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Anthony McIntyre ⚽ It was much like watching Arne Slot’s Liverpool side from his second and final season in charge. Big hat no cattle.


With neither cohesion nor coherence to their play, France - despite all the hype carried into the game based on scintillating soccer, the frontal assault mentality, the dazzling displays, the prodigious ability, the exhilarating fluidity, the promise - simply did not turn up to win the only game standing between them and their third consecutive World Cup final. Tournament favourites, they came in with a bang and went out with a whimper. A serious disappointment not only to their own supporters but to lovers of the beautiful game in general who gathered to watch giants and saw only midgets. 

A matter of days ago sports columnists were asking if this would turn out to be the best les Bleus side ever. On the strength of last night’s performance the side that turned out compares more with the team of 2002 that failed ignominiously to defend the trophy it secured for the first time in Paris four years earlier: no wins, no goals, elimination in the group stage. 

If we sigh in disappointment, and take a more panoramic view, looking back for comparison to the great Brazil side of 1982 - the explosive team that boasted they did not care who they met in the final, they were going to win it anyway - we would be instantly reminded that the Zico-Socrates side went out having played the best match of the tournament. They went down to Italy fighting, not like France's graceless exit. The Socrates equalizer remains one of the great goals of World Cup history.

Spain who have stuttered for much of World Cup 2026, relying on late strikes from Merino to get games across the line, put in a solid performance. Their game plan superb, they were worthy of their victory, dominating France in every area of the park and using every blade of grass to ensure passes reached their target. French passing was, again, much like that of Slot's side. Spanish coach Luis de la Fuente might be a tad premature with his claim that Spain is 'the best team in the world’ after last night's victory, but few would deny him the megaphone. One more game and the answer will be revealed.  

Didier Deschamps' side might feel hard done by over the penalty decision awarded against Lucas Digne but the former English Premier League man went from Villa to villain for displaying no sense of awareness that a player of the threat posed by Lamine Yamal was bearing down on him. Even if it was handball by Yamal, and it is highly disputable, Digne has no grounds to petition for a fool's pardon for his unpardonable lack of concentration. Had Saliba stayed on the pitch it was unlikely to have made any difference. In such situations a side with the depth of France should swiftly recalibrate and move on. They failed.' As Mbappe observed in his post match interview: When you don't do what you have to do in a World Cup semi-final, you don't win.' France didn't just fail to win, they lost miserably.

French Newspaper L'Equipe was scathing in its criticism of the national team's performance, rating Digne, Dembele and Olise 2/10. Mbappe did little better managing only 3/10. Compare that to the ratings of Spain's Porro and Dani Olmo with 8/10, and the chasm opens up to expose its vastness. 

England take on Argentina in around thirty minutes time and are more than capable of making it through to the final. The English have grown into this tournament and have dug deep when most needed. They have a stronger and more dynamic midfield than the Argentinians and are not as overly reliant in front of goal on one towering talent. While Argentina could go all the way, there is a feel of the 1986 Mexico squad to the current crop. Without Maradona that team would never have won the World Cup. Messi is the main man here but in 86 Maradona was 25 whereas Messi is almost 40. An old dog for the hard road might find that old legs won't carry it the distance.

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Les Bleus Blew It

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 6-June-2026.

The left can see that something has gone wrong with Sinn Féin. It has reached for revulsion where the answer is structural

RDS Stage, Dublin

1. The Standard

The Robert Tressell Festival took place in the RDS on Saturday, and in the course of it Ruth Coppinger TD stood up and described, more completely than anyone has managed in months of commentary, what a genuine left would have to be.

She began with the form. There should be a common left platform, she said, coming up to the next election. And then, before anyone could file it under electoral arithmetic, she widened it: it is not just about elections, because to challenge what is happening you have to build movements on the ground as well. That second sentence is the one worth holding onto. It says the platform is not a transfer pact or a seat-maximising arrangement. It is a thing built outside the electoral cycle, in the places elections do not reach, and the electoral form is meant to grow from it rather than stand in for it.

Then she set the conditions. A genuine left, in her account, stands implacably against racism and in solidarity with racialised communities, with women, with LGBT people. It acknowledges that the wealth of the society is hoarded by a tiny minority, and it advocates for that wealth to be taxed and taken under control. The social commitments and the economic commitment are not two lists. They are one list, and the holding of both together is what she meant by genuine.

On migration she was emphatic in a way that is worth reproducing closely. A united front against racism, she said, with no leaning in, in any way, shape or form, to anti-immigrant sentiment. Immigrants are not to blame for the crisis in capitalism. To challenge the myth of scarce resources, you talk about wealth, not about the people who have arrived to live among the scarcity. On abortion she was just as plain: no backtracking, on that or on any position previously held. And on the question of who a left platform could govern with, she drew the hardest line of all. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are excluded from a common left project. Not negotiable, not a matter of seats, excluded.

Set those pieces beside one another and what you have is not a wish list and not a purity test. It is a coherent account of a political position: hold the whole terrain, social and economic, as one thing; do not trade your positions for advantage; build the strength outside the electoral cycle that the electoral cycle can then express; and do not walk through the door marked government if the parties of the existing order are standing in it. Whatever one makes of any single plank, the thing hangs together. It describes a left that knows what it is and will not be moved off it.

That is the standard. It was stated clearly, from a stage, by a sitting TD, on a Saturday in June. Hold it there for a moment, because the rest of what follows is a question about the distance between that standard and the ground it was stated on.

II. The Room It Was Stated In

Consider the room it was stated in.

The festival’s theme, printed on the banner behind the speakers, was that the enemy is not the foreigner, the enemy is the system of greed. It is the right line, and it gathered the right people: trade unionists, the flotilla crews, Corbyn and McDonnell over from a British left in its own difficulty, the Higginses as patrons, writers and organisers and musicians, the whole ecosystem of the Irish and international left assembled under one roof for a day. The framing was solidarity, and the solidarity was real. For a day, the left performed its own unity, and there is a value in a movement reminding itself what it is for.

