Aberdeen 3—3 Celtic (win on penalties after extra-time)

Aberdeen win the moral victory, but Celtic get to the Scottish Cup final after penalties. Bojan Miovski has a good scoring record against Celtic. He was at it again today. Two minutes in and he’s in behind the defence and scored. Game on.

We’d 88 minutes to retrieve the match. Yang missed an early chance, when he really should have scored with a back post header. He’d an awful match.

I’m not sure Kuhn on the other wing is much better. He did grab the equaliser. Kyogo had robbed Angus MacDonald just outside the Don’s box. His shot was blocked and Kuhn simply slid it into an empty net. We’d another seventy minutes to grab a winner.

Just after the hour mark a real winger came on. I used to slate James Forrest. Lately, (as in before the Old Firm game) I wanted him to start. Here’s the reason why. He came on, drifted in off the wing and bent a shot into the bottom corner of the net. He’d another few chances were he was unlucky. He did more in his cameo that our two other so-called wingers, before bizarrely getting taking off in extra-time of extra-time for  Maik Nawrocki to shore up an increasingly unreliable defence.

But his substitution had the opposite effect. Liam Scales has been on the slide recently. He wasn’t as awful as Yang, but most of the Aberdeen goals came down his side. Scales was also lucky to get away with a hand ball. Replays suggest it might have been outside the box, but it was marginal, on a day when everything Scales did seemed laboured.  

Not as lucky as Carter-Vickers, who looked to have given away a stonewall penalty. He clearly kicked Hoilett. Both luck and VAR came to Celtic’s rescue again. Carter-Vickers has had a great press and pundits are telling us how good he is. Not today. He did make a few blocks but Mivoski got the better of him for the first goal and, generally, got the better of him and Scales.

Aberdeen’s late and even later goals were identical. Substitute, Ester Sokler, headed in at the back post from a cross from fellow substitute Junior Hoilett on the 90th minute.

Sandwiched by a coolly taken Matt O’Riley strike high into the net in extra-time.

Junior Hoilett flung another cross into the back post where Scales et al were found wanting, and the Aberdeen captain, who’d gifted Celtic an equaliser in the opening minutes, scored on 120nd minute to make amends.

Penalties. We all know what happened next. Hart the hero and the villain. Hitting the post with a spot kick, but saving that crucial one that took us to the final.

My man of the match was James Forrest, which says it all. I think we’re fated to win the league but not the cup. I hope we win both, of course. Rangers implosion has been wonderful but there’s still work to be done. The joy of a cup final, but poor in defence, poor in midfield and missing lots of scoring opportunities doesn’t make good reading, but does make a good game for the neutral. I’m never that. Move onto the next game. Dundee away. Play like this and we’ll win nothing.

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Cheryl Strayed (2012) Wild: A Journey From Lost to Found.

I’d picked this book up and put it down several times. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild was nearer Lost than Found. I got it was some kind of travel journal. Cheryl Strayed had walked part of the Pacific Crest Trail that stretches from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border and goes through a lot of places I’ve little or no knowledge but might be vaguely interested in because of the naturalist John Muir (a fellow Scot and honorary American). That doesn’t sound interesting enough for a book.

But I was wrong. Strayed nails it, while walking most of the way and loosing six of her toenails in boots that are too small for her and carrying a backpack far too big for her called Monster.

She segues in and out of the life she had been living. Her mother had married her father when she was nineteen. He beat her and was a violent presence in their little lives, but they didn’t know that because they were children. Three children. How her mum found the courage to leave and find the cheapest apartments and worked as a waitress to live and somehow survive. They gained a stepfather along the way, Eddie, who broke his back. Then her mum got cancer and died, when she was 42.

Cheryl was 22. She was carrying a lot of grief on the trail. Grief for her marriage to a good man she’d fucked up, because she wasn’t mature enough yet to settle down. How her new man got her into smoking heroin. Then injecting. But she wasn’t a junkie. Not really. She was just trying to live. Trying new things. Joe went one way. She went another.

Her determination to walk the 1100 miles of the trail is dented on the first day. She can’t lift her pack. She needs to cross the ice and snow of the Sierra Madre. Where Humphrey Bogart cheated and got cheated by another fusty old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And she had to cross deserts and avoid stepping on rattlesnakes. But first she had to get the Monster on her back. She couldn’t do it. It was too heavy and cumbersome. Hiking hurt, even before it started to hurt.

‘I didn’t know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life,  but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.’

