Gavan Reilly's Portfolio writings, ramblings, mumblings

Opinion: The Great 3pm Blackout

The singular beauty of football, the reason it’s known worldwide as The Beautiful Game, is the sheer simplicity of the sport. Gary Lineker once famously quipped that football “is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.” While the ultimate outcome might not be quite that predictable – and certainly Everton, Manchester City, Tottenham and Aston Villa will be doing their best to disprove it this year, with inevitable mixed success – the overall sentiment is a true one. Football is a global language, an art of beauty as simple or complicated as one might wish to make it. Put two sets of toddlers together and a goal at either end and without instruction, they’ll immediately spurt into soccer mode, toddling (literally) in swarms after a ball.

Put a batch of middle-aged Chilean men and a group of disaffected Russian urbanite teenagers into the same patch of grass and they might have nothing in common – no language, no shared values, no frames of reference by which to communicate – but throw a size 5 ball into the pot and no further instruction is needed. Without briefing, goalkeepers will be designated, general (though blurry) formations assigned, and there’ll be no quibbling about the rules. Have a quick look at the latter stages of the video for Three Lions to witness a perfect illustration. In the 21st century, people might struggle to relate to each other as the world gets closer together but grows spiritually apart, but put a group on a pitch and they’ll at least understand the offside rule.

Of course, adding to this is the global reach of television, perhaps the only similar art form with a parallel global reach. The same analogy about univeralism applies: my Dad often tells me a story about how he and Mum were on holiday somewhere in Italy during the 1982 World Cup, and how he and another Irishman he met were out walking when West Germany met France in the semi-final. Anxious to see how the game was going (both men were accompanying their fiancées out shopping), they peered over the wall of a private compound where a local was watching the game in his garden. Being spotted by the owner, and fearing a clash with the local Polizia, they scarpered – only for the man to chase them down and invite them into the garden for a few beers to watch the rest of the game, forever immortalised by Harald Schumacher leaving Patrick Battiston unconscious and without several teeth later in the game. (This, again, all took place without the man speaking English or without my father having even a few words of basic conversational Italian.)

I digress. Back to the power of television. There’s probably very few of the younger football-following population of this giant football we call Earth who didn’t get their first exposure to the game through television. It has a reach simply incalculable and impossible to exceed. Put the world’s most universal game onto the world’s most universal medium and you have a profound, immense and unstoppable captivation. But yet, amongst all of this, in the third millennium with moneybags footballers and worldwide support for the biggest leagues, we’re seeing a shift away of this, primarily in England, where the power of the remote control is being slowly slugged away.

Let me explain. If you travel to France, Germany, Spain or indeed anywhere else in the world, while you might have to get hold of a pay-per-view channel (or two) to watch the domestic leagues, you’ll at least be assured that when the goals are flying in on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, you’ll be able to see them live. Not so in England, where – under the pretences of maining the physical crowds at games – there’s a formalised Saturday 3pm blackout, and the closest you’ll get to the action is Jeff Stelling doing a live link to Chris Kamara. Don’t get me wrong, Jeff and Chris are brilliant, but it’s not quite the same as getting to see the full action live.

The rationale for this, an idea when Sky showed up in time for the Premier League in 1992, was that if there was too much television coverage of 3pm games on a Saturday, it would entice people who otherwise might have attended games in person to stay at home and watch them on TV instead. A fair point at the time – in the aftermath of Hillsborough, with waning public interest and the danger of football’s financial arse falling out from under it, it was a necessary step. With hyped-up overexposure the game could genuinely have died on its feet. But with the rampant explosion of wealth that followed – admittedly, largely at Sky’s hands – is there really a merit to such a blackout any more?

The Premiership has gotten its bedrock together now, it’s crowds aren’t going to suffer, and so the rationale descends to the lower leagues. If the Premiership was on TV, it itself might be safe, but what about the lower leagues? So enter the BBC with their free-to-air Championship coverage. What logic of safeguarding attendances of matches when the pick of its games are available to all and sundry? What’s left? The FA Cup? There’s no logic of trying to safeguard 3pm attendances there because it’s not as if it’s an ongoing worry as a tournament. The tournament won’t suffer if there’s a medium-interest game aired at 3pm – if the TV networks really believed their own hype about the romance of the tournament, then airing the games would surely only give a greater platform to it. As it is, the only Saturday game aired at 3pm is the FA Cup final.

