Relegation for the Rams

So relegation is now confirmed for Derby County. There has been little hope for most of the season, even though the opening result – a draw against Portsmouth – was some encouragement, as was the solitary win against Newcastle on 17 September. For me at least the defeat against Birmingham on 25 August was a very ominous sign, in its way even worse than the 6-0 defeat against Liverpool on 1 September. My reasoning was that several sides would lose at Anfield and nonetheless escape relegation, but few would lose at home to Birmingham – a side that Derby led in terms of league position for much of the 2006-07 season – and still survive.

As Derby’s supporters, although possibly not many of the players – look forward to the Championship, I am left wondering what is the best a club like Derby can expect in playing terms. The top of the Premiership table is dominated by four sides that will probably stay there for a long time, but Portsmouth after 32 games lies in sixth position. Meanwhile, West Bromwich Albion, the team Derby defeated to win their place in the Premiership, has a semi-final fixture against Portsmouth in the most open F.A. cup competition for many years. There is still a place in football, perhaps, for clubs outside the wealthy elite.

Snow and staying at home

The BBC is reporting that motorists in Derbyshire and other places “have been told to keep out of their cars because of Easter snow”.

My Swedish friends are always amused over the immoderate reaction to very moderate falls of snow in the UK. The slightest dusting leads to shops closing early, police solemnly advising motorists not to travel unless necessary (it is never explained what this means) and of course school closures. If schools in Sweden closed for 10 cm of snow it would be hard for anyone to get an education at all.

Part of the difference is of course that people in the UK expect to be able to drive around on the same tyres all year round: winter tyres, common in places with a similar climate to that in Britain, are not so much unpopular as unheard of in the UK. Accidents are then attributed to the failure of road authorities to grit the roads early enough rather than to the use of what in the rest of Northern Europe would be called summer tyres.

Predisposition, Predetermination and Grace

A good deal of comment has been provoked (as was doubtless his intention) by Mr Gary Pugh, a spokesman on DNA matters for the Association of Chief Police Officers. Mr Pugh was quoted in the Observer on 16 March as saying “'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large.” The idea is to register the DNA of very young children identified as predisposed to crime. I cannot help wondering about the timing of this intervention. Recently there have been two high-profile murder cases in which DNA evidence played a part, and a suggestion, quickly denounced in many quarters, about the possibility of a universal DNA data base. Is it possible that a kite is being flown here so that some proposal yet to emerge will look moderate in comparison?

From a legal point of view the idea of future crime is meaningless. In the criminal law of England a crime generally consists of two elements: an unlawful action (actus reus or “guilty act”) and the intention to commit the unlawful action (mens rea or “guilty mind”). So if there is no action – no actus reus – there is no crime. Even for attempted crimes there must be some action that goes beyond mere preparation.

Mr Pugh might well say that of course the children whose details he wants registered are not (yet) guilty of anything in legal terms, but they could commit crimes in the future. So could he or I. He thinks that it is possible to identify children who are - actuarially - more likely to commit crimes than others. This seems to me to make depressingly deterministic assumptions about the heredity and environment as factors influencing children.

I recently read “Freakonomics” by Levitt and Dubner. One of the more startling ideas in this book was the explanation of the decline in the murder rate in the 1990s in the USA. Pointing out that the decline in the murder rate was a sharp change from previous trends and that it had been completely unpredicted by all experts, the authors conclude that the true explanation is neither policing policies nor economic trends, but abortion. The young men who would have in their peak offending years in the 1990s had not only not started to offend: they had not even been born. This involves the assumption that the circumstances of the women who started undergoing abortions in large numbers in the 1970s were such that their children would have been likely to embark upon a life of crime.

This may be so in actuarial terms. This week however we remember our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross of Calvary: the deepest act of love ever. Instead of abandoning us to our predetermined fate, our Lord entered our world to suffer and die for us, and to rise again from the dead: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10, AV).

A Happy Easter to all.

Cymru am byth!

Congratulations to the Welsh on the Grand Slam: two in three years is very impressive bearing in mind that the Welsh teams of the seventies came up with three Grand Slams and ever since have been looked on as representing the golden age of Welsh rugby. It was fitting that Shane Williams should score the try that marked the turning point in the match against France: he makes things happen when the ball comes his way.

England's second place may be the best finish since 2003 but losing two matches in a season means that it still feels flat. Could Ireland be starting a period of relative decline as the generation of Brian O'Driscoll and Ronan O'Gara fades away?

Anyway, the days are getting longer and thoughts start to turn to the smell of newly-mown grass and the crack of leather on willow...

Songs from Sweden

Last night Charlotte Perrelli won the competition to represent Sweden at the Eurovision song contest. It is difficult to convey how seriously this event (“Melodifestivalen”) is taken in Sweden. There were over 3400 entries for the event: this in a country of 9 million. There are four heats (semi-finals) and a repechage (“andra chansen” or “second chance”). Ten entries contest a grand final held at Globen in Stockholm. The complicated voting system to select the winner depends on the results of eleven regional juries which are combined with results from a telephone poll.

There were no fewer than 2.410.200 telephone votes last night. The winner receives a trophy representing a songbird, which is presented by the previous year’s winner – or is meant to be: last year winners the Ark inadvertently swept past Carola Häggkvist who was trying to give them the trophy.

Charlotte won the competition in 1999 when she was still called Nilsson, and so knows her way around the event.

Why don't we see tap penalty moves nowadays?

Mompesson has been enjoying the Six Nations tournament, but struck by an insistent question - whatever happened to tapped penalty moves in international rugby? Pivot moves were a staple at club level in my playing days, but seem to have died out. Perhaps they became too predictable and easily countered. Can it be that the change in 1992 (I think) to award the put-in at line-outs to the kicking side after a penalty kick into touch made touch-kicking a better option in most cases? This afternoon for example, Italy kicked for touch inside the French 22-metre line.

St David's Day

In years past when I was often in Wales at this time of year I usually noticed signs of daffodils patriotically trying to make an appearance by St David's Day: this February however I was more struck by the appearance of reasonably priced strawberries - of course from Spain - in supermarkets. In Marlowe's Dr Faustus there is, if I remember right, a scene where Faustus produces grapes for a lady: he explains to her that he has a demon to fetch them from a part of the world where they are in season. As perhaps do we. Is it a yielding to temptation to choose strawberries as a treat in February? An orthodox economist would say that a deal that is freely struck shows that each party gets something of more value to him than what he surrenders. Others say that the externalities of the means of distribution are not fully accounted for: the pollution released into the atmosphere by the planes and lorries used are not fully reflected in the price paid by the shopper. Something different strikes me: that what was a summer treat in my boyhood is now a part of my diet almost all year round. Perhaps if I want a real summer treat it will have to be plucking the strawberries in my own garden.