But a standard stated from a stage is also a measure laid against everyone standing on it. And Coppinger’s standard, taken at its word, describes a left that several of the parties in that room do not currently constitute. Arriving at the festival, Mary Lou McDonald spoke clearly and without hedging on Gaza, confirming Sinn Féin would table a motion to stop the Irish football team playing Israel while a genocide is committed, calling it unconscionable. Bacik and Gibney said the same, in much the same words. On that question the left was united and unequivocal, and Sinn Féin was unequivocal with it.

It is worth asking why that question was easy. The answer is that on Gaza the line costs Sinn Féin nothing. Its base is already there, the broad public is largely there, and clarity on Palestine loses the party no votes it wants to keep. Set it beside the questions on which the party does hedge, migration above all, and a pattern appears that is not vagueness and not cowardice but something more precise. Sinn Féin is clear exactly where clarity is free and reaches for ambiguity exactly where clarity has a price. The same instinct that let McDonald be unequivocal about the Israel match is the instinct that produced the leaflet promising to manage migration. The unequivocal stance and the managed one are not a contradiction. They are the same calculation, run on two questions with two different costs.

And the choice of what to carry home from the day tells the same story. The clip Sinn Féin cut and sent into the world was not the Gaza motion or anything on the terrain Coppinger had named. It was reunification, and the building of the republic we all deserve. A party’s choice of what to amplify is a choice about what it wants seen, and from a festival convened around the economic and social terrain, Sinn Féin chose to show its base the one piece of ground that is unambiguously and historically its own, and that costs it nothing to stand on.

So the room performed a unity that the standard stated within it quietly fractured. Not because anyone present was insincere about solidarity. Because solidarity as a feeling and a genuine left as Coppinger described it are not the same thing, and the gap between them is precisely the gap the rest of this is about. The left can fill a hall. The question is whether the thing it stated from the stage of that hall is a thing any party in the hall can actually be.

III. The Revulsion and the Analysis

Here is where I want to slow down, because the way the left has talked about this matters as much as the thing it has been talking about.

When Sinn Féin leans toward anti-immigrant feeling, when it hedges on migration, when it lets a leaflet promise to manage the thing rather than refuse the framing of it, the response from the left has been revulsion. Betrayal, disgust, the sense of a party showing a face it had kept hidden. And the revulsion is not wrong. Something is wrong. The leaning-in is real and it is bad, and the people who feel it as a betrayal have correctly identified that a line has been crossed. I am not going to ask anyone to feel less about it. The feeling is earned.

But the feeling has been close to the whole of the response, and a feeling is not an analysis. Revulsion treats the hedge as a failure of character. They were cowards. They were cynics. They sold the principle for a few points in a poll. And if that is what the problem is, then the remedy follows from it: better people, more courage, a leadership that would hold the line where this one would not. Find the braver party, or shame this one into bravery, and the problem is solved.

I do not think that is what the problem is, and I think the comfort of the revulsion is part of why it has been mistaken for an explanation. There is a satisfaction in disgust. It flatters the one who feels it: we would never lean in, we hold the line, the rot is in them and not in the situation. It sorts the field into the principled and the sold-out and lets us know, warmly, which side we are on. That satisfaction is exactly what an analysis has to give up, because the question an analysis has to ask is the unsatisfying one. Not how do we feel about the leaning-in. Why does it happen. Why does it happen to this party and not to the party down the bill. Why does it happen to the large party and not the small one. The revulsion has no answer to those questions, because it was never asking them. It was naming a wrong, which is a real thing to do, and then stopping at the naming.

What follows is an attempt not to stop at the naming. The wrong is real; the revulsion has that right. But the wrong is structural before it is moral, and reading it as moral leads somewhere that does not work, because the next party that reaches the size this one has reached will meet the same thing, and bravery will not have been the missing ingredient. To see why, you have to put the feeling down for a moment and look at the table the pieces are actually standing on.

IV. The Physics of the Table

There are two forces on the table, and between them they do most of the work that the language of cowardice has been asked to do.

The first is the shape of the terrain itself. There was a time when a party could hold a clear economic position and stay vague on the social questions, or hold firm on the social questions and stay quiet on the economics, and the two could be kept in separate rooms. That time is over, and the far right ended it. The achievement of the reactionary politics now organising across the West, in Ireland as everywhere, has been to bundle the questions together: migration, the borders, the national culture, the rights of women, the climate, sovereignty, all wired into a single circuit so that a position on any one of them reads as a position on all of them. You cannot, any longer, be sound on housing and evasive on 
migration and have the evasion go unnoticed, because the migration question now carries the whole charge of the bundle. This is why Coppinger named the two grounds she named. The migration line and the abortion line are not two items she happened to mention. They are the two places where the integrated terrain bites hardest, the points where a left position is most exposed to the pull of the bundle, and she named them because she understood that holding the terrain means holding it precisely there, where it is hardest, or not holding it at all.

The second force is the one the party is standing in rather than standing on. The institutional architecture of the southern state is built to absorb. Every serious attempt to construct a left politics outside the two parties of government has, within a generation, been drawn into one of them, and the drawing-in has a mechanism. The architecture rewards the party that comes inside and punishes the party that stays out. Come inside and there are ministries, there is the vocabulary of the state, there is the slow education in what cannot be done, and at the end of the education the party speaks the language of the thing it set out to change. Stay outside and there is permanent opposition, permanent criticism of decisions taken by others, permanent smallness. The architecture is not neutral ground that parties cross. It is a set of rails, laid in advance, and the party that climbs aboard can take the driver’s seat and grip the wheel and feel itself to be steering, while the track decides where it goes. Coppinger’s hardest condition, the refusal to govern with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, is a condition written against exactly this. It is an attempt to bar the one door through which the absorption has always come.

These are the two forces. The terrain that will not let the social questions stay quiet, and the architecture that carries aboard whoever climbs on. Neither of them is about the character of any particular leader. They are the physics of the table, and they act on every object placed there, regardless of what the object intends or how brave it is. Which is why the question that matters is not whether a given party is principled, but where on the table it has come to rest, and what the forces do to an object resting there.

V. The Standard and the Scale

Now put the standard back on the table and watch what the forces do to it.