Premiership clubs, as I mentioned in my last opinion piece, are debt-leveraged to the hilt by now, and need to keep cranking up their ticket prices to keep their ships afloat – but yet, with a guaranteed attendance base for these games, they risk squeezing out the everyday family unit from the game. Restoring 3pm coverage, even if it was pay-per-view, is a real chance for English football to get back into the mainstream consciousness of those in society who haven’t yet drank the Kool-aid.

It says a lot that in the next international TV package, the Premier League are going to reallocate their Chinese rights and ensure that one in ten games is carried on free-to-air television. Maybe they’re overlooking the uncracked market sitting in front of their noses: the one still in England, where fans are finding the universal game less and less universal.

Opinion: The Salary Cap Can’t Come Soon Enough

In his first piece for BPF, Gav Reilly explains why football will die if a salary cap isn’t introduced soon.

The year is 2020. The UEFA Super Champions Europa League Cup final (second leg) is just about to kickoff, and fans all over the world are breathing a weary sigh as Roy Keane’s Ipswich Town kick off against Red Bull Salzburg, with an 8-1 win in the away leg rendering club football’s greatest fixture totally and utterly redundant. What’s the point of playing this competition, wonder the fans, if the big teams when the tournament was conceived aren’t even in existence any more? Why bother taking part when Real Madrid aren’t around to try and win a tenth title, or if there’s no Man United/AC Milan/Bayern Munich/Barcelona to light up the tournament?

Except, of course, the year is not 2020, and UEFA haven’t thrown all of their tournaments together into one giant money-spinning football orgy. (Yet.) But wild as it might seem, the notion of football’s leading lights universally folding and leaving expensive, empty stadia, waiting to be demolished into boutique apartment blocks, and destroying the worldwide heritage of the Beautiful Game isn’t all that fanciful. We, in the summer of 2009, are witnessing the beginning of the end. The devil is a Spaniard, and he’s elected.

This may sound like a line well-worn by a supporter of any team other than Real Madrid (particularly when your writer is a Manchester United supporter) but Florentino Pérez is killing football. Capitalising on the honorable Spanish system of munipical club ownership, Pérez knows what people want. Real Madrid, 2008 vintage, are flounderers. Gone are the days of Figo, Zidane. Now are the days of Christoph Metzelder and Gabriel Heinze, and boring adequacy. The days of getting thrashed in El Clasico. Pérez, a former President with a filofax full of bankers’ names, has a great idea. Why not, with a Presidential election looming, promise every big name under the sun, and borrow the money to pay for them? Genius. The only problem being, in Pérez’s last term at the helm, he ran the club into £200m of debt – just think of the numbers when you’re dealing in pesetas – and the club was only saved from a serious liquidity problem when the city council bought the club’s training ground and immediately leased it back for free.

You would think, then, that with the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of the disaster only averted by municipal taxpayer money, Pérez’s second term would be one of more fiscal conservatism and right-minded financial thinking. Alas. With the impending purchase of Liverpool’s Xabi Alonso, Real’s net summer spending clocks in at about the €275m mark – and with the unusual step of paying Manchester United the full €94m for Cristiano up-front, instead of in instalments or linking pay to performance, have instantly buried themselves in another €220m (or so) in debt, with more to come should the team perform as well as Pérez hopes they should.

How do Madrid plan on paying for these players? Aah, that most 21st Century of ideas – the far-eastern tour.

The notion of big soccer teams touring the world is a reasonable one. Travel abroad, get the chance to play against teams of other footballing cultures, pick up a few fans along the way, sell some more shirts, lather, rinse and repeat. The problem, though, is that in this modern era of recession and financial conservatism, there’s no more money left to win. People don’t have discretionary income any more, particularly in the poorer parts of the world. The Far East has been bludgeoned to death by incessant Man United pre-season jaunts, the signing of Park Ji-Sung, the rampant growth of Asian domestic leagues – particularly that of China – and now the fact that people don’t have any spare money any more. The World Cup has been and gone to Asia and, just as the United States before them, Japan and South Korea are yet to find themselves at the top of the footballing ladder and up to their eyeballs in new stadiums nobody can fill any more.

