About John Guillem

Though half British, half Catalan-Mexican, football was somehow a late arrival in John's life. While as a child he dallied with Liverpool and Manchester United (mostly via the medium of football stickers) and Barcelona (the team of half of his family), he today supports Arsenal after finally deciding upon the Gunners as a fully-formed, adult human male.

This Blessed Plot (or: Meanwhile, in England)

TFN’s resident academic John Guillem dissects Roy Hodgson’s England. Set your brows to high! 

The accelerated qualities of the contemporary mediascape make international football something of an oddity. The cliché runs that international football, in spite of the best efforts of FIFA to reduce it to the same robotic fare as club football, remains something of a bastion for the core values of the game: passion, unpredictability, honour; a certain sense of pride connecting to the sport’s working class roots.

FIFA are obviously reprehensible types of the most reptilian of bents, but in spite of the unsavoury commerciality of the World Cup and other tournaments1 some of the above rings true, if only incidentally. The relative lack of cohesion and preparation compared to club football lends the scrappier proceedings a romantic aura, whilst the lower quantity of games (particularly when you factor in the fact that there are many fans who only show an interest in tournament, playoff and crunch qualifying games) means that upsets appear to possess greater magnitude and resonance than a domestic cup upset. Continue reading

Podcast: Episode 10 – Elko comes to London

The False Nine podcast is back, with new regular guest Elko Born joining Greg Johnson, James Dutton and Francis to talk England, Wayne Rooney, Netherlands after van Gaal and the transfer window.

As you may be able to tell from the “atmosphere” during the recording, the pod took place at The Candid Cafe in Angel. Be sure to swing by for some cake and a coffee next time you’re in the area.

Listen on iTunes.

The False Nine World Cup Review Preview Of Brazil 2014: Part 3—Germany ’06

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TFN regulars James Dutton and Francis Gene-Rowe join host Greg Johnson to review the last four World Cups ahead of Brazil 2014, continuing with Germany 2006.

A new podcast reviewing a different tournament will be uploaded each day up until the opening day of fixtures at Brazil 2014 on Thursday June 12.

The False Nine World Cup Review Preview Of Brazil 2014: Part 2—Japan & South Korea ’02

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TFN regulars James Dutton and Francis Gene-Rowe join host Greg Johnson to review the last four World Cups ahead of Brazil 2014, continuing with Japan and South Korea in 2002.

A new podcast reviewing a different tournament will be uploaded each day up until the opening day of fixtures at Brazil 2014 on Thursday June 12.

The False Nine World Cup Review Preview Of Brazil 2014: Part 1—France ’98

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TFN regulars James Dutton and Francis Gene-Row join host Greg Johnson to review the last four World Cups ahead of Brazil 2014, starting with France ’98.

A new podcast reviewing a different tournament will be uploaded each day up until the opening day of fixtures at Brazil 2014 on Thursday June 12.

Andre Santos – Arsenal’s cuddly maverick who loved fish and chips

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John Guillem looks back on one Andre Santos’ time in England…

‘Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.’

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht

There are certain sad moments in our lives where the congenial veneer of our world peels back a little, revealing a brief, harrowing glimpse of limitation. All too often it is a realisation of transience or mortality: the moment when you can see white hairs on your mother’s head (or is it just that she can’t be bothered to dye anymore?), when your old form teacher retires, when the first creaks in the beloved sports pro’s game emerge.

In football, we tend not to encounter such moments of bathos, as everything is slathered with a thick layer of drama and hyperbole. Things are always one way or another, often both at the same time or interchanging so rapidly as to create a resonance effect: grey areas are scarce. Surprises are always hugely surprising or something we knew all along … so it’s surprising that I was surprised in just that way I mentioned before (the one about death and all that – that is, an unsurprising but nonetheless very much a surprise surprise) some eleven months ago, with a mildly but not hugely surprising individual at the centre of it all: Andre Santos.

The news in question was just a scrap of transfer gossip (arising, as they tend to, in a manner which is entirely logical if you work back to first principles, and as such is likely to have been made up by some journo, and unlikely to ever happen): given Nacho Monreal’s signing for Arsenal, and the fact that the Turkish transfer window was still open (he played there before, you know!), inevitably Andre would be moving out sharpish, Kieran Gibb’s six week plus injury notwithstanding.

Leaving that piece of bollocks aside for a moment, the simple realisation which accompanied it was that his days were very clearly numbered at Arsenal. In many ways, this was already pretty obvious (given that he plays like a horny bumblebee, only lacking much sting), but the gossip-giblet shifted my relationship to it from the cognitive realm to the emotional one – I realised that old uncle Andre wouldn’t be in the team again come summerfall, whether he would spend years on loan like Denilson or does us a favour and bugger off the wage bill (which – thankfully I suppose– is what did happen). He is, to return to the life and death bit, a gonner now, rather than a Gooner (if you’ll excuse the shitty pun). And now, indeed, he is gone. Continue reading