The Glidd of Glood Blog

Fighting cows at the Tortin Inalp - what happens when the skiers have all gone home

 

We're at the bottom of Tortin, the famous black run in Verbier which makes the hearts of the less competent skiers quail. But the snow has all melted, and the tourists have gone home. There are no more Moncler jackets on the slopes, no more Chanel specs and Jet Set suits.

Like fairies at the bottom of the garden that appear when no one is around to see them, the Swiss have come back to reclaim their pastures and the ski slopes take on a whole different complexion. This is the face of the Alps that most of the winter-sporting tourists never see. It is the day of the Inalp, when the mountains take on their other, older visage and revert to providing grazing for cattle. If you dropped something off a chair lift, it is now that some cow will discover it.

 

The Inalp is when the cows are led up from the valleys to their summer home, grazing on the grass and Alpine flowers that appear when the snow has finally receded. But at Tortin in the Valais, these are not just any old cows. They are the fighting cows of the race d'Herens, the black and muscular animals that now seemingly serve no purpose apart from entertaining their often wealthy owners. It is time to have a fete, a party, and in the Valais tradition with a lot of melted cheese and local wine. It's all very traditional: Alpine horns and the sort of music that is never going to be featured on MTV. There is even a bell-strap repairer on hand to make good the damaged leather that inevitably results when the cows get stuck in.

  

The cows are already here and having been let out for a bit of a scuffle in the morning, they are now chilling out in the cowshed, having a lie-down and a chew before coming out for round two in the evening. For it is in the early days of the Inalp that the cows will establish the pecking order that will determine their social hierarchy for the rest of the summer. Cows come from different farms to be lumped together in the Alpine pasture for a few months. In each stable, the cows will already have established their hierarchy. They will have decided this last year for the most part and there is already an understanding as to who is the Queen of the cowshed. But now that they are meeting strange cows from different sheds, the process has to start again on a bigger scale. Who is going to be Queen of the larger herd? That is what everyone is here to find out.

At half past five, the cows are led out of the shed to a roped-off area of the pasture where they get on with the business of roughing each other up. There is a tremendous clonking of huge bells, a lot of pawing of the ground in areas that quickly become dusty pits. Like a school playground, they go around in gangs, with lesser cows from the same herd happy to defend their queen and lend a helping hoof when she is defied by some pretender. Men with stout sticks are on hand, reading the complicated game, to ensure that the fighting doesn't degenerate into gang warfare. Fights have to be on a strictly one-to-one basis. The spectators, like sporting spectators anywhere, add their expert commentary.

 

 

It's easy to spot the toughest beasts. The stable queens have red numbers on their flanks, the others only white numbers. Naturally, a lot of the fights tend to be between rival queens. Quite how the cows keep track of it all, I have no idea, but they do, and after a few days, one of them will become Queen of the pasture - la Reine - and they will all be able to settle down for reasonably trouble-free grazing for the rest of the summer. There will still be spontaneous fights, but they are sporadic and only witnessed by the cowherds.

There is massive prestige attached to having a Queen, and owning a fighting cow is not a cheap business. I was told that the running costs for a cow are about CHF 9'000 a year - that's over £5'000. The cows seemingly have no real purpose apart from getting involved in a bit of agro. From what I can make out, they aren't milked and they are not generally eaten for meat (although it can be found). There are a lot of breeds available that are more suitable for either purpose. So you have to think of the fighting cows as sort of pets to be cherished and admired. Their whole uselessness is superb in this day and age of economic utility.

Europe in uproar as teams disappoint

Raymond  Domenech. Not one of his better weeks. 

The Mundial is livening up nicely both on and off the pitch. The matches are getting better as the teams get over their first game nerves and the stakes get steadily raised. The Brazil – Ivory Coast match was fun, even if there was quite a bit of theatre towards the end. Brilliant second goal by Fabiano, just a pity that it was a double “shoulder ball”. But hey, the important thing was that there was at least a show.

