Celtic can rebuild after slipping back at the Tony Macaroni

Perhaps the only relief for Celtic fans who saw the aftermath of the club’s first ever defeat to Livingston was that the tensions bubbling between the two sets of players did not boil over at the final whistle. Ryan Christie was already in the dugout after his first half red card, with a three game suspension in the post, and there was no sense in anyone else joining him.

As it was, Christopher Jullien’s thousand-yard stare as he went through the motions of the post-match handshakes would be as ugly as things would get.

The £7-million centre half’s frustration summed up the mood among Neil Lennon’s side. They had been roughed up, wound up and mugged off in a tight, ugly encounter on the plastic turf of Livi’s Tony Macaroni Stadium. They would soon slip into second place in the table, Rangers romping past Hamilton in Sunday afternoon’s later game to render Celtic’s victory in the first Old Firm clash of the season an irrelevance.  

Straight red: Ryan Christie

Walter Smith used to tell his Rangers players to worry about the games before and after each Old Firm clash and Celtic will have their one-time nemesis’ words ringing in their ears as they enter the international break trailing their great foes. The defeat to Livi, on the heels of last weekend’s draw at Easter Road threatens to dampen the enthusiasm around a Celtic side capable of a great deal more.

Indeed, the Celtic Park faithful will be desperate to see Neil Lennon’s men consistently display the quality they have shown in their first two Europa League ties, as well as their earlier Scottish Premiership fixtures. The dynamism and discipline evident in Thursday night’s 2-0 victory over Cluj, along with the draw away to a strong Rennes side, has been lacking in the last two domestic assignments.

Tiredness from Thursday evening may have contributed to Celtic’s defeat on Sunday, particularly in the instance of Christie’s uncharacteristic lunge on Scott Robinson, which earned him an immediate dismissal. However, in other areas the Bhoys clearly lacked the requisite nous and guile against Gary Holt’s well-drilled Livi side.

The recall of Austrian right-back Moritz Bauer for such a predictably physical encounter was puzzling, with the Stoke City loanee looking unsettled by the home side’s rugged approach. Hatem Abd Elhamed, who helped secure a clean sheet against Cluj, is a more defensively assured full-back and may well have coped better with the frequent long balls from the home side.

Livi benefitted from an excellent focal point in attack, with Lyndon Dykes troubling the Celtic backline with his strength and speed, not to mention more than a few of the dark arts. The young target man was certainly abrasive, offering the full complement of trailing arms, shoves and ankle-nips before settling the game with a fine chip over Fraser Forster.

Abrasive and outstanding: Lyndon Dykes

Jullien in particular appeared driven to distraction by the antics of Dykes and his colleagues, with the Frenchman repeatedly losing his rag at his opponents as the match wore on. He’d have been better off focusing on the basics, with Scott Robinson benefitting from huge gap between him and Bauer to poke home Livi’s opener.

Even Celtic’s most reliable performers failed to shine, with James Forrest largely anonymous and Scott Brown frequently crowded out by Robinson and Robbie Crawford in the centre of the park. Mohamed Elyounoussi was a rare bright spot, with the Norwegian showing his athleticism and flair on a number of storming runs down the left flank.

Celtic will hope that the likes of Forrest and Odsonne Edouard can quickly regain form when they return from Scottish and French under-21 duties in a couple of weeks, although Christie’s suspension will leave a vacancy in the number 10 role, where he has excelled up until Sunday.

Comeback trail: Tom Rogic

One consolation could be that it offers Tom Rogic a route back into contention, as the Australian continues his recovery from an injury-ravaged 2018-19 season. Rogic scored in the 5-0 cup rout of Partick Thistle recently, and the left-footer is a classy addition to the side when fit and firing.

Celtic fans have not seen enough of him lately, with some contradictory reports in the Scottish tabloids suggesting he will spend the international break getting married, but Christie’s absence could be a precious opportunity for the enigmatic attacking midfielder to assert himself once again.        

Tom McMahon

Pitch invasions - a disease or a symptom?

The imprisonment of Paul Mitchell, the 27-year-old Birmingham City supporter who vaulted the hoardings to punch Aston Villa midfielder Jack Grealish in Saturday’s Second City derby, was inevitable.

The father-of-one pleaded guilty to the sucker punch that shocked the country, with his lawyer reporting that his client “cannot explain what came over him yesterday morning”, before he was sentenced to 14 weeks in prison and given a 10-year football banning order.

