4737carlin
Player Valuation: £90m
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...stion-time-that-would-change-things-b56crcrj9
Neville Southall: What’s the best way to change politics? Electrify seats on Question Time
The outspoken Neville Southall has gone from star on the pitch to a cult hero off it, writes Alyson Rudd
Alyson Rudd
February 3 2018,
The Times
Jeremy Hunt, the health and social care secretary, is, he says, a complete cabbage. With just one phrase, Neville Southall sums up all the frustration that he feels over the way the NHS is being run. The former Everton and Wales goalkeeper does not waste nor mince words. Indeed, he cannot bring himself to name the prime minister, so badly has she disappointed him.
Southall had hoped that Theresa May would be sensible and maternal. She let him down by saying that she would look after those “just about managing”. He says: “She should look after the people who can’t manage. She seems to be so cold, nothing like any of the women I’ve ever known.”
Southall is nothing like any of the footballers we have ever known. He is a cult figure on Twitter, cutting through political expediency, championing the rights of those marginalised by society.
The reason he thinks of Hunt as a cabbage is because “he is trying to privatise the NHS and the problem is they are playing games and people are dying. Why are they trying to privatise it? Because they can’t afford it and if they can’t afford it then find a way of paying for it.
“If people earn lots of money fine, but there has to be a way for those who earn lots to help those who don’t.”
The government has its priorities wrong, he says. The professions that we need most are the ones that are poorly paid.
“The people who run towards the [Poor language removed] we get in our lives get treated the shittest by the government. The Grenfell Tower. The firefighters did not back off and yet she could not even talk to them properly.”
It is so obvious that he should appear on BBC’s Question Time that I am not the first one to mention it. The BBC even phoned him for a preliminary chat that came to nothing but Southall, right, would still be keen if approached again, even though he calls it “Dodge the Question Time”.
He suggests electrifying the seats on David Dimbleby’s show with the audience pressing a button if it thinks that a panellist has not answered the question. “That would f***ing change politics, wouldn’t it?” he says. “MPs go on the same bollocks courses as football managers.”
And, yes, he does know that he would not be able to swear on the telly. More impressive than his Twitter life is his real life. Southall works in a small school tucked away in Ebbw Vale, off Steelworks Road. It is a school for children who struggle in the education system and have nowhere else to go.
When Southall rails against teaching methods, he does so from a position of knowledge. He knows that it takes one year for a pupil’s mental health condition to be assessed. In the meantime an underfunded system copes as best as it can.
Southall does all manner of tasks. He drives the children to where they need to be, he finds them work experience. He raises funds. He breaks up fights. He can spend eight weeks convincing a local employer to give a child a job placement “and then they don’t turn up. Having been a footballer, I’m used to defeat”.
It can be uplifting, though. He praises a local garage owner who has “never refused any kid, ever, no matter what their circumstances. This is one of the most deprived places anywhere.
“They had lots of jobs when the mines were here and lots of jobs when the steel was here. You take those two big things away, what’s left?”
It is tempting to suppose that Southall spent all those years as one of the most highly regarded goalkeepers of all time — winning two league titles, two FA Cups and the European Cup Winners’ Cup — quietly railing against injustice but he admits to having been selfishly insular. “Football was all-consuming, nothing else mattered,” he says.
“I didn’t give a [Poor language removed] about anything else. Looking back, it was the wrong approach in some ways but it got me to where I wanted to get to.”
He was probably rather irritating. He would avoid team talks, take match preparation at his own pace. Howard Kendall, his manager at Goodison Park, complained that Southall was trying to be too perfect.
These days he would like to save the world. If he can’t save the world, then he would like to raise money so that his school can afford a psychologist and a mental health nurse.
This is where Twitter comes in. Southall checks almost every follower, even though he has 119,000 of them, in case they are people who can help the school. He is also intrigued that so many of his followers have little or no interest in football.
Despite his long service with Everton, Southall does not get on well with the current directors
A friend set up his Twitter account. He found that he liked it because “people reply straight away and you can talk to anyone around the world” and he is immune to Twitter abuse.
“I stood in goal in front of people giving me abuse for years. If someone comes on Twitter who is a proper knob, then I’ll just retweet it and someone else gives them stick so I don’t have to. If I was bothered about what people said about me I’d be dead by now.”