Football at the turn of the 21st century reached the great unknown – total saturation. America can’t be cracked; dozens of failed attempts to ship over the world’s biggest and best without profit are testament to that. Asia is a lost cause. Africa won’t have the money until the G8 forgive their debt (unlikely). There, simply, is nowhere left to turn. And so Real Madrid will battle on, buying the best and making it too hard for their opponents to compete, and borrowing the money until there’s no money left to borrow and no money coming in to repay the loans. Shirt sales are well and good, but they don’t keep a roof over your head.

The difference between Pérez I and Pérez II is that this time around there is no municipal get-out clause. With no additional funding model to tap into, and only the hope of increased revenue from TV rights to bank on (which is hardly a healthy idea when the Setanta Sports of this world keep folding under the weight of their own debt, and BSkyB’s parent News Corp is posting slumping profits year after year) the money to keep breathing is going to dry up. Soon, other clubs will start sueing for unpaid transfer fees. Rights will be auctioned of, and players returned to their original clubs. Banks will come scraping at the door, wondering when the repayments for the Ronaldo and Kaka loans are to be expected. And down – inexorably, unstoppably, inevitably down – come the house of cards.

This isn’t just a Madrid issue, either, though Pérez is certainly fueling it. While the banks and Berlusconis of this world are still around to lend, the Barcelonas, AC Milans and Manchester Uniteds are going to try and compete, and keep digging themselves further into the mire.

In an attempt to keep the game alive or to make the prize money high enough to sustain the borrowing, UEFA will merge all their competitions. They might even advocate the elimination of domestic leagues. But all it will do is put off the inexorable. The biggest will run out of money, and the Ipswich Towns of the next decade will find themselves rising to the top, not on merit, but by default. There simply will be no clubs left to beat.

So. How do we stop it? We keep transfer fees down. And how do we do that? With a salary cap. Transfer fees are based on the remaining wages due to be paid under the terms of a player’s contract. And so, the wages need to be fixed at a lower point.

The financial world works on the twin basic principles of supply and demand. Demand success, supply funds. Demand repayment, supply funds back. But in a culture where the fans of Real Madrid aren’t the ones signing the cheques for their players, the demand for success will never equate to the money needed to afford it.

If you’re looking for a silver lining to this cloud, I recommend putting a tenner on Newcastle to be relegated to League One, before you sit back to enjoy the press coverage for their games against Leeds United. The clash of the Once-Titans, perhaps, while Ipswich beat Red Bull Salzburg for a trophy nobody wants to win any more.

The Students’ Union is a wasteful, and irrelevant resource: NO

Gav Reilly argues that the Students’ Union sabbatical officers’ work behind the scenes counts for more than people realise. [Read more →]

Shifting politics by social networking

Barack Obama was the first politician who used the internet to win big. Gavan Reilly investigates how the Web stands to become a permanent feature of government.

[Read more →]

Album review: Jape – Ritual

Review Snapshot: Things could have gotten very quiet for Jape in the last few years, but Ritual will be banishing any barren times for Richie Egan. Not a perfect album, but a magnificent one nonetheless. If music was food, Ritual would satisfy more tastes than most.

The Cluas Verdict? 8.5 out of 10

Full Review:
It’s been four years since Richie ‘Jape’ Egan cemented his place amongst Ireland’s new breed of gifted songwriters with second album, The Monkeys In The Zoo Have More Fun Than Me. In the meantime, with his third album nearing completion, he signed to V2, and promptly saw his new home go belly-up. The Monkeys…, meanwhile, bore fruit to ‘Floating’ covered by The Raconteurs, itself leading to more questioning of just where Egan would go next. Irish music might not have undergone any seismic changes in the last four years, but it’s certainly taken enough detours where old dogs need to learn new tricks.

Put simply: if an album could have been custom-made to bridge this gap between notability and glory, Ritual wouldn’t be very far off it, opening with a voice loop on Christopher And Anthony that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Mylo album, before settling into a light, insightful and relaxed yet upbeat path.