Players and stewards apprehend Paul Mitchell as Jack Grealish recovers

Football fans across the UK might be struggling to explain what has come over the national game after a trio of ugly pitch invasions threatened to eclipse the weekend’s fixtures. Like most disastrous weekends, it got started on Friday night, when Rangers captain James Tavernier was confronted by a fan at Hibernian’s Easter Road. This continued a spate of foul incidents in Scottish football, including sectarian abuse of Kilmarnock manager Steve Clark by Rangers fans, and glass bottles descending on Scott Sinclair from the Easter Road stands.

While the recent incidents north of the border have a sectarian dimension that makes them particularly unsavoury, crowd trouble even surfaced in the perfumed realm of the Premier League on Sunday afternoon. An Arsenal fan ran onto the pitch after the home side’s second goal and shoved Manchester United defender Chris Smalling, before attempting to join the Arsenal players’ celebrations.

David Cotterill called for armed police to protect players

The trio of one-man pitch invasions provoked a storm of conjecture from pundits and columnists. This ranged from well-judged appeals to protect players through appropriate stewarding and deterrent punishments, to David Cotterill’s ludicrous proposal to introduce armed police at football grounds. 

The Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive, Gordon Taylor, deserves some credit for speaking out quickly and suggesting that ground closures and points deductions could be considered for clubs that prove unable to control their fans. His claim that “we’ve been down this road before and we don’t want to go there again”, however, hints at a misdiagnosis of the issue afflicting British football.

Taylor’s comments suggest that the incidents that took place over the weekend mark a return to the hooliganism that plagued grounds across the 1970s and 1980s. While the violence in both eras is repugnant, there is marked difference between the senseless actions from a few modern-day individuals and the organised, Firm-based hooliganism that stalked city centres and stadia before the Premier League era.

Disturbances have traditionally been between fans

What made the weekend’s misdeeds so startling was that the aggression was directed towards professionals on the field of play, rather than other supporters. While this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon (witness the 2012 attack on Chris Kirkland), it represents a shift from the carnage previously wreaked on an almost-weekly basis by established firms such as The Subway Army, The Headhunters and The Soul Crew.     

In a reflection of modern society, the weekend’s incidents were the sole actions of three disorganised and socially disconnected attention-seekers, rather than participants in any sort of community – even a criminal one. It’s not hard to spot Paul Mitchell’s desperation for 15 seconds of infamy as he waves his arms to stir up applause while being dragged off the turf at St Andrews.

The Arsenal pitch invader, meanwhile, wears a Stone Island jacket – that universal marker of aggro – despite grinning manically and seeming more concerned with hugging his team’s players than inflicting any serious damage on Smalling. His hooligan clobber seems an affectation, a costume to distract from the more serious business of celebrity-worship.

Stone Island gear: hooligan dress-up costume?

The same blend of vanity and spite was present on Twitter, where a Birmingham City supporter used the liberating power of social media to taunt Jack Grealish over the death of his infant brother. The supporter – who made no effort to disguise his identity – has since been banned from attending fixtures at St Andrews.

This grim abuse on social media, coupled with the naff hooligan clobber sported by the weekend’s pitch invaders, reveals a section of men desperate to apply outmoded masculine aggression in a society that has (thankfully) moved on.

It’s telling that Paul Mitchell was wearing a hat inspired by Peaky Blinders, the Brummie mafia serial that is a staple on the BBC and Netflix. The overblown Boardwalk Empire rip-off has enjoyed great success as a retro wish-fulfilment showreel for the Strongbow Dark Fruits crowd: slick hairdos, sharp suits and easy women interspersed with shoot-and-stab set pieces.

Retro wish-fulfilment: Peaky Blinders

It’s little surprise that these lurid 1920s images hold some appeal to the young men of modern Britain, often faced with an environment of meaningless service-industry labour, crippling debt and a cultural landscape increasingly focused on hedonistic individualism.   

The same, self-interested society is reflected in the incidents across the weekend, with the perpetrators blundering into crude assertions of their warped masculinity, striving for a few moments of attention as they lash out at more talented, better-adjusted versions of themselves. While fines, banning orders and jail terms may deter some football fans from similarly thuggish behaviour, the vain anger among disconnected young men is something that British society urgently needs to examine and remedy.   

Why Succeed when you can Survive?

Michael Jordan, in a confession that would be endlessly reproduced in motivational screensavers, admitted that he had “missed more than 9,000 shots in my career”. He continued, “26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again. That is why I succeed.”