He is a little baffled by how his tweets have given him a different kind of fame. “People think I have an agenda on Twitter, but there’s no campaign,” he says. “It’s nice for me to listen to other people. I can find stuff out. The way I tweet is the way I think. People think I’m writing poetry but it’s just the way I think. There’s no mystery, I read the news and if there’s somebody I want to take the piss out of, I do it.
“I started tweeting about the LGBT community because I know sod all about it. A lot of kids here have issues with who they are and, if they asked me questions, I did not have a clue so I got to understand a lot more.”
He did not grow up in a political household and wasted his final year at school because they suddenly raised the leaving age to 16. Although infamous for being a binman before joining Everton, it is his hod-carrying job that had most impact.
It built up his strength and kept him fit. If he was not training on a Sunday morning he would go on to the building site and set up the bricks so that Monday morning could be more efficient. It is where he found his work ethic.
His most treasured football memory is the second leg of the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Bayern Munich in 1985, which Everton won 3-1 after the first leg had finished goalless. “Everyone I’d ever met in Liverpool was at the game,” he says. “Must have been 400,000 people in the stadium. We went 1-0 down and smashed them second half, physically and mentally. It’s the only game where I’ve known the crowd make a difference. For me, as a player, they made a difference that night. The club and the fans and the stadium just came together. The performance mirrored the city.”
The best he ever played, though, was, he insists, for Wales in a 7-1 defeat by Holland in 1996. The team were a mess, preparation had been a joke but he is proud that he kept on trying.
“It would have been easy to give up,” he says, which leads us nicely to his view of how the game has developed since he stopped playing 16 years ago. He watches all of Everton’s matches but finds a lot else boring and avoids the preamble for televised games because, “what’s the point?”
The former goalkeeper is no fan of less aggressive modern football
He is not much of a fan of the post-match offering either. “Managers are not proper football people any more because they’re frightened to death of losing their job,” he says. “They think they can cling on a bit longer by talking complete bollocks.
“The Premier League is so much up its own arse it’s ridiculous. They don’t seem to grasp it’s about the people who watch every week.”
Unsurprisingly, he is not a fan of VAR. A lack of computer analysis never cost anyone the title, he says, and he worries about the future, about the game becoming like American football and being dictated to by adverts. Soon, he says, teams will be able to bring on specialist corner-kick takers and then take them off again.
The rift between what fans like and what they are offered could be healed if the chairmen went on the pitch at the start of the season and told fans what they planned to do. “Why do they hide behind all that political bullshit?” he asks.
I do not dare mention prawn sandwiches. Southall sits with his mates in the stands at Goodison and rarely ventures into the posh seats. The last time that he was in the directors’ box they complained that he was wearing tracksuit bottoms.
“I don’t think we have a magnificent relationship, to be fair,” he says. “I don’t think Bill Kenwright [the Everton chairman] particularly likes me because I say what I think. But whatever I say is what the fans are thinking.
“I hope Everton take a real good look at their new ground and be the first community ground where they have a homeless shelter on the side.”
He has little time for players who cannot last 90 minutes given they have access to best the physios and dieticians. “They’ve taken everything away from a footballer that he has to worry about and they still can’t perform.
“Pitches have to be perfect, everything has to be perfect. Why? You’re fit. Run. The game has to reflect the people on the terraces. They work their bollocks off to go to the games.
“They don’t want to see players with their socks over their knees in pink boots. They want to see people run through a brick wall for the team. You might be [Poor language removed] or have a bad game, but the least you can do is run.”
This is why he has time for Pep Guardiola, who may have the most expensively assembled team but makes sure that Manchester City work hard and compete intensely. Southall has less time for Guardiola’s “stupid” complaint last week that his players needed protection from Cardiff City’s tackling in their FA Cup fourth-round tie.
“If I’m playing against Kevin De Bruyne and I’m not as good as him, then I’m going to smash him because that’s my job for the team,” he says. “I don’t give a [Poor language removed] how much he cost because my loyalty is to my team. It’s no good whingeing. What would he do in the same position? Say, ‘I ain’t going to tackle him because he’s better than me?’ I’m surprised there weren’t more tackles from Cardiff.”
Southall believes in a more equitable society — “I thought the idea of a state was to treat everyone as family”— and his views are an amalgam of his experiences. “What these kids have had all their lives is people shouting at them,” he says. “I’ve been in enough dressing rooms where the manager is shouting and seen people switching off.”
He looks at the world and sighs. We discuss why there are so many houses left without adequate flood defences. Why are the roads in a mess? Why have double glazing when we have global warming?