I Was A Man, the album’s lead single, opens with a memorable hook that could well have kicked off a chart-botherer but for the slightly obtuse instrumental later in the track. If it won’t be bothering the charts you’ll probably hear it soundtracking another short-lived sports series on RTE in the not-too-distant future. Replays, its sequel, a slightly grimy faux-future opus with a few too many repetitive High E synth taps pushing it too close to the boundaries of bearable.

The album then takes a turn into a slow-burning but gorgeous interlude duo. On Graveyard, Egan shows that while the previous songs are built on melody, his lyricism is worth an exposure too. “It’s just a short, short distance from the nipple to the soil”, he sings, over a lush, deep, layered euphony of minor synthesis. This lyrical strength then hits astonishing new high gears on Phil Lynott. In a truly seanachaí mode, Egan tells an initially acoustic story of a night at a gig under a lunar eclipse, as the rockers around him say “look / at / the / fuckin’ / moon” in a staccato so perfect you can’t help but be smug even listening to it. The mortality of the occasion hits him to the point where he realises, “One day I’ll be a dead man / who plays the bass from Crumlin / like Phil Lynott” in an interlude of honest-to-God beauty. It says much about Jape’s output that it’s only on the word “Crumlin” that you’re aware you’re listening to domestic produce; you’d easily think you were listening to something that had been well-respected enough on the other side of the Atlantic to make the leap to these shores.

Streetwise is the spiritual start of Side B, with triadic vocals underpinning a electronic masterpiece of booming chords. The Hibernian references are kept up with tributes to Jackie’s Army among others, before At The Heart Of All This Strangeness appears as a musical aberration; a sole acoustic guitar atoneing a beautiful, fragile melody augmented by silences placed to pinpoint perfection, as Egan is overwhelmed by how “there is nothing but hate in every dictionary” with gripping pathos.

The closing triplet almost echo the openers: Apple In An Orchard gets back into the form of the earlier tracks, with Egan borrowing from the Morrissey school of sing-as-you-think storytelling; Strike Me Down opens with another repetitive – but upspeed – synth hook leading into syncopated semiquavers in both vocals and score that sounds like a GameBoy on LSD; while Nothing Lasts Forever ends the album with a virtual scan of the radio channels before settling on a sibling track to Radiohead’s All I Need. That the album produces similar opuses as In Rainbows is a tribute of which not much higher order could be paid.

In short – after a four year break where things could have gotten very quiet for Jape, Ritual will be making sure that the next couple of years will be busier for Richie Egan. A masterpiece, not quite; a potential Album Of The Year, very much so.

Album review: Rubies – Explode from the Center

Review Snapshot: Swedish (we think) five-piece debut with a sound collection of works that – regretfully – seem too comfortable in their own skin to reach out and engage the listener in an anotherwise worthwhile listen.

The Cluas Verdict? 5.5 out of 10

Full Review:
Rubies are a five-piece built around the longstanding pair of Simone Rubi and Terri Loewenthal, and while all of their promotional material manages to avoid details of their geographical heritage, Rubies are as Swedish as Ikea – you know they’re Swedish, but don’t know exactly how you can distinguish it that way, it’s just something you know.

‘Explode from the Center’ is a very solid and distinguished album, and doesn’t at all sound like a debut. Whether this is a good thing or not is another matter – the album seems to lack the distinct, urgent freshness that classifies a great debut. Perhaps Rubies just aren’t that kind of band.

Despite the synthesis, the album has a consistent sense of timelessness, ably sitting comfortably in mental images from late 80’s warehouse raves to third millennium wine bars. The opening half of the nine-track opus is a promise of more energy to come; the latter, however, mostly disappoints, save for ‘Diamonds on Fire’, which hits stride with repetitive smacked guitar and muttered vocal riffs. Lyrically the strongest song of the album. “I could make it / so much easier on you / but it’s hard, it’s so hard”, sing the band, before growing into lush counterpoint with comforting warmth.

Opening with light funk guitar, ‘Room Without A Key’ settling into a light Sia Furler-esque groove before hitting an 80’s chord in the chorus, yet embellished with distinctly modernist vocal tweets, and smacks of a 4am red wine crash in a city centre shoebox, being followed by the lush acoustic and intimate synthesis of ‘Too Bright’.

