Whilst it deals with a contemporaneous situation, Route Irish is perhaps most comparable to Loach’s previous Troubles-set story, Hidden Agenda, which was concerned with political and military subterfuge in war-torn Northern Ireland.

‘Route Irish’ is a codename given by the British forces to the road leading from Baghdad International Airport to the International Zone. It is on this stretch of dusty terrain that Frankie (played by comedian John Bishop) is killed by an improvised explosive device.

The film’s preliminary scenes flit between the past and the present. Initially we are transported back to a Liverpool supporter’s club and shown Frankie being persuaded by his best friend, Fergus (Mark Womack) – formally of the SAS – to go and work for a private military company in Iraq.

Fergus decries Frankie’s initial reservations, informing him of the rich economic benefits (£10,000 per month) he earned whilst working in the same role at the outset of the war. The juxtaposing scenes eventually bring us forward to Fergus breaking down with anger at Frankie’s funeral.

Thereafter Fergus trawls over every detail about how his best friend died with a forensic intensity and challenges the rehearsed syntax of the military executives, who run the mercenary sideline that Fergus and Frankie had seen their fortunes tied up in.

Evidence eventually falls into Fergus’s possession that persuades him that Frankie was far from just another casualty of war. On an Iraqi mobile phone he discovers a harrowing video of Frankie witnessing members of his security team killing an innocent family only weeks before Frankie’s eventual death.

The theory is that his friend was killed as part of some sort of high-level cover-up. It is this obsessive need to learn the truth that consumes Fergus and drives the action forward.

For Route Irish, Loach was reunited with cinematographer Chris Menges. Menges had worked on previous Loach features, including that other lugubrious film about friendship and loss, Kes.

The image and tone of the conflicting forces at work in Route Irish are excellently rendered by Loach and Menges, and the viewer is drawn into a tight and claustrophobic world where instability reigns and people are presented as pawns in a dangerous game.

Route Irish, however, is very much concerned with human paranoia and misery, friendship and the (un) justification, as Loach sees it, of war in a foreign land. It will not be to everyone’s taste and it is sure to provoke much debate about a controversial conflict that is likely to intrigue film-makers and writers for decades to come.

From Losey’s The Damned (1963) to Roddam’s adaptation of The Who’s rock opera Quadrophenia (1979), the area has been depicted in cinema as an energetic and fraught battleground stalked by youths intent on living up to their feral tag.

The genesis for this violent reputation is Graham Greene’s classic 1938 novel Brighton Rock, which follows teenage antihero Pinkie Brown.

Ultimately a morality tale, the book was reflective of its time. It depicted the exploits of a razor-carrying, suit-wearing gang leader who could easily have been transferred to or from contemporary Glasgow – a city which was, when Greene’s novel first appeared, often compared to Chicago due to violent internecine feuding on the streets of its working-class and slum districts.

Rowan Joffe’s new film Brighton Rock (2011) – which stars Sam Riley and Dame Helen Mirren – is essentially a reimagining of both Greene’s novel and John Boulting’s 1947 film version starring Richard Attenborough, which has come to be regarded as a classic.

Joffe’s 21st century remake brings the social context forward some 30 years to 1964. It is an era in which ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ fought pitched battles in seaside towns across the south coast of England, much to the dismay of a frightened parent generation who were still reeling from the horrors of the Blitz.

This ‘moral panic’ – arguably the first of its kind in Great Britain – provides, on paper at least, a tantalising backdrop to Joffe’s retelling. He succeeds in demonstrating that the central issues Greene wrote about (religion, social responsibility, comradeship) can pervade any social setting at any given time in history. However, rather frustratingly, the style of his film rather outweighs the substance.

Throughout Sam Riley is trapped in a permanent James Cagney impression. Riley can do brooding well – as was demonstrated when he took on the role of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in Control (2007) – but there is something maddeningly soulless about his acting here. His melodramatic homage to early gangster flicks begins to grate as the film develops.

We are also asked to believe that Rose (Andrea Riseborough) is so lacking in confidence that she would naively surrender her relative independence as a single woman in the 1960s to give unswerving loyalty to a character who is played without even a hint of mischievous charm.