“Why can’t we get the old double-decker buses, put beds in them and drive around to the homeless people?” he asks.
He would go down a storm on Question Time.
-----
On Tory policies
Save money on burials
Make your nan’s skeleton into a coffee table and your uncle into a lamp
Saving the country money
I have lived a blue
I will die a blue
But on the 8th of June I want the country red
Get rid of poverty
Vote @jeremycorbyn @WelshLabour
Why are the Tories trying to reduce the fire service to 2 people with a glass of water
Killing me softly with your love
Don’t think so
Cuts kill people
Fund them properly
You donuts
We put a £100 million footballer on a perfect pitch
But a priceless human we leave sleeping on a street
Roberto Martínez
Donald trump
Napoleon
Roberto
Mad or genius
Discuss
Grassroots football
Saturday morning kids football pouring down
1 game off already
Why don’t they just raise all pitches in Wales 3 feet?
I am getting webfeet
The game that’s off is on old school pitch
New school has 3G pitch
Not allowed on that in case it gets ruined
Grassroots dying why?
Transgender rights
I find it funny that if I tweet something about LGBT stuff people ask me if I am gay but if I tweet about animals they never ask if I am a tiger.
Why?
Lesbian, gay, bi, trans skeletons sat on a cloud
No one gives a f***
Heaven
Pity not same on earth
-----
Advice to Premier League goalkeepers
“I’d like to mentor some goalies so they could phone up and talk to me. But somebody has got to want you to do it and I’m not with a club. I could change a goalkeeper on the phone as well as I could change them on the training ground. It’s 90 per cent mental and 10 per cent physical.”
So, who might be on the line?
Wayne Hennessey
I look at him and think he could be ten times better if he could just move quicker.
Jordan Pickford
He can learn a lot. He kicks the ball miles and really hard all the time. Why? You have to vary your service. Play it into feet sometimes.
Loris Karius
You look at the Liverpool pair and think . . . no. With Karius, his decision-making is not bad. He’s just too slow in picking things up, he’s too slow in the game. He came in and made a few mistakes so now he’s got that reputation of being [Poor language removed] but over time, when he gets the speed of the Premier League, he’ll be OK.
Joe Hart
At times he over-concentrates, at times he lets his emotions get the better of him, at times he goes for the ball with two hands when it’s better to go with one.
Neville Southall: What’s the best way to change politics? Electrify seats on Question Time
The outspoken Neville Southall has gone from star on the pitch to a cult hero off it, writes Alyson Rudd
Alyson Rudd
February 3 2018,
The Times
Jeremy Hunt, the health and social care secretary, is, he says, a complete cabbage. With just one phrase, Neville Southall sums up all the frustration that he feels over the way the NHS is being run. The former Everton and Wales goalkeeper does not waste nor mince words. Indeed, he cannot bring himself to name the prime minister, so badly has she disappointed him.
Southall had hoped that Theresa May would be sensible and maternal. She let him down by saying that she would look after those “just about managing”. He says: “She should look after the people who can’t manage. She seems to be so cold, nothing like any of the women I’ve ever known.”
Southall is nothing like any of the footballers we have ever known. He is a cult figure on Twitter, cutting through political expediency, championing the rights of those marginalised by society.
The reason he thinks of Hunt as a cabbage is because “he is trying to privatise the NHS and the problem is they are playing games and people are dying. Why are they trying to privatise it? Because they can’t afford it and if they can’t afford it then find a way of paying for it.
“If people earn lots of money fine, but there has to be a way for those who earn lots to help those who don’t.”
The government has its priorities wrong, he says. The professions that we need most are the ones that are poorly paid.
“The people who run towards the [Poor language removed] we get in our lives get treated the shittest by the government. The Grenfell Tower. The firefighters did not back off and yet she could not even talk to them properly.”
It is so obvious that he should appear on BBC’s Question Time that I am not the first one to mention it. The BBC even phoned him for a preliminary chat that came to nothing but Southall, right, would still be keen if approached again, even though he calls it “Dodge the Question Time”.
He suggests electrifying the seats on David Dimbleby’s show with the audience pressing a button if it thinks that a panellist has not answered the question. “That would f***ing change politics, wouldn’t it?” he says. “MPs go on the same bollocks courses as football managers.”
And, yes, he does know that he would not be able to swear on the telly. More impressive than his Twitter life is his real life. Southall works in a small school tucked away in Ebbw Vale, off Steelworks Road. It is a school for children who struggle in the education system and have nowhere else to go.
