Justin Souter awesomeness!

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One of the constant refrains in our reportage this season has been our relish for the battle; not literally as was the case with the Shepherds Bush branch of the Morrissey Fan Club, but in terms of spirited defences of leads and just collectively “wanting it more” than the opposition.

That’s not to underplay the organisational and motivational contribution of Pardew and his staff though, but as Martin O’Neill swiftly found out down the road, someone else’s poor squad remains just that when the desire to impress wears off after a dozen games and clowns revert to type.

It simply has to come from the players - no amount of coaching will add heart or willingness - and the dressing room mix of new and old signings from various regimes has somehow proved to be a harmonious one.

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Overall, Bounce is a good read, not least because it makes you realise that achievement is possible with the right attitude and extensive, high quality practice.

So on with the question! As the featured Inspirational Person I asked Matthew:

What is the one best piece of career/life advice you’ve ever received?

He responded:

‘The best advice was: “never think that your abilities are fixed. All abilities can be fundamentally and powerfully transformed with the right kind of practice”. Or words to that effect. It was my first table tennis teacher, Peter Charters, who said that…’

The idea that we can change our abilities and transform our performance with the right kind of practice is an exciting even radical thought. As Matthew Syed observed, Mozart didn’t get there on talent alone. He put in the hours.

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A Greek tragedy

SIR – Your coverage of Greece (“An economy crumbles”, January 28th) failed sufficiently to emphasise the main cause of the current debacle and still the greatest obstacle to a way out.

The country has a corrupt political class, people who featherbed benefits for themselves and their preferred trade unions, operate state-owned enterprises as vehicles for employing cronies rather than as businesses, and obstruct the functioning of the private sector to neutralise potential competition. The laws protecting parliamentarians from prosecution would make Silvio Berlusconi blush.

Under these circumstances, to discuss economic statistical aggregates such as output, employment and growth is meaningless, as the economy is dysfunctional. There has been almost no reform in the 18 months since the crisis started, because the political class still reckons at the end of the day Greece is too big to fail and will always be rescued.

The Greeks have a word for those who are recipients of the state’s favours: the volemmenoi, loosely meaning those “made comfortable”. The newly unemployed are almost all casualties from the private sector. The state is growing, in effect, so why should politicians risk antagonising their cadres with reform?

They would welcome a return to the drachma because freshly printed money would be handed in the first instance to the volemmenoi, who would benefit from inflation at everyone else’s expense.

Only foreign pressure for a root-and-branch clean-up of politics can allow Greece to start healing.

A. Manthos
Begnins, Switzerland

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“ According to Lev Gudkov of the Levada Centre, an independent polling-research organisation, this reaction against the monopolistic, corrupt and authoritarian regime is itself part of a Soviet legacy. It is driven by the lack of alternatives rather than a common vision for change. For Russia is still a hybrid state. It is smaller, more consumerist and less collective than the Soviet Union. But while the ideology has gone, the mechanism for sustaining political power remains. Key institutions, including courts, police and security services, television and education, are used by bureaucrats to maintain their own power and wealth. The presidential administration, an unelected body, still occupies the building (and place) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. More important, the Soviet mental software has proved much more durable than the ideology itself. When, in 1989, a group of sociologists led by Yuri Levada began to study what they called Soviet Man, an artificial construct of doublethink, paternalism, suspicion and isolationism, they thought he was vanishing. Over the next 20 years they realised that Homo sovieticus had mutated and reproduced, acquiring, along the way, new characteristics such as cynicism and aggression. This is not some genetic legacy, but the result of institutional restrictions and the skewed economic and moral stimuli propagated by the Kremlin. This mental software was not a generational feature, as the Levada group at first suspected. The elections were rigged in Moscow not only by middle-aged people with Soviet memories, but by thousands of pro-Kremlin younger folk gathered from across the country and dispatched to cast multiple ballots around the city. Symbolically, they made their camp in an empty pavilion of the Stalinist Exhibition of People’s Achievements. Most of them had no memories of the Soviet Union; they were born after it had ceased to exist. Yet the election results also revealed the reluctance of a large part of Russian society to carry on with the present system. Thousands of indignant men and women, young and old, tried to stop the fraud and protect their rights. One election monitor, who was thrown out of the polling station, wrote in his blog that “I thought I would die of shame…I did not manage to save your votes…forgive me.” Such voices may still be a minority, but the clash between these two groups was essentially a clash of civilisations—and a sign that the process of dismantling the Soviet system, which started 20 years ago, is far from over. ”

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Irish leader Enda Kenny has launched an unprecedented attack on the Catholic Church in parliament.

He said the recent Cloyne Report into how allegations of sex abuse by priests in Cork had been covered up showed change was urgently needed. “The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’,” the taoiseach said.

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“ Aleksey Polikovskiy in Russia’s Novaya Gazeta (Owned by Alexander Lebedev): With such a scale and tempo of snooping, every person on the British Isles could have been exhibited naked in their moments of love or grief in front of his countrymen. Certainly Murdoch is no more guilty than the two-and-a-half million people who rushed to the trough called the News of the World once a week in order to eat their fill. Everyone has his own freedom ”