THE66POW: Birmingham City 0 v Reading 2

Saturday 28th August 2017
SkyBet EFLChampionship
at St. Andrews Stadium
Birmingham City (0) 0
Reading (0) 2
Jon Dadi Bodvarsson 60, George Evans 85
Admission £25. Programme £3.
Attendance 19,993 inc. 895 from Reading

Birmingham City:

Stockdale, Grounds (Davis, 78), Roberts, Kieftenbeld, Bramall, Ndoye (Jutkiewicz, h/t), Gallagher, Maghoma, Jenkinson (Nsue, 32), Morrison, Gleeson.

Unused subs - Kuszczak, Shotton, Gardner, Harding.

Reading:

Mannone, Gunter, Van den Berg (Evans, 69), McShane, Moore, Barrow (McCleary, 70), Bacuna, Llori, Bodvarsson (Smith, 87), Blackett, Kelly.

Unused subs - Jaakkola, Clement, Popa, Andresson.

A mixed bag of results in the Championship thus far for these two teams, saw Harry Redknapp's Blues start the day in 16th place, with Jaap Stam's Royals tucked in just behind in 18th; both on four points and having scored just three goals apiece, in their opening four games.
A low scoring draw looked like the most likely outcome before kick off, but by the 85th minute there was only going to be one winner here at St Andrew's... and they came from Berkshire.
Last night, Aston Villa leapfrogged City and Reading in the Championship table, when Steve Bruce's side picked up a point at Bristol City, courtesy of a Tottenham Hotspur loan player, Josh Onomah, scoring the equaliser from a deflected shot, after Jamie Paterson had put the Robins ahead.

Blues goalkeeping coach, Kevin Hitchcock (ex Mansfield Town)
warms up Blues keeper, David Stockdale (ex Worksop Town)

Last Friday night, after Birmingham had effectively surrendered a half time lead at Burton Albion and lost a televised match 2-1, Redknapp spared nobody with his post-match rant/analysis and made no bones about levelling criticism at a number of his under performing players and upped the ante in his search for new signings, as a matter of urgency.
I watched the game from a very precarious vantage point, astride a wobbly bar-stool, at a holiday (Stalag) camp in northernmost Northumberland, sans any commentary and surrounded by swarms of
marauding kids, charging around the place, completely out of control and bereft of even a modicum of parental control, psyched up to the max on a lethal combination of E numbers and fizzy pop, performing a modern day re-enactment of the 'Charge of the Light Brigade' in premises that was laughingly called a 'Family Fun Bar'.

I left when three kids from Peterlee, who had acquired a box of matches, wheeled a cannon in, and as a consequence, missed lip reading Redkanapp's post match press conference, which is reproduced here, in full, for your benefit and mine.
“We’re in a great position to win the game, no problems, we’re in control; they come out second half, change the system, they go 4-4-2 and we lost it”
“Suddenly four or five of them disappeared and I didn’t see them second half. We didn’t win any battles and it’s not good enough.
“I have to keep coming on and saying nice things. People say: ‘Don’t say anything bad’. Listen, what am I supposed to say? People are not stupid. People see the second half, it’s not good enough.
“You don’t go 25 games and win two of the 25 with virtually the same team.
“Nobody can say: ‘OK lads, I’ll sprinkle stardust on you, you’re a new lot of boys this year, forget that you ruined Zola last year, this year we’re going to be different’.

Hmm... he was making perfect sense as well, until that last sentence.
Dwelling on the past, even the recent past; especially when pontificating on the subject of Blues managers, spilled over the periphery of most people's boredom threshold ages ago.
And while I insist that nobody should try denying that City were crap at times, in fact many times,
over the course of last season.
But let's not ever lose sight of the fact, that the main culprit for Gianfranco Zola's downfall, was Gianfranco Zola himself.
And his undoing was down to him persisting, for far too long, with a game plan that clearly didn't work at Championship (or any other) level, whereas passing the ball to death is never going to achieve results when you play width ways across the pitch, instead of length ways up and down it. Nuff said and subject closed, forever as far as I am concerned.
In midweek, when Blues also lost 2-1 after being ahead at half time again, this time against Premier League side AFC Bournemouth in the League Cup, 'Our 'Arry' was far more enthusiastic about his team's performance, citing the opening 45 minutes as: "the best half we have played since I came here" and proclaiming that his side were excellent and unfortunate not to win.

