Time to stop blaming the foreigners

As though we need to hear it again, BBC Sport leads today on study it commissioned into the amount of English footballers playing in the Premiership. It will inevitably be solid newspaper filler for the coming days, in place of those Euro 2008 wall charts we would be pinning up had, well, all number of things been done differently.

Many have argued England’s failure to reach Austria & Switzerland is due to this record low in domestic players, but there are certain facts that seem to be consistently omitted by those who further this point of view.

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Bon Iver, Noah and the Whale @ The Great Escape, Brighton

I managed to make it down to Brighton on Saturday for the last day of a new music festival called The Great Escape.

The festival was similar to the Camden Crawl, in that a ticket gave you access to any of the several venues which had acts performing over the three days. Brighton’s compact city centre made this very convenient, and of the 25 or so venues which were taking part, the majority were within about ten minutes walk of each other.

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British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?

Rock folklore has it that Win Butler spent three months following a British Sea Power tour around Canada before recording Arcade Fire’s debut. The influence of the Brighton based band on Funeral was almost tangible, but four years on they attract only a modest following while the Canadian troupe have become one of music’s hottest properties.

British Sea Power’s third LP, provocatively titled Do You Like Rock Music?, sees the debt repaid. Not only did the band travel to Canada to record several tracks, but even invited former Arcade Fire drummer Howard Bilerman to produce them

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The only Tory in the village

Last Thursday, an old flatmate of mine stood for the Conservatives in a ward of the Rhondda Cynon Taff borough, in the local elections.

RCT is in south Wales. It is very Welsh, and covers an area of valleys, small towns and disused coal mines. Everyone votes Labour or Plaid. They have done so for as long as they can remember, and they don’t see any reason to change now. People aren’t ready to forgive the Tories for Thatcher quite yet.

My friend only found out he was standing a few weeks back. He had shown some interest in politics before but had done very little in terms of active participation. He had applied for some research jobs at the Welsh Conservatives, and someone suggested he stood in the elections. It would look good on a CV after all.

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‘Death is the beginning of immortality’

They say history is written by the winners, and certainly the past’s heroes and villains have almost unanimously been decided by those who have triumphed. But while Hitler, Stalin, Churchill et al have been pigeonholed with relative ease, some of time’s more interesting characters are far trickier to categorise.

I was watching an episode of Chucklevision a few months back, and was somewhat surprised when Barry and Paul’s slapstick nemesis proclaimed himself to be none other than Maximilien Robespierre.

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Sweden’s footballing immigrants

Swedish football has long exported top players and managers to the rest of Europe, but there are signs that the trend is beginning to reverse.

This season Sweden’s top flight boasts more foreign players than ever before, all hoping to become stars in a new country just as the likes of Freddie Ljungberg and Zlatan Ibrahimović have across Europe.

Just one of the many foreign imports is James Keene, an English striker who was only 19 when he made the switch from Premier League Portsmouth to the Allsvenskran.

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