Coppinger stated the standard and she holds it. Implacably, in her phrase, with no leaning in, in any way. And she holds it from two per cent. Her party, Solidarity – People Before Profit, the alliance her party sits within polls at two per cent between them, and it has held the line on migration with a completeness that no larger party has matched. The temptation is to read the completeness as the cause of something, a purity that ought to be rewarded and has been punished by an ungrateful electorate. I want to suggest the relation runs the other way. Solidarity – People Before Profit can hold the line with total confidence because two per cent is a position the line has never cost it anything to hold. It is a group of committed activists in a handful of constituencies, talking mostly to people who already agree, never within reach of the kind of power that puts a position under the pressure that breaks it. The line is easy to hold there. That is not a criticism. It is a description of where on the table the small left rests, and of how light the forces fall on an object resting there.

Move to where Sinn Féin rests and the forces fall differently. A poll this weekend, the second in a fortnight to say the same thing, put the party at 20%, sliding, with the vote it gained in 2020 visibly draining away. The Social Democrats were up 3% in the same poll, and it does not take much to see where a good part of the drained vote has gone. 20% is not 2%. 20% is a party trying to hold together a coalition of voters that includes the cosmopolitan and the communitarian, the city professional frustrated by housing and the worker in a town where immigration is felt as a pressure and not an abstraction, and 20% is within reach of the power that 2% is not. That is where the migration question bites. That is where the integrated terrain and the architecture meet, on a base too wide and too contradictory to be held by a single clear line, with the rails of government close enough to climb aboard. The party leaned because that is what the forces do to an object resting there. Not because it was braver or more cowardly than the party at 2%. Because it was bigger, and bigness is where the test is.

This is the sentence the revulsion cannot say, and the reason it cannot say it is that the sentence offers no one any satisfaction. The small left holds the line not because it is virtuous but because it is small. Sinn Féin leaned not because it is vicious but because it is large, and largeness is where the pressure lives. The principled small party and the compromised large one are not two kinds of character. They are the same forces acting on objects at different points on the table, and the difference between them is the difference between 2% and 20%, between never being tested and being tested constantly. Strip the moral language away and what is left is a structural fact with no villain in it. The standard that Coppinger stated from the stage is a standard that becomes harder to hold the closer a party comes to the scale at which holding it would matter.

It is worth saying that the fracture this describes is not invisible to the mainstream. The Irish Times, surveying the same left after the by-elections, noted that the disagreements between Sinn Féin and the rest run through abortion, immigration and climate, and concluded that they do not extend to the economic questions that once defined the divide. The first half of that is exactly right, and it is the half that matters here: the terrain on which the left fractures is the social terrain, the integrated terrain, the ground the far right has wired together. Whether the economic agreement is as settled as the second half assumes is a question for another day. What is not in doubt is where the breaking happens, and it happens precisely where the bundle bites.

Holding the line and reaching the scale to enact the line have come apart. The party that has the line does not have the scale. The party that has the scale cannot hold the line. And the form that would have both does not exist.

VI. The Gamble

There is a reply to all of this, and it is the best reply available, and it comes from someone who was inside the building.

Siobhán Fenton was a press adviser to the Sinn Féin leader and then a spokesperson for the party, and she has written an account of its inner workings that is due in the autumn. Ahead of it she has offered the strongest version of the case that the drift is not a failure at all but a strategy. The argument runs like this. The 2020 coalition of voters was always incompatible, the cosmopolitan and the communitarian wired together by a housing crisis they both felt and little else they agreed on. To pick a side would be to lose the other and collapse back to a smaller party. So the ambiguity is deliberate, a holding of both for as long as both can be held, and it has an exit. The issue that will decide the next election is not yet visible, just as immigration was not visible early in the last cycle and housing was not visible early in the one before. The party waits. When the galvanising issue arrives, late in 2028, it plants its flag, recovers a clear identity, and fights the election on ground it has chosen. The lacklustre years are the price of the option, and the option is worth the price.

It is a serious argument and it should be taken seriously, with the caveat that it is an account offered by a former press officer rather than a proven fact about what the leadership decided, and that the book it trails is framed less as a story of strategy than as a story of how things came apart. But take the argument at its strongest, as the deliberate gamble it claims to be, and it still rests on a single assumption that the rest of this piece has been quietly dismantling. The gamble assumes that the deciding issue of 2028 will arrive in the form the gamble needs: a clean issue, an economic one, the kind a party can lead on while keeping the social questions in their separate room. Housing in 2020 was such an issue. You could ride it without committing on migration or abortion, because in 2020 the terrain had not yet been bundled.

It has been bundled now. That is the whole burden of the integrated terrain, and it is why the gamble’s exit is sealed over. The issue that decides 2028 will not arrive clean, because there are no clean issues left on a terrain the far right has wired into a single circuit. Whatever the galvanising question turns out to be, it will come already carrying the charge of the bundle, already entangled with migration and the borders and the rest, and the party that has spent the intervening years declining to hold a position on exactly that terrain will not be able to plant a flag on it, because the flag-planting is the very thing the years of declining will have unlearned. Coppinger named the two grounds where the terrain bites because she understood that they cannot be kept quiet until a convenient moment. The gamble is a bet that they can. The bet is against the structure, and the structure does not break.

VII. What Would Have to Be Built

So return to the stage, and to the standard stated on it.

The thing worth holding onto from Saturday is not that Sinn Féin failed a test. It is that the test was stated at all, completely and clearly, by someone who meant it. The left does not have a problem of not knowing what it is for. Coppinger said what it is for, in plain sentences, from a platform, in front of the whole movement: hold the terrain entire, refuse the leaning-in, keep the positions, build the strength outside the cycle, stay off the rails that lead inside. There is no confusion about the standard. The standard is not the difficulty.

The difficulty is the one this piece has been tracing. The standard becomes harder to hold the closer a party comes to the scale at which holding it would change anything, and at the scale where it would change everything it has so far proved impossible to hold at all. The party that keeps the line is kept small partly by keeping it. The party that reached the scale could not carry the line up the slope with it. This is not a story about good people and bad people. It is a story about a shape, the shape of a terrain that will not let the hard questions stay quiet and an architecture that absorbs whoever climbs aboard, and about the fact that no political form has yet been built that can hold the standard and the scale at the same time, against both of those forces, on the ground as it actually is.