After today's calamity for the home team at St. Andrews, in which they fielded six of their seven new signings from the off, an increasingly dejected looking Birmingham manager spoke of the line up he turned out against the Royals as being "nowhere near the side I'm trying to build" and lamented that: "the owners have made the cash available, but it's been difficult getting the deals done".
As the clock ticks down infuriating quickly towards the end of the transfer window, it's hard not to feel a certain amount of sympathy for Redknapp and his current plight, and needs to be remembered
that when Jeff Fortang wrote the song: "Some guys have all the luck", which has been recorded (and re-record many times over) by a plethora of different artists, his publishing company had told him to trim down the songs working title, from: "Some guys have all the luck, except Birmingham ****ing City!" to it's more commonly known truncated version.

But time stands still for no man, so, as the (self appointed) 'People's Poet' and 'Cockney Cowboy' Jimmy Pursey once said: "C'mon! C'Mon! Hurry up Harry come on!"
And, if it isn't the manager himself that is failing to squeeze the deals for several publicly named 'big' transfer targets over the line, then somebody connected to the worryingly anonymous 'powers that be' needs to get their finger out ASAP, or be held accountable for yet another season of frustration for a Blues manager, and sheer misery for their supporters.
Carl Jenkinson, who arrived from Arsenal in midweek, on a season long loan, looked to be a quite a large step in the right direction, but he suffered a dislocated shoulder this afternoon, just twenty minutes into his Blues debut and will be out of action for a long time as a consequence.
It would seem, that in spite of former manager Barry Fry infamously ('pissing about') trying to remove an alleged Gypsy curse, that as hexed St Andrews for many a year (since 1906, to be precise), the bad vibes are still hanging around the place, to this very day.

"We're going down the pub!"

For the record, another former City manager, Ron Saunders had crucifixes attached to the floodlight pylons in a bid to rid the ground of it's aura of evil and foreboding; and as recently as last year, a local businessman and die-hard Bluenose, John Baines, an upholsterer by trade, re-covered the seats in the Birmingham dugout, with fabric that he claimed an Irish priest had sprinkled with holy water.
In their very next game, Birmingham beat Sheffield Wednesday, which was apparently held forth as evidence that the ground had now been cleansed.
But let's not be taken in by such a folly...I mean, FFS, who hasn't ever beaten the Owls?
Such an occurrence is commonplace enough, throughout the national game, most weekends.

"We're going down the pub!"

To add some flesh to the bones of this most fascinating tale, that some of you may well be dismissing as space filling hocus pocus, conveniently appearing on this blog as a means of putting off, for as long as possible, relating just how poor today's game was... and moreover, how crap Birmingham played; we need to dig up the past and examine the some of the history pertaining the club and, in particular, the timeline of the grounds and venues that Blues have played at, since their formation in 1875.
When Blues were still called Small Heath Alliance, they played at a ground at Muntz Street, just off Coventry Road, and less than a mile from their present home; in the opposite direction from where McDonald's now stands along with that nightmare of an urban roundabout, that is the absolute bane of motorists and pedestrian football fans alike.

Note* If you are crossing the road here, the
directions to the hospital are for your benefit

I've had some spectacularly close near misses there, both on foot and while behind the wheel of a car,
and one direct hit. But the constraints of time dictate that I should skip recounting the details of that particular 'joviality'. But if you're the silly Oldham Athletic fan who ended up across the bonnet of my car late one afternoon, I still laugh out loud recalling your obvious pain and distress... in fact, I'm laughing at you right now. Ha, ha!
If you leave the ground at the Tilton End and turn left up Cattell Road then right down Arsenal Street, which is named after a former munitions factory site, rather than the North London football team of the same name, you can probably reach Muntz Street more quickly, but you'll need Google maps to help you with that.
Besides, this is a football blog, not the bleedin' Geography Channel.

"We're (still) going down the (aptly named) pub (reprise"

As the club outgrew the modest sized enclosure on Muntz Street, it was decided to move to their present home in 1906, which was the site of a former Brickworks, surrounded by Cattell Road, Coventry Road, Tilton Road, Garrison Lane and the railway, standing close to St Andrew's church. By this time they were now called Birmingham FC, before finally adopting their current day moniker of Birmingham City FC in 1943.
As an aside, prior to playing at Muntz Street, Small Heath Alliance had also played at Arthur Street, in the Bordesley Green area of the city, that is next to Small Heath itself and Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook.
The building of St Andrews, would, as legend as it, necessitate the removal of a Romany community who were occupying the area, which is where the ill feeling towards the football club and subsequent curse originates from.

