6th.

[This entry was first written 4 days ago, and has been edited slightly to make sense being published today]

Posted by James at 13:46 | Comments (3)
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