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    #51
    Originally posted by EIM View Post
    I too used to want to be Mark Hughes, but only so I could kick balls really fucking hard in mid-air.
    It was the 25-yard chest passes that reeled me in.

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      #52
      Originally posted by EIM View Post
      I too used to want to be Mark Hughes, but only so I could kick balls really fucking hard in mid-air.
      I was going to ask "What kind of balls do you mean?" but then realised it was Mark Hughes and he was equally at home volleying goals, or leaping centre-halves in the knackers.

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        #53
        Yes, I remember the physical side of his game less fondly than many. So aggressive on the pitch, so quiet off it, too.

        EDIT: one of the additional pleasures of beating Barcelona home and away in 87: El tel brought him in for the Tannadice game, as he would relish British centre half battles...Hegarty and Narey kept him very quiet.
        Last edited by Felicity, I guess so; 10-05-2018, 10:02.

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          #54
          Originally posted by EIM View Post
          Jesus Christ. Why can't someone write 8000 words on Lee Sharpe in ENGLISH?! Kev's response is more beautiful than my post deserved. Not much could get me Googling Haussmann at 1am, but OTF and Lee Sharpe have managed it. The Cantona and Sharpe comparisons interest me. If they were magazines then Sharpe would be the Just 17 to Eric's Cosmopolitan or Vogue. Sharpe was the teenage crush that shaped my adult crush on Cantona. And where Sharpe was the transitional figure representing a changing Manchester, Eric became symbolic of a new, confident, continental city. Gary Neville's role in all this remains to be determined, the hotel building dickhead.

          Anyyyyway. I'm off to learn French to read that article. J'ai perdu mon stylo dans le jardin de ma tente. Est qu'il y a un singe dans l'arbre? Lee Sharpe était plus rapide que les guêpes.
          You're absolutely right to start with Eddie Izzard, best possible introduction to learning French.

          It should of course have been "the Haussmannisation" in my previous post. And "knuckle down", not "buckle down"…

          To save you the bother of researching about Haussmann EIM (not that it's uninteresting of course), in a nutshell, Haussmann totally redesigned Paris between the early 1850s and 1870. It was as much a physical transformation of Paris as a revolution in the Parisians’ way of life, their habits, interactions and so on, including a fair dose of gentrification, so it had plenty of detractors. (I wrote about this period and Haussmann in these two posts, here and here, it might help you understand the context a little, it wasn’t just the transformation of Paris but France at large, new radically different and tougher regime).

          Baudelaire (1821-1867, a Parisian through and through) could see some of the positives of this Haussmannisation of Paris but mostly felt alienated by this "new city" that was barely recognisable from his teenage days, a place that in just one generation went from being a scruffy city largely unchanged for centuries to a modern urban metropolis. Baudelaire particularly mourned the obliteration of what he called the "history of Paris" or something similar (countless old buildings and whole neighbourhoods levelled). Baudelaire, a very complex character, coined the term modernité, he was both fascinated by modernity (an era of opportunities etc.) and disdainful of it. Duality is indeed a central and recurring theme in Baudelaire’s œuvre, he once said: « Enfant, j'ai senti dans mon cœur deux sentiments contradictoires: l'horreur de la vie et l'extase de la vie. » (As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.)

          A lot of the poems in his masterpiece Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil – 1857, a ground-breaking poetry book that shocked France – it was censored etc.) express the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during that time.

          The Napoleon III-Haussmann era was profoundly different from the previous one (the golden age of Romanticism) as French society was undergoing deep changes on many levels (social – industrial revolution; economic – capitalism; political – autocratic regime). This led a few writers such as Baudelaire to be very ambivalent about society and life and as our poète maudit aged (he didn’t live long mind) he became very disenchanted and depressed.

          Anyway, enough of Baudelaire but in my previous post I was sort of making a parallel with English football as it reminded me, in relation to Lee Sharpe, of what happened during the transitional 1986-1996 period that I referred to (sea change from the old Football League model to the "modern era"). Many players rolled with it and adapted reasonably well to the new football landscape with its demands and constraints but Sharpe didn’t, he never came to grips with the seismic changes that took place, eg the brutal shift at Man United, from the very lax regime of Atkinson (players' power, alcohol etc.) to Alex Ferguson in one fell swoop. Concomitantly, the domestic football scene was being metamorphosed by the advent of the Premier League, far more money meant more responsibilities, more pressure, squeaky clean lifestyles etc.

          Anyway, if you don’t have much time to devote to the effect of the Haussmannisation of Paris on Baudelaire, this article very succinctly encapsulates his feelings about this Haussmannisation (which took place from the 1850s onwards and not the 1840s as written below): https://www.myfrenchlife.org/2017/10...ire-150-years/

          Paris was a place of narrow streets, small barrack-like housing, and distinct class areas between the rich and poor. It was into this so-called ‘city of misery’ which Baudelaire was born in 1821.
          However, the processes of Haussmannisation in the 1840s provoked a sense of nostalgia for this former Paris – now lost in the rubble, making way for new buildings. In his poetry, Baudelaire evokes the feel of an outsider, gazing at a city he once called home. ‘Le Cygne’ demonstrates his feelings toward being ostracised by the new developments, comparing himself to a caged bird trapped in a world dissimilar to the one he once knew.