That form is what would have to be built. Not a better leader for an existing party, because the forces do not care about leaders. Not a purer small party, because purity at two per cent is not a counter to anything. Not a clever wait for a clean issue that the terrain will no longer supply. Something else: a politics that could hold what Coppinger described, at a scale that could enact it, while resisting the pull that has absorbed every previous attempt to do exactly that. Whether such a thing can be built I do not know. I know that it does not exist, that the weekend made its absence unusually visible, and that the absence is the actual subject beneath the polls and the speeches and the insider accounts of who decided what.

The standard was stated on Saturday. The form that could carry it has not been. That gap is the whole of the matter, and what fills it, if anything fills it, will be built by people with more at stake than a writer watching the room. I will keep watching the room. The building, if it happens, will happen elsewhere.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

No Villain In It

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Hate Theology @ 7

 

A Morning Thought @ 3206

Gary Robertson ⚽ Saturday July 11th and the return of actual competitive domestic football.

Ignoring the distraction that is FIFAs corruption taking place in the land of the free, providing you’re white and Christian, back home the Premier Sports Cup/League Cup group stages got underway with sixteen matches taking place on Saturday. Perhaps the biggest shock being Lowland League winners Linlithgow Rose beating Championship Morton by a solitary goal in front of nearly 1100 people at Morton’s Cappilelow Park.
 
Sadly though for fans of the Rose their promotion to the Scottish Second Division was blocked by the SFA due to club not holding a SFA Bronze licence.
 
It's all official red tape I won’t bore you with details of what this entails as it’s all very dull, to be honest. For instance, the manager and at least one first team coach must hold a UEFA B licence. I'm sure some people find this stuff fascinating so I’ve added a link here where, if you’re a nerd or insomniac you can investigate this yourself. I wish you well.

Suffice to say, I feel sorry for the players and the fans who won’t get to watch their club competing at a higher level, this season at least.
 
Other results of note include Dundee United relying on a penalty to get past Stirling in the 93rd minute.
Who says the bigger teams don’t get preferential treatment eh? 🤣
 
Other Premiership clubs took care of their opponents with wins for St Mirren by four against Dumbarton, Falkirk putting five past Edinburgh City and Dundee coming out victors with a 4-2 win over Airdrie

In other news: finally Celtic have made a signing, not a contract renewal but, no, not one, but two new faces. Camilo Duran, the 24 year old Colombian forward landed on a five year deal from Qarabag. A potential replacement for Daizen Maeda who whilst is still a Celtic player, fans are resigned to the fact that he’s likely to be gone soon.

The other new face is a brand deal with Christophe Duchamp luxury watches - the official timepiece of Celtic FC

Yes, while other teams rebuild, the Celtic board continue to look for money making opportunities.
I know it’s a business etc etc but FFS, seriously, Celtic what are you doing?
 
Your average fan couldn’t afford one of these watches, they’re clearly for “monied people” and while us peasants look for players, the Celtic board through their official X account “are pleased to announce”… fancy fucking watches.

I gave up alcohol for a number of reasons, and despite my son buying me whisky and a decanter for Father's day I’ve so far managed to avoid drinking it even though right now it may be the only way to get through the day. It’s draining being a football fan, it’s certainly draining being a Celtic fan.

As I finish writing this I’m acutely aware that in the last few days we’ve had the 45th anniversaries of the passing of Joe McDonnell and Martin Hurson. On July 8th and 13th respectively. I extend my condolences to their family, friends and former comrades. May they rest in eternal peace.

Til next time ….

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Fitba's Back . . . Kinda

Tinfoil Tuesday 🧪 Sci Man Dan addresses Young Earth Creationist pseudoscience on the age of the earth. 

Earth Is No Spring Chicken

Barry Gilheany 🏴The deaths of any public figure does arouse mixtures of emotions. 

Ken Bates

The past few days have seen welters of condemnation by conservative writers and commentators on the glee allegedly being expressed online by lefties/progressives/woketards on the deaths of former Conservative and latterly Reform UK politician Ann Widdecombe and US Republican Senator Linsey Graham.

I must state at the outset that the death of any human being leaves their loved ones in a state of grief and so any comment on the recently deceased must in the first instance acknowledge that fact and express sorrow for those who mourn their loss. Death and its impact on relatives and friends is a universal which will affect all of us on this planet. Any reflections on the passings of public or private figures must always incorporate this unchangeable truth. That is as true for those for those who have whooped with glee at the deaths of the aforementioned big beasts of the political Right either side of the Atlantic as it would be for Donald Trump reacting to the death of Robert Mueller, former Head of the FBI and his would-be nemesis by saying “good” and that “he wasn’t a very nice person”.

However normal human decencies should never preclude honest reflections on the conduct and character of any public figure who has departed this temporal existence. That Ann Widdecombe was the elderly female victim of an appalling act of homicide and who had in her post-Westminster life achieved a partial national treasure status due to her participation in reality TV shows such as “Strictly Come Dancing” and “I am a Celebrity” should not deflect from critique of her views on abortion, same sex marriage, capital punishment and Brexit (all views which are polar opposite to mine but which I recognise the sincerity in which they were held) and her actions as Prisons Minister in John Major’s Conservative administration in the mid-1990s which included the shackling of pregnant female prisoners. 

Likewise, Linsey Graham’s staunch support for Ukraine needs to be balanced against his cynical volte face on his views on Trump’s unsuitability for the US Presidency and his enthusiastic backing for his illegal war on Iran and for Netanyahu's war of obliteration in Gaza. Yes, it is a truism that the deaths of universally admired personalities such as the broadcaster Dermot Murnaghan and the tragic passing of young athletes in their prime such as 25-year-old Jayden Adams who made his debut for South Africa recently in the World Cup will generate much more outpouring of sadness that partisan political figures. But the rule in obituary and tribute paying should always be play the public persona.