Perhaps Chris Grayling has a knowledge of basketball that belies his suit-straining paunch, as the Transport Secretary seems to have taken up Gatorade’s challenge to Be Like Mike, quickly compiling his own catalogue of failures.

Last week proved Grayling’s commitment to cock-ups, with his role in not one but two costly scandals again putting his position under scrutiny.

Like Mike? Chris Grayling in Kent

On Thursday afternoon, the government was forced to pay £33 million to French transport company Eurotunnel in an out-of-court settlement as the Seaborne Freight fiasco reached its farcical conclusion. 

Eurotunnel had taken the government to court on the grounds that the procurement process that saw Grayling’s Department for Transport award a £14 million contract to Seaborne Freight was not sufficiently thorough and transparent, meaning their business case was not given a fair hearing. Seeing as Seaborne Freight turned out to have no ships and no port to land them in, Eurotunnel probably had a point.         

On Friday, a vintage Grayling blunder from 2013 was brought up from the cellar by the National Audit Office (NAO), with a price tag north of £400 million to the taxpayer. The NAO's report reminded Parliament that in his stint as David Cameron’s Secretary of State for Justice, Grayling had applied the trusted Tory tonic of privatisation to Britain’s probation services with his typical combination of diligence and flair.

Grayling was Justice Secretary before Michael Gove

The eye-wateringly expensive experiment yielded poor results, with a 2.5% drop in the number of offenders proven to commit another crime more than offset by the number of offences by reoffenders rising 22%. Fans of mass incarceration could at least be cheered that the number of offenders recalled to Britain’s famously safe and rehabilitative prisons after breaching a licence condition increased by almost half, from 4,240 to 6,240.

Grayling’s week from hell, alongside previous failures such as a rail timetable reshuffle that left platforms across England looking like the Battle of Thermopylae, ought to make his position untenable.

Indeed, Labour’s shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald and deputy leader Tom Watson have both clamoured for “heads to roll”. However, it might yet be too soon to expect a resignation.

Here's one he made earlier: passengers queue amid rail timetable chaos

Theresa May has repeatedly spoken of her admiration for Geoffrey Boycott, but it appears Grayling plays the role of another English cricketer within the Tory cabinet. It’s likely that May sees her Transport Secretary as a John Edrich figure, the fearless Surrey opening batsman who was once likened to a ‘human punching bag’ when facing the dreaded Australian duo of Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee.

Jeremy Hunt did a similar job in his hapless stint as Health Secretary, somehow clinging on for six years as waiting lists lengthened, survival rates fell and medical staff quit. These dour, grey ministers have turned incompetence into a bizarre virtue, much admired by the Tory leadership for their ability to shrug off the concept ministerial responsibility and ride out media storms, rather than display any skill in governing.

Accident waiting to happen? Jeremy Hunt visits a hospital

Whereas Michael Jordan used his failures as a platform to become the greatest athlete of the last 30 years and Edrich blocked, cut and hooked his way to 12 test centuries, the likes of Grayling and Hunt embrace failure as their signature.

Although regularly confronted by the miserable results they have overseen, they know that any resignation would damage their party’s hold on power. So they hang grimly on, and are handsomely remunerated for their subsistence politics. Their only merit is understanding that modern society’s ever-accelerating news cycle will soon move on, the scrutiny will fade and new catastrophes will snatch the public's attention.
 
Oh - have you seen the news about Storm Freya?

World Mental Health Day

I walk home from work pursued by memories, reading through drafts of letters I’ll never get to write.

The thought of a face, obscured by some fashionable but unstylish cap or hat. My friend, gone these two years, grinning back at me.

The boy. Conflicted, contradictory, full of life. He taught English to secondary school pupils at an Academy in Enfield. The students, he reported, were second-generation immigrants with a wit and brio that offset the PFI staleness of the institution. Livewires and dreamers largely unburdened by rigid codes of conduct, strict uniform policies and other technocratic silver bullets for educating working class children.

At his after-school workshops the children worked on poems, recited with a bounce and charm that only he could adequately convey. The talk would flow onto music, the youngsters sharing a buzz about the latest J Hus, Stormzy or Bugzy Malone that would trickle on to our friends at the next gathering in Dulwich or Haggerston.