A supporting cast of fine British actors – Mirren, John Hurt, Phil Davis and Andy Serkis – are rotated without ever being allowed to develop. It constantly feels like Joffe is unwittingly diminishing the substance of Greene’s characters by paying more attention to the visual aspect of the film, which, to give him his dues, is often remarkable.

From the vibrant but disarmingly melancholy Brighton pier to the tatty vestiges of a declining British Empire as symbolised by the stuffed away Union Jacks in Pinkie’s bedsit, Joffe visually depicts the fragmentation of England’s working-class.

Sadly, however, these are all we are left with – images. Had Joffe managed to marry content and character, perhaps the result might have been an intriguing reinvention of an enduring tale. Sadly, that is not the case.

Yet one of the most obvious and central backdrops to this ongoing crisis has been the less than smooth relationship that the Protestant working class has had with the Ulster Unionist Party, which sat unchallenged for so long in Stormont until 1972. The Troubles, however, highlighted the declining faith that ordinary Protestants had in the seemingly monolithic political force. Challenges to the Unionist Party from the DUP and Vanguard in the early 1970s raised awareness of a class schism within Protestant politics and society in Northern Ireland, and that sense of discord has been increasingly important in the confrontations between Ulster Unionism’s different faces.

It seems strange, then, that at a time when working class faith in the UUP is still low the party would try to reinvigorate its links with the Conservative Party whose leader and potential future Prime Minister David Cameron was invited to the UUP’s conference at the weekend. Chris McGimpsey, who worked tirelessly on the Shankill with families affected by the paramilitary feud of 2000, was dismayed at the formation of the UUP/Conservative bond. The negative reaction of McGimpsey toward the alliance may have been a minority verdict within the UUP, yet it was vital in highlighting the reservations that many working class Protestants hold for the Conservatives.

On one level it might be suggested that this pessimistic response can be traced back to more recent reservations about the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the mid-1980s, however it is also possible and perhaps more crucial that many working class Protestants are also aware of the labourist tradition that has long existed within their community. The PUP for example has often proclaimed its Northern Ireland Labour Party credentials.

While the UUP’s flirtations with Cameron are an attempt to reassure errant supporters about the future shape of the Union, it seems that the party has overlooked the importance of labour politics and trade unionism to many working class Protestants in Northern Ireland – an historic factor which needs to be reclaimed by the Unionist and Loyalist community if attempts to empower a people often regarded as experiencing a process of social and political decline are to prove successful.

Source: Belfast News Letter, December 2008

Admittedly the Troubles coloured the decade here in Northern Ireland, yet according to 2004 evidence by the New Economics Foundation which has been highlighted in a recent book ‘Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in The 1970s’ by Alwyn W. Turner, people in Britain were actually happier in 1976 than any time since. Despite this suggestion it might be said that popular culture in Britain, despite often appearing negative in its outlook, has never been as interesting as it was between 1970 and 1980.

While the social and cultural revolutions experienced throughout the 1960s were undeniably important in shaping an understanding of contemporary Britain, it is the manner in which people reacted to the slide in the 1970s which arguably provides more intriguing material for historians of politics and culture in particular – indeed, in his book Turner uses the commissioning of the South Bank Show by London Weekend Television late in the decade as evidence that culture had, by the 1970s, become central to observing how British people behaved and interacted with each other and their environment more generally. Turner is correct, and Mike Leigh’s classic play ‘Abigail’s Party’ (1977) with its commentary on the new suburban middle class and its beige aspirations was important in portraying how everyday life was often flavoured by an acute fatalism. Indeed less acknowledged works in the ‘Play for Today’ series at the time portray the many schisms that were causing social tensions in 1970s Britain. Peter McDougall’s excellent ‘Just Another Saturday’ (1975) which was centred on a day in the life of a drum major in an Orange band acutely observed everyday life in Glasgow in the midst of a constitutional crisis in Scotland.