Certainly this up and coming team, suffered some kind of strange reversal of fortunes, as they were relegated to the Second Division, almost immediately after moving into their new ground and suffered the ignominy of having to reapply for their membership of the then two tiered Football League set up in 1908.
Moving swiftly on to 1941, Adolf Hitler obviously recognised that Birmingham City posed a big threat to the overall plan to make 'Dem Germans' a supremacist master race in both European and world Football, and St Andrew's suffered 20 direct hits from Luftwaffe bombing as a consequence,
destroying the Kop roof (on the very side of the ground that today's THE66POW pictures were taken from) and causing extensive damage to the Railway End, which is now called the Gil Merrick stand and is where the Reading fans were sitting today.

For the record, because I know you're all bristling with intrigue and want to know more about the footballer AKA 'Me Birmingham City':
Gil Merrick was a goalkeeper, who won 23 England caps and set a club record of 551 appearances in all senior competitions while playing for City, including the FA Cup Final of 1956, which Birmingham City lost against Manchester City.
Merrick began his international career in England's 2-0 win against Ireland at Villa Park in a Home International Championship tournament in 1951 and played his last game for his country three years later, when he represented England at the 1954 World Cup.

When England lost 3-6 and 1-7, in two very famous matches, against Ferenc Puskas and the 'Mighty Magyars' of Hungary, in 1953 and 1954, Merrick was in goal for both of those games.
After retiring from playing, he then went on to become the reserves manager at St Andrews and subsequently took charge of the first team, where he led Blues to their first major honour, when they lifted the League Cup in 1962-63, after a 3-1 two legged final win, on aggregate against, Aston Villa.
A year later however, at the end of the 1963-64 season, when Blues finished one place above the relegated teams in the (old) First Division, the club 'invited' him to, or rather 'requested' that he should resign.
Sadly the Sparkhill born Blues legend, passed away in 2010, aged 88.
His biography written by Keith Dixon, is well worth tracking down.

Mr Hitler (legend has it, he only had a single testicle) got many, many things wrong and was obviously a stark raving madman, but the seeds that he had set to harvest football dominance on a global scale eventually bore fruit.
In spite of Birmingham City having to play elsewhere for the remainder of the Second World War hostilities, the FA surprisingly chose St Andrew's as the venue for a wartime international match between England and Wales, after a British spy had intercepted a phone call from the Fuhrer himself to Hermann Göring (the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe), where he had (allegedly) said: "Listen here Hermann the German, these Blues frighten the pants off me, but the England team will never win a sausage, not unless the damn Ruskies are ever allowed to become match officials in World Cup finals. And as for those Welsh sheep fornicators! Don't even get me started. So we won't interfere with this trivial matter of an international match"

Apparently Göring went on to ask the crazy Austrian short-arse (he (Hitler) wasn't actually German, tall, blond haired, nor blue eyed), if his airborne Wehrmacht should switch their tactics in the second city and concentrate their efforts on Villa Park, the home of Aston Villa, on the outskirts of Birmingham instead.
To which Hitler was heard to laugh out loud and reply: "No, no, Jesus wept you big dumbkopf. They are unimportant, irrelevant even, and fall some way behind Blues, the Baggies, Wolves, Walsall and possibly even Paget Rangers and Solihull Moors, in the West Midlands pecking order of things. But out of sympathy to their lowly disposition, I will see to it that one of our future football stars shall be named after them... and we shall call him Stefan Kuntz!"
England won the game against the Welsh 2-1, on 25th October 1941, in front of an all ticket and strictly limited crowd of 25,000, but you probably knew that already.

However, in spite of the apparent Nazi seize fire, three months after the England v Wales game, the Main Stand at St Andrews, which was being used as a temporary National Fire Service station, was raised to the ground and burned down, completely destroying the club's records and all their other equipment, when a fireman mistook a bucket of petrol for water when attempting to damp down a brazier.
Obviously fire brigade training was far more rudimentary in those days.
As a quick aside, illustrating why 'Heil Hitler Klop' felt emasculated by the threat posed by BCFC on a world stage, take note:
When people talk about British, English and Scottish teams, and their pioneering exploits in European competition, they always go on (and on, and on) aggrandising Celtic's Lisbon Lions, or Manchester United beating Benfica at Wembley.