Nothing, though, compared to the show that is going on off the pitch. A total scandal in France as Anelka roundly insults his manager Raymond Domenech and is summarily sacked. This might seem a little extreme until you hear what he is reported to have said. This, according to L’Equipe, was “Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute”. A literal translation would have this as “Fuck off, you dirty son of a bitch”. But had I been translating this in a Cambridge unseen, I think I would have preferred the more vernacular and probable English rendition: “Fuck off, you fucking arsehole”. I think that pretty much gets over the sentiment of the comment.

There aren’t a lot of companies where you can say that to your boss without getting fired, and so it comes as no surprise that Anelka is getting the next plane home. But things have not stopped there chez les Bleus. Evra, the captain, almost gets into fisticuffs with the coach, who has resigned. The whole of France is in a torment, with the French sports minister in South Africa and staying until the French have played their last match to make sure that they actually show up for it. OK, I exaggerate that last bit, but she is there to make sure that people face up to their responsibilities.

So the fact that the FA has publicly declared that should England fail to make it through to the next round they are giving a red card to Capello (they can’t actually, as he has just signed another multi-year contract, but they will “expect him to resign”) is small beer. It is inexcusable in my view, to say such a thing publicly, especially to the guy who picked up a team who had failed to qualify for Euro 2008 and got them through the World Cup qualifiers with one defeat in 10 matches. But there you go. It’s the way of management everywhere these days in any company; all managers are on a permanent ejector seat which pops the moment you produce one mediocre result. No one will be firing the Ferrari-driving prima donnas that will actually be running (or trudging) around the pitch, but Capello is already growing his scapegoat horns.

Don’t worry, though. Marcello Lippi is already getting beaten up by the Italian press for failing to produce more than a couple of draws against Slovakia and New Zealand. There hasn’t been much news out of Spain, but I can’t help feeling that the press must be giving their squad a very hard time for losing to Switzerland. So there you have it, the populations of Europe – Spain, France, England and Italy – are all furious. It must be selling no end of papers. I still think that all of these countries will qualify for the next round with the exception of France, who must be wondering who they can actually field for their next match who might not turn around and punt the ball into their own net. Stay tuned. This is turning into a highly entertaining World Cup.

A footballer’s job description

 England's Glen Johnson races for the ball against Algeria's Karim Ziani. He's going to get beaten again. Just not quick enough.

You know those bits at the end of a job description, where it says what qualities the successful candidate will have? Well, as I look at the World Cup – and think of all the other zillions of matches I have looked at over the years – I reckon it comes down to this:

Ball skill: this is all the stuff you can do with a football, the heading in the right direction, the instant ball control, the shooting and passing accurately, the effect you can give to the ball, the ability to do Ronaldo-style stepovers. It is what makes a footballer rather than, I suppose, a tennis player or a golfer. It’s the stuff that means that a footballer is happy on the ball and that it tends to stick to his feet.

Speed and athleticism: Not much point being good at ball control if you are too slow to get to the ball in the first place. There is a lot of running involved in football, and a lot of that running means being able to run faster than someone else. If you are on the break, you need to outpace the defence to have your chance at goal. If you are a defender, it is essential that you can outstrip the attack if you are to defend successfully. Speed is the most important thing. Then I suppose there is jumping – that’s pretty handy for winning balls in the air. Being physically strong is useful too, but if you are fast enough, it’s probably not essential, although in defence it has to be an advantage. It would be very interesting to have the personal best 100m sprint times of footballers.

Intelligence and imagination: An often neglected feature of the footballer’s make-up, it seems to me. As the game becomes closed down with the opposition all in defence, the only way you can win is to be smarter and quicker than your opponents. The best teams and players have so many ideas that they make scoring goals look very easy. When you run out of good ideas, or they are just so mediocre that the defence has sussed them out immediately and taken the appropriate action, your game goes nowhere. Most teams have a paucity of ideas. But then a lot of footballers aren’t the sharpest knives in the draw. You can spot the difference. A Michel Platini goes on to head up UEFA. You can’t imagine Wayne Rooney heading up anything much. I don’t think I’d ask John Terry to manage a vegetable patch. Football can be a bit like a chess match, trying to work out moves to break through a solid defence. Where it all comes unstuck is when it moves about as fast as a chess match. It is supposed to be high speed stuff. The faster you play, the less time the opposition has to think.