When Southall rails against teaching methods, he does so from a position of knowledge. He knows that it takes one year for a pupil’s mental health condition to be assessed. In the meantime an underfunded system copes as best as it can.
Southall does all manner of tasks. He drives the children to where they need to be, he finds them work experience. He raises funds. He breaks up fights. He can spend eight weeks convincing a local employer to give a child a job placement “and then they don’t turn up. Having been a footballer, I’m used to defeat”.
It can be uplifting, though. He praises a local garage owner who has “never refused any kid, ever, no matter what their circumstances. This is one of the most deprived places anywhere.
“They had lots of jobs when the mines were here and lots of jobs when the steel was here. You take those two big things away, what’s left?”
It is tempting to suppose that Southall spent all those years as one of the most highly regarded goalkeepers of all time — winning two league titles, two FA Cups and the European Cup Winners’ Cup — quietly railing against injustice but he admits to having been selfishly insular. “Football was all-consuming, nothing else mattered,” he says.
“I didn’t give a [Poor language removed] about anything else. Looking back, it was the wrong approach in some ways but it got me to where I wanted to get to.”
He was probably rather irritating. He would avoid team talks, take match preparation at his own pace. Howard Kendall, his manager at Goodison Park, complained that Southall was trying to be too perfect.
These days he would like to save the world. If he can’t save the world, then he would like to raise money so that his school can afford a psychologist and a mental health nurse.
This is where Twitter comes in. Southall checks almost every follower, even though he has 119,000 of them, in case they are people who can help the school. He is also intrigued that so many of his followers have little or no interest in football.
Despite his long service with Everton, Southall does not get on well with the current directors
A friend set up his Twitter account. He found that he liked it because “people reply straight away and you can talk to anyone around the world” and he is immune to Twitter abuse.
“I stood in goal in front of people giving me abuse for years. If someone comes on Twitter who is a proper knob, then I’ll just retweet it and someone else gives them stick so I don’t have to. If I was bothered about what people said about me I’d be dead by now.”
He is a little baffled by how his tweets have given him a different kind of fame. “People think I have an agenda on Twitter, but there’s no campaign,” he says. “It’s nice for me to listen to other people. I can find stuff out. The way I tweet is the way I think. People think I’m writing poetry but it’s just the way I think. There’s no mystery, I read the news and if there’s somebody I want to take the piss out of, I do it.
“I started tweeting about the LGBT community because I know sod all about it. A lot of kids here have issues with who they are and, if they asked me questions, I did not have a clue so I got to understand a lot more.”
He did not grow up in a political household and wasted his final year at school because they suddenly raised the leaving age to 16. Although infamous for being a binman before joining Everton, it is his hod-carrying job that had most impact.
It built up his strength and kept him fit. If he was not training on a Sunday morning he would go on to the building site and set up the bricks so that Monday morning could be more efficient. It is where he found his work ethic.
His most treasured football memory is the second leg of the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Bayern Munich in 1985, which Everton won 3-1 after the first leg had finished goalless. “Everyone I’d ever met in Liverpool was at the game,” he says. “Must have been 400,000 people in the stadium. We went 1-0 down and smashed them second half, physically and mentally. It’s the only game where I’ve known the crowd make a difference. For me, as a player, they made a difference that night. The club and the fans and the stadium just came together. The performance mirrored the city.”
The best he ever played, though, was, he insists, for Wales in a 7-1 defeat by Holland in 1996. The team were a mess, preparation had been a joke but he is proud that he kept on trying.
“It would have been easy to give up,” he says, which leads us nicely to his view of how the game has developed since he stopped playing 16 years ago. He watches all of Everton’s matches but finds a lot else boring and avoids the preamble for televised games because, “what’s the point?”
The former goalkeeper is no fan of less aggressive modern football
He is not much of a fan of the post-match offering either. “Managers are not proper football people any more because they’re frightened to death of losing their job,” he says. “They think they can cling on a bit longer by talking complete bollocks.
“The Premier League is so much up its own arse it’s ridiculous. They don’t seem to grasp it’s about the people who watch every week.”
Unsurprisingly, he is not a fan of VAR. A lack of computer analysis never cost anyone the title, he says, and he worries about the future, about the game becoming like American football and being dictated to by adverts. Soon, he says, teams will be able to bring on specialist corner-kick takers and then take them off again.
The rift between what fans like and what they are offered could be healed if the chairmen went on the pitch at the start of the season and told fans what they planned to do. “Why do they hide behind all that political bullshit?” he asks.
