#like they play these memories bamba has with him but i want to see everything like the whole timeline up until nada left

[t-u-i-t-c]

thought i was gonna be fine, but then they played the video

[365footballorg-blog]

'I've not seen anything like it' - fans and players reflect on a day like no other

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As kick-off approached on a grey autumn afternoon, a banner was passed between Cardiff City and Leicester City’s fans – two tribes setting rivalries aside, uniting to pay their respects.

The flag bore the clubs’ emblems and the national flag of Thailand in tribute to Leicester’s owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, one of five people killed in a helicopter crash near the club’s King Power Stadium last weekend.

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This was Leicester’s first match since the tragedy and the game itself felt incidental.

After a wreath was laid on the pitch, the two sides gathered around the centre circle for a minute’s silence and the usually boisterous Cardiff City Stadium fell profoundly silent. The crowd was consumed by the stillness.

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And then came the noise.

Once the game was under way, Leicester’s supporters sang in memory of their owner and roared encouragement to their players. Cardiff’s fans joined in. This was a rare, harmonious atmosphere.

On the pitch, this looked like any other match. In the stands, it was one like no other.

And after a week of tributes, Leicester provided another with a courageous victory, clinched by Demarai’s Gray’s goal, which prompted emotional celebrations that will be etched in the club’s history.

Below, we hear from fans, players and managers about the emotions on a day that few at Cardiff City Stadium will ever forget.

‘Today was hard but next week will be doubly difficult’

Di Statham, of the Foxes Trust supporters’ group, is a lifelong Leicester fan and was in the away end at Cardiff City Stadium.

It’s been a very emotional day. We didn’t know what to expect. The Cardiff fans were brilliant. In the minute’s silence, you could have heard a pin drop. We really appreciated that.

Not only the team but the whole Leicester squad came out for the minute’s silence and after the game to applaud the fans. We won for Vichai and it was nice to see some of the Cardiff fans had stayed behind after the game as well. So thank you, Cardiff fans.

Today was hard but next week [the first home game since the crash] will be even harder. It’s Remembrance Weekend as well. We always do a big thing about that, so next week is going to be doubly difficult as we remember the fallen. Going back to the scene of the accident will be difficult.

‘It was very odd trying to whip up some enthusiasm’

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Cliff Ginetta is the Leicester City Supporters’ Club chairman and was also among around 3,000 Foxes fans who travelled to Wales.

It’s been a very sad, emotional week and everyone has felt it in Leicester. The family atmosphere we’ve created has been shaken to its core, so it’s been a tough week to get through.

All credit to the lads for playing. It was very odd for the fans to get to the stadium and whip up some enthusiasm, but we had to do it for Vichai and what he did for Leicester City. They called him The Boss but he was the best boss. He was such a nice chap and he did everything for the club and the fans.

I must praise Cardiff and their fans, how they treated us before the game, giving away free food in the concourse and things like that. These things put it all in perspective.

‘I will never forget Cardiff’s gestures’

Ian Stringer has been covering Leicester City for over a decade, including their remarkable Premier League title triumph in 2016.

I’ll have a few abiding memories, and it has been emotional. I’ve never had to commentate on a game like that before in my life, and I’ve commentated on 600-odd matches.

What got me was the Cardiff City flag which moved to the Leicester City end, and then the Cardiff fans took the Leicester flag to their end. I know Cardiff lost and there’s a fallout from that with tactics and so on, but the gesture from the Cardiff fans to change flags, a flag with the Leicester City badge on it – let’s not let that pass us by.

I will never, ever forget the gestures of Cardiff City Football Club, who have been classy, dignified and magnificent.

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‘It brought a lot of emotions to the fore’

Osian Roberts has been part of Wales’ coaching staff since Gary Speed’s time in charge. Following Speed’s death in November 2011, Roberts led the team for the tribute match against Costa Rica at Cardiff City Stadium three months later. Roberts was back at the ground for Leicester’s win over Cardiff.

It was incredibly hard and days like this bring those emotions to the fore, especially in this stadium.

The players will have had a huge shock last weekend with this tragedy. And throughout the week they will have paid tribute and tried to deal with those emotions as individuals and as a group of players.

I spoke to Leicester midfielder Andy King and he said, as we’ve been hearing from the other players this week, that they wanted to put on a performance that Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha would have been proud of.

In our match here, Gary Speed’s memorial match, I remember players like Ashley Williams, the captain, coming in at half-time and saying, “I can’t move, I can’t move my legs, they’re like lead”. The emotional situation affected the players physically, they couldn’t even run around the pitch, let alone perform.