Winning attitude: The will to win is extremely important. You could be fast, bright and skilful, but if you just caved in to the opposition, that wouldn’t get you very far. All successful sportsmen take winning very seriously indeed. The best get extremely annoyed – not to say unpleasant – when they don’t win. For many footballers, you get the impression that winning would be nice, but it doesn’t have to happen at every match. This is a mature attitude that you can respect in everyday life, but doesn’t win you many games on the pitch. With the winning attitude comes its corollary – the refusal to give up. There have been some epic examples of this, notably Manchester Utd finals won in the dying moments of the game, or Liverpool putting in a stonking second half in the final of the Champions League in 2005 against AC Milan having gone 0-3 down at half time, and finally winning it.

I reckon that’s pretty much it for the individual. After that, the manager will take the talent and make a team out of it, but if he doesn’t start with the raw ingredients of skill, speed, intelligence and attitude, he can do what he likes – it isn’t going to work.

As Capello gets a hounding, until next week when by some fluke England will do just enough to scrape into the next round of the World Cup, it would be interesting to mark the England players on the above qualities vs the opposition.

What it looks like is that they are not up to par skillwise, are slow to the ball and not quick enough generally to execute plans, and don’t have a great deal of imagination and flair. Do they want to win enough? Probably, but lacking the other qualities, this might not be sufficient. There is nothing remarkable about the current England team in this respect; it was ever thus (which is why they haven’t won a major competition in the last 44 years – almost half a century).

If Capello was incapable of getting star quality to play together, you might give him some stick, but just how well does the England team fulfil the footballer’s job description? Could that be why there are so many foreign players in the Premiership – because there just aren’t enough interesting home-grown players? Questions, questions.

Still, let’s not be too hard on England. France are abysmal; Spain couldn’t overcome Switzerland (yo!); Holland have been dull; there was nothing remarkable about the Italians and Brazil sent me to sleep. Even Germany, who put in the best opening match, managed to get beaten by Serbia. Could it be that there is something wrong with latter day football itself?

England were pants

“Lacklustre England fail to impress.”

Or how about:

“Mediocre England – like watching paint dry.”

Another big competition, another tedious performance from the national team. How can anyone have imagined for an instant that this crowd of night-club frequenting, Bentley-driving also-rans could claim football’s biggest trophy? There will be enough people on blogs and comment pages, not to mention paid journalists, writing much the same sentiments on all sorts of web pages. But this is my blog, so I am going to have the fun of indulging myself with my own uninformed comment.

I have seen quite a lot of the World Cup matches in this competition, and I can safely say that England are one of the most uninspiring teams in it, only beaten for sheer uselessness by the French.

In a nutshell, from the safety and omniscience of my sofa, this is how it looks:

Rooney was awful, slow, had to resort to shirt-pulling tactics to try vaguely to stay in contact with Algerians who were running around him, and continually looked incapable of keeping possession of the ball. Johnson was poor, didn’t seem to work much and was beaten for pace all evening. Heskey is only impressive in his sheer unimpressiveness. Lampard and Gerard have never played well together and demonstrated this evening that nothing has changed. Defoe looked good, but then there was only 15 minutes of him. Can’t see the point of bringing on Crouch 5 minutes before the end – what’s that supposed to achieve?

I like Capello a lot. But what is he supposed to do with these people? Commentators are down on Dominec for failing to create a team out of the stars he has available. Should Capello be tarred with the same brush? My gut feel is that the England players have a sense of entitlement that is born of having just too much material success in their lives. Maybe once you have the mansion, the Ferrari, and the model wife/girlfriend and a few medals you just don’t see why you should put in any more effort. Or equally, it could just be that the skill level of England’s footballers is very average. They look average.

Or maybe it is all symptomatic of a crumbling country with ideas way above its station. The rest of the world has moved on and England in all sorts of ways looks like an irrelevancy. But so long as we have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, maybe we should continue to expect to have a permanent position in the closing stages of the World Cup…

Well it’s not over yet. Come on England and surprise us. Please. The Swiss already have.

