Jamie Vardy is the Premier League top scorer – so why the lack of recognition?
Stuart James – The Guardian
Trawl through the Premier League’s leading scorers – or, to be more specific, a list of 25 players who have registered three goals or more this season – and there are only five Englishmen. Saido Berahino, Raheem Sterling and Nathan Redmond have scored four times, Callum Wilson, whose campaign has been cruelly wrecked by injury, has five to his name, and then there is the man who is not only flying the flag for his country but also leaving Sergio Agüero, Alexis Sánchez and the rest of the Premier League in his wake. Jamie Vardy, take a bow.
Vardy has plundered nine in as many appearances, three more than anyone else, and if the Leicester City striker gets another goal against Crystal Palace on Saturday, he will join a select band by becoming only the sixth player in the last 20 years – Ruud van Nistelrooy, Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry, Emmanuel Adebayor and Daniel Sturridge are the others – to score in seven successive Premier League fixtures.
Whether Vardy is getting the praise and credit he deserves for blazing such a trail at the start of this campaign is another matter. Roy Hodgson thinks extremely highly of Vardy, with the England manager surprising many by calling him up at the end of last season and giving him four caps between now and then, but wider recognition seems harder to come by, so much so that Vardy could be forgiven for thinking how different it would be if one of the Premier League’s A-listers had scored at a similar rate at the start of this term.
It will certainly be interesting to see who picks up October’s Premier League player of the month award. September’s went to Anthony Martial, the French teenager who made a big impression for Manchester United after scoring on his debut against Liverpool before adding another two against Southampton. Interestingly, however, United’s supporters did not deem Martial worthy of winning the award at club level and instead voted for Juan Mata. Vardy, for the record, scored four in three fixtures across the same period, including two against Arsenal.
It is the nature of the media beast that the spotlight shines brightest on the biggest clubs and the sexiest names, whether that be Chelsea trying to emerge from a crisis, Sterling scoring the first hat-trick of his senior career or Jürgen Klopp enjoying a pint of Stella Artois, and it is perhaps also true that in an age when domestic football is a global product, a wiry former factory worker from Sheffield may not be everyone’s cup of tea on the other side of the world.
Those close to Vardy talk about “club snobbery” and wonder whether it counts against the striker that, as well as playing for an unfashionable Premier League team – albeit one that is thriving and where he is extremely happy – the 28-year-old goes under the radar because he is a product of the non-league football pyramid, rather than a teenage prodigy that spent 10,000 hours in an elite academy.
Others may not be falling over themselves to get excited about Vardy’s goalscoring exploits because of off-the-field matters, notably the incident in a casino when he made a racist remark to another gambler, whom he called a “Jap” during an argument. Vardy deeply regrets the whole episode and has publicly apologised for his behaviour, which breached the Football Association’s code of conduct for England players, and he has also met and said sorry to the person he abused.
Leicester and England stood by him and nobody can dispute the fact that Vardy has stayed true to his promise to let his feet do the talking from now on. Beyond the deluge of goals, which have arrived at an average of one every 89 minutes this season, Vardy has had more shots on target (30) than any other Premier League striker, created more chances (15) and made more tackles (13). Indeed Sánchez is the only player in the top flight to have touched the ball on more occasions (one more, to be exact) in the opposition box than Vardy.
An aggressive runner who never gives defenders any peace, Vardy is much more than a predator who comes to life in the penalty area, and Leicester have reaped the rewards of playing to his strengths. He is a constant menace and thrives in a team that presses high up the pitch, acting as Leicester’s first defender when they are without the ball and, by playing on the last man’s shoulder, the focal point of their attack once in possession.
His transformation from this season to last, when he came good towards the end but scored only once in his first 24 Premier League appearances, has been startling and there are several factors behind the turnaround. Chief among them is the fact that Vardy has flourished since being used as an out-and-out striker, rather than deployed out wide, which is where he often found himself in the first half of last season under and also the role that Hodgson had in mind when he started him wide on the left in the Euro 2016 qualifier against Lithuania last week.
Vardy had his moments on the flank last season, most memorably in what he describes as the game of his life, when he ran Manchester United ragged in that extraordinary 5-3 victory at the King Power Stadium 13 months ago, but he is not a winger and never will be. Playing him through the middle leaves the opposition much more exposed to his pace and allows Vardy to have a far greater influence on the game (it is, of course, one thing to command that role for Leicester and quite another with England).
