36. It’s Not The Despair……

I was honestly going to do something poignant about Robin Williams, forceful about Vicky Beeching, and hilarious about Gaza (it can be done, trust me). Instead, SOCCER.

Here’s your cut out and keep guide to the forthcoming season. Please feel free to keep it and abuse me about it come May.

I haven’t backed anyone yet, so if your team are crap it’s not my fault.

I’ve tried desperately to be impartial, but I’ve failed obviously…..

Placed in reverse order then…

20th Burnley
Probably the smallest budget in the division, no notable signings, and a small squad will mean that Sean Dyche is hampered fatally, despite his qualities. Seventeenth will be a miracle. I’ve been to Burnley. There are no miracles there.

19th Crystal Palace
No Pulis, no hope. Whoever comes in will have to deal with an interfering owner and a tiny budget. They will be fucked by Christmas anyway. The most pointless breakdown in a relationship since Kid temporarily fell out with Play.

18th Southampton
If you keep selling your best players it will eventually catch up to you. If you sell them all over one summer it will catch up to you a lot quicker. Koeman’s side will be neat and tidy and well coached, and the balance sheet will look stunning, but ultimately without their departed stars they are a championship squad, and will soon be there…

17th West Bromwich Albion
Again, not a great side by any stretch, but others will keep them up. Notoriously tight budgets might be tested if January rolls around and they are in trouble but they have fight and knowhow.

16th Queens Park Rangers
Car windows will be wound down, players will be talked up in the press and not picked, and Glenn Hoddle’s hair will be off the hook. They will do enough by being hard to beat at home, and beat enough worse sides than themselves to never trouble the relegation scorers. Won’t give two monkeys about the cups.

15th Swansea City
Will stay up because there are several worse sides than them. You’ve got to hope they stay brave and pass it, and with the other strugglers being so bad they might well be able to. Got to keep Bony fit and at the club though.

14th West Ham United
Won’t be relegated, and where they end up will be decided if they are ok in November. Allardyce has given up trying to win the fans round with football so will live and die by his results, and if they aren’t up to snuff by Bonfire Night he might get his cards. And if THAT happens, well, you know the rest. Bit tough on them to start the season with a cup final though……

13th Leicester City
Looked impressive coming up, and Nigel Pearson has enough resources (unlike Burnley) to ensure they cling on and look to consolidate next season. Likely to be torture to watch but if they stay up their fans won’t care a jot.

12th Hull City
Almost pulled off the shock of the season to continue Arsenal’s trophy drought. If their chairman doesn’t continue to be bonkers and Bruce spends the Shane Long money wisely they will be solidly in midtable and safe from any relegation fears by March. Might have a pop at the League Cup too.

11th Newcastle United
Expectations will be sky high, results will not match them. Alan Pardew will argue with Ben Arfa then have to pick him as he’s their best player, or sell him at a huge loss to get him out of the dressing room. Shola Ameobi has finally left, and will have the same effect as the ravens leaving the tower. Dark times in Black And White Town…

10th Sunderland
Could be anything. If Conor Wickham becomes the player he showed glimpses of during last season’s climax they will give anyone a game. If Brown and O’Shea self-destruct as they often did early in the season they will be pushovers. Outside bet to finish higher than Newcastle, and to their hard core that will be a great season.

9th Aston Villa
Spent last season winning the games they were meant to, and losing the others but never disgracing themselves. Roy Keane may light a few fires under any slackers but lack of goals will mean they won’t threaten a Europa place.

8th Stoke City
Prettier to look at than Pulis’s side (not hard), Mark Hughes will be looking to push on from mid table safety. Sadly replying on Peter Crouch for consistent goals is foolhardy, and so their mid table mediocrity will only be leavened by the sight of their fans crowding round the Sky Sports News reporter on deadline day looking for all the world like extras in a The Hills Have Eyes remake.

7th Tottenham Hotspur
A drop of a place for Spurs, but only because of a resurgent United and the fact that for the 40th season in a row they are in a period of transition. Pochettino is credited with improving a lot of players at Southampton, so the White Hart Lane faithful will be hoping they have acquired the real star of their last twelve months, and he can make some use of £30m man Erik Lamela. Unlike the last two managers picking him would be a start. They are also desperate for the players purchased last summer to follow Christian Eriksen’s example and take to the Premier League. Should take the Europa League seriously. Won’t.

6th Everton
Expectations will be high at the School Of Science after securing Lukaku, but there is a reason Chelsea never trusted him, and if we find out what it is he might disappoint. The Europa League will test their squad depth too, and may ultimately hamstring their attempts to turn a creditable 5th into 4th.

5th Manchester United
Not in Europe so will be going all out to win the cups as compensation for their fans. van Gaal has too much to turn around to challenge even the Champions League places this season, and will hope his fans are patient and expect signs of progress and potential rather than trophies. Wayne Rooney as captain sets a dangerous precedent after his two transfer requests too…..

4th Arsenal
Will start well if managers keep quitting two days before they have to play them. Home for their first and last games, don’t leave London over the festive period, so their traditional luck remains. Sanchez could make the top four an easier target to achieve, but a paper thin squad and still fragile mentality will mean they are ten points off the pace by Valentine’s Day.
3rd Liverpool
I’m afraid they still haven’t convinced me that their defence is tight enough to win the league, but the loss of Suarez is something I think they can deal with by other players stepping up. Sturridge gets a lot of stick but I think he will be OK without his partner from last term. Cup squads will be interesting now they are back in Europe too.

2nd Chelsea
Lack of goals cost them last season, and if Diