Hi, it’s Stella Lagerwolf-Bruno, fashionista suprema at the Greenygrey, with a mix of serious reporting and satirical fashion for you today. I’ve been chosen to write this blog because there’s some greenygrey fashion later, as well as the fact that Voyager has left our solar system to become the first human object to travel in interstellar space after thirty-six years.
To me, interstellar space usually means keeping my distance from two of my closest rivals in fashion, Stella McCartney and Karl Lagerfeld. Or time between pints of Stella Artois. Anyway, enough about me, and on with the footie.
Football Needs Clark Carlisle, not Peter Herbert
Clarke Carlisle seems to take a balanced honest rational greenygrey view on his life and football in his new autobiography, You Don’t Know Me, But …: A Footballer’s Life; in which he has provoked controversy for criticising more extreme anti-racism campaigning footballers like Rio Ferdinand. We supported Carlisle’s Kick Racism Out campaign last year.
While the Greenygrey doesn’t want any prejudice in British sport and society, it also doesn’t want selfish and greedy people stirring up trouble where it is not needed.
Last year, Rio Ferdinand led a campaign that seemed totally out of proportion to the problem. After a couple of racist footballer cases, one of them by a South American, Ferdinand seemed to take inspiration from Malcolm X‘s black power movement, while Clarke Carlisle seemed more like Martin Luther King.
Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Ferdinand’s raising of the agenda to critical point in the media led to some crowd incidents; with Ferdinand, the media and crowds like a perfect storm feeding off each for a while.
This was in a modern football culture where Congolese Fabrice Muamba had been cheered at every ground after surviving a cardiac arrest on the pitch while playing for Bolton.
Moreover, England goalie David James said he’d never experienced any racism in English football during his long career. James also said in an Independent article that he thought anti-racism groups were just trying to stir things up to justify their existence.
Peter Herbert’s Society of Black Lawyers
Into the perfect storm appeared Peter Herbert and the Society of Black Lawyers. While Herbert might be a good lawyer, and done good things in other cases, he apparently suffered racism in his childhood, and admitted he knew nothing about football. So he was hardly likely to take a greenygrey balanced view like Carlisle. However, the British media has still given him wide coverage.
Moreover, Herbert’s also caused trouble for Tottenham Hotspur’s Jewish fans, citing them as racist for calling themselves a ‘Y’ term I don’t want to use because I’m not Jewish, so would almost certainly be considered racist by Herbert and his cronies. 
The Jewish fans use the term as a self-defence, in the same way as some black people use the ‘N’ word; and Marc Latham uses the ‘C’ word. So Herbert diving into the football world without much knowledge criticising the Spurs fans as ‘racist’ is like a Jewish lawyer diving into the music world and calling black rappers racist for using the ‘N’ word.
Anyway, enough serious stuff for now, and there’s been some great greenygrey news in the football fashion world this season…
Greenygrey Football Kits
Andrii Piatov kept a clean sheet as Ukraine drew 0-0 with England. Piatov wore a mainly grey kit with green stripes.
Asmir Begovic has helped little Bosnia and Herzegovina to the brink of World Cup qualification in a green shirt, and grey shorts and socks.
Begovic plays for Stoke in the Premier League, and in a first for the Greenygrey, their away kit has been passed as greenygrey by the Board of Greenygrey Quality Control.
The main colour is definitely grey, described as dark shale. The second colour is described as electric. Electric can look green or yellow, so is quite controversial, but it has now been passed as green enough; with this greenygrey little and large Owen and Crouch photo clinching the case.
There’s lots more greenygrey mixing of serious observations and humour in Doctor of Philosophy Marc Latham’s books available on Smashwords and Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/author/marclatham), with Werewolf of Oz and 242 Mirror Poems self-published to create bargain prices.
mistYmuse 