So long Iker

Iker Casillas has left Real Madrid. 25 years after joining them as a nine year old he’s moving on to join Porto in the Portuguese Primeira Liga. Having come up through Real’s youth system, won a total of 18 trophies including five league titles and three Champions Leagues, and been club captain since 2010, Casillas’ departure shows a ruthlessness from the club which probably shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has watched Real’s dealings for any period of time.

Casillas is widely agreed to be one of the best goalkeepers of the past 25 years. As well as the trophies he’s won with Real Madrid, he has also won multiple goalkeeping awards including the International Federation of Football History and Statistics World’s Best Goalkeeper award a record five times, been named in the UEFA Team of the Year every year between 2007 and 2012, and the FIFA FIFPro World XI every year from 2008 to 20012. He was also the captain of Spain as they began their domination of world football, winning their first European Championship for 44 years in 2008, then their first ever World Cup in 2010, and another European Championship in 2012. He has been a natural leader on the pitch for years.

However, the past couple of seasons have been rocky ones for Casillas. After winning the World’s Best Goalkeeper award again during the 2011-2012 season, Jose Mourinho did the seemingly unthinkable in December 2012 and dropped Casillas to the bench. This was the beginning of a series of reported disagreements between Mourinho and Casillas that marked the first stage on the road to the once untouchable Casillas’ exit from Real. The disagreements behind the scenes continued, even after Mourinho left the club to return to Chelsea, culminating in one of the club’s greatest ever servants now leaving.

Real are perhaps the biggest football club in the world. Rated the most valuable team in the world by Forbes magazine, ten times winners of the European Cup/Champions League, and constantly fighting for dominance over their hated rivals Barcelona. For the board, perfection is everything, and once anything seems to be getting in the way of that, it gets removed. Football fans have given up trying to guess what’s happening with the constant revolving door of managers arriving and departing just as quickly. Carlo Ancelotti, a world class coach who has won league titles in Italy, England and France was hired in 2013 and fired in 2015, despite leading Real to the tenth Champions League trophy the club had been desperate for.

Players are also moved on swiftly, even after years of service; Casillas is not the first of Real’s heroes to have left the club in less than happy circumstances. The striker Raul also came through as a youngster and spent 16 years as a club figurehead. One of my favourite ever players, he is still the club’s top scorer with 323, ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo. Raul is also still Real’s most capped player, and was captain from 2003 until he left in 2010. Like Casillas, Raul also began to suffer criticism from the fans and the board, and decided to leave a club where he had seemed part of the furniture. Fernando Hierro was a rock in defence for them from 1989 until 2003, when he was released on a free transfer with barely any fanfare, although he has now returned as part of the coaching staff.

Iker Casillas is still only 34, relatively middle-aged for a goalkeeper; with enough luck he could continue playing for the next six years. He and many others, including me, may have thought that he would be at Real until the end of his career, but somehow it never seems to end that way with this team. Real’s search for perfection will go on, leaving many football fans to ask, what will it take to satisfy a club that has won a record number of European Cups, a record 32 league titles and become the richest in the world?

The tribulations of being an Inter supporter

Sometimes its hard being an Inter fan. I still remember some of the wilderness years between 1990  and 2004, when we failed to win much of note, and the heartbreak of the loss to Lazio on the final day of the 2002 season when a win would have won us the league and we had been 2-1 up. Then came Calciopoli, and we won five straight Serie A titles, culminating in the league, Coppa Italia and Champions League treble in 2010. The Champions League win came on my birthday, and is something I never thought I'd see.

Since those heady days though, Inter have been on a big downward curve. Going back to the ways of not winning anything, and not qualifying for the Champions League since 2011. We've been struggling to get back amongst the big time for four years now, and this season seems like we'll miss out again.

On Sunday Inter lost to 1-0 to Torino, leaving us 10 points back from third place, and probably ending our chances of qualifying for the Champions League through the league for another season. I watched the Torino game with a sense of resignation; Inter controlled the match, but as I've seen a thousand times, couldn't capitalise and then conceded in the 94th minute.

Although it looks like third place, which was our objective at the start of the season, is already out of reach this early in the year, I'm not too disappointed. Roberto Mancini's return has me feeling optimistic for next season, even though I wanted Walter Mazzari to succeed, and I'm sorry he had to be fired. We've made some interesting signings this January in Lukas Podolski and Xherdan Shaqiri and I'm eager to see how they perform given some more time, and see how the whole team does under Mancini's tactics. The loss to Torino was our first in five games and there's been a new sense of positivity around the club and from the players.