Strayed brings what it feels like to be alone in the world, but figuring out the costs of not being alone, of being someone she was not. She had to bury her mother, not in the ground but in remembering her as she was. Fully human. Fully alive. Read on.

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Storyville, Blue Bag Life (2022), BBC 4, BBCiPlayer, writer-director Lisa Selby and co-director Rebecca Lloyd-Evans, Alex Fry, Josie Cole.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001lspj/storyville-blue-bag-life

Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s appealing.

‘Disconnection is the only mothering I’ve ever known.’

‘At Primary School my nicknames were “Disease” and “Witch”. I was sure Helen gave me up because of some disease I had…I thought maybe she didn’t want to be called ‘Mum’ cause I was too dirty.’

Helen is Lisa’s mother. She left her when she was ten. Ran away with her lover and her dad brought Lisa up, a single parent. Usually, that’s the kind of thing men are good at.

Helen had six months to live when Lisa tracked her down to a filthy council house in London, where she stayed with her current—and much younger lover—her mother was unrepentant. In her fake furs, including a natty hat, with a can of Special Brew in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she explained it wasn’t really her fault. After Lisa’s birth, she had been sectioned in a psychiatric ward, which made her incapable of being a proper person, never mind a mother. Her love for drugs was stronger than her maternal instinct. She favoured opiates with a smattering of hallucinogenics. 

There was always a fag in her mouth, as there was in Lisa’s. Lisa met Elliot, her boyfriend, after attending an AA meeting. A self-proclaimed alcoholic, Elliot had also been addicted to heroin, like her mum.

‘Heroin was Helen’s favourite. Heroin was Elliot’s favourite.’

We know where this is going. ‘I was drawn to the dark things in life. But this was a different kind of dark,’ admits Lisa.

 ‘I’ve just found out that my mum is in a hospice. She has cancer. They won’t give her chemotherapy because she’s a heroin addict. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m filming this. It just makes me feel less alone.’

Who are you? What are you? You decide. If life was only that simple, it could be scripted and the chaos of fucked-up lives reigned in?

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Vasily Grossman (2010) The Road. Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.

I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate. It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population of around 54 000 were murdered by the Nazis outside their town. ‘Shoah with a gun’, Grossman termed it.

Ironically, Grossman would surely have followed the same fate by the Soviet authorities he served. Stalin’s Jewish purge after the so-called doctor’s plot was on its second wave, which would have swept him away if Stalin hadn’t died.

His article, The Hell of Treblinka, he termed ‘Shoah by gas’ was approved by Soviet authorities. He also wrote about the siege at Stalingrad being the turning point of The Great Patriotic War.  

His highly acclaimed short fiction, such as In the Town of Berdichev was admired by other Soviet writers such as Isaac Babel. And Babel appears in a later story, Mama. The latter was a kind of warning, not to get too close to those in power who are themselves purged as Babel was by the forerunners to the NKVD.

I was largely unmoved by Grossman’s fiction. I know I was meant to feel some kind of awe. The historical weight also added a kind of taken-for-granted consensus that this was great fiction. I get it that. I’m meant to like stories and plays like Anton Chekov’s The Lady and the Dog and The Cherry Orchard, but really they just bore me like something you had to revise for some exam I’ll never pass. Life is more than that as Grossman understood.

I prefer his essays and reports. The Hell of Treblinka, based on first-hand experience and second-hand reports to him from those that had been in Hell, was ahead of its time. It told how it is and how easily the world slipped into Fascism. For the moron’s moron Trump and his supporters, it sounds a familiar clarion call to hate and despise others based on eugenics and geography.

People became unpeopled. In the conveyor belt of Treblinka, they were robbed of citizenship, their home and their freedom. They were transported to a wilderness. Penned and squeezed into a station and robbed of their belongings, papers and photographs of loved ones. They were stripped naked and shaved. No one was sure what human hair was harvested for, but psychologically, it pushed them into compliance. Lined up in rows of five. Surrounded by barbed wire on ‘The Road of No Return’ with the black uniform of SS guards on one side and grey Wachmanner conscripts on the other. They were beaten with the butts of machine guns and rubber hoses. Alsatian dogs trained to attack the genitals were released. For the guards this was just another day. 20 000 to 60 000 unpeople were piling up and carriages shunted down the tracks were waiting to be brought for processing into the station. Schneller. Schneller.  