Tabrett Bethell loses out to World Cup

There has been a collapse in this blog's viewing figures over the past few days. No real surprise as most of the visitors just want to look at sexy pics of Tabrett Bethell in leather. I assume they are hugely predominantly male. And what are most blokes doing these days with their spare time? They are looking at the World Cup.

So it seems that the allure of Tabrett just doesn't make the grade when you can watch international tussles for the weird plasticky South African ball, or spend your time trying to solve the conundrum of why the ref disallowed the American's third goal against Slovenia. Not to mention the aural delights of the vuvuzelas.

By the way, should anyone actually know why the ref did disallow the third American goal against Slovenia, please post the answer in the comments below. We are all dying to find out (and I don't even support the USA).

In the meantime, Hop Suisse! as they say here, and dur fromage! France, as they don't.

World Cup – who let that bloody wasp in here?

Half way through the second match of this Mundial – France vs Uruguay (slightly yawn) and the most striking thing is that bloody awful noise of those f*@!king horns. Who was the idiot who signed that one off? A stadium full of horns, all playing the same atonal note – it sounds like a giant and angry wasp banging up against a window. It’s the sort of noise that can really get on your nerves. There is another month of this to come. Can’t wait.

And yet…and yet… it wouldn’t have taken much to alleviate this row. For example, they could have sold three or four different horns, that sounded together made an agreeable chord. If they had to sell anything. I suppose the only people really chuffed about it are the inevitable Chinese producers who appear to have made money hand over fist with their coloured plastic horns.

You can barely hear the Swiss commentary over the noise – and I think the commentator is getting at least as pissed off with it as I am. The astonishing thing is that the supporters don’t seem to get tired of blowing into them. Just what are they on? I am hoping that the Swiss cowbells are going to be the prevalent noises in the Swiss matches, but I doubt it. You can’t buy a cowbell for a couple of Rand, and in South Africa, I doubt you can buy a cowbell at all.

Oh well, we’ll just have to get used to it. Hoooooooonk!!!

Combat de Reines – the incredible Swiss fighting cows

I have spent the afternoon in front of the box – a pretty sad way to spend a Sunday, but it was raining and the TV looked promising. After the fairly uninspiring Barcelona Grand Prix, there was the final of the Swiss Cup (football) which I was going to look at as it as between my local club Lausanne and Basle, but on the other channel was the vastly more interesting Combat des Reines d’Aproz or Fighting Cow Championship. OK, it looks as if you need bringing up to speed.

 

In the Canton of Valais, consisting mainly of the Rhone valley and mountains, there is a breed of cows called the cows of the Val d’Herens. If you look at a map, you will find the Val d’Herens as a valley running north-south parallel with the Val de Bagnes, which contains the famous ski resort of Verbier, and next to the Val d’Anniviers. The cows of the Val d’Herens are black, quite small in cow terms, but extremely muscular. They are also very aggressive – at least with each other. The cows live in the valleys in the winter – normally inside as there is snow on the ground – but are led up into the Alpine pastures in the summer to graze for several months. Transhumance – you no doubt remember it from geography.

 

 

 

The peculiarity with the cows of the Val d’Herens (not that all of them are now to be found there by any means) is that they naturally establish a pecking order (grazing order?) by fighting each other. It’s just what they do. The dominant cow, having fought or intimidated all the others, is known as La Reine – the Queen. This is the cow that will lead the others up to the pasture during the annual Montée à l’alpage, and will lead them down again in the autumn during La Désalpe. As the dominant cow, the others naturally follow her. We are talking cows here, not bulls. God knows how aggressive the bulls are.

 
La Désalpe. Note - these are not fighting cows. Most cows in the Alps aren't.   