‘Signs of Love’’s Wurlitzer opening is reminiscent of Semisonic, and offers the first chance for Simone Rubi to really push her melodic chorales. “Lovin’ each other ‘til the end of Summer / into the Fall under we find another way / to stay inside our hearts” sings Rubi, with the kind of elegance that Morcheeba made an easy career from.

With a synth opening that Duran Duran could have relaunched with, lead single ‘I Feel Electric’ is made for a nightclub scene from an edgy independent drama (think Juno or the Sugar Rush TV series). A multiminded song, it ebbs, flows and glides its way through four and a half disco-tinged minutes with alarming invention and creativity, although sounding like a Casio keyboard’s workout demo song once it settles in the middle eight.

Second single ‘Stand In A Line’ opens sounding like it was tailor-made for an Orange ad with summery streetscapes and gently syncopated beats, and then flirting with funky hip-hop before detouring into the slap bass identikit R&B you’d hear in a mental image of a Topshop. “Did you notice your mind’s on fire?” asks Rubi during the hip-hop phase of this awkwardly adolescent opus – awkward in the sense that the song seems to take on phases just as arbitrarily as your average teen.

Elsewhere, ‘Turquoise’ opens with groggy plucking and settles into a sunburnt bop suspiciously like Bell x1’s ‘The Money’ before discovering gospel at the end with blaring saxophone and searing vocal backup, while the closing couple of Silver Mornings (conjuring images of tamely driving down a straight country road with nothing to amuse on either side and only one tape for the stereo. “This is what it’s like when it’s lonesome at night”, eh? Too right) and The Truth and the Lies bring the album to a muted close.  On the latter in particular, coming after eight songs desperate for a strum, when it comes it’s misspent on lazy, Feist-y (sic) oozing without direction. If you were to play the album coming in at 4am, this one would lead to a steady slumber.

‘Explode from the Center’ is a work of real promise but is ultimately crippled by its comfort in its own skin and the absence of a desire to reach out and engage. A good album in that it’s open for engagement, but not a great one without offering it in return.

Album review: Paris Hilton – Paris

Review Snapshot: Self-styled new era icon and soon-to-be-more-minted hotel heiress throws money at a childhood fantasy, hires decent producers and produces an album that the money men will love and everyone else will just go ‘nyeh’ to.

The Cluas Verdict: 6.5 out of 10.

Full Review:
Within the first nine seconds of her eponymous debut (God help us, is she planning more?), Paris Hilton moans, groans a ‘yeah’, drops a clich? ‘that’s hot’ and blathers a shout-out to her producer. Immediately the panic alarms sound. Surely a genuine artist wouldn’t indulge every hip-hop stereotype within the first ten seconds of their recording career? Such is Hilton’s telling choice. What follows in the next forty minutes is – gulp – really not all that bad though.

Hilton’s music career is very obviously an vanity project; the fantasised birthday present of any Hollywood teen ?erprincess, but because she’s basically minted beyond belief, she can buy the best talent that non-dirty money can buy. The result is a mixed bag; a conclusion that while you might need some talent to put an album together, the reality is that anyone can make a good collection if they’ve enough money to rent enough expertise.

Opener “Turn It Up” is, aside from the aforementioned 10-second cringe-o-rama, a reasonable offering. Big league knob-twiddler Scott Storch (of 50 Cent and Beyonc? works his magic and interweaves some cheerleader vocals into an RnB grunk that genuinely fits with an archetypical midweek night out. The following “Fightin’ Over Me”, while cringey in the extreme with blatant renting of ego diesel in Jadakiss and Fat Joe, is a memorable lump too. Again Storch does his job to perfection, keeping a drum ‘n’ piano roll to perfect impact while Paris does little more than whisper about how lads fight over her because “I’m hot to death and so, so, so sexy.” Moving on.

“Stars Are Blind”, the lead single, sounds like a Fatboy Slim remix of a UB40 back catalogue. Hilton’s “kittenish” (copyright, her media people – perhaps ‘fragile’ would be a better reading) vocals are used only on backing aaaahs while a surprisingly more accomplished and wholesome voice shines through on main lyrical duties. You can’t help but chuckle at “I can make it nice and naughty“, says she who’s known to half the Western world for being in an internet sex video as much as for being a TV star or model.