Grossman suggests that Stalingrad did not change the way—mostly—Jews were murdered, but how they processed the raw material, their bodies. Himmler himself visited Treblinka and had a look at the hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses covered over in pits. He ordered that they should be exhumed and burned. Germany and Germans who had participated in and committed these atrocities were no longer sure they would not be held to account. The un-people might be given a voice. Himmler’s strategy was to burn the evidence.

Some monsters were more monstrous than others. SS Sepp, for example, delighted in murdering small children.

‘Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.’

Others carried sabres and whips and heavy gas piping. They would fling children still alive to roast on death pits.

‘We hear of women trying to hide little babies in heaps of blankets and trying to shield them with their own bodies.’

Ironically, as an atheist, who disavowed his Jewish heritage, Grossman finds consolation in the image of hope in humanity of The Sistine Madonna. He avows it shows, although tortured and crucified, ‘what is human in him continued to exist’.

I hope it continues to exist in us, but I get less sure. Amen. Read on.    

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Celtic 3—0 Saint Mirren

Zach Hemming had little or nothing to do in the first-half. Celtic had two enforced changes from the team that started against Rangers. Liam Scales has picked up an injury. I’m not particularly worried. He’s been on a downward slide. Nawrocki gets his chance and did OKish. I am worried about Maeda. We saw his value at Ibrox. It’s not so much the work he does with the ball, but his closing down, in that sense he is irreplaceable.

Yang got the nod. He took the wrong choice with a chance in under sixty seconds. He could have shot, but chopped back. His form has been up and down as it was here. The same could be said for Kuhn. He’d a disastrous start to his Celtic career and then had a few assists. I’d have preferred Forrest at Ibrox and Forrest now, which tells you everything you need to know of what I think of our wingers. But Kuhn made a few tentative passes and you wonder if he should have shot instead.

Most of our goal-scoring opportunities came from the right wing. After giving away the penalty that wasn’t a penalty last week, Alistair Johnson had a man-of-the-match performance with a hand in our two goals.  

Reo Hatate from the edge of the box and an attempted nutmeg inside the box were one of the few other first-half chances. O’Riley a sidefooted shot but didn’t look like scoring.

But it was Hatate’s genius that opened the scoring. A pass from Johnston and inside the crowded box, the Japanese international pinged it into the top corner to open the scoring and the floodgates of relief in the 53rd minute.

 Much has been made of there being lots of rain over Dundee. No conspiracy. Just Scottish weather and bad groundkeeping. The assumption being, Dundee wanted to avoid defeat by employing a rain maker. Someone explain that to me. All our games are must-win now. We take it for granted that is going to happen. But I get nervous, pre-match. We’ve seen what happened this season and it’s not been good enough.  

We’ve had high winds over Paradise making it harder to judge passes. A twelfth man. With Saint Mirren and all other teams coming to sit in, including Rangers, we know what to expect. Long throws were their primary weapon. In the main we dealt well, with them. Carter-Vickers brings composure to our defence and allows us to pass from the back.  But corners present the same challenge. But Saint Mirren’s first, and only corner, didn’t come until the 89th minute and we were 3—0 up.  

Kyogo’s goal, fifteen minutes into the second-half, settled the game. Again it was Johnstone with the assist. A delightful ball over the top took out Gogic. Kyogo from almost inside the six-yard box headed home.

Celtic upped a gear. Greg Taylor, strangely reluctant to shoot, with Hemming saving awkwardly with his knees locked together. Yang getting into a muddle in front of goal, again.  Hatate’s effort swinging past the post.

Obviously a quiz question in later years, both teams made six substations. We weren’t really sure how that worked. Something about a head knock.

Adam Idah got a late goal in the 89th minute. Luis Palma should have scored but fluffed it. His rebounded shot hit by Paula Bernardo. The ball looped into the air and easily knocked over the line by the Norwich loanee. Every point counts. Every goal counts as we know from the recent past. We weren’t as ruthless as we could have been, but after a wind-strewn first-half, most everyone would have settled for a three goal, full-time lead. Let’s hope it doesn’t snow on Hampden next Saturday.

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Deborah Levy (2016) Hot Milk

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to walk. Sophie is her legs.

Sophie is the narrator. She has given up studying for an Phd in Anthropology to become her mother’s carer. She is making a study of her mother’s illness     

‘History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.’

Rose’s medical history is the art of clinging to belief and disbelief. Like Carl Sagan’s baloney test about the ‘fire breathing dragon in my garage’, her symptoms are tested by Dr Gomez, but for every physical test, Rose offers an alternative view of why it hasn’t worked. She clings to her illness. Her daughter’s part of the fallout.