          Paris had not changed since the French Revolution until Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann was hired to completely renovate the entire capital under the control of Napoleon III. Napoleon III loved uniformity, regulation and control, and so Haussmann replicated this theme through his architecture.

          France Culture’s podcast explained that this very need for uniformity caused Haussmann’s buildings to manifest the same ‘banalité’ (banality) and ‘monotonie’ (monotony) that Baudelaire detested.
          This New Yorker article is more in-depth, hundreds more on the Net I’m sure: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cu...-and-destroyed

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            #55
            This is great stuff. Cheers, Kev. I'm tempted to pitch a Sharpe article to Mundial given they've published my piece on Vietnam.
            Last edited by EIM; 10-05-2018, 21:25.

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              #56
              link?

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                #57
                Aye, Cannae leave us hanging.

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                  #58
                  It's in the next issue, published in the next few weeks or so.

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                    #59
                    Originally posted by EIM View Post
                    This is great stuff. Cheers, Kev. I'm tempted to pitch a Sharpe article to Mundial given they've published my piece on Vietnam.
                    Fantastic, I'll buy the next issue then.

                    And feel free to use my French bollocks about the old Charles [Baudelaire] in relation to Sharpey le winger maudit...

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                      #60
                      Originally posted by EIM View Post
                      Sharpe was brilliant, you madman. A product of his era, a totem for a new and swaggering Manchester. Young, exciting, twatted on E, Sharpe was as essential to Manchester shedding of post-industrial decay as the Hacienda was. As I wrote on this very board in 2016:

                      Lee Sharpe. In the 1980s Manchester was a dull rainy city wallowing in post-industrial decay. Then Tony Wilson formed Factory records and signed Lee Sharpe from Torquay. His debut album was a hattrick against Arsenal in a speckled blue adidas kit that was, for a while, the only colour in the North of England. I remember seeing him play live for the first time, in the Hacienda. I was stood next to Joy Division, John the Postman, Mick Hucknall and John Cooper Clarke. They went on to form Happy Mondays and open Dry Bar. Lee Sharpe died in 1995 and was sold to Leeds.
                      I think I'd been drinking, but be that as it may, it's still a fairly faithful retelling of the Lee Sharpe story.
                      And didn’t he let us know it…

                      Among Sharpe's other accomplishments is a brilliant hat-trick at Arsenal in the Rumbelows Cup in the 1990-91 season which, according to a review on Amazon, is mentioned 43 times in his autobiography.

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                        #61
                        I’ll defer to ye Learned Gentlemen re Lee Sharpe, ages 12-17 didn’t involve much watching fitba, so I missed Himself in his pomp, mostly. Now I’m going to disappear down a rabbit hole of authoritarian town planning and mercurial Northern based jinksyness.
                        Last edited by Lang Spoon; 10-05-2018, 23:59.

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                          #62
                          Rangers' late 40's defence of Brown, Young, Shaw, McColl, Woodburn and Cox were the Iron Curtain.

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                            #63
                            Originally posted by sw2bureau View Post
                            The Rioch era Boro phoenices that rose from the ashes were 'Bruce(y)'s Babes'.
                            More generally referred to as The Class of '86 these days. There was also Hignett, Barmby and TLF who were known as the "Midget Gems"!

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                              #64
                              Originally posted by EIM View Post
                              This is great stuff. Cheers, Kev. I'm tempted to pitch a Sharpe article to Mundial given they've published my piece on Vietnam.
                              Picked up my copy of Mundial last night at local newsagents (had ordered it) on the way to the swimming-pool, really liked your article EIM.

                              Interesting what you’re writing about the big identity crisis affecting Vietnamese clubs. This state of constant flux reminds me of the beginnings of English football with that initial period of great instability (first 30-40 years), even down to the colour and patterns of the shirt that changed so often.

                              Re this bit: "Take Sài Gòn FC, referred to on the English Language Hồ Chí Minh City FC Facebook page as Franchise, a nod to their similarity to the MK Dons mutants etc." Must have been gutting to travel all the way to Vietnam and be haunted by the fucking Plastics and bloody Winkelman!

                              Their FB page has 35 year-old Brasilian Renan Marques possibly joining from Thailand on $25,000 a month. That’s pretty decent for the Vietnamese league, isn’t it? (judging from what you’re writing about the strength of the League etc., notwithstanding the fact that some of the backers appear to be relatively big. I take it’s similar to the MLS with a couple of marquee players in each team paid a lot and the rest eking out a living).

                              In terms of football standard, would you say that their top flight is roughly equal to our semi-pro 6th-7th tier?

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                                #65
                                I think the teams would struggle to give FC United a game. The teams were mostly local, with a couple of Brazilian or Portuguese players, who were clearly superior both physically and technically, but still not particularly good.

                                $25000 a month would go a long way in Vietnam. A very long way.

                                Thank you for the kind words.

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                                  #66
                                  Thanks. Yes, I can imagine (that it'd go a long way).

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