 

The cows don’t need the intervention of man to organise some good fights. They naturally lock horns and head-butt each other. But it goes without saying that this is quite a spectacle and man has taken advantage of the cows’ natural inclination to stage cow fights. As you will see from the videos (plenty more of them on YouTube), these take place in an arena in the form of a sort of knock-out competition. The cows each have a number painted on them, and are set against an adversary on the basis of a draw. Winning cows go on to fight another one. Not all the fights are spectacular by any means. Sometimes a cow only has to give another one a dirty look and that is enough for it to secure victory. The cows seem to be highly aware of their chances in a fight and some are more combative than others. But as a breed, the fighting cows of the Val d’Herens are very proud beasts, and don’t easily admit defeat. There aren’t that many of the breed in Switzerland – only a few thousand, as they are somewhat difficult to control and probably don’t provide as much milk as other breeds. These days, they are mainly kept for their fighting abilities.

 

There aren’t many organised fights, and they only happen in the spring and autumn. This is because for the rest of the summer, the cows are up in the mountains, and the winter isn’t a very propitious time for organising fights as the cows are inside, not getting any exercise, and no one wants to freeze to death outside watching them.

 

 

 

Today was the cantonal final, with the cows fighting to be La Reine des Reines – the Queen of Queens. Amazingly, there is no betting – no book on the outcome of the fights. I find this incredible. In any other country, the betting would be the major interest. But Swiss betting laws don’t permit it. I have always suspected that there are illegal books on the outcomes, but now I am not so sure. This is because to be the owner of the winning cow, or any cow that does well, is such an honour that the sport doesn’t need betting in order for it to arouse the deepest passions. There are four different categories, three based on weight and one for young cows that have only had one calf. The cows may not be so big as a breed, but naturally the best fighters tend to be bigger. The categories vary from around 600kg to 850kgs. That’s the better part of a tonne.

 

Today’s final was fascinating. One of the fights ended in a draw after about 30 minutes of intense struggle, when the owners decided that their cows had had enough and deserved to call it quits. But the final pitted last year’s champion, Manhathan (sic) against the young and inexperienced Altesse. Manhathan is a monster of 850kgs, who hasn’t lost for 2 years. Altesse – not what you would call a small cow at 750kgs – and only about 3 years old, seemingly had no chance. This was to discount her incredible spirit and pride. The fight lasted 40 minutes – almost a record – and was so long, that there was much discussion about whether it should be called a draw and the beasts tied up. But a school of thought decided that it should reach its logical conclusion – after all, it couldn’t last indefinitely. Finally the youth of Altesse won out and the seemingly indomitable Manhathan caved in. It was worthy of the most moving moments in sport.

 

The Swiss have other strange and traditional mountain competitions, like flag-throwing and wrestling, involving throwing your adversary by getting hold of his shorts. But the cow fighting is the most spectacular and interesting and only happens in the Valais. I am surprised it hasn’t become a major tourist attraction. If you’ve never been to Switzerland, I advise you organising a spring or autumn trip to see it - clouds of volcanic ash permitting.

We get the footballers we deserve

There’s nothing like a good bit of sporting controversy, is there? And the France – Ireland debacle is proving more entertaining than most.

I am amused by all the outraged people getting angry with Thierry Henry; I feel a little sorry for him. There is something slightly cat-like about Henry at the best of times; he has a certain feline grace. But seeing him pat the ball about with the palm of his hand and I just can’t help seeing a cat play with a toy. Henry says that his gesture was instinctive, which has caused global scandal. How can something so deliberate be instinctive? Of course he is completely right, and this because to cheat in football has become so much part of the game that it is instinctive for a professional footballer to obtain any unfair advantage that he thinks he can get away with. Football has become a game of cheats.

When I played it- though that was a pretty long time ago, admittedly – football was a game where you didn’t use your hands unless you were making a throw-in or you played in goal. Nowadays, hands are routinely used, pretty much by everyone it seems, to pull your opponents shirt as you jostle for position, or he beats you, to press on his shoulder to make sure he can’t jump for the ball, or to control the ball if you think the ref isn’t looking. I lost count during the France-Ireland game where all of these fouls were committed, though most went unpunished. And there was nothing peculiar about that game; they are all like that.