A Greek tragedy, like her marriage was, but with hints of matricide and rebellion.  

Dr Gomez seems like a charlatan. A purveyor of false beliefs and miracle cures. Yet, he warns Sophie not to begin limping after her mother. He tells her mother’s symptoms are ‘spectral, like a ghost, they come and go. There are no physiological symptoms’.

Rose depends on Sophie. Sophie has become dependent on her mother. An unvirtuous circle in the hellish heat of the Spanish sun in which something has got to give. Read on.

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Real Madrid 3—3 Manchester City.

I’ve never been to Spain or the Santiago Bernabéu, the state-of-the art domed stadium, where the pitch is rolled out before the multimillionaire players warm up. I saw Real Madrid under the bright lights of Paradise in their white strips. Johnny Doyle (RIP) scored a double and we we went to the home of Real Madrid and got gubbed 3—0. Laurie Cunningham was the star of the show then. More recently, ‘Don’ Carlo Ancelotti came up against Ange ball and did that slightly patronising thing that all managers do of praising the unique atmosphere of Parkhead while grabbing the points. In the return leg the referee gave the Ancelloti’s  multimillion pound team two early penalties for nothing and they ran away with a 5—1 victory, without breaking sweat. Jota celebrated his late free kick as if he’d won the Champions League. Fat chance. These teams are in a different league entirely.

Brendan Rodgers in his first incarnation of saviour (before it all went wrong in a familiar way) did run Josep “Pep” Guardiola Sala close. 3—3 draw at Parkhead. Our previous with these teams is accepting our place in the football world. After the 3—3 draw with Ranger, Real Madrid go it with Champion League holders and favourites and draw 3—3.

I used to watch every and all football matches on the telly. Arsenal v Manchester City, for example, promised much but was a dreadfully boring game in which nothing much happens over 95 minutes.

With three goals in the first 15 minutes, this was much better and more entertaining. I’m not entirely sure what Jack Grealish is for. He seems to get rave reviews for not doing very much more than back-pedalling and falling over. I don’t think he went past the full-back all night. But in two minutes he bought a free kick. Bernardo Silva looked to cross it into the box. Instead, his 25-yard free-kick rounded what little wall there was and past goalkeeper Andriy Lunin, who was late to react, flapped as the ball passed him. Terrible defending and goalkeeping of the lowest order.

Manchester City played a big part in their downfall. Vinícius Júnior caused all kinds of chaos with simple balls played behind the City defence. Eduardo Camavinga’s deflected shot made it 1-1, Rúben Dias gifting an OG in 12 minutes and most improbable of all, Rodrygo giving Madrid the lead two minutes later. The stadium was bouncing as the Madrid turned it around.

Júnior had a big chance to make it 3—1 but hit the side netting after half time.

Phil Foden’s equaliser was a thing of beauty. With Kevin de Bruyne’s injury Foden had stepped into the number ten role behind the striker. I’ve seen lots of Erling Haaland recently. None of it has been good. Foden is a giant of the game, but here he too was dwarfed by the occasion. Mostly non-existent. But when Silva, City’s best player, created a space for Stones to make a pass to Foden on the edge of the box, he instinctively banged it in the top corner. Sixty-six minutes gone and there looked like City’s retention of the ball and overall superiority was going to pay off.

Five minutes later, City went ahead.  Gvardiol took a heavy touch from Grealish’s pass. The ball seemed to get away from him, but he hit in the top corner. It was a game of great goals.

Júnior’s cross looked like one of those floppy crazy things player hang up when they have ran out of ideas. Federico Valverde, who never scores goals, caught is sweet and smashed it into the bottom corner from the edge of the box as if he’d been practicing that move all night and this was the time to show it off.

3—3 with almost ten minutes to go.

Toni Kroos had been substituted for Luka Modrić. The German is touted as one of the best in the world. He did nothing of note.

Let’s talk about Luka Modrić. Phil Foden went off with an injury, but if he wants to play as the highest level he needs to do a Luka. We gave him a standing ovation when Madrid beat us at Parkhead. The little man created a goal and scored another. In this game he helped turn the tide. Shouting and gesturing. Give me the ball. You could see him pointing. There’s talk of him retired or being retired at the end of this season. Celtic should offer him a ten- year contract. We’ve had nothing like him since losing Ľubomír Moravčík. Martin O’Neil once famously said when we were being outnumbered and outgunned in a European tie, ‘give the ball to Lubo’.