Which brings me to the dilemmas for Leeds United supporters such as myself posed by the death at the age of 94 in Monaco of another notable figure last weekend: Ken Bates, former Leeds and Chelsea Chair. For in death as in life he has provoked division among Leeds fans. It is undeniable that he saved the club from almost inevitable liquidation as a result of the catastrophic financial mismanagement by the PLC board headed by Peter Ridsdale by investing £10m in January 2025 and for this he earned eternal gratitude from one section of the fan base. But for others, most likely the majority, his tenure which ran to 2013 was another dark chapter in the history of the club which saw relegation to the third tier for the first time, and the club being put into administration the manner of exit from which earned us a 15-point deduction at the start of our first season in League One in 2007-08. 

Even after we returned to the Championship three seasons later under the stewardship of fan and ex player Simon Grayson, actions taken by Bates would serve to delay our return to the Premiership by almost a decade. From these fans, the reaction was as vituperative as those of the woketariat to the demise of Miss Widdecombe and Senator Graham with “Rot in Hell” being amongst the more family newspaper printable comments. While I belonged to the latter faction and abhorred everything he done after promotion from League One my reaction was “Let bygones be bygones” as, to paraphrase Amy Winehouse, hate is a losing game.

Ken Bates, a self-made millionaire from haulage and readymade concrete whose own football career was ended by a knee injury entered football chairmanship in the 1960s first as Chair of Oldham Athletic for five years before becoming owner and vice chair at Wigan Athletic and then really establishing his reputation at Chelsea. When he bought the club for £1 in 1982, it had become a ramshackle club far removed from the Kings Road glamour era on the late 60s and 70s with debts of £1.5 million and who had reached such nadirs on the field as a 6-0 defeat at Rotherham and a 7-3 home defeat to Leyton Orient in 1979. 

It is fair to say that he rescued Chelsea from extinction, and he can boast of setting them on the road to modernity by securing the freehold on its Stamford Bridge Ground from property dealers Marler Estates, enabling its conversion into a 40,000 plus capacity all seater stadium. His business acumen attracted quality players like Pat Nevin, Dave Speedie and Kerry Dixon, and by 1984 the club had returned to the then First Division suffering only one more one season in 1988. With the advent of the Premier League in 1992, Chelsea regained the glamour factor winning trophies such as FA Cup in 1997 and 2000 and the old European Cup Winners Cup with star continental imports such as Ruud Gullit (he of the “sexy football” vibe), Gianfranco Zola, Marcus Desailly and Gianluca Vialli along with English grit such as Dennis Wise and Michael Duberry (both eventually Leeds bound).

But his time at the Bridge was also characterised by grandiose gestures such as the construction of an electric fence around the Bridge to deter hooliganism (Chelsea fans had a particularly notorious reputation in that dark era of the 80s in English football) which was never switched on due to a refusal of permission by Greater London Council on safety grounds. His period in charge also say spectacular ruptures with friends such as Vice Chair and lifelong Blues fan Matthew Harding who was crucial to their revival, but who Bates banned from the boardroom in 1995 and who died the following year in a helicopter crash with no reconciliation with his erstwhile ally. Ruud Gullit who had steered Chelsea to the FA Cup in 1997, their first major trophy in sixteen years, was sacked the following year reportedly by teletext. Bates’ match programme notes became compulsive reading as he played out his feuds to the wider Chelsea community. It was a playbook that Leeds fans were to become used to.

Bates eventually sold the club, again in a parlous debt situation, to Roman Abramovich in 2003 and the rest, as they say, is history.

As a member of the FA Executive Board, Bates was a prominent figure in the rebuilding of Wembley Stadium being appointed chair of Wembley National Stadium Limited in 1997 only to resign in 2001 owing to what he felt was lack of progress on the project.

And so the unlikeliest White Knight arrived to save Leeds United oblivion. To reprise briefly what was the lie of the land then in January 2005. Leeds had been relegated from the Premier League in May 2004 with debts amounting to £100m as a result of the boom-and-bust era under Peter Ridsdale which saw scintillating form on the pitch leading to four successive top four finishes, a UEFA Cup semi-final place and, the piece de resistance, a Champions League semi-final appearance in 2001. It seemed only a matter of time before trophies started rolling in as David O’Leary’s young team (his “babies” as he cringingly called them) with young stars like Harry Kewell, Alan Smith, Stephen McPhail Jonathan Woodgate who had broken into the first team from the youth squad who had won the FA Youth Cup in 1997 augmented by established first teamers Lucas Radebe, Gary Kelly and Lee Bowyer and then joined by exciting arrivals on transfer such as Rio Ferdinand, Mark Viduka and Robbie Keane enthralled fans and football lovers generally with attacking, fearless prowess. 

The trouble was that the sunny uplands of the present and future were built on a pyramid of high interest loans from hedge funds secured against twenty years of season ticket sales; HP payment arrangements for new arrivals such as Mark Viduka, five year deals with excessive wages and a culture of excess and extravagance throughout the club with directors flying in private jets to away matches and 17-year-old youth players on wages of £6k a week. All this was mortgaged against annual participation in the Champions League and when Leeds failed to secure this objective for the second successive season in 2002, the whole edifice was to crumble with the departures of Ferdinand, Woodgate, Bowyer, Keane, Smith and Danny Mills in the next two seasons and the sacking of O’Leary as manager in June 2002. The cull was completed after relegation with only Gary Kelly and Michael Duberry remaining.

When Bates arrived, the club was run by a group of local businessmen headed by insolvency practitioner Gerard Krasner who had mortgaged their own properties to keep the club running but clearly lacked the wherewithal to carry on for the long haul. The Chelsea connections were always going to rankle with elements of the fan base but after false hopes had been raised by the prospects of rescue by Bahraini sheiks or Ugandan property developers; it was patently obvious that Bates was the only show in town. The prospect of administration averted (for now) Leeds ended the first of what was to be a sentence of sixteen years exile from the top flight in fourteenth position.

The arrival of reinforcements to the squad such as Rob Hulse, Richard Cresswell, Eddie Lewis and David Healy led to optimism that we could get promotion in the 2005-06 season. However the goal of securing the automatic route back to the Premiership was undermined by Bates’ decision to sell another homegrown starlet Aaron Lennon to Spurs who subsequently went to play for Everton and England. The absence of Lennon’s pace on the right flank was arguably the crucial difference between us going up automatically and having to do it through the play-offs. And so it was that thousands of us flocked to Cardiff on the third Sunday of May 2006 perhaps more in hope rather than expectation of a return to the Promised Land. Our abject 3-0 defeat to a hungry and ‘up for it’ Watford side put paid to any such optimism. 