The many recent volumes written on the punk phenomenon have continually suggested that by the late 1970s British youth in particular had reached a boiling point of disillusionment – indeed there have been observations that John Lydon’s fantastic post-Sex Pistols project Public Image Ltd. was in danger of bringing the burgeoning dystopia of the late part of the decade to dangerously wretched levels in the new wave era of the 1980s (how prophetic he was in terms of setting the mood for the advent of Thatcher’s early 1980s!). However in the early to mid 1970s David Bowie had already provided chillingly prescient commentaries on issues such as the cult of personality and the alienation of the majority with famous albums such as ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Diamond Dogs’. By the end of the decade Bowie’s mood had been cheered little as he released the malevolent trilogy of ‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’. On top of Bowie’s pacesetting work brooding soundscapes conjured by Throbbing Gristle, Magazine, Gang of Four and Joy Division laid bare the many discourses, from dealing with the legacy of the 1960s to the more immediate issue of the power of the trade unions, vying for attention in 1970s Britain

The importance of the 1970s in understanding wider British society cannot be ignored. Indeed in the same manner in which people reacted to the war and the post-war years, it has been during periods when Britain’s collective back has been against the wall that its literature and music has been at its most fascinating. Indeed in recent years some artists have called upon the zeitgeist of the 1970s for their own craft. The most obvious example of this was David Peace’s novel ‘The Damned United’ which was based on Brian Clough’s brief tenure in charge at Leeds United and which has proved to be so popular that it is soon to be made into a film.

Indeed the popularity of the recent television series ‘Life On Mars’ might provide a small clue about the depth of people’s feelings regarding the over-sensitive nature of modern British society. While cultural representations of the decade may often appear muggy and claustrophobic it has only been recently when some commentators have noted the emerging similarities between Brown’s Britain and the 1970s that a non-retro nostalgia has emerged for a time when edgy music, literature and television rallied against and commented on important social phenomena, and indeed came to the fore in the consciousness of the mainstream. One wonders how Britons in 2040 will talk about the latest Keane or Snow Patrol records in relation to their social and cultural origins?

Source: Belfast News Letter, October 2008

Of course this isn’t a sociology essay, and we want to know what the music is like. At first Glasvegas do admittedly come across as ‘Mary Chain stooges at a talent show with a dead ringer for Joe Strummer leading the parade. Yet their somewhat monochrome image betrays a deep and original package, meaning that they stand apart from many of the current crop who often appear to have lazily picked a band from previous generations to ape. Glasvegas’s ability to tell stories – refracted through an incredibly forceful soundscape – about less than fashionable topics such as football violence, the death of a father and other themes which would probably be anathema to many on the bandwagon makes them seem somewhat antiquated, yet it is this ability to walk against the tide that means they are wholly essential to making pop music interesting. However it often feels that Glasvegas have tacked Glasgow onto their songs in the same way that other bands have tacked their forebears onto their art. ‘Flowers & Football Tops’, ‘Geraldine’, ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’ and ‘Daddy’s Gone’ have all established themselves in people’s heads over the past few months whether it be from constant rotation on music channels on television or BBC fare such as ‘Football Focus’. These songs will endure, but the long-term future of Glasvegas remains less certain as it seems that they have used up all their reference points in one heady record.

Their longevity is questionable. Everything is arguably set up for them to be a one-album wonder – from the novelty name to their fixed image and preoccupations. They may provide a more accessible insight into the darker side of Glasgow – and indeed wider contemporary British – city life than their compatriots Errors and Mogwai, but after the initial untamed thrill of ‘Glasvegas’ has worn off you cannot help but feel somewhat short-changed.

If ‘Glasvegas’ is a very personal and dark glamorisation of a city’s underbelly, then ‘The Holy Pictures’ by David Holmes is a scrapbook of the artist’s youth in Belfast during a period which stands in stark contrast to the current post-ceasefire ‘peace process’ era. While many songs on the album may sound whimsically in tune with the current positive mood, Holmes actually bemoans the loss of an intensity which the Troubles brought to both himself and the dance scene in Belfast in general during days which people often describe as being among the city’s darkest. Indeed, in a recent interview with Lisa Verrico in The Sunday Times Holmes described how he missed the visceral edge of the dark days in Belfast and the sense of escapism that his semi-legendary club nights in the Art College provided. All of this is wired into the sound of ‘The Holy Pictures’.

Indeed the marvellous lead single ‘I Heard Wonders’ has been promoted with a video which depicts the spirit of change and optimism that 1968 visited upon Europe and the USA. While the fortieth anniversary of that momentous year has provoked much debate regarding its long-term implications in Northern Ireland in particular, Holmes eschews direct political debate and has concentrated on making a very personal album which has universal appeal. ‘The Holy Pictures’ is dotted with moments of true beauty – none more beautiful than on the album’s piano-led swansong, ‘The Ballad of Sarah & Jack’ which is Holmes’s tribute to his parents. The song is so powerfully tangible that it evokes lamentations for a Belfast which has disappeared completely – the days of dance halls and an era of comparative goodwill that existed so tantalisingly and so briefly immediately prior to the explosion of the Troubles in the late 1960s. It probably isn’t histrionic to suggest that this might be one of the best local songs ever and should soundtrack any documentary footage of early to mid 1960s Northern Ireland.