As well as the positional shift, Leicester’s staff point to the way Vardy has worked on refining his finishing skills by recognising the importance of placement over power at times – his brilliant opening goal against Arsenal this season was a case in point – and in doing so acknowledge the part that Kevin Phillips, the club’s former first-team coach who has since moved onto Derby County, played in that process.
Last but by no means least is confidence, which Vardy admitted is “oozing” after his second-half brace at Southampton on Saturday salvaged a point. Vardy, clearly, is not going to keep scoring at the same rate – at least that is what Claudio Ranieri, Leicester’s manager, said before the Southampton game – and it is tempting to think that the real test for him will come when the goals dry up for a few matches and we see how a player who is enjoying only his second season of Premier League football responds.
Yet those who have closely followed Vardy on a remarkable journey that started with Stocksbridge Park Steels in the Evo-Stik Northern Premier League will point – with some justification – to his position at the top of the Premier League goalscoring charts and his place in the England squad, and argue that he has long since answered all the questions that have been asked of him
Britain clings to its bombing addiction withtheweary rationale of a junkie
Frankie Boyle-The Guardian
In every addiction, a part of us is addicted to the process. Laying out the cigarette papers to build the joint; heating the spoon and flicking the syringe; dealing with our emails before our DMs; cueing up Netflix for when the kids go to sleep; methodically polishing the keys to our own prisons.
Britain seems to be going through the preliminaries associated with one of its most cherished addictions: bombing. Bombing Syria has probably only been postponed by Russia’s intervention. It was, of course, amusing to see the western press suddenly preoccupied about whether bombs were hitting their intended targets. Perhaps Putin should have avoided such rigorous international scrutiny by bombing only hospitals.
The recent immolation of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan presented us with the internal contradiction of our media’s presentation of bombing: that we have technology so precise our weapons can hear their victims begging for a trial, and that we sometimes blow up stuff “accidentally”. It has been suggested that non-white people caught up in our foreign wars are “unpersons reported”. More accurately, they are treated as subpersons. A handful of Afghans dying could make the front pages, but only if they were strangled one by one by Beyoncé as the half-time entertainment at the Super Bowl.
Historically, Syria has existed as a place where outsiders come to fight, a bit like Wetherspoon’s. No one likes Assad: he has the surprised appearance of a man who has just swallowed his own chin, and a bizarre, faint, fluffy moustache, as if he pulled on a cashmere turtleneck just after eating a toffee apple. He has created a hell for his own people that British teenagers seem eager to go to and fight in, just to give you some idea of how shit Leeds is.
But if their desire to go to Syria is deluded, how is our government’s any less so? A government that doesn’t believe it should have any responsibility for regulating our banks or even delivering our post thinks it needs to be a key player in, of all things, the Syrian civil war. Somehow, the plight of this strategically significant state has touched their hearts. Britain is so concerned about refugees that it will do anything – except take in refugees – to try to kill its way to a peaceful solution.
Why is war more palatable than more refugees? Why is the destruction of lives you can’t see easier to live with than someone on your bus making a phone call in a language you don’t understand? The idea that war is for Queen and country has always struck me as bizarre. It must be hard for the British royal family to see who we choose to fight against – I can imagine they were as baffled when we went after the Nazis as they are now that we disapprove of the ritualistic murder of journalists.
So, which of a variety of awful groups is Britain going to side with? We have all the options of a 39-year-old woman whose Tinder app has given her only one match: Broadmoor.
Of course, there are no guarantees that airstrikes in support of rebel groups will work. It’s simply uncharted territory for Cameron, with only the fact that he did exactly the same thing recently in Libya and caused an unmitigated disaster that turned the country in to a kind of jihadi Mad Max to provide any kind of guide. Perhaps we believe the myth that bombing helps because we think bombing beat the Nazis. That was a win, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s not as if we now live in a Europe controlled by the Germans or a country where the poor are restricted from breeding and disabled people are dying as a result of forced labour.
We cling to our dependency with the weary rationale of any addict. The addiction is simple; giving up is complicated. It’s a tricky old situation when you get down to it. Our key allies are the people funding the jihad that we are supposedly trying to stop. We want to stand against Islamic State while having a cosy relationship with other Islamic tyrannies. The tiresome thing about social democratic allies is that they don’t usually need to gun down their own people in any significant numbers, and we don’t make our money exporting ballot papers. Bombing is simple. It’s what we’ve prepared for. As the old saying goes, when all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a foreigner you can beat to death with a hammer.