However what none of us suspected was that this defeat had laid the ground for future calamity. Having seen his strategy of getting Leeds back to the PL on the cheap fail, Bates in the following season was to turn his attention to Plan B which was to put the club into administration at the most opportune moment. The opportunity presented itself when - with one game to go, relegation to League One was virtually assured due to our hugely inferior goal difference to that of the club above us, Hull City, - Bates called in the administrators with the club debt at £35m including £7m to the HMRC who incensed by the obligation of clubs in administration to pay off their football debts in full while settling for much lower terms for the other creditors including the taxman, decided to take a stand. They challenged Bates’ deal to buy the club from off shore companies with connections to him in the British Virgin Islands and to repay creditors with a rate of one penny in the pound. After a summer of shenanigans, the Football League agreed to allow Bates to circumvent normal insolvency procedures with the proviso of a 15-point deduction.

Bates also imposed Dennis Wise as manager on a hostile fan base. He waged war on the Official Supporters Club and banned those who didn’t like from the boardroom. On our return to the Championship he presided over the dismantling of the core of the squad that got us promotion and who with additions could have got us to the PL in order to build bars and restaurants around Elland Road. He undermined Simon Grayson before sacking him.

But that is all in our past. We have moved on. Rest in Peace, Ken.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Do Not Speak Ill Of The Dead ⚑ Ken Bates Passes Away

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Thirty Two

 

A Morning Thought @ 3205

Catherine McGinty ✏ writing in Derry News.

‘Most egregious use of data I have seen in my entire clinical life’ - former WHSCT Consultant

The veracity of Western Health and Social Care Trust (WHSCT) claims regarding outcomes for patients in Derry’s Altnagelvin Hospital requiring emergency general surgery (EGS) is being challenged.

There are also concerns about the level of over-inference or optimism the WHSCT attaches to outcome measures.

The data relates to patient outcomes following the centralisation of EGS provision in Altnagelvin.

Speaking to The Derry News, London-based statistician Paul Bassett said there was “a lot of uncertainty around the Trust’s figures”.

Mr Bassett specialises in the application of statistics in medical research and clinical trials.

A former WHSCT Consultant described the Trust’s claims as the “most egregious use of data I have seen in my entire clinical life”.

While an independent clinical professional said it was a “poorly thought through use of metrics”.

They added:

The outcome (mortality) itself is poor and there is a lack of methodological clarity about how the patients were counted at a basic level. Small changes between admission groups from new pathways of care could have a big effect on these data.
There are other measures much more valuable to measuring the quality of emergency surgical care at individual patient level.
It is easy to come up with these if you look at the most recent reports about pancreatitis, bowel obstruction and gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding, from the National Confidential Enquiry [Into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD)]. Why isn’t there a bigger focus on taking processive care measures from these reports?
It is disappointing that there are highly paid professionals not doing adequate due diligence on using information. Especially when the initial consultation seemed to involve significant missteps - said the clinical professional.

Processive care measures are the specific steps or activities carried out to deliver patient care. These are potentially more important than weak (statistically uncertain) indicators of mortality outcomes.

The WHSCT “temporarily” suspended EGS provision at Enniskillen’s South West Acute Hospital (SWAH) in December 2022.

Altnagelvin is currently providing EGS for local patients, in addition to patients who have had to travel from Fermanagh and Tyrone to Derry because, three and a half years later, the SWAH EGS suspension remains in place.

Jimmy Hamill from the Fermanagh-based Save Our Acute Services (SOAS) campaign said the disparities in the WHSCT’s data first emerged at a meeting of the Assembly Health Committee.

On March 13, 2025, the Committee held a session titled ‘Review of Emergency General Surgery at the South West Acute Hospital: Department of Health; Western Health and Social Care Trust’.

Appearing before the Committee were, Dr Tomas Adell (Head of Elective Care, Department of Health); Mr Mark Gillespie (Director of Surgery, Paediatrics and Women's Health, WHSCT); and Dr Brendan Lavery (Medical Director, WHSCT).

Chairman, Philip McGuigan (Sinn Féin) voiced concern about “double emergency department (ED) waits”.

He said: 

It is of major concern that people are waiting in EDs twice [in SWAH and in Altnagelvin], before travel and after travel.
How are you getting on with the [RQIA] recommendation on increasing the number of ambulances? 

According to the Hansard record of the meeting, Dr Lavery replied that patient outcomes were “actually better”.

He added: 

We use a company called CHKS [Caspe Healthcare Knowledge Systems] which analyses the admissions across every trust in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. CHKS looks at every admission - thousands of admissions - and does a statistical analysis of age, sex, comorbidities and the diagnosis that the patient was admitted with using 250 categories of diagnoses. CHKS uses all that data to generate a risk-adjusted mortality index (RAMI).
At the time of the temporary suspension, the figure for the South West Acute was 110, and the figure for Altnagelvin was 85.
We got the figures in July or August last year [2024]. Effectively, the RAMI scores for Altnagelvin have continued to fall - to the extent that, if you extrapolate the data to look at mortality rates, you find that, due to the change that we have made, every 40 days, one patient survives who would not have survived.

Later in the session Dr Lavery said: 

The Public Health Agency (PHA) has independently reviewed the information. There is no adverse outcome for patients who live in that area.

"SOAS was immediately dubious about the WHSCT’s RAMI claims,” said Mr Hamil.

He added: 

We subsequently discovered that, writing to the Trust’s Medical Director on October 3, 2024, Joanne Mc Clean, the Director of Public Health, described the WHSCT’s data as needing ‘some more work. 

The Derry News has seen a copy of the confidential email which SOAS obtained under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the PHA.

In it, Ms McClean wrote:

While you could say … there is no evidence of an increase in in-hospital mortality following the service change … I don’t think you could go beyond that without some more work.

She added: 

The biggest issue is that the absolute number of deaths per month is very small and subject to significant month to month variation … This means that the RAMI figures calculated are likely to have wide confidence intervals.