While both ‘Glasvegas’ and ‘The Holy Pictures’ are respective attempts to come to terms with home towns which share so much in common, David Holmes’s subtle imagining of a bygone Belfast is more appealing than Glasvegas’s bombastic majesty. ‘The Holy Pictures’ may be David Holmes’s masterpiece, but he still has much more in the locker. Paradoxically by rejecting the current trends in indie music, Glasvegas may run out of steam more quickly than one would anticipate. How I wish they would prove me wrong.

Source: Brazen City, September 2008

The tone of the interviewees ensured that the programme was as controversial as its title suggested – for instead of recalling events that occurred during some of Northern Ireland’s darkest years in a manner befitting such an era the jolly tone, almost Dan Dare-like, throughout much of the documentary was a stark juxtaposition to a recent book by the journalist Susan McKay in which she allowed victims of paramilitary violence to recount in grim detail their horrendous experiences. Not so in this programme, where the IRA-related crimes were airbrushed out and the violence which occurred during the prisoners’ breakout was mentioned almost as an afterthought despite a prison official losing his life.

It almost seems as though a certain slot on Monday evenings is being filled with controversial Troubles-related programme making for the sake of it, without considering the effects of such programmes on the wider public’s opinions regarding the peace process. Indeed a subsequent documentary on Marie Jones’s play ‘A Night in November’ is sure to have made people incandescent. Jones appears in the advertisement suggesting that on that night in November 1993 at Windsor Park the sectarianism of Northern Ireland football supporters had reached an epoch. Again it must be questioned what the benefits are of rerunning this play and the accompanying documentary at a time when Northern Ireland’s fans have been officially recognised as among the greatest in Europe.

Now is perhaps not the best time for such partisan programming. If anything a ‘shared vision’ should be encouraged by celebrating the positives of Belfast and Northern Ireland both historically and in the present.

Source: Belfast News Letter, September 2008

Berbatov spent the summer prowling the perimeter fence of White Hart Lane, dreaming of an escape to pastures anew in Manchester where the likes of Garry Birtles and Neil Webb carved out a niche as also-rans after leaving fine careers behind them. Both of course furthered their profiles (more in terms of girth than stock) at Old Trafford, but hardly set the footballing world alight. Things have changed now and Berbatov’s addition to Manchester United’s electrifying array of talent is enough to make any neutral fan salivate.

Yet it is the attitude of these players – Ronaldo and Berbatov – that typify the excesses of the English game in the first decade of the ‘noughties’. Indeed it is telling that a major football publication only this month predicted that the long-term impact of this era will be fondly remembered only marginally more than the 1970s which was rather surprisingly judged to be English football’s darkest era.

While there are still a few stragglers who seem to realise how privileged they are to be getting paid astronomical wages for playing the sport they profess to love, there are many more players who are fanatically gorging on the bulging pots of gold that clubs such as Manchester United and Real Madrid can put in front of their snouts.

Something of the Corinthian spirit of football as a sport that can be enjoyed both by the spectator and the player has disappeared. Ticket prices increase as supporter’s wages remain static or fall. While the FA may celebrate the contribution of Manchester United to the rich legacy of English football, they might do well to remember that it was that very club, during its heading days in the late 1990s and early millennia that disrespected the FA Cup in order to do a whistle-stop promotional tour.

As things stand, the top-heavy top four in the English league continue to feed off the lower Premier league teams. In turn teams such as Spurs harvest youthful talents from Football League teams for paltry amounts of compensation at tribunals – just ask Crystal Palace fans – and the whole repetitive cycle depressingly continues.

Source: Belfast News Letter, August 2008

While ‘Five Minutes Of Heaven’ may be regarded as an attempt to represent a Northern Irish society coming to terms with the legacy of the Troubles, it might also be said that it demonstrates a gradual acceptance that the conflict, which has informed day to day life in so many ways for the past 40 years, is now a topic which can be used as a reference point for a new and rich vessel of local television drama.