I do not dare mention prawn sandwiches. Southall sits with his mates in the stands at Goodison and rarely ventures into the posh seats. The last time that he was in the directors’ box they complained that he was wearing tracksuit bottoms.
“I don’t think we have a magnificent relationship, to be fair,” he says. “I don’t think Bill Kenwright [the Everton chairman] particularly likes me because I say what I think. But whatever I say is what the fans are thinking.
“I hope Everton take a real good look at their new ground and be the first community ground where they have a homeless shelter on the side.”
He has little time for players who cannot last 90 minutes given they have access to best the physios and dieticians. “They’ve taken everything away from a footballer that he has to worry about and they still can’t perform.
“Pitches have to be perfect, everything has to be perfect. Why? You’re fit. Run. The game has to reflect the people on the terraces. They work their bollocks off to go to the games.
“They don’t want to see players with their socks over their knees in pink boots. They want to see people run through a brick wall for the team. You might be [Poor language removed] or have a bad game, but the least you can do is run.”
This is why he has time for Pep Guardiola, who may have the most expensively assembled team but makes sure that Manchester City work hard and compete intensely. Southall has less time for Guardiola’s “stupid” complaint last week that his players needed protection from Cardiff City’s tackling in their FA Cup fourth-round tie.
“If I’m playing against Kevin De Bruyne and I’m not as good as him, then I’m going to smash him because that’s my job for the team,” he says. “I don’t give a [Poor language removed] how much he cost because my loyalty is to my team. It’s no good whingeing. What would he do in the same position? Say, ‘I ain’t going to tackle him because he’s better than me?’ I’m surprised there weren’t more tackles from Cardiff.”
Southall believes in a more equitable society — “I thought the idea of a state was to treat everyone as family”— and his views are an amalgam of his experiences. “What these kids have had all their lives is people shouting at them,” he says. “I’ve been in enough dressing rooms where the manager is shouting and seen people switching off.”
He looks at the world and sighs. We discuss why there are so many houses left without adequate flood defences. Why are the roads in a mess? Why have double glazing when we have global warming?
“Why can’t we get the old double-decker buses, put beds in them and drive around to the homeless people?” he asks.
He would go down a storm on Question Time.
-----
On Tory policies
Save money on burials
Make your nan’s skeleton into a coffee table and your uncle into a lamp
Saving the country money
I have lived a blue
I will die a blue
But on the 8th of June I want the country red
Get rid of poverty
Vote @jeremycorbyn @WelshLabour
Why are the Tories trying to reduce the fire service to 2 people with a glass of water
Killing me softly with your love
Don’t think so
Cuts kill people
Fund them properly
You donuts
We put a £100 million footballer on a perfect pitch
But a priceless human we leave sleeping on a street
Roberto Martínez
Donald trump
Napoleon
Roberto
Mad or genius
Discuss
Grassroots football
Saturday morning kids football pouring down
1 game off already
Why don’t they just raise all pitches in Wales 3 feet?
I am getting webfeet
The game that’s off is on old school pitch
New school has 3G pitch
Not allowed on that in case it gets ruined
Grassroots dying why?
Transgender rights
I find it funny that if I tweet something about LGBT stuff people ask me if I am gay but if I tweet about animals they never ask if I am a tiger.
Why?
Lesbian, gay, bi, trans skeletons sat on a cloud
No one gives a f***
Heaven
Pity not same on earth
-----
Advice to Premier League goalkeepers
“I’d like to mentor some goalies so they could phone up and talk to me. But somebody has got to want you to do it and I’m not with a club. I could change a goalkeeper on the phone as well as I could change them on the training ground. It’s 90 per cent mental and 10 per cent physical.”
So, who might be on the line?
Wayne Hennessey
I look at him and think he could be ten times better if he could just move quicker.
Jordan Pickford
He can learn a lot. He kicks the ball miles and really hard all the time. Why? You have to vary your service. Play it into feet sometimes.
Loris Karius
You look at the Liverpool pair and think . . . no. With Karius, his decision-making is not bad. He’s just too slow in picking things up, he’s too slow in the game. He came in and made a few mistakes so now he’s got that reputation of being [Poor language removed] but over time, when he gets the speed of the Premier League, he’ll be OK.
Joe Hart
At times he over-concentrates, at times he lets his emotions get the better of him, at times he goes for the ball with two hands when it’s better to go with one.