But the real trail blazers to this end, were in fact, Birmingham City, who were the first ever English club side to take part in European competition, over a decade before either of those aforementioned games apparently 'set the ball rolling for future generations'.
Blues played their first ever fixture in the inaugural Inter-Cities Fairs Cup as long ago as 1956, when they went on to lose to Barcelona (after a replay) in the semi-final.
And they were also the first UK side to reach a European final, when they lost against Barcelona in the 1960 Fairs Cup final, and a year later, they were also defeated by Roma in the next final (more evidence that the Roma-ny curse really does exist, some might say).

Recently commissioned research, has made claims that no travelling community was ever evicted from the St Andrews site, and says that no documented evidence exists.
However, it is improbable that anybody living a Gypsy type lifestyle one hundred and eleven years ago, would have a filing cabinet full of paperwork in their caravan, or even a website or blog, or digital camera to record important events and data on.
And FFS, the WiFi signal at the ground on match days is still a bit hit and miss in 2017, so imagine what it must have been like back in 1906, when they still only had dial up internet connection, which required a permanent address and fixed phone line socket to use. Not very many caravans had such luxuries in them there olden days.
And remember, the researcher conveniently forgot that all of the club paperwork had perished in the blaze back in 1941.
Personally, I reckon that there must have been a curse, because there is no way that any club with as much potential as Birmingham City, with a stadium that stands in such a densely populated city, have simply underachieved and been decidedly average, for over 140 years, is there?
Although eventS (non events even) on the field of play this afternoon might suggest otherwise.

I have undertaken extensive and meticulously detailed studies, into the histories of quite a few clubs,
aligned with the most fascinating subject of current and former football grounds and their origins, often finding that sometimes you can dig too deeply through vast piles of old newspaper footage and spend too long trawling through library resources, when the real clues were right underneath your nose all along.
So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel duty bound to end all of the preponderance and speculation and hereby present to you, the actual, factual, definitive proof, that there had been a travellers camp on Cattell Road:
On June 16th 1906, a Mr Seamus O'Toole, of nofixed abode, whose location app was displaying 'Toys R Us car park, near Cattell Road, B9', while using his Twitter handle of @CaravanMan06,
with a hashtag of #Romanylivesmatter, posted the following:

"Sad time tonight to be sure, to be sure. We are heading off towards Dover, to invade some unspoilt green belt land in Kent, because the council have asked us to feck off so they can build a football ground and possibly a Morrison's supermarket as well, sometime in the future. Please leave all your white goods, old bicycles, radiators and metal bedsteads out for us to collect en route. Thx"
Now before any of you pedantic swines tell me that I just made that up, because you can only use a maximum of 140 characters on Twitter; that restriction didn't come in until 1947, in a vainglorious attempt to prolong mobile phone battery lifewhen post World war Two rationing was still in effect.
And might I just add, if you are ever experiencing a bad connection problem near the ground, go over the road to the Toys R Us car park and experience for yourself just how good the 4G signal is there... you can apologise and thank me for providing you with this very useful tip later.

So anyway folks, you can look the other way now if you don't want to know the score, because

having run out of a myriad of circuitous tangents to zoom away off topic into the distance on, and having exhausted the abundance of historical anecdotes and fascinating tales of yore and times gone by, that I have provided this evening, to both enlighten you and feed your curiosity, and having circumnavigated a whole solar system's worth of diverse routes to manoeuvre (the long way) around,

to vaingloriously avoid touching upon the subject of how painfully bad this game actually was to watch; sadly the moment has arrived to spill the beans.

What an ugly approximation of the game of football this was.

And when I say ugly, I don't just mean rough looking, I mean hideous!

Don't tell me that aesthetics are subjective, you all know the truth when you see it.

Did I actually dream that Mr Zola had phucked off and there was going to be the dawning of a new era at St Andrews?

Because what I sat through today was just as bad, if not worse, than anything that I saw at a Blues game at any time last season.

Having seen a lot of speculative reportage about incoming players at City, experienced lads of the calibre of John Terry, Ashley Cole and Robbie Keane; you will have to excuse me, for stating the bloody obvious here; but aren't they all getting on a bit?