Rattling onwards, Jonathan Rotem (Rhianna) engineers excellent string samples and a song-making siren into the likeable and impedingly radio-friendly “I Want You”. “Jealousy”, meanwhile, has a baffling string intro before launching into a bitchfest against on/off TV partner and best pal Nicole Richie who is “no longer the girl I once knew” and who will “never walk a day in my shoes“, before finishing with a vocalised where-did-it-all-go-wrong olive branch. For a song to do with ego problems, though, it’s a genuine case of stone-throwing by people in glasshouses.

“Heartbeat” is a short, minimalist ode to? whoever she’s currently going out with. The idea is that she can feel the other half of her heartbeat lying there with her. “The way you do me”, though, is probably enough to prompt a fast-forward. “Nothing In This World” was undoubtedly written for Kelly Clarkson – and lo and behold, was written by the same Dr Luke who penned “Since You’ve Been Gone”. The result, inevitably, is upbeat lite-band material that has still been tailored to pack an egotistical punch (“I can do what she can do so much better“). “Screwed” follows in the same rocky mould, Hilton delivering something sounding like a Pink/Steps duet.

“Not Leaving Without You” does exactly what it says on the tin and isn’t much to talk about, other than to note that the RnB openings of the album seem completely lost in the flow of more listenable disco rock. “Turn You On” that follows then seems remarkably out of place as a return to the earlier stuff that pumps self-image as much as a dancefloor. If only, if only, she hadn’t finished by tearing apart Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” with kittenish (except this time read ‘crap’) vocals and left it dripping with ego juice. Arrrrrgh! It might be a recommendable album if it didn’t leave such a rancid aftertaste. Close, but no post-coital cigar.

Culture Shock #11 – in which our hero says goodbye… three months early

Sob. I can’t believe it’s come to this so soon. It doesn’t seem like nine months since I first strolled into the Observer office for a visit and left having agreed to write a column about my tales of Erasmus in Germany… but here we are, coming to the end of Semester 2, in the last issue of the year, and I’m already sending my final missive on life abroad.

I say ‘end of Semester 2’: what I forgettably mentioned long ago is that German academia doesn’t quite run parallel to the Irish equivalent. The first semester runs from October to February; the second from April to July with exams in August. Hence, strangely enough, this and the previous two columns haven’t in fact been written from Germany at all, but from various spots around UCD and Greater Dublin. So my apologies for misleading you since last month: it hasn’t really been Culture Shock but rather the less appetising Culture Abandonment. Sorry about that.

Erasmus is a concept both simple and strange; it throws you into the most unusual of situations, slams you into wonderlands unknown and stamps on your personality with challenges that either copperfasten your character or break you down altogether. It would be amiss of me to unashamedly declare that the entire experience (so far at least) has been wonderful; there’ve been times where I was inches away from handing in my keys and booking a flight home. But similarly there have been moments, gliding on trains to Munich and lounging on a bench at the Danube, and memories to go with them, that I wouldn’t change for the world.

Before I finish I want to put on record, to Carla, Clem, Sandy and Neil, my Passau buddies, for keeping me on the rails when I veer to one side; to The Girl at home for keeping me going when home seems so far away (you know who you are!), to Stephen, Michelle, Zelda, and all at o2 for having me; and to those of you reading now and over the year: a heartfelt and sincere danke schön.

Erasmus is an experience that will change your life. Don’t dismiss it out of hand; but don’t feel compelled to delve into it looking for excitement either. To those who’ve never thought about it, run for Class Rep. Get involved in a society. Write for the college papers. UCD is a wild and wonderful place: it gives to you exactly what you put into it. It’s the one thing about my life that I regret least, and even though by the time you read this I’ll be back in the Vaterland, I don’t need to go abroad to know, sitting in April sunshine on Baggot St, that there’s just no place like home.

So thank you all for reading, and see you next year.

Auf wiedersehen,
Gav

Culture Shock #10 – in which our hero gets stared at. Loads.

When you’ve never properly lived outside Ireland before, moving abroad will always be a daunting experience. One has to worry about accommodation, food, company, often the language… I really could go on. Throw in having to attend a University that works on a completely different modular system than the one being introduced at home and things become very, very complicated. So once one gets one’s head around the many individual issues that rear their varied heads in the adopted country, you’d think the rest would be reasonably plain sailing. And – to be honest – it pretty much is. Except there’s another thing about the Germans that most people would find pretty disconcerting.

