Image via Wikipedia of all that has gone wrong. My! How the place has gone downhill in recent years. Mistake number one: coming out of New Street station and expecting to know where I was. About twelve years ago the Midland Hotel was my first refuge for a pint of Holden's Golden, unquestionably the best pint of beer in England. Unless it has been dwarfed by shopashock then sadly that magnificent edifice to the great past of the city has been bulldozed, together with most of the other familiar places that I knew and cherished. Mistake number two: when your hotel provides a map and tells you it is seven hundred yards from New Street do not come out of the wrong exit. Several trips around the Bull Ring and numerous enquiries as to where Holloway Circus is resulted in blank stares, or the response, "I don't know" before an obliging road sweeper pointed us in roughly the right direction. What has happened to that gentle, cheerful accent that was linctus to the ears?
As ever great sighs of relief and the ritual throwing off of shoes marked the arrival, or should I say near collapse, into the hotel room to where we were eventually guided, over the phone by reception. In fact reception is an inappropriate term to describe the very polite people /person who manned this desk as they seemed also to be cleaners, cooks, barpersons and cheereruppers as well, bless them. Employers demand a great deal for the minimum wage these days.
Then a miserable afternoon traipsing around the same shops that are found in every town and city around the world these days. Confusion piled upon confusion when entering from street level and finding yourself on the third floor and having to have the navigational skills of Drake to chart your course back to the same exit or run the risk of running aground in some smoke filled car park. And then as a winter evening quickly slipped into night we try to console ourselves by finding somewhere pleasant to eat. Impossible: every hotel and restaurant in and around the city are choking with revellers celebrating something that occurred in an Arab land a long time ago.
Dying for a pee I duck into a hostelry, only to be stopped by a bouncer who told me that they ran a "No hats policy". Cap removed I rush to the loo where I get my only relief of the evening. On the way out I tell the guy, "I operate a no buy policy, and you are going to have a busy night because everyone in there is breaking the house rule and wearing paper crowns". After two fruitless hours we give up and buy a sandwich and a fruit juice and retire hurt to the sanctity of the hotel room.
Sunday, it is frosty but Good King Wenceslas is nowhere to be seen amongst the dreary, repetitive towers of Birmingham, looking like enormous tombstones to a bygone age. At last I journey to New Street station, sidestepping and swerving past the sick on the pavements, but still with a modicum of hope, reigned in by past experiences, in my heart. I am letting the train take the strain to transport me past the decaying factories and litter filled canals to Wolverhampton where my beloved Blues are playing the Dingles in yam yam territory.
Dear reader I am lost for words to describe the performance of my team. The Wolverhampton keeper may have spent his day back in his native Wales, where hill climbing would have at least caused him some exertion, because he was required to do absolutely nothing during the match. My team showed no heart, no passion, no effort and seemed not to care that the match was passing them by and trooped on and off the field like condemned men.
My first feelings were of disbelief that they could play, or rather not play so poorly, this was quickly followed by disappointment and then anger at their tawdry performance. I have been following the team for over fifty years, seen them lose by six or seven goals but at least in those matches the buggers tried. I am a proud Birmingham City fan but except for our goalie, who performed heroics, those highly paid and pampered professionals should be ashamed of themselves. They let us down.
As for our manager, Alex McLeish, he is now half way through his six year tenure at the club and if I was writing his mid term report then I would say, "He builds teams to defend. He has no concept of how to play attacking, exciting football which will entertain the fans. Tactically he is inept, his judgement is poor and he is indecisive. Must and should do far, far better but I think that he will continue to disappoint."
Someone said that the past is a foreign country. What has happened to this once great city which only twenty years ago was enjoying a renaissance. Who has allowed it to slip back to the dark ages? This tale of two cities is, as ever, a sad one and I fear the current City Fathers will continue to take it on its downward spiral. My love affair was with a mistress who is now dead.
A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD"