As far as I can see, the whole point of any game is to establish the limited parameters for success through the application of rules. It is the product of your actions within the confines of what is allowed that dictates a successful result. Everyone signing up to play a game is supposedly subscribing to this code. It doesn’t matter whether you are playing cards, driving a car around a circuit or playing football, the basic understanding is the same. Cheating just defeats the whole object of the exercise. If you’re going to cheat, where is the fun, for you or for anyone else? Though all sport – like pretty much all human activity, really – is ultimately pointless, it just becomes even more risible if some participants don’t bother playing within the rules. If footballers can wrestle and attack their opponents, then they aren’t really playing football, are they, but some other hybrid game which is a lot less amusing to watch.

And how tedious football has become. How many goals don’t materialise because the striker is cynically brought down when he might have scored.

That football has come to this can only be because its governing bodies have allowed it to. You don’t see rugby players or cricketers arguing with the ref or umpire, whereas in football it is endemic. This is surely symptomatic of a mindset in which the players feel that they can interpret the rules as they go along. With someone like the odious toad Sepp Blatter at the top of it, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for football. It pains me to think that he is Swiss and it is only a limited consolation that he is Swiss German. What is it about these vile little people? Blatter, Silvio Berlusconi, Antonio Samaranch (“Ça m’arrange”), Bernie Ecclestone – thrusting ego-maniacs all.

What is also interesting is that the cheating mindset isn’t confined to the football field. It is in fact just a manifestation of current society where the result is all and how you get there is of no consequence. I worked for a couple of cheats once. They must have spent almost as much time with their lawyer working out how to screw people and get away with it as they did with their management team. They eventually found a way to declare a bankruptcy, make everyone redundant without paying them, avoided tax, sent their suppliers to the wall and then magically made untold millions from some other dodgy venture.

 In the words of The Clash: “Cheat cheat, no reason to be fair. Cheat cheat, or don’t get anywhere”. The important thing is not to participate in life; it is to win and, in doing so, to make lots of money.

FIFA has an option. It can get serious about cheating in football and introduce video refs as well as asking the flesh and blood ones to whistle for any fouls under any circumstances. Or it can accept that cheating is now an endemic part of the game and carry on as it is. Depends if you want to look at football, or a sort of football-rugby hybrid.

Given these circumstances, I am with Roy Keane. Everyone is cheating. Get over it if it backfires on you. The notion of fair play is increasingly deserting all sports and all areas of life. Get used to it. Or rant about it on a blog.

Is Ronaldo worth 80 million quid?

This is how you find out. Look at the teeth. As any gipsy will tell you, you can tell a lot about a horse from inspecting its gnashers.

Here Ronaldo displays a fine set, proving to Manuel Pellegrini that he is worth every £.

France 4 – England 0

Not, as you might have expected, the football score of the recent match (see post below) but the number of times the demonstrators in Paris managed to extinguish the Olympic flame compared to the pathetic attempts of the London demonstrators the day beforehand. What should we put this down to? The mighty efforts of the “world’s best police force” in curbing the fire-fighting efforts of Britain’s most fervent Tibet admirers, or the equally valiant efforts of the world’s most bolshy nation?

The French have a long and noble tradition of getting out in the streets and complaining. They showed this to spectacular effect in 1789 and have never looked back. The days of strikes and discontent in Britain are long past. Thatcher showed that when faced with an iron will, the Brits just can’t cut it in the demonstration stakes. And now our team is once again shown up by foreign players. The French were masterful, showing superior tactics which paid off handsomely. On the northern side of the Channel, we hang our heads in shame.

On to the USA match in San Francisco (which I haven’t bothered to follow). But hold on – something is surely amiss: You can’t tell me that they had the torch burning all the way across the Atlantic in a 747. You can’t even light a cigarette on a plane, so an Olympic Flame would surely not be permissible. There I was, naively thinking that they would have to put it on a container ship, or better still use it to power a hot-air balloon (seems the most appropriate conveyance, somehow). But no. Suddenly, keeping that flame alive seems to be not so important after all, as it gets extinguished prior to its no doubt business-class trans-Atlantic flight. If the Flame is all about symbolism, then I think we get it. You can snuff it out any time it seems convenient. And if you were looking for a better way to encapsulate the Olympic spirit, do you have to look any further?