So, I'm going to look at this season as a rebuilding season. The average age of the team  has been lowered and I'm hoping for good things from a team that can learn and grow. We went so long without winning anything until 2004 and winning the Champions League in 2010 was such an unexpected joy that I can wait a little longer to get back to the heights.

Tomorrow we play Sassuolo away, a match that I would hope Inter can win, but with Inter, who knows? Whatever happens though, I just want to see a good performance, and signs that things might improve next season. Forza Inter!

Do football fans resent the international break?

If you've spoken to many football fans this week, you may have found them drifting aimlessly, seemingly without direction. It’s the football international week, and there are many fans who are not happy about it.

It seems like in the past few years, each international week has been greeted with less and less enthusiasm by some fans, who see it as a disruption to the ‘proper’ football; football with club teams. There are a few reasons this might be the case.

Firstly, in many international weeks there aren't always big matches; matches with two top teams playing each other with a lot on the line. With the European Championships being expanded from having 16 teams to 24 teams for Euro 2016, more teams will qualify. This means that qualifying is not that exciting, particularly at the early stage of the process where we are now. England for example, in a qualifying group with Lithuania, Estonia, San Marino, Slovenia, and Switzerland, don’t exactly have a mountain to climb to qualify. With the first and second placed teams qualifying automatically from each group, plus the best third placed team, plus the rest of the third placed teams going into a playoff, not many of Europe’s top teams will be in danger of not making it to the finals. 

Another possible reason for the lack of enthusiasm is because international week breaks up the hustle and bustle of the season. Fans used to having several league matches to watch on the weekend, then Champions League and Europa League matches during the week, have to make do with just one or two televised international matches. In addition, Match of the Day, which is usually something to look forward to on Saturday and Sunday nights, is absent from the schedules.

UEFA, trying to freshen up the format, devised a new ‘Week of football’ idea, with qualifying matches taking place over several days over the international week from Thursday to Tuesday. To me however, so far this has just made it more confusing knowing when teams are playing. England played on Thursday and today, Sunday, whereas international matches used to be played on Fridays and Tuesdays.

International week can often seem like an inconvenience. It brings the league calendar, with its weekly drama, to a juddering stop. It is a necessary thing though in the end, to set up the big international tournaments every few years.  I'm a big fan of international games; I'm like a kid at Christmas when the World Cup or the European Championships are on. I guess, as with so many things, you just have to get through the boring parts to get to the good stuff.

Great Hip Hop Samples: Volume One

Hip Hop is built on sampling. Starting with the first DJs in the 1970s who took two records and mixed them together before getting a friend to rap over the beat, and continuing until today, hip hop beat makers have always looked at songs from other genres and thought, yeah, I'm going to take that and create something new with it.

Here are a few hip hop songs, and the songs they sampled.

Dr Carter/ Holy Thursday

Dr Carter is the sixth track from Lil’ Wayne’s 2008 ‘Tha Carter III’ album. It samples Holy Thursday, a song by composer David Axelrod, from his 1968 album ‘Song of Innocence’.

Holy Thursday sounds like Axelrod has brought a jazz orchestra together for a jam session, with several of the instruments getting an opportunity to do their own thing. Periods of richness and volume blended with more calm periods, and instruments come to the forefront, take some time in the spotlight, then recede into the background again. The song is very playful, and I can imagine how much fun the musicians would have had riffing off each other.

In Dr Carter Lil’ Wayne raps about the state of Hip Hop, seeing himself as the doctor who can cure what he thinks is wrong with the genre. 

The song strips Holy Thursday, taking out a large amount of the instruments to leave a skeleton for Lil’ Wayne’s lyrics. What remains is piano, the bass and drum beat, and the crescendo of strings and horns. Wayne builds his verses up through the calm parts, before using the crescendo to as his cue to end each verse. I really enjoy how he matched the playful beat with a playful, bouncy flow. I also like how he uses the calm parts of the song to talk to the ‘nurse’, before the drum beat kicks in again.

Through the Wire/Through the Fire

Through the Wire was Kanye West’s breakthrough single, and the song that introduced the world to him as a rapper. Released in 2003, it was the first single from his debut album ‘The College Dropout’. It samples Through the Fire by Chaka Khan, which was released in 1985, and is on her ‘I Feel For You’ album.

Through the Fire is a slow R&B power ballad. It’s very 80’s sounding, with big drums and synths showcasing Khan’s big voice. It also has a very 80’s guitar solo at 3.03.

The title of Through the Wire is a play on the fact that Kanye recorded his vocals for the song while his jaw was wired shut after he was in a serious car crash in 2002. The song is about the accident and its aftermath, when Kanye was in recovery.

