Cherry

What does Don Cherry represent? What does Don Cherry stand for?

Does Don Cherry represent Canada? Does Don Cherry stand for the Canadian way of life?

I hope not. Don Cherry just comes across as a grumpy old man, a septogenarian curmudgeon who has a singular idea of what Canadians are: gap-toothed, hard-working, win-at-all-cost hockey players who wear their hearts and patriotism (among other things) on their sleeves.

I don't think Don has looked around metropolitan Canada in the past 30 years. I don't think he's even close to understanding what it means to be "Canadian" these days.

I would not be surprised if Don admitted he didn't realize Adrienne Clarkson, the 26th Governor General of Canada, was Chinese.

Wake up, Don. Enough of the European-bashing. It's one thing to be proudly Canadian; it's another to portray all Europeans as pussies who whine and dive and wear visors and won't drop the gloves (though Alex Semin wasn't helping).

You don't represent Canada. You don't represent Canadian ideals. You may be fiercely proud of your small-town Canadian roots, but small-town Canada no longer represents Canada as a whole. Nearly half of the country's population now live in the ten most populous cities in the country. That's more than the total population from less than 60 years ago.

You may be entertaining. You may be controversial. You may even be entertaining because you're controversial. But times are passing you on, and until you are ready to admit that maybe there are other ways to play hockey and other ways to live life, you'll always go down as a stubborn grouch in my books.

New Lows

Liverpool have hit new lows with their Carling Cup exit at the hands of League Two Northampton Town. That's three divisions below the Premier League.

You'd think that Pepe Reina, Jamie Carragher, Steven Gerrard, and Fernando Torres is a pretty good spine to build a team around.

But they've lost the two key midfield ingredients in Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano and failed to adequately replace them. And things are just falling apart.

Is the lack of transfer funds to blame for their failures? Or is it the poor use of available funds?

I lean towards the latter. Benitez spent the past six years and over 200 million pounds on mostly second-rate players (read: Luis Garcia, Scott Carson, Peter Crouch, Dirk Kuyt, Jermaine Pennant, Ryan Babel, Martin Skrtel, Andrea Dossena, Albert Riera, etc.) and washed-up veterans (read: Fernando Morientes, Bolo Zenden, Robbie Fowler, Robbie Keane, Craig Bellamy, etc.). The only true world-class players signed during his tenure were Alonso, Mascherano, and Torres.

Instead of building a team with a top-class Starting XI, Benitez went for a bloated squad filled with mediocre players. In contrast, besides bringing in Michael Carrick, Owen Hargreaves, and Dimitar Berbatov in successive seasons (comparable players, if not in style then at least in stature), Fergie also brought in the likes of Wayne Rooney, Edwin van der Saar, Park Ji-Sung, Nemanja Vidic, Patrice Evra, Anderson, Nani, and Antonio Valencia. Not to mention the departed Gerard Piqué, Giuseppe Rossi, and Ben Foster.

So let's compare.

Alonso + Mascherano + Torres: Nearly 50 million pounds

Carrick + Hargreaves + Berbatov: Over 60 million pounds

The United trio cost a little more, sure. But fairly close. The rest of them?

Garcia + Carson + Crouch + Kuyt + Pennant + Babel + Riera + Morientes + Keane + Bellamy: Over 90 million pounds

Rooney + van der Saar + Park + Vidic + Evra + Anderson + Nani + Valencia: Nearly 100 million pounds

Ouch.

Toss in Alberto Aquilani (20 million) and the scale gets tipped the other way.

Is the lure of playing at Old Trafford really that much greater than playing at Anfield that, given a choice, a player would snub Liverpool in favour of United? I doubt it. I think it's purely a case of spending poorly.

Can you imagine if Liverpool had signed even just half of the players on United's list? (Anyone except Rooney: I can't imagine he would go from Everton to Liverpool. He'd never make it to the red half of Merseyside alive.)

Bottom line: Benitez spent his money on second-rate players and made Liverpool a second-rate club.

Remember: You are what you eat.

Plans For Tonight

Father-in-law is coming in tonight, so the plans are for us to vacuum the basement once more and run the air purifier for a few hours, and start moving things back into their rightful places with the carpets now in-place.

The shelves should hopefully be dry now - its second layer of paint was done on Saturday night - so we can put things on it and get everything hooked up. We still need to mount the surround speakers onto the ceiling, but that'll have to wait till the weekend at the earliest, after my father-in-law has left.