Yes, recovery is difficult, but that’s because it’s a return to reality, in all its beautiful complexity. The ability to act unilaterally and the ability to create solutions for difficult situations with multiple actors are mutually exclusive. The very idea of unilateral action is probably a post-imperial hangover. If we wanted to get well as a society, we would end up like anyone in recovery: sitting around a table talking, having awkward conversations and making compromises. Instead, a few months from now, we’ll be dealing with the kind of horror that is unleashed when British MPs are told they can vote with their consciences.
School is not a rehearsal for life. It’s the real thing
Tim Lott – The Guardian
Our establishment doesn’t have much time for the church – all that whining about refugees and such – but it does worship the gods of Hard Work, Discipline and Academic Attainment with a faith that is, if not spiritual, then patently blind.
That faith was evident yesterday when schools minister Nick Gibbresponded to a request that school heads be given more discretion over how much time could be given off to individual children during term time.
Gibb was unbending. No leeway could be given. A single week off school, he insisted, could damage your chances of a successful career for life. We could not afford to give headteachers discretion – presumably in case they were too soft. Children must turn up to school whatever the circumstances – maybe a day for a funeral here and there might be permissible, thanks, but no moping about grieving.
Setting aside the typical control-freakery and micromanagement of this policy, of course parents cannot be allowed to disappear with their children whenever they feel like it. This is why we have headteachers who should be able to decide individual cases on individual circumstances.
Last week father Jon Platt had his £120 fine overturned by a magistrate. He’d taken his children on holiday with 17 other family members the only week they could manage it – during term time. Good for him – for this focuses the issue precisely. What is more important to a child – the chance to get to know their far-flung family, or another week doing sums and finger paintings (his daughter is only seven years old)? The answer is a no-brainer to me. But to Gradgrind Gibb it’s heresy.
For other parents, requests for taking time off in term time may be on economic grounds – they can’t afford the prices of holidays otherwise. Yet, inconvenient though it may be for teachers, this too seems a reasonable basis for bending the rules in individual cases. Why should the poor suffer while the rich can either afford to pay for a break within the official holiday period, or pay the fine easily?
The well-off seem to be the only ones who can afford to be concerned about the broader goals of education. The new headmaster of Eton College, Simon Henderson, said this week: “The whole point of school is to prepare young people for happiness and success in their personal lives and working lives … there’s more awareness of emotional intelligence and of mental health.” Meanwhile, the private Cheltenham Ladies’ College has introduced meditation classes, and reduced homework demands out of much the same philosophy.
It seems that it’s only the poor who need to keep their noses to the grindstone day in day out, lest they bunk off or become slothful. Children may suffer mental illness as a result, since such incidences among schoolchildren are increasing.
I am not being a cheerleader for the anything-goes 1970s (I went to a grammar school, like Gibb himself). I can see things from the point of view of the school administration – it’s inconvenient to have children drop out of school for holidays in term time. However, flexible working is well established in the private sector now – why not in the arena of public education?
I have myself witnessed – through my four daughters over the last 20 years – the hardening of attitudes. My first two went to a profoundly happy inner-city state school where the headteacher was a lovable eccentric who was extremely kind, flexible and tolerant. Gibb would unquestionably have judged her attitude “lax”. Yet even today they talk about how wonderful that school was, and the pleasure and richness they got from attending it. If the head’s flexibility did them any harm I have yet to see the evidence.
But now we must keep the clamps on, lest the working classes get idle and the GDP suffers. School, even primary school, is no longer a way of rounding out a whole personality: it’s just a way of feeding the economic machine.
I don’t want my children to be food. I want them to be fed – and something more nutritious, hopefully, than a harsh, narrow ideology dressed up as “common sense”.
Thomas Gradgrind finally realised that “facts” weren’t enough when his own daughter, Louisa, had an emotional breakdown. Since Nick Gibb doesn’t have any children himself, this is not a fate he needs to personally contemplate. In the absence of such a blessing, he needs other qualities that his fictional forebear was sorely lacking – imagination, empathy and the understanding that school years aren’t merely training for life in the workplace. They are life.
What if the Chinese were to ‘raise human rights’ with us?