The song takes Khan’s vocals from the chorus of Through the Fire and makes them higher pitched. Her vocals appear sporadically in the background of the verses at first, then get more regular towards the end of the verses, before turning into the chorus. 

I think Chaka Khan’s soaring vocals really fit well with Through the Wire, helping to add emotion to what is a song about triumphing over adversity. Kanye uses Chaka Khan's song about fighting through adversity for love to tell his story of fighting through adversity for success.

Machine Gun Funk/Chief Rocka

Machine Gun Funk is the fourth track from The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album ‘Ready to Die’, which was released in September 1994. Machine Gun Funk samples Chief Rocka, a song by Lords of the Underground, a hip hop trio who had some success in the early nineties. Chief Rocka was released in June 1993, from the album ‘Here Come the Lords’.

Chief Rocka was Lord of the Underground’s most successful single, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a fun song, with an excellent beat which showcases the Lord’s excellent flow and lyricism.

At 3.19 in Chief Rocka is the part of the song Machine Gun Funk samples. 

Machine Gun Funk builds its whole chorus out of just two lines from the Lord’s of the Underground’s song, lines which were no more important or significant than any others in the original song, showing how sampling can turn the smallest part of a song or a part you'd never think of into something new. 

Most Interesting Serie A Transfers of January 2013

The January transfer window closed last Thursday night with the usual fanfare. In Italy most teams have been pretty strapped for cash for a while, leaving them playing second fiddle to the English and Spanish top divisions, and now the new money upstarts of Eastern Europe. However, Italian teams still found enough money to make some intriguing moves in the transfer window, and here are some of the most interesting.

Mario Ballotelli to AC Milan

With Roberto Mancini finally giving up on trying to rein in the player he first discovered at Internazionale, Ballotelli has returned to Italy, to what is probably the club where he will have the best chance of finally achieving his potential. Ballotelli has always been a Milan fan, even when he was at Inter, and this should give him added motivation to want to do well. A potential front line of Ballotelli, El-Sharaawy, and the developing Mbaye Niang could be devastating, and I wouldn't bet against Ballotelli coming back to haunt Manchester City in the Champions League in the coming seasons.

Guiseppe Rossi to Fiorentina

Perhaps a gamble of a signing, Rossi has been out injured since October 2011, and isn't expected to be fit to play until the end of this season, or maybe even the beginning of next. In spite of this, if Fiorentina can get him fit again, they will have a very exciting player on their hands. In his last full season at Villareal in 2010-11, Rossi scored 32 goals in 56 appearances. He was also becoming first choice for Italy, whose manager, Cesare Prandelli had seen Rossi and Ballotelli as his front pairing. Fiorentina's gamble could pay off hugely if they can get him back to that kind of form, especially if they keep Stevan Jovetic, and manage to get them playing well together.

Mateo Kovacic to Internazionale

After finally ending the Wesley Sneijder saga with his transfer to Galatasaray, Inter have moved to replace him with a player who has been described as the new Luka Modric. Only 18 years old, so maybe one more for the future, Kovacic became the youngest goalscorer in the history of the Croatian top division at the age of 16 years and 198 days, was the youngest player ever to wear the Dinamo Zagreb captain's armband, and in scoring against Olympique Lyonnais in the Champions League group stage, became the second youngest ever scorer in the competition. It will be very interesting to see how he develops. 

Nicholas Anelka to Juventus

Juve have been searching for a striker for long time now. Despite their continuing dominance in the league, the one thing the team could be said to be missing is a 20+ goal a season striker. They were expected to make a big move in the summer but ended up having to settle for loaning Nicklas Bendtner, who now mostly warms their bench. With Fernando Llorente on his way on a free transfer in the summer, signing Anelka can possibly be seen as another attempt at a short term fix, although he will be out to prove he can still cut it at the top level.

Sickle Cell and Me

I was sick a couple of days ago, and I wanted to write about it because I've never really talked about it, but I've got an illness called Sickle Cell. Its not something I talk to people about much and I try not to think about it until I have to, when I get sick. Its not something you would notice about me if I didn't tell you, because most of the time its not an issue, but I've had it all my life.

Most people would never even have heard of it but Sickle Cell is a genetic illness that some people from certain regions of the world get. I'm not going to explain completely what it is here to save time, and because to be honest I'm not sure I understand it properly myself. There's a charity called the Sickle Cell Society that can explain it better than I ever could.