A ‘confidence interval’ is the statistical range which tells where a true population value is likely to fall.

Mr Hamill continued: 

SOAS was also aware that in December 2018 CHKS published its ‘Hospital mortality measures’ guidance which stated: ‘Indicators that count events such as deaths suffer from huge uncertainty.

That document said:

To be confident of a rate (to within 10 percentage points) approximately 1,000 deaths must be included in the dataset.
Many smaller hospital trusts have fewer than this number of deaths in a whole year, and analysis of a smaller subgroup of deaths (a specific condition, for example) would require proportionately more years of data before an acceptable degree of confidence about the underlying rate can be reached.

The former WHSCT Consultant told The Derry News, there was no way the Trust had this amount of deaths.

They added:

When we go to scientific meetings, whenever data is presented, there are always confidence intervals, and when you see confidence intervals as wide as they are in the Trust’s data, you can have no confidence. You cannot draw any conclusions from the data.
Speaking to the Assembly Health Committee, the Trust’s Medical Director just took the numerical change and said this is an improvement but with the confidence intervals, you cannot say that. It could have improved. It could have disimproved. We have no idea.
The PHA told the Trust not to use the data but it went ahead and used it. It is the wrong analysis.
The claim that for every 40 days one life is saved is outrageous because the Medical Director has derived that data from the RAMI. He looked at the reduction in mortality and he extrapolated it to the number of deaths. He said the number of deaths is now is reduced by X every 40 days.
“It is all complete nonsense. The whole methodology is flawed. It is the most egregious use of data I have seen in my entire clinical life.

Mr Hamill said SOAS realised rigorous interrogation of the Trust’s RAMI data was essential. He explained:

We therefore commissioned a ‘Statistical evaluation of data on the change in Emergency Surgery provision in Western Health and Social Care Trust’ (November 19, 2025) - an analysis of the Trust’s RAMI data by Paul Bassett (Statsconsultancy Ltd).

Mr Bassett subsequently told The Derry News: 

Because of the nature of the hospital and the fact mortality is quite an unusual occurrence, there is a lot of uncertainty around the [WHSCT] figures.
It is hard to say with any certainty that things have gotten better or worse because the numbers are quite small. If there have been some changes, which they are claiming, there is no statistical justification that those differences are genuine ones and not just a chance variation over time.
There is certainly no evidence to suggest it is what we normally call a statistically significant change, in other words that the difference is unlikely to be due to chance and as a result is likely to be a genuine effect.
Although there have been some slight improvements, the uncertainty around the estimates is such that it is highly likely that those are just due to chance.
There is no definitive conclusion that those are genuine improvements in the performance as a result of the centralising of ESG provision in Altnagelvin Hospital.

Essentially, the WHSCT’s has been criticised for using analytic approaches that have significant uncertainty but attach strong inference without any degree of statistical skepticism or triangulation with other critical metrics of process.

This has been described as “a very poor example of medical leadership and strategic planning for change of this magnitude”.

On Monday (July 6, 2026) WHSCT issued a press release titled, ‘Western Trust highlights independent evidence of safer Emergency General Surgery pathways following inaccurate public claims’.

It has also established an Emergency General Surgery Information Hub.

The Trust said:

Independent evidence has confirmed continued improvements in Emergency General Surgery patient pathways across the Western Trust, with both the RQIA Inspection Report and the independent CHKS review highlighting better patient outcomes, improved patient flow and enhanced patient safety.
The full Trust statement is available.

 ⏩Catherine McGinty is a journalist covering the North West.

'Grave Doubts On Validity Of Western Trust Data'

Anthony McIntyre ⚽Jay didn't make this one.


Being a touch under the weather on this occasion was a cloud with a silver lining. He was spared the misery of another miserable performance. We were denied his prediction.

At the game's end I came away feeling that while Jay would get better there was little prospect of that happening for the Drogs. Then against the odds they went up to Oriel Park the following week and took all three points from their Dundalk rivals, a number of places above them in the league table. There were more than me amazed by that result. Inconsistency, while it worked out at Oriel, has been the bane of this struggling Drogheda side. 

Upon arrival I shook hands with Tony the tireless steward. It was coming up to the first anniversary of his wife's passing so I guess his mind was on other things, as well as the game at hand. 

Myself and Paddy settled into our seats just to realise that the sun was out once again to torment out view of the game. Maybe it thought it was doing us a favour, being the only thing to brighten up Sullivan And Lambe Park, but to me it is a lazy bollix. Does nothing all week and then comes out on a Friday night when nobody on our side of the ground wants it. Like the previous game, we were back to shielding our eyes from its rays through holding our phones above us. On this occasion I didn't even have the numbing compensatory balm of a double Glenfiddich. 

In the 5th minute Thomas Oluwa failed to make the most of a Brandon Kavanagh cross, putting his attempt on goal wide of the post. Minutes later Oluwa turned provider, allowing Leo Burney to head goalward from close range only to see his effort blocked. As if the sun was not doing a good enough job at annoying us, the stars seemed to be aligned against us as well. The two misses in the space of a minute were a harbinger of a missed opportunity to come.

Bohs defend in numbers especially from free kicks and corners which forces their opponents to rely on open play. The Drogs have more success from set pieces than any other side in the league while seeming unable to take advantage of the service provided by Brandon Kavanagh. Both avenues to goal closed off, it portended to be a difficult night.

It wasn't long before that moment of a fate foretold in the 5th minute arrived. Mark Doyle scoring at the wrong end of the pitch to put the visitors in front. Despite some attempts on the Bohemian goal the Claret and Blue failed to pull level, and went in at half time trailing by that solitary own goal. 

When Luke Dennison saved from Dawson Devoy in the 57th minute there was a hope that the Drogs had stabilised and could go on to salvage something from the game The Bohs seemed to be apprehensive about holding their lead and committed to some robust tackling to maintain the status quo, leading to a yellow card for Harry Vaughan on the hour. This saw the Bohs man replaced a minute later. 


In the 74th minute Ryan Brennan joined Vaughan when his name went into the book for a foul. The Drogheda captain had been putting himself about the park a bit, and it seemed inevitable that he would come to the ref's attention before the game's end.

