No more exasperation

OLAS 467 October 25th 2009

It’s not often that I get inspiration for my OLAS column from my day to day work as a primary school teacher, but education has been on the front page of the news lately. A huge head of steam is building up around the demand to dump the SATs tests for 7 and 11 year olds that, for several years now, have been getting parents agitated and teachers tearing their hair out (and we don’t all have much to start with). These high stakes tests prevent our children from simply gaining pleasure from learning, from thinking, discovering, and imagining, without fear of failure or excessive pressure.

My union, the NUT, and the Headteachers’ union, the NAHT, are about to run an indicative ballot of their members to take forward the campaign to boycott the tests and hopefully put them where they belong, with lots of other failed “educational” ideas, in the dustbin of history. And if you get rid of the tests then you also get rid of the hated league tables. You only have to glance at the main arguments against league tables and to substitute a couple of words here and there to see how closely they apply to West Ham’s predicament.

1. Schools/football teams that are lowly ranked lose confidence and it is really hard to throw off the label of being a poor school/crap team. If everyone goes round telling you at every opportunity that you are shit, and you read headlines in your local paper that say the same, it isn’t long before you believe it yourself. Though, to be fair, in Jonathan Spector’s case it is both fair comment and true.

2. When you name and shame schools/football teams which don’t perform well against a narrow set of tests (winning games), it makes it harder for these schools/teams to improve because teachers and students/quality players not crap cast-offs, won’t want to go there.

3. When your ranking of schools/football teams is based on narrow test scores (how many games they win) it means that other subjects (how you play the beautiful game, the clever dummies, back-heels, nutmegs etc) get neglected and kids don’t get a rounded education (fans get less pleasure).

4. League tables don’t show the value you have added (by making the most of having fuck-all resources and building an exciting team with young inexperienced players). Instead, they treat every school/football team as if you are starting each year on a level playing field - as if we ever start the season on the same basis as the likes of Manure and Chelski.

5. And finally - and this is the thing that really gets my goat about the school league tables more than anything – maths is seriously not my best subject but I know enough about statistics to realise something that our dumbcluck politicians on all sides don’t get at all: that if you put schools/football teams in a league table, then someone has to come bottom. What’s more, half the schools/football teams, however well they do in circumstances that can be very taxing, and often with pitiful resources (they all went down with the Icelandic banks), will end up in the bottom half. That’s as inevitable as night follows day.

The other thing that gets my goat is when people get their metaphors mixed up and say: “Now the thing that really gets right up my goat…” I just don’t want to know, or have to think about, what gets right up your goat.

OK, let’s leave the goats on the backburner. Now, if you are like me, and you don’t like looking at the league table, since it just resembles a map of England with Man U right up there in the North and West Ham way down South with just Portsmouth further south, then why not sign up to my campaign against league tables? If you do you will never have to feel depressed or exasperated again this season.

Because depressed and exasperated must be what so many fans, and Zola as well, must be feeling. We had a golden opportunity to turn it around against Fulham last time here at Upton Park. Cole headed an excellent goal on 15 minutes from Daimanti’s top delivery. We made the chances to score more but didn’t take them. Nevertheless, as the first half wore on, our dominance became more and more established. Fulham did not really look up for it and when they had a player sent off just before the break, I know I wasn’t alone in honestly feeling at half-time that we were likely to win by two or three goals. A win here would have been so welcome. it would have lifted us out of the danger zone while condemning one of our rivals to that position instead. More selfishly I had put a small wager on with William Hill for a 2-0 correct score and at half-time I was already thinking how I would spend my winnings.

But then came the disastrous restart. Upson only needed to stand his ground on the edge of the penalty area but instead he needlessly pushed a player who was not in a threatening position, presenting a hopeless-looking Fulham team with a penalty and a chance to recover. Ten minutes later Greenie was all over the place at a corner, Fulham scored the softest of goals and we were suddenly chasing the game against a revitalised 10-man team. The psychological impact was immediate. Our morale went through the floor while Fulham’s lifted enormously, and we were lucky to scrape a point thanks to Junior Stan (and a deflection of a defender).

I would love to be wrong but I have a sneaking feeling that we will look back on that game at the end of the season as one we should have secured maximum points from to save us.

In know in my last column I avoided the “must-win game” cliché and suggested instead that the crucial thing was to not lose, but I hardly expected the game to be so patently in our hands at half-time. When the final whistle went I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I think I just let out a peculiar groaning sound. We may have not lost, we may have secured a point, but it felt like a crushing defeat.

A win would have given us confidence before our trip to Stoke, who are always a hard team to beat, though results against them in recent years have largely gone our way. We can moan about the Upson incident and how we should have had a penalty but at the end of the day we were let down less by the referee than by the failings of a midfield player unable to play like a right back. Faubert has generally improved this season, especially going forward and can deliver dangerous crosses, but we need someone who can defend as well. He was badly at fault with both goals. So what do we do next week? Put in Jonathan Spector? Against Arsenal? fuck no.

Above all we were let down by the financial movers and shakers at the club who knew that they had to take decisive action to ensure we started the season with a recognised right back, but did nothing except further deplete our defensive cover.

What was most disturbing against Stoke is that, apart from having Parker suspended and Dyer missing again (and again and again) we were playing with pretty much our strongest squad. This is it until January – and who knows what happens then? Stoke are hardly world-beaters and if that is all we can offer against them, then how will we fare when we play proper teams – like, well today, when we entertain the Arse who are scoring more freely that someone going on a weekend tour of Amsterdam coffee-shops?

Much as I love to see Arsehole Whinger getting a strop when things go wrong, I can’t see anything other than a heavy defeat for us today, even if we play well. The gap in class, confidence, movement and imagination is too large, even if we play with more consistency and concentration than we have until now. And if we don’t like the look of last week’s league table, the one at the end of today’s game may appear even less pretty. Portsmouth put on a spirited display against the Spuds last week and are a good bet to turn over Hull this weekend which could leave us propping up the rest of the table.

And talking of spirited displays – congratulations to Ginger Pele on his first goal for Villa against Chelsea and to George McCartney in helping Sunderland get one over Liverpool. Things must be getting seriously bad here when I’m having to scrape around so much in search of positives that I’m resorting to basking in the reflected glory of players that have long since left us.

Still, help may be at hand. The news that an alternative Hammers-supporting consortium to Messrs Porn Merchant and Shyster may be on the horizon, and will provide funds for the January transfer window, is the boost that we all need. Let’s hope that it is not media hot-air but real, and still a possibility by the time this is printed. Last year Zola did a fantastic job at protecting the players from the backroom disasters with his overwhelming positivity. This year, though, the players look as if they know only too well the gravity of the situation and it is weighing down on them. It is also weighing down on Zola, who clearly had been lied to about how bad things were financially and must be sorely tempted to walk away.

So I have no expectations from today. If we get anything, that will be a fantastic bonus and I’ll spend the week laughing my plums off. Just keep it all in perspective. Our fate this season will not be decided today. How we do when we are away to Hull and home to Burnley in November, away to Birmingham and Bolton and at home to Portsmouth in December, will be far more important than anything that happens on the pitch this afternoon. So enjoy the game and close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears when Arsenal get near our penalty box.

I’ll leave you with the West Ham SATs test before they and the league tables get dumped:

1. Which event is more likely to happen – Gordon Brown lays an egg or Keiron Dyer plays two games in a row?
2. In which century did a director of West Ham last tell fans the truth about the club’s financial position?
3. What is the point of Scott Duxbury?