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Jimmy Hill on the Box
For the serious football fan and
Sky Sport subscriber, one of the great pleasures of a Sunday morning
is the opportunity to tune in to Jimmy Hill’s Sunday Supplement.
The formula is simple and very effective.
Every week, under the skilful chairmanship of Brian Woolnough, two
of the country’s top journalists join Jimmy ‘in the
kitchen’ to discuss material that’s topical and right
on the button - including transfer news, the latest football rumours,
England football, the Premiership, managers, players, moves, headlines,
highlights, odds, predictions…
Catch the show and the chances are
it will quickly become a regular habit - and when that happens,
you’ll be surprised how many outstanding football journalists
we have these days, how well they know the game and how easily they’ve
made the transition to television. You’re likely to be impressed
and entertained too by the diversity of characters – among
them the urbane Patrick Collins, the pugnacious Steve Curry and
the expansively witty Martin Samuel.
There is, of course, a price to
pay. Dear old Jim can never resist hauling himself up onto one of
his soap boxes. We need ex-professional players to become referees.
There are too many foreigners in our game – and that’s
why we aren’t producing enough good English players, or managers.
We haven’t got a left-sided player to play up front in the
England team. Worse still, we haven’t got a ‘number
nine’.
That last one is the biggest and
most boring box of all and you can feel Jimmy’s guests cringe
when he ritually climbs up on it. Apparently, there’s some
unwritten law in football that stipulates that you can have any
formation you like, but if you want to succeed it must include a
‘number nine’. By which, so far as we can tell, Jim
means a traditional centre forward – a big tall geezer who
can ‘win things in the air’, ‘hold the ball up’,
‘bring others into play’ and ‘get goals’.
A new Alan Shearer perhaps. Or, perish the thought, an English version
of Didier Drogba.
Leaving aside the fact that the
Laws of the game do not actually insist upon a ‘number nine’
of the type Jim favours, there are other important considerations.
Do we have such a player? If we do, who is he – the lanky
Peter Crouch, that good old workhorse Emile Heskey, or…? And
more important, do we really need such a player to succeed –
especially when we have players of the calibre of Michael Owen and
Wayne Rooney? It’s worth pointing out that in recent years,
Brazil and France seem to have managed OK and at club level so have
others, among them Arsenal and Real Madrid.
It might be argued that the ‘number
nine’ may already be an endangered species. Unlike Jimmy Hill
of course.
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