‘It was tough to prepare this game’

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Claude Puel was appointed Leicester manager by Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha.

It was a difficult game, they did their best. We deserved to win and it is fantastic and it is for the chairman.

It was tough to prepare this game, important to find the good balance between emotion and concentration. I want to congratulate the players. Today is the first step, now we can continue.

We will have a difficult week or so. We go to Bangkok for the funeral, we come back in the middle of the week and we have a training session to prepare against Burnley. That will be our first game at home with the fans.

‘I’ve not seen anything like it really’

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Cardiff City manager Neil Warnock saw his team lose, meaning they drop into the relegation zone.

It’s been a strange week, surreal really, I’m glad it’s out of the way if I’m honest.

I was quite pleased with the players – and the fans – in the circumstances, with the respect they showed.

I can understand Leicester’s players, the closeness they had [to Vichai]. But it was so difficult for our lads too, I’ve not seen anything like it really.

We had to have a word with them before the game to remind them they had to play the game. Nobody could fault the effort really – on another day we might have got something.

‘I couldn’t steady myself, I was shaking’

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Leicester goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel has been at the club since 2011. He was one of the first people on the scene of the helicopter crash and was in tears during the minute’s silence before kick-off. He, along with the rest of the squad, flew to Thailand for the funeral straight after the match.

Today was difficult. Coming out for the warm-up was tough. The first 10 minutes I couldn’t steady myself, I was shaking a little bit. But it was nice to get a win to take to Thailand and hopefully we did his family proud.

It has been hard, we have tried for a few hours a day to be professional and train hard, but everyone wanted to play and win for his family. His family have been strong, the courage they have had. I feel just an overwhelming sense of pride of being part of the family that Vichai built and the extended family of Leicester City.

Everyone grieves in different ways and the opportunity was given and we wanted to go to the funeral. We are a family and wanted to pay our last respects together.

‘The build-up wasn’t easy to handle’

Cardiff centre-back Sol Bamba played in Saturday’s game. He spent the 2011-12 season with Leicester in the Championship.

Vichai was a good man. I had the chance to meet him and he is a big loss.

It was difficult for us, the whole build-up wasn’t easy to handle. But that is not an excuse, the gaffer warned us about this. Obviously we pay respects before and after, but during game we are professional.

The fans were magnificent all season, and in particular today, showing the whole football family sticks together.

‘We had to try to hold our emotions in’

Wes Morgan captained Leicester to their Premier League title triumph in 2015-16 and led the team at the Cardiff City Stadium.

You can see by our reaction at the end of the game how much we wanted to get the win and do it for the chairman.

We were very close to him. We know what his wishes were. He used to come down at home games, have a joke and a laugh, always say, “Want win and three points” and we did that today. It has not been an easy week, we had to try to hold our emotions in today and do the best we can.

We have a very emotional connection with the fans, so we stayed until the end and celebrated victory with them.

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BBC Sport – Football

'I've not seen anything like it' – fans and players reflect on a day like no other was originally published on 365 Football

[jayhawksofficial]

Back Roads And Abandoned Motels essay (by Wesley Stace)

The Jayhawks – Back Roads And Abandoned Motels

by Wesley Stace (2018)

Attempts to pigeonhole The Jayhawks have long been fruitless, as any longtime fan or fellow musician knows. The band habitually transcends any label - Americana, Roots Rock, or Alt-Country: you name it - with great songs, musical adventure and sheer derring-do.

Back Roads and Abandoned Motels, the latest addition to the band's varied catalog, is both a case in point and the exception that proves the rule. The record serves only to emphasize the band's pedigree, when by rights it might have been something of a mongrel, given that it largely consists of songs written with (and for) other artists, here in versions recorded for the record by the band. Both title and backstory belie the canny conceptual unity of a record that Jayhawks fans, both more recent converts and those with longer memories, will love. You wouldn’t want to call it Hollywood Town Hall Part Two, but then again... perhaps you would.

There are presumably some listeners who wanted Los Lobos to keep making Will The Wolf Survive? (or, heaven knows, La Bamba) over and over again, for the rest of their careers. Perhaps there were even fans who thought the Beatles let themselves down with the experimental Peppers shit and shouldn’t have ventured beyond the day trippiness of Day Tripper. The Jayhawks’ more outre explorations have met with commercial and critical success - last year’s excellent Paging Mr Proust was proof that there was no intention to go gently into that good night - but there still doubtless remains the occasional Jayhawks fan who wishes they’d stop being clever and make a primarily acoustic country-rock classic again. It’s a rather tedious nostalgia, given the joy the Jayhawks always bring, not to mention the fact that the band has existed in its current line-up for 24 years since they originally parted ways with Mark Olson. The point being: the Jayhawks did those things already back then; they don’t need to keep doing them because we liked it a lot: that’s not how artists work.