In recent decades there has been a rich pool of local writers and actors who have succeeded in having their work transmitted. For example Gary Mitchell’s excellent play ‘As The Beast Sleeps’ was shown by the BBC, and the classic ‘Billy Plays’ which starred a young Kenneth Brannagh lived on to become a trilogy after its first instalment initially aired as part of the excellent ‘Play For Today’ series. In both works the Troubles loomed large, inviting various narratives that are both unique to this country and applicable elsewhere.

In other parts of the UK screen writers have been unafraid to confront the negative aspects of their respective societies. Indeed some of the best English drama in recent years has relied on the issues that have characterised the changes experienced in that country; post-industrial decline, racism and the effects of Thatcherism flavoured excellent episodes of Jimmy McGovern’s work such as the dystopian ‘Cracker’ and more recently, the underrated ‘The Street’ where the simple pleasures of day to day life are staged against a backdrop of impending social and economic pressures.

Northern Ireland is coming out of the worst of its negative history, yet reservations about the recent past and the reality of a society that in parts is still very much divided and violent make for a combustible mix; similar in tempo if not context to the issues that have consumed McGovern’s imagination.

From initial reports ‘Five Minutes Of Heaven’ looks to be a promising addition to what has, throughout the UK in the past 35 years, been a uniquely regional brand of television drama. Yet it would be a mistake to close the book on Troubles-related drama thereafter. A cursory glance at Susan McKay’s latest offering, ‘Bear in Mind These Dead’ or the hefty ‘Lost Lives’ suggest that the past 40 years have produced many stories that demand to be told whether that be in private or – in the case of ‘Five Minutes Of Heaven’ – communicated to a wider audience through television drama. If classic British television drama has demonstrated anything throughout its rich history it is that ordinary people’s stories are compelling, and in the case of Northern Ireland’s quest for a lasting peace – valuable.

Source: Belfast News Letter, June 2008

McDougall’s work, directed by John Mackenzie for television is filmed in a grainy documentary style – in part due to its shoe-string budget. It is often impossible for an engaged viewer to distinguish drama from reality and that style is what gives it much of its power on the small screen. Among these recent DVD releases the most high profile and perhaps most pertinent for Northern Irish viewers would have to be ‘Just Another Saturday’, supposedly originally written by McDougall at the behest of ‘Z Cars’ star Colin Welland whose London house he happened to be painting. Inspiringly McDougall had apparently never read a book, never mind written a drama script yet he was able to draw on his real-life experiences; those of working in the shipyards and being a drum major in the Orange parades in Glasgow (an activity which is shared by John McNeil, the main protagonist in ‘Just Another Saturday’) to create a series of stirring social commentaries. In a similar manner to local playwright Sam Thompson who wrote about sectarianism and bigotry in the Belfast shipyards, McDougall captured Glasgow, a similar city, in the midst of crises. The shipyards which like Belfast had provided so much employment to manual workers in the surrounding areas were in decline. The constitutional status of Scotland was under considerable debate, sectarianism was a societal and institutional malady and the Northern Irish conflict was spiralling out of control across the Irish Sea (Graham Walker provided an erudite analysis of some of these themes in his 1995 book ‘Intimate Strangers – Political and Cultural Interaction Between Scotland and Ulster in Modern Times’). Indeed, having been filmed in 1975 ‘Just Another Saturday’ was, like ‘Scum’ deemed so controversial at the time that its broadcast was put back for some years. Apparently during its production the head of the Glasgow police force banned its creation on seeing the script, predicting that the piece would cause social disorder during its filming and eventual screening.