The music played. We’d sing along, shout along, curse along to the rhythmic blood feuds playing from a laptop. There would be dances of limited flair and rhythm, then cigarettes smoked while leaning on the kitchen worktop. Occasionally neighbours would complain, their Zone-3 idyll disturbed by a gang of idiots in the early hours of a Saturday morning.

I look down at my phone and I’m reminded that it is World Mental Health Day. Corporate accounts gush over the importance of talking, the meaning of anxiety, the prevalence of the problem. A few friends and acquaintances offer well-intentioned words and images via social media: “speak up”, “get help”, “break the stigma”.

It’s all worthy and righteous and most of it makes me burn with a dull rage. It condenses a huge and complex epidemic down to a simple fault on the part of the sufferer: a stubbornness, a failure to communicate, a twisted privacy. The suffering, that dense sadness or raw fear that can take a hold of your spirit – they propose that it can be worked away once it’s all out in the open. Your issue will be managed, your risk will be contained.

The strange idea that effusiveness will wash you clean. Speak to your GP in an inversion of Catholic confession. Serve your penance one prescription at a time. What of those who speak openly of their sorrows, yet remain mired in them?

My departed friend was open. He was honest and forthright about his problems, and he guided other people through theirs. He sought treatment and counselling, and medication was provided. At football games, or in the pubs and bars, he would occasionally mention his fight to improve, to stabilise and grow. He discussed his mental health with candour and a certain grizzled humour, and it encouraged us to explore our own issues.

Yet he left us. Overcome by old torments in new patterns, returning waves of anguish. Driven beyond an unknowable edge where logic fails and hope expires.     

We try to keep him with us. We meet up on the anniversary, mark his birthday, exchange rambling anecdotes at parties. I sense that each of us carries a dull but persistent grief in separate and morphing ways. Within a year of his passing, I flogged myself up a mountain in Provence, ostensibly in the name of charity. Privately, I sought a pathetic sense of catharsis in the lactic burn of the training climbs and the blind pushes to the top of each hill, and my mind was calmed in the moments of absolute concentration needed during a rapid descent. On the slopes of Mont Ventoux, the sweat that dripped from my forehead and onto the handlebars was proof of life, an affirmation that I could continue.

Two years later, my friend’s memory has cooled into a mellow presence, a pleasant haunting that accompanies me frequently. While sometimes in the form of recollections (this party, that meal), I more often speculate on the moments we did not get to share. I think of which new novels would enthuse him, whether he’d be keen to join me on certain holidays, which tracks he would be playing to the point of exhaustion.

Imagining his righteous and well-articulated anger in each instance, I regret that we missed the chance to revel in fury at Trump’s presidency, Osborne’s editorship of the Evening Standard or the butchering of Jamal Khashoggi as he collected paperwork from the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. I miss his scorn and his rage, as much as his laugh and his wisdom.

There’s a doubt within me, a whispering guilt that I never told him how precious he was. Just as society conditions us to hide our sadness, we learn to conceal our admiration and affection for those close to us. We think it’ll sound weird, or insincere – that it can only come out when we’re drunk.

Let your friends know they matter, let them know they’re beloved, write the letter in your head and send it.  

Me versus Mont Ventoux - the good, the bad and the ugly

I keep going because the mountain won't give up. I pedal harder and harder because the mountain won't complain about cross winds, unfamiliar chainsets or a spiteful sun sitting high in French sky.

I fire up another sprint, pushing my power output into the 320 watts territory as sweat surges out of my pores. My tongue lolls madly out of my mouth and my heart rate rises into the red zone. It is a Monday afternoon and I am enduring another interval training session at the local gym, as part of my preparation for this July's ascent of Mont Ventoux.

As well as creating a sweat-streaked monster in the depths of Lewisham PureGym, my training for the epic climb has revealed the good, the bad and the ugly of cycling in Britain.

Early days: a Sunday spin leads me to an out-of-town retail park 

Since buying my first proper road bike in January (the undersized Carrera MTB travesty I used in Manchester has been successfully erased from my memory) the pure joy of speed has lit up my hours in the saddle. The poise and control of the dropped handlebars, the grip when accelerating out of a corner and the blessed relief in shifting down to the small ring when climbing are all fantastic sensations for a road rookie. Even donning one's first pair of bib shorts has its own vaguely kinky thrill, quite apart from their aerodynamic benefits.

Despite these delights, some persistent problems prevent cycling from becoming an automatic choice for London commuters. The capital's roads remain a mixture of pristine and the precarious, with hazardous potholes and inexplicably gnarly gravel roads popping up fairly frequently if you take routes suggested on Google Maps.

