In Kenya, Jambo means hello.
In Scotland, Jambo means goodbye.
At least that was the way it has looked over the last couple of weeks at Heart of Midlothian Football Club, AKA the Jam Tarts, AKA the Jambos.
Last weekend the club slipped from it position atop the Scottish Premier League (SPL) after a defeat by Edinburgh city rivals Hibernian. It was their first defeat of the season and followed the appointment of a stand-in manager following the departure the previous weekend of George Burley, apparently fired despite his 100 per cent record. Jambo George as they might well say in those parts.
Burley’s departure was followed by those of both the club’s chairman and CEO, who found that they too were Jamboed by the club’s Lithuanian owner who promptly put his son in charge of both roles.
Owner Vladimir Romanov said the guys weren’t up to the job, even though they say that the club was enjoying its best ever start to an SPL season, that season ticket sales had increased hugely and that plans for stadium development were well advanced.
Not good enough though for Romanov, who became a local hero when he took over the club last year and prevented the sale of its Tynecastle ground and a possible stadium share with the hated Hibs.
It remains to be seen how long their gratitude will last.
Chairman George Foulkes has accused Romanov of acting like a dictator etc etc etc, and promised that a revolution will follow. He may be right. Any move which may destabilise a ship is likely to be resented and the dangers of nepotism are clear. Even my boss won’t let me call him Dad at work.
While it may still be too early to judge, it looks as though Hearts fans are experiencing the sort of problems which Manchester United’s followers anticipated in the wake of Malcolm Glazer’s take-over of Old Trafford.
To date Glazer and his three sons have more or less let things tick along as before, at least in terms of key personnel. But this week’s apparently gutless defeat against Lille in the Champions league means there’s a real possibility that United won’t make the lucrative final stages of the competition for the first time. That defeat, coupled with the club captain’s public criticism of some of his team mates, has focused attention on United’s decline which is being portrayed in some quarters as an Empire on the brink of collapse. If these are the vibes being felt at Glazer HQ in Florida, it may be only a matter of time before there’s some heavy-duty Jamboing going on around Old Trafford as well.
United’s position within football was underscored by default this week when a consortium involving an Irish building firm - who, we are told, rather appropriately made their first serious money building psychiatric hospitals - have made an approach to acquire Aston Villa.
Now Villa is the biggest club in the UK’s second city, and boast a long and relatively glorious history which includes a European Cup victory in the early 1980s when Peter Withe’s shin defeated Bayern Munich.
The point is that Villa is a significant club in what still claims to be the most attractive league in the world. Yet the bid was only £64million, or 15 per cent of the value of United.
The discrepancy is interesting for a number of reasons. It’s partly to do with actual income and partly to do with potential. While United is established as a national and increasingly international brand, capable of generating revenue from a huge and widespread fan-base, Villa is only just the dominant brand in its home market which is itself shared with two significant local rivals and of course, Manchester United.
According to research by TNS Sport, just about the only market in the UK where United didn’t make a significant dent in the local supporter base was in the North East. Newcastle reign unchallenged on Tyneside where to wear the black and white shirt is to be a God and where, in recent times, the club has been seen as central to the concept of the Geordie Nation. That’s the sort of brand loyalty a club owner could only dream of, but whether it’s possible to grow that brand much beyond Gateshead is open to debate.
But, casting the realities of existing ownership structures and intent to one side for a second, one can’t help thinking that Newcastle United could be the next magnet for new and probably overseas investors. It would be interesting to see how the local support will react.
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So the two Koreas are to unite for next year’s 15th Asian Games in Doha and then for the Beijing Olympic Games. It’s indicative of the positive power of sport that a nation divided by doctrine and riven by the mutual distrust and hatred that has been engendered over half a century, should even consider such a move.
It would be particularly interesting to be in the huddle ahead of, say, a football game between the two Koreas and the USA. All sorts of rhetoric is used to whip a team into a winning performance and the North Korean players would probably not need too much encouragement to dislike their opponents. After all, this is a nation which still makes movies about defeating the capitalist imperialist running dogs and launching nuclear strikes against US cities.
Any South Korean players on the team may feel a little left out. Having been – arguably – the net beneficiary of US attention for 50 years, the nation has wholeheartedly embraced the notion of industrial capitalism and have a standard of living their friends in the North can only dream of. It may be a little more difficult to motivate those members of a team whose country embraces Coca Cola-culture to the extent that baseball – America’s game – is one of its most popular sports.
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By way of a footnote, Aston Villa’s European Cup winning goalscorer had a mixed evening after the game in Rotterdam.
Having nabbed the winner, he was selected for a routine drugs test. Inevitably, dehydration meant that – despite the presence of supplies of beer – the process of producing the necessary urine sample took some considerable time and, having finally passed (as it were) his final test of the night, Withe made his way back to the dressing room to enjoy the warm embrace of grateful team-mates.
But that’s not quite how it worked out.
By the time he got back to his kit bag, the rest of the team and club officials had disappeared leaving no forwarding address. Withe was left to hail a passing taxi and make his own way into town in a desperate bid to locate the victory celebration.