Would any of them still have the legs to compete for a whole league campaign, especially when the pitches start to get heavy, as the onset of winter takes hold?

What kind of salary would such players expect to be picking up... and does anybody actually believe that such an outlay genuinely represents good value for money, in the long run?

Would any of them actually be joining the club because they really wanted to play for Blues, or am I right in suspecting that all they would be doing is pulling the shirt on for one last crack at topping up

their own, or even their pet dogs, offshore tax avoidance bank accounts.

You couldn't blame any of them for having such motives, because; face facts: footballers aren't loyal to clubs and vice versa, and lets not even try to kid ourselves that such a statement isn't exactly 100% accurate and true.
But investing in the future, should surely be the way forward, shouldn't it?

Of course all teams need to strike a balance and wily old pros passing on a few tricks of the trade, won't ever harm any up and coming players, who can play alongside the 'elders', who have been around a bit, as part of their own learning curve.

But my worst fear, as regards Birmingham City, was that Mr Redknapp was all but on the verge of assembling a very close approximation, of what could be called: "Harry's Celebrity All Stars XI"

But Redknapp, the oldest manager in the top four divisions, at 70 years of age, has a far more vast knowledge of the workings of the game than I ever will have, so let's show the guy the level of respect his longevity and survival rate warrants and a large portion of benefit of the doubt, that he is going to pull a rabbit (or two), out of the hat any time soon.

I genuinely hope he succeeds where many others have tried, only to be thwarted by frustration, misfortune and the burden of a history book on the shelf, that keeps on repeating itself.

Hey look! I just waffled on and deviated away from today's match report again.

Right, before it starts to look as though I had forgotten that there were two teams here today: Introducing: Reading!

A well organised and hard working side, drilled in the ancient art of defending, by one of the best foreign players ever to grace these shores, Jaap Stam.

Masters at running down the clock, whenever they're given even the slightest and minuscule opportunity to do so. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say that they cheated to this end, but by heck, they certainly utilised each and every precious moment of time they could.

The Royals, or Biscuitmen if you prefer, arrived in the West Midlands with a game plan, soaked up most of Blues had in their locker, even though that didn't actually amount to very much, frustrated and suffocated (not literally you understand) their opposition, by closing down any room to create passing and movement in the last third, they won just about every 50/50 challenge by being quicker than City to attack the ball and always looking more focused and alert. And they won the game by virtue of two well taken goals.

408 issues and still telling it like it is.

I won't win any friends in Birmingham for saying this, but Reading looked far more clued up, streetwise and appeared to want it more. Far, far more.

Blues for their part, had chosen to play at a trot, rather than a gallop or even a canter and though it pains me to say it, showed a complete lack of urgency, until it was too late to salvage anything out of this game of strategy.

You have to wonder about the psyche of some of the home side's players, here they were playing in front of large, loyal, vocal, partisan, but ultimately very patient crowd and they look to be suffering from some sort of psychological lock, that is scrambling the necessary communication channels, between their brains and their feet.

A lack of confidence and self belief was evident in a few cases... and if you go out onto the field in that frame of mind, you're already halfway beat and of virtually no use or help to the rest of your teammates. Any chain is only as strong as it's weakest link and will fall to bits fairly quickly if two or three of it's components lose their shape and open themselves up to being worked on.

The forthcoming international break as come exactly at the right time for Redknapp, because he can now concentrate his energies on widening his search for new players and interacting with his players on the training pitch, to get inside their heads and point them in the right direction.

Opposition sides, like let's say for example: Reading, will pick up on clues like: crestfallen body language, dropped heads and frustrated niggling between teammates and punish the apparent disunity that this kind of behaviour displays. And, in a nutshell that is what they did.

After the game, on the walk back to New Street, a frustrated Blues fan asked of me: "Go on then, you can usually find something upbeat and constructive to say, what do you make of that pile of crap today!?"

It took me a while to provide an answer (of sorts) and I doubt if it cheered him up any, when I feebly offered: "Well, you've got to take heart from the fact, that although they were very poor today, it is highly unlikely that they could actually play that badly again... isn't it?"

It was a rhetorical question on my part. Of course they can!

BTW, here is the detailed match report that you have all been waiting so patiently for, from the official Birmingham City website... Blues match report

And here is the Reading website version... Reading match report