What it means for me is sometimes I get sick; maybe every few months I might start feeling a lot of pain (I mean a lot, it really, really hurts). A lot of the time this starts in the afternoon or evening, small at first, with only a bit of pain that I try to ignore and hope will go away. Sometimes it does go away, which is great! Sometimes it doesn't though and steadily just gets worse. When I was a kid, these episodes would lead to me having to go to hospital and stay there for anything from a few days to several weeks. Luckily I seem to be doing better now I'm older and a hospital visit hasn't happened for a long time.

It usually gets worse for me in the night when I'm trying to get to sleep. Because it hurts so much though, its really hard to get any sleep, and sometimes I end up not being able to sleep until the afternoon or evening of the next day. During those hours sleep is pretty much all I want, because I'm so tired and because it offers an escape from the pain.

Having Sickle Cell I get prescribed some pretty powerful pain pills for times like this and I find myself necking them to try and stop the pain. Sometimes they work first time, and sometimes I have to take a few doses over some hours. I can tell you there's nothing worse than having to wait another six hours to take more pills because the ones you just took haven't worked and you're still in a huge amount of pain. Luckily, one side effect of these pills is they make me feel sleepy, so that sometimes helps me get to sleep before the Sun comes up.

Getting sick usually means I have to stay in bed, and all I want to do is sleep. A lot of the time I can't even bring myself to eat, and I'll pretty much sleep all day and then all night as well, helped by the pain pills, or morphine if I'm in hospital. 

One thing about getting sick is it does give me some clarity, things that I would have been stressing over a couple of hours before don't seem that important when I just want to not be in pain any more. Also, perhaps because of all the pain pills, or maybe because of the euphoria of feeling better, I do feel amazingly zen when the pain starts to go away, like nothing that I've been stressing about could be that bad, which is one good side to the whole Sickle Cell thing.

So that's my relationship with Sickle Cell, its a part of me and my life, and its made me who I am today, but I don't let it define me.

6 Star Albums

Part 4: The Recession – Young Jeezy

The Recession is an album many British people would never have heard of before. Young Jeezy is a rapper who rarely appears in the British charts; at best many people might know him from collaborations with artists such as Usher on 'Love in This Club', and 'Hard' with Rihanna. However, this just means that many people are missing out on one of the best rappers around, and this album is his masterpiece.

The first song, the title track 'The Recession', captures the essence of the album. An intro of voices speak about the financial crisis then drop into one of the huge beats that is Young Jeezy's trademark. Using this beat Jeezy paints a portrait of the difficulties of trying to make ends meet, and as in much of his best work, blends dopeboy swagger with discussion of the worries of trying to make it from day to day. 

The next two songs 'Welcome Back' and 'By the Way' are standard street bangers, with Jeezy in thug mode talking about money and guns. However, track four, 'Crazy World', is where the album truly starts to get going. Another song that fits with the theme of struggling, it has a sense of frustration seen in the refrain "God damn another trap, I think Bush is trying to punish us", and lines such as "I want a new Bentley, my auntie need a kidney, and if I let her pass her children never will forgive me" mix rap aspiration with worries recognisable to anyone who's ever felt the weight of responsibility on their shoulders, in a bouncy, fast-paced song. The next track 'What They Want' is another bouncy track that I dare you to be able to stop yourself from moving to, as Jeezy slickly uses sport metaphors to describe his hustle game. Track six, 'Amazin', is another street anthem, with Jeezy flowing over a beat with awesome, almost subsonic bass. Things then slow down slightly with Track seven, 'Hustlaz Ambition', a more introspective song that again ties into the theme of the struggle, and sees Jeezy express his determination to be able to provide for his family and be a success.

The best songs on The Recession can be divided into two categories. In the first category are the fast paced street anthems such as 'Crazy World', 'What They Want', and 'Amazin'. The second category includes slower songs such as 'Hustlaz Ambition', track nine 'Don't Know You', track 12 'Vacation', and track 15 'Don't Do It'. These are songs where Young Jeezy is more thoughtful, and talks more about the darker side of hustling.

Other notable tracks on The Recession are 'Circulate', a song suited to these times of austerity and government cuts, sampling a Billy Paul song of the same name that is also well worth a listen. Also great are 'My President' featuring Nas, an ode to Barack Obama, who was to be elected soon after the album was released, and 'Put On', an anthem that was adopted by several sports teams to warm up crowds before games because of its riotous and infectious nature.

The Recession is a relatively unknown gem; an album that passed many people by, but that has all the things I love about hip-hop. It manages to be both fun and thoughtful,  and as a package of songs, works as well as any album I've ever heard, with its consistent themes, and flow from one track to the next. That's why its a 6 star album and one of my favourite albums ever.