Germans (or native Bavarians at least, though a trip to Berlin was no different), you see, can’t just immediately absorb any outsiders in the same way that the Irish, in this era of European inter-cultural mingling have graciously(!) learned to. Germans, instead, when hearing a language that isn’t their own, or seeing someone who doesn’t share their same uniform fairish skin tone, stare. And don’t just glance before turning back. They stare, scarily.

There aren’t many experiences that an Erasmus student in Bavaria can possibly come across that might give them the illusion of fame; but then again, there can’t be many other places in the world where five freckled Irish kids speaking English as they board a train carriage would cause anybody within earshot to immediately spring up out of their seat and stare at the people just boarded until they themselves found seats together and sat down again. Sometimes it’s humbling, as we convince ourselves they’re standing up to honour our presence in their picturesque province; more often, though, we see it for the truth: Bavaria’s a bit like South Park, and anyone else that takes a sejour there simply wants to take their jobs.

Even in pubs (of the still smoky variety – when German health ministers met last month to discuss a smoking ban, an escape clause was left for the beer tents of Bavaria. Assume to yourself that I cursed under my newly-wheezing breath) – well, in every pub except the local Irish one, of the type run by a Welshman – when five people walk in speaking the language of the Imperialists (that’s English, by the way) everyone stops to watch us. When we sit down in the college and people see the ILTG labels on our Quinn School laptops, people even stare at the labels, for fear of having them jump out and insult their society. Or something.

Apparently when the founding fathers of the USA were deciding the basic foundations of their Union and decided on things like decimalised currency, German only lost the ballot for national language by a single vote. Strange how one person could have changed my year so much.

bis nächste Mal,
Gav

Culture Shock #9 – in which our hero is glad he doesn’t write for the Universitäter Beobachter

How many of you knew that the World Cup Final was on the same day as the Superbowl this month? Better yet, how many of you knew who was playing, and who won? Or where it was held? No? No idea? Come on, you lot. Get with the times. Everyone in Germany knows where the World Cup was on, and who was playing, and who won.

Of course, the sport was Olympic Handball, and of course the Germans know the answers to all of these questions: it was held in Cologne …in Germany, the final was played between Poland …and Germany, and the winners were …Germany. This is the same weekend that more people were in Croke Park to see someone flip a light-switch than there were in Dolphin Stadium, Miami to watch the Colts destroy the Bears. Seriously, no word of a lie: there were 28,000 people in the K�lner City Hall to watch Germany, who up ‘til a week previously were nothing special, beat Poland in a thrilling 29:24 contest.

It’s not a matter of national pride, though, that every German knew the tournament was happening at home, or that the national team had made the final. Rather, it was because once something gets good in Germany, the entire press hop on the bandwagon – and once it gets bad, the press are the first to bemoan. Almost every paper in Germany is a yellow press tabloid; indeed, the biggest-selling is Bild – pretty much The Sun only in broadsheet format, almost entirely graphical (the title literally means ‘Picture’) – which sells 3.8m copies a day. To put this in context, the nearest competitor is the broadsheet S�ddeutsche Zeitung with 1.1m daily sales. Such is the completely populist tabloid nature of Bild that it was initially modelled on the Daily Mirror but quickly outdid it. To illustrate, today’s front page story on Bild: Paris Hilton came as the date of a pension-drawing entrepreneur to a hoteliers’ ball in Vienna. Scandal.

Regular readers – all six of you – will recall that I said I was going to a Fratellis gig in Munich. I won’t bore you with the gig; but on the way there was an abandoned Bild in the carriage which I read for amusement. The chief sports story of the day – mindbogglingly, a German paper carries no stories whatsoever about the Six Nations – but rather about Ottmar Hizfeld’s reappointment as Bayern Munich coach, and detailed his entire day when he was appointed (starting with breakfast at the Four Seasons, etc). But the one thing that the piece featured – something you’d never even find in British tabloids – was, no kidding, the model and registration number of Hitzfeld’s Audi A6. Do it in Britain and you get a court order; do it in Germany and you sell four million copies a day.

So on that appropriate note, my credit card details are… oh no, I’ve run out of space. Better luck next time?

Ciao,
Gav