Subtitles

Ran into a major roadblock with the KDVD's.

I guess it was a stroke of luck (or not) that the first set of KDVD's I tried to convert into KSongLover-compatible MPEG-2 files did not utilize subtitle streams for subs, but rather, the lyrics were encoded directly onto the video streams, of which there were two. All that was required was selecting the right Angle prior to demuxing and all was well.

However, I popped in another set of KDVD's today and found that it used subtitle streams, which can be demuxed into .SUB files by DVD Decrypter, but there is no lossless way to re-mux it into an MPEG-2 file (perhaps because MPEG-2 files cannot carry subtitles?).

As far as I can tell, I must re-encode the video with the subtitles laid on top. I have yet to figure out how.

Basement Update

So... carpets are getting put in early next week (or possibly this weekend), which means I've gotta move everything downstairs out of the way. We threw out most of the cardboard boxes (except for the pretty ones) and we'll toss the packaging material tonight. After that, all the cables need to be disconnected and everything put away into storage until the carpets are in.

All the necessary pieces are slowly coming in. I'll be dropping by Ikea to look at shelving material as well as the sofa bed after work.

England Squad Missing John Terry and Frank Lampard

That's good news to me. Now if only an injury would befall Ashley Cole.

But can anyone tell me what Matthew Upson is doing still in the squad?

I would love to see Fabio Capello try something like playing Carrick, Gerrard, and Barry all in the middle of the pitch, with Milner and (Adam) Johnson out wide and switching wings every now and then.

Premiership 25-man Squad List

Here's the new Premier League Home-Grown Rule as found on premierleague.com:

"Premier League Clubs agreed, from season 2010/11, to introduce the following rules governing squad numbers and Home Grown Players.

• Each Club must submit a squad by 5pm on 1st September containing no more than 17 players who do not fulfill the Home Grown Player criteria. The remainder of the squad, up to a total of 25 players, must be Home Grown.
• A Home Grown Player means a player who, irrespective of his nationality or age, has been registered with any club affiliated to the Football Association or the Football Association of Wales for a period, continuous or not, of three entire seasons or 36 months prior to his 21st birthday (or the end of the Season during which he turns 21).
• Changes to the squad list of 25 may be made during the period of a Transfer Window.
• U21 players are eligible over and above the limit of 25 players/squad.
• For the 2010/11 campaign Under 21 players will have been born on or after 1st January 1989."

(Any emphasis mine)

What a completely useless rule and an utter, utter waste of everyone's time.

The most obvious counter-argument to the effectiveness of this rule is in the squad submitted by Arsenal, which included only 20 players over the age of 21. Of those 20, only 7 qualified as "Home Grown", and of those 7, none were even English.

Let me say that again: The rule created to supposedly ensure young English players are given better chances resulted in Arsenal registering 20 players in their 25-man squad, none of whom were English.

(Of course, in addition to the 20, Arsenal also registered a further 56 players aged 21 or younger.)

See, the way the rule is reading, it seems a club can even get away with not registering any "Home Grown" players, nevermind English, as long as they do not register more than 17 "non-Home Grown" players.

Which is completely different from saying a club must register no less than 8 "Home Grown" players.

The other problem, of course, lies in the definition of "Home Grown". As it stands, "Home Grown" is any player, regardless of nationality, who has been registered to an English (or Welsh) club for 3 full seasons or 36 months before the end of the season in which he turns 21.

Which means, you can sign him from anywhere in the world, as long as you sign him at the start of the season in which he turns 19, and he'll still count as "Home Grown".

How exactly does encouraging managers to tempt 16, 17, 18-year-olds away from their home countries and into English club academies promote the development of young English players?

If I were the manager of an English Premiership club (and I am, in the fantasy world known as FM), I would just stockpile the best young foreign talent, hoarding them from the young age of 16, 17, or 18, and unload any English youngsters who can't make the grade amongst them.

Oh wait, isn't that what Wenger does? Do the names Fabregas, Bendtner, Clichy and Denilson ring any bells??

Just saw Chelsea's squad list, and it brings us back to the first point: Chelsea only registered 4 "Home Grown" players. Four. Plus 17 "non-Home Grown" players. Exactly the kind of abuse I thought would happen. But at least all four of them were English.

Surprisingly, even Man City were able to register 12 "Home Grown" players.

Someone needs to do a study on the number of English man-games in the 2010-11 season compared to previous years.