How the pros do it: Alberto Contador and Chris Froome do battle on Ventoux

As well as physical hazards, London cyclists have to keep an eye out for the city's other road users. While most drivers are now at least aware of the existence of cyclists, there is some way to go before pedal-powered travellers get parity of esteem on the road. A significant minority of motorists are still prone to gamble with other people's lives in order to shave a few seconds off a journey, pulling out without warning.

Other commuters actually drive relatively safely, but seem to live for confrontations with cyclists, beeping their horns manically and leaning out of windows to hurl the sort of invective usually reserved for someone you've caught in bed with your spouse.

While the recent hot weather in London might contribute to drivers' frayed tempers, it makes for ideal training for my upcoming ride in the Provence region of southern France. Recent temperatures near Mont Ventoux have hit 37 Celsius, with the fearsome Mistrale winds from the Mediterranean also contributing to the mountain's unique climate.

In the heavens: the summit of Mont Ventoux

As well as the recent continental weather in London, my training efforts have been blessed by the digital gods, in the shape of some interesting new apps. Strava, even on the free version, lets you track your pace against other users, creating some occasionally ill-advised sprint sections on the streets of south London.

Since leaving my last job, I've even been able to contort the gig economy to the benefit of my training, using Deliveroo to earn money whilst clocking up the hours in the saddle. 

The ride itself has already raised over £900 for the Campaign Against Living Miserably, which is a brilliant effort. With two weeks to go, you can add to these heartening tributes to my great friend Matt Robinson at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Thomas-McMahon2 .

Daily Mirror article on Voting in 2017 General Election

Take a look at my guide to voting in the 2017 general election, originally published by the Daily Mirror:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/need-polling-card-vote-uk-10576714?service=responsive

Foul play finds a home online with General Election looming

The Crown Prosecution Service last week confirmed it will not press charges against members of the Conservative Party over expenses relating to their “battle bus” in the run-up to the 2015 general election.

While Jeremy Corbyn admitted he was “surprised” by the CPS's decision, it is perhaps more startling that this was an electoral controversy focusing on traditional, offline campaign tactics. Intrigues around recent overseas elections suggest that any foul play is now much more likely to be conducted by digital means.

Old School: The Conservative Battle Bus of 2015

With Britain heading to the polls again in a little over three weeks' time, the prospect of online subversion is already looming as a threat to the integrity of the general election. Facebook has been sufficiently concerned to place a full-page advert in a number of British newspapers, providing ten tips on how to spot “false news” online. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the site has also removed tens of thousands of bogus accounts in a plan to tackle what it describes as “spam, misinformation or other deceptive content”.

Fake news first came into the public consciousness in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in last year's US Presidential race, with an array of outlandish news stories circulated on social media. An article reporting that Pope Francis supported the Republican candidate's campaign was a particularly successful hoax, receiving almost a million shares on Facebook.

Pope Francis: Not actually a Republican

Trump's team, while not openly condoning the dissemination of fake news, have acknowledged the power of social media as an electoral influence. Gary Coby, the Republican Party's director of marketing, enthuses: “If you are on Facebook, I can match you and put you in a bucket of users that I can target”.

While Trump's campaign spent around $70 million on Facebook advertising to hammer home key messages, it has also been widely alleged that a more underhand digital campaign was secretly underway, in collusion with Russian hackers.

FBI director James Comey's dismissal this week, against the backdrop of the Bureau's ongoing investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia, has done little to quell suspicion. The FBI probe centres on Kremlin-sanctioned e-mail hacks against the Democrats which destabilised the party's White House campaign, and Trump's security advisor Michael Flynn has already been dismissed after covering up his meetings with Russian officials.

Departed: Former Trump security advisor Michael Flynn

A similar hack on the eve of run-off voting in France also threatened to derail Emmanuel Macron's successful Presidential race, with Macron's team claiming that hackers added fabricated messages to “five entire mailboxes” of stolen e-mails. Cybersecurity experts have since attributed the breach to the APT-28 hacking group, who have been linked with Russian military intelligence and also orchestrated last year's leak of Western athletes' medical records.

The hacked emails, hosted on anonymous document-sharing site Pastebin, failed to make an impact on the outcome of France's election as Macron stormed to 66% of the vote. The constant threat of online interference in the run-up to the polls, however, means that democracies now have to work harder than ever before to protect the integrity of their elections.