Give the ball to Luka and good things will happen. Phil Foden, Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior, Erling Haaland, were pedestrian. Luka caught the eye. This man cannot retire at the end of the season. Nothing much has been decided in the tie. They go head to head next week. City should win. But you never know with Luka in the ranks. This is what a great in the game looks like.

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Rangers 3—3 Celtic.

On paper there seems certain symmetry. Both teams scored with a deflected goal. Both teams scored from the penalty spot. And a substitute scored for both teams. Rangers also had a ‘goal’ disallowed with the score 2—1 to Celtic and the ball brought back to near the half-way life for a clear foul on Iwatta after Dessiers thought he’d scored. Both teams if they win all their remaining fixtures will win the league.

Rangers were expected to win at home, and they didn’t. Rangers fans had little to shout about in the first-half. Fabio di Silva falling over a lot and a Connor Goldson header that came off his shoulder when he really should have scored.

Celtic were 1—0 in sixty seconds. A long ball in behind. Tavernier tried to clear as Daizen Maeda closed him down. The ball came off Maeda and into the net.

Rangers couldn’t string together two passes. Celtic dominated, but they were to get their half-time lead from a corner whipped into the box. Carter-Vickers and Liam Scales were first to react. Scales tried to get a toe poke onto the ball from three-yards, but Jack Butland smothered the ball. The England wannabe found himself lucky after Kyogo nearly nicked the ball off his toes twice, but he did make a decent-enough save from an O’Riley header the Celtic midfielder should have scored from.

VAR however brought the game back and showed Goldson clearly elbowing the ball in the six-yard box. Clear and obvious penalty. Matt O’Riley stepped up and delivered, scoring with one of those chips down the middle I hate.

Kyogo had a few shots on goal and ghosted in a few times. Hatate got a shot away. A few efforts on goals that could have led to the crucial third. A two goal lead is more often enough, but when Rangers get one back at home anything can happen.

Brendan Rodgers claimed ‘the momentum of the game of the game was changed with the penalty’ which clearly wasn’t a penalty. Ten minutes into the second-half, with Rangers winning more of the ball, without looking very threating, Fabio Silva went down again. It was inside the box. John Beaton booked him for simulation. The correct decision. But he was sent to the monitor, the booking rescinded. It even seemed Celtic might be penalised twice. Once for a penalty that wasn’t a penalty. And for Alistair Johnston, who was on a booking to pick up another yellow, for letting Silva fall over him.

James Tavernier is good at penalties, and has had plenty of practice. He whipped it into the top corner, leaving Joe Hart with no chance. 2—1 seemed fragile.

Hugh Keevins talked about Celtic’s management being given a let-out clause because of refereeing incompetence in letting an eight-point lead ebb away. He’s right, of course, we shouldn’t have let a sub-standard Rangers team back into being favourites for the league. But when Beaton gets it wrong again today as he clearly did also at Tynecastle. Call is conspiracy theory, call it what you like. Celtic were in control of both games. That’s four points or more that incompetence or worse has denied us. Rangers are still in it, not through luck but help from officialdom.

Abdallah Sim hit the equaliser after a wicked deflection left Hart with no chance. McGregor was at fault here. The Celtic captain playing a ball across the midfield that failed to find his man, Yang, who was also poor in his response. And Rangers were flooding into the box. The ball deflected off the Celtic captain.

Adam Idah had come on and had an impact. He’d got in behind the Rangers defence a few times and set up his teammates. He thought he’s hit the winner two minutes after Sima’s deflected shot had brought them level. 88 minutes. He twisted and turned in the box and Connor Goldson could only watch as the ball went past Jack Butland.

Eight minutes added to the ninety. Rabbi Montondo swerved one into the far post, 93rd minute, with Alistair Johnston standing off him. Yang showing him inside and too easily beaten. An equaliser, of course, Phillipe Clement said his team deserved. The usual waffle about team spirt. Rangers are a poor team. I’m disappointed Celtic didn’t beat them today. But sometimes you’ve got to hold your hands up and say the officials gave a big helping hand. If both teams win the remaining fixtures, they’ll win the league. Celtic have Rangers at Paradise. We’ll dominate that game as usual. Whether that’s enough to win the league, I’d like to think so. It was a great point today for the home team. Not so great for us. Not disastrous either.

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