As the contest entered its dusk stage an old Drogs favourite took to the field only this time he was turning out in the colours of the Bohs. Within two minutes the switch showed promise when Douglas James Taylor forced a Luke Dennison save. Only seconds passed before success struck for the English forward, placing his shot to the right of Dennison. Bohemians had doubled their lead.

Ten minutes later the former Drogs favourite could also have doubled his tally when a penalty was awarded against Leo Burney. Unfortunately for him he placed his shot over the bar and to safety for the Drogs although it would have no bearing on the outcome of the game. 

With time added on in either half, when they trudged towards the dressing room both sets of players teams had been on the field for over 100 minutes. 

We left the ground acutely aware that Waterford - for whom the season had seemed a lost cause with relegation looking a foregone conclusion - were now breathing down the neck of Drogheda. A 2-4 win up at the Brandywell over Derry City was edging them closer to safety while pushing the Drogs ever closer to the precipice. 

If Drogheda are to play premiership soccer next season they need to do it on their own steam. The steady climb of a consistent Waterford has shown that reliance on other teams to fail is a precarious hope for an inconsistent Drogheda.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Drogs ⚽ Bohs ⚽ Sliding

Dr John Coulter ✍ As tens of thousands of Orange brethren, sisters, band members and the public celebrate the Battle of the Boyne today, the event should also be used as a springboard to launch a Shared Union offensive aimed at persuading the 26 Counties to rejoin the a new Union of the British Isles.

Much is being made by elements of the Pan Nationalist Front (PNF) as to when they will be in a feasible position to have a Border Poll. While that is unlikely in the foreseeable future, it has not stopped the PNF from launching various projects and ventures to spark debate on Irish unity and what, in their eyes, a united Ireland should look like.

Rather than Unionism playing the constant Ulster Says No to any such debates, the Protestant Unionist Loyalist (PUL) community should start its own project to promote a Shared Union by persuading the 26 Counties of Southern Ireland to ultimately rejoin a new Union of the British Isles.

Whilst at first reading this will ultimately be dismissed by nationalists and republicans as a ‘rejoin the British Empire’ stunt, given the broad global tensions, the Irish republic may soon need to rethink both its relations with the European Union and its supposed military neutrality.

But primarily, how should a Shared Union campaign move forward beyond the theoretical into the practical given that the Irish unity debate is still firmly bogged down in the theoretical, if not downright fantasy politics.

The practical outworking of the Shared Union project should not wait until any future - if ever - Border Poll is called. In fact, it is already underway, and it lies in the hands of the Loyal Orders and marching bands.

Saturday witnessed the traditional Rossnowlagh parade in County Donegal when the Southern border county Orange lodges are joined by many Northern Ireland Orange members and bands for the annual so-called ‘Donegal Dander’.

It is one of the showpieces of the Orange Order in particular and is a far cry from past scenes at Drumcree during confrontations between the Order and the security forces. There are no political speeches at Rossnowlagh; just a route of around a mile, followed by a religious service, plenty of ice cream and a wee walk along the Donegal coastline.

The traditional Rossnowlagh parade is always held on the Saturday prior to the Twelfth to allow Southern lodges and bands to march in the main 12 July demonstrations across Northern Ireland. As 12 July 2026 falls on a Sunday, only annual divine services and church parades will be held that day with the traditional demonstrations scheduled for Monday 13th.

The Rossnowlagh model of Orangeism could be a blueprint for venues, not just across Northern Ireland, but also for an increased number of Orange and Black parades in Southern Ireland.

Whilst the Order is strongest in the Southern border counties of Donegal, Cavan, Monaghan and Leitrim, the Rossnowlagh model could be used as an organisational springboard to launch more Loyal Order parades throughout the 26 Counties, especially deeper into Southern Ireland.

Republicans like to talk a lot about ‘persuading’ Unionists about the fantasy benefits of the mythical united Ireland. But the reality is that Southern Ireland may have to abandon its ‘republic’ status and be ‘persuaded’ that its future as a nation like Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England lies within a new Union of the British Isles.

Military neutrality will have to be binned with the increasing threat from Russia. During the Cold War, the Right-wing National Monday Club pressure group portrayed Southern Ireland as Britain’s Cuba.

History is now repeating itself and its only a matter of time before the Ukrainian conflict becomes a head on war between the West and Russia. In this new impending war, the island of Ireland will play a crucial geographical role.

The Irish Defence Forces have already acquired an impressive peace keeping record serving with the United Nations. But the time has come for Southern Ireland to stop playing the neutrality card and become a full member of NATO.

Politically, too, Southern Ireland needs to realise that it has milked the European Union cow to the maximum and it is only a matter of time before Eire is forced to become a substantial giver to EU coffers rather than a receiver.

Irexit must follow Brexit. If the so-called Celtic Tiger economy goes bust again, there will be no British millions to bail out Southern Ireland. Practically, the 26 Counties also needs to be part of a major power bloc politically in the event of Irexit.

That bloc will be the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA), which represents some 50 plus national and regional parliaments and assemblies across the globe. It must be noted that Ireland was a founder member of the Empire Parliamentary Association - the forerunner of the CPA - in 1911 when all 32 Irish counties were an integral part of the British Empire.

As a Ballymena man myself, there is the old saying - money talks. The PNF can spoof all it likes politically about Irish unity, but the crucial financial bitter medicine which the 26 Counties must swallow - it can never afford to economically run all 32 counties.

Southern Ireland cannot make Irish unity financially viable, but the UK can make a new Union of the British Isles economically effective. Unionists must sell not only the benefits of remaining in the UK, but also the political, economic and military advantages of Southern Ireland becoming an integral part of the Union of the British Isles.

Over the coming days tens of thousands of folk will commemorate the Boyne victory at Orange demonstrations as well as the traditional Sham Fight at Scarva. That 17th century Williamite settlement heralded in the Glorious Revolution and the Protestant Ascendancy.

It is time for the UK to take back what is rightfully and historically our’s. It is time for the Dublin establishment to waken up and smell the poteen - Southern Ireland belongs in the Union.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
Dr Coulter has been a journalist since 1978 and is currently a political commentator with GB News.

PUL Community Should Launch Shared Union Offensive!

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