In many ways the themes played out in ‘Just Another Saturday’ were relevant to the Ulster situation in the 1970s and are perhaps still just as pertinent for Belfast in the year 2007. While things are improving incrementally, it is hardly yet a cultural Xanadu. Although there are some who seem to bask in this notion, the flipside of this perceived utopia is that there has actually been a persistent decline in many communities in Belfast and beyond which have yet to taste the benefits of the ‘peace process’. Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell, who despite having his play ‘As The Beast Sleeps’ televised, has often encountered trouble in attempting to get his message across and is a dramatist who in a similar fashion to McDougall has constantly tried to project through an artistic medium the intense problems facing working class communities – in Mitchell’s case Protestant communities in Belfast as they come out of the protracted conflict. McDougall and Mitchell, while possibly unaware of each other, undoubtedly share a common narrative in that both have successfully critiqued their respective similar backgrounds and the inherent machismo, violence and divisive institutions that have dogged them and their communities, especially in a shared experience of post-industrial decline. Indeed the central characters in Mitchell’s ‘As The Beast Sleeps’ and McDougall’s ‘Just Another Saturday’ are faced with contextually similar though circumstantially incongruent choices about their destiny and identity. For Kyle in Mitchell’s play the narrowed definition of his role as a post-ceasefire Loyalist paramilitary have come to bear along with the political and economic pressures of that role (John Hill – ‘Cinema and Northern Ireland – Film, Culture and Politics). For John McNeil, the young drum major in McDougall’s play it is a matter of coming to terms with his previously concrete convictions about Orange pageantry which has been abused by Rab Williamson, who was up until the Saturday in question something of a role model for McNeil. The institutions of paramilitarism and Orangeism, which are respectively central in the urban communities written about in ‘As The Beast Sleeps’ and ‘Just Another Saturday’ come in for unflattering scrutiny in each writers’ works.

No matter what our individual opinions on the institutions subjected to analysis in these works are, it is vital that a new generation has the opportunity to appreciate Peter McDougall and John Mackenzie’s classic work from the 1970s. In ‘Just Another Saturday’ and ‘Just A Boy’s Game’ we get glimpses of social ailments – violence, bigotry and misogyny – that are still sadly prevalent on both sides of the divided city in Belfast. Perhaps if someone acts upon Peter Hain’s advice about the importance of local television drama they’ll first take a took at these DVDs, Gary Mitchell’s work and tomes similar to it in the Nationalist community and aim to give a balanced view of a society which has yet to fully transform.

Source: Fortnight Magazine, December 2007

Throughout the recent domestic league season Manchester United have correctly won plaudits by serving up their characteristically perfect blend of strong-willed defensive shut-outs and majestic attacking flair while Chelsea have, on the other hand, produced doggedly determined essays in pure grit that might only have attracted the odd dour-faced fan of Italian football which had all self-flagellators tuning in to Channel 4 on Sunday afternoons throughout the 1990s.

For all the flair and panache that those presently at the pinnacle of English football are possessed of, it still doesn’t feel like the ‘all-English’ protagonists are actually all that English. Fans of the Premier League should rightfully feel proud that Ronaldo, Tevez, Essien and Ballack have graced their stadiums over the past nine months, yet something of the buccaneering spirit that made top-flight football in England such a joy to watch has been replaced by a diluted version of the game that puts one in mind of the theatrics of, say, the WWF wrestlers of the 1980s. The demand for success at the big English clubs puts one, perhaps cynically, in mind of an essentially all-European rather than all-English European final.

Understandably the current pedigree athletes that compromise the majority of the players at United and Chelsea need protection from the pitfalls of unnecessary injury – the pitch at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium was, at the time of writing, causing some concern – yet it does make one pine for an era when bumpy surfaces were just one of the many challenges that professional footballers had to rise to on their travels. The worst that any team had to endure in the recent Premier League season was Wigan’s pitch at the JJB Stadium which admittedly, by mid-winter, looked like the cast of The Wicker Man had reunited and attempted a daily recreation of the May Day festival procession on it (though the playing surface was eventually relaid for United’s final day, title-winning visit).

The rumblings of discontent about playing surfaces over this past season in particular bring to mind a stark contrast in footballing cultures – the Nottingham Forest team which, under the curation of the genius Brian Clough, dominated Europe in 1979 and 1980 with their brand of free-flowing attractive attacking football yet had to endure continental and domestic pitches which were more akin to potato fields than bowling greens along the way.

I fancy that the highly paid current crop would struggle to adapt to the playing surfaces that faced Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and Aston Villa when these sides thrived throughout English football’s heady days of the late Seventies and early Eighties. No matter how good or bad last night’s final was, and despite the fact that Liverpool have twice got to the final along with Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea over the past three years, it’s hard to imagine anyone becoming misty-eyed and nostalgic for the new glory days of English football in Europe: 2005-2008.

Source: Belfast News Letter, May 2008