But the amazing news about the new album is the unlikeliest news of all: that’s exactly what they’ve done, and in the strangest of ways. A saner man, or even a regular rock critic, might go so far as to call Back Roads and Abandoned Motels “a return to the more acoustic sound of Rainy Day Music,” but the fact is, whatever the reason, the record showcases the band we’ve always loved.

It’s all here: those sweet sweet harmonies, the devil-may-care roots rock, the effortless melodies you can’t believe you haven’t heard before (if you’re a listener) or were too lazy to write yourself (if you’re a songwriter), and those sinewy, beautiful constructed solos that make Gary Louris one of the most underrated guitarists in rock (and roll), and the Jayhawks one of the archetypal American bands. Since Paging Mr Proust, the band has in fact been staking its claim as the greatest backing band in the world, working with the likes of Sir Ray Davies, and the less-knighted but critically revered Wesley Stace AKA John Wesley Harding (and it would be a conflict of interest if I didn’t mention that I were he.) It’s always good to try on someone else’s clothes, see what fits. And that’s what’s happening on this record too.

Far from being, in terms of The Who, a record of odds ’n’ sods, the disparate origins of the songs on display have brought the band, road-tested and barely-rested, closer than ever. They sound totally relaxed and utterly confident in their ability to deliver the goods. They’ve never sounded better, and we’ve never heard a fairer division of labor among the members.

Of the songs on the new record, only two (the last two, Carry You To Safety and Leaving Detroit) were newly written. Others were written with, and for, other artists, bespoke and besung. Gary Louris is a great songwriter whatever the context, and here we find him confident enough to stand back, to share the lead vocals around his fellow singing members, just as those songs were always meant to be sung by others. (Only Marc Perlman, the secret weapon on bass, doesn’t get his own song. Next time, I hope.) All members are of equal value and status, like a band, but, like The Band, you don’t get to be this good without that being true. Here, in the words of Everybody Knows, they’re "stepping out" for the first time.

The harmonies have always been a wonder, an essential part of the Jayhawks experience, but here we get to appreciate their component parts individually. Thus it is that the album boldly goes where no Jayhawks album has gone before, kicking off with keyboard player Karen Grotberg’s first lead vocal. Come Cryin’ To Me was originally written for the Dixie Chicks, their first collaboration with Gary (though it only appeared on Natalie Maines’ solo album Mother), but it sounds like it was written specifically for Karen to sing on this particular record, and it’s a joy, as is her later lead vocal, El Dorado, and her harmonies throughout.

But if it’s Mr Louris you’ve come to hear - and it may well be! - he’s to the fore throughout and up next with another Dixie Chicks associated song that first appeared on their Taking The Long Way album in 2006, since often heard at Louris solo concerts. It’s a statement-of-purpose song, yet, given its co-written origins, the listener can’t necessarily be sure (and I’m too polite to ask) whose statement-of-purpose it actually is. Who’s stepping out? The Dixie Chicks or Mr Louris? Part of the joy of Back Roads and Abandoned Motels is the middle-place that these songs occupy, the universality of their lyrics - they’re kinda covers, they’re kinda not - which frees the band up to play them without self-consciousness, the reason that experimentation can be put to one side. There are some songs to deliver, and many of them have been previously delivered, so best just to allow them to sound as great as a great band possibly can. Which is pretty great. It’s that that makes the record such a familiar and beautiful Jayhawks experience, like those early records, yet played by the band as it is now, with all its know how and experience.

Tim O’Reagan (more commonly known as ‘the drummer’) has sung three or four memorable lead vocals on Jayhawks records previously, songs often played live (Tampa to Tulsa, for example, and Bottomless Cup) but his singing on the stellar Jakob Dylan co-write, Gonna Be A Darkness, makes the song an instant Jayhawks classic, better even than its original version (though it’s not a competition, obviously) which was recorded for the HBO series True Blood. I shan’t list all the songs, though there are co-writes with Carrie Rodriguez, Emerson Hart (from Tonic), Ari Hest, Kristen Hall and The Wild Feathers. None with me, however. Interesting.

In 2018, 34 years after they formed, and 24 years in their current line-up, The Jayhawks are still coming up with new ways to give us everything beautiful. Back Roads And Abandoned Motels is an unexpected and vital corner piece in their puzzle, and it fits together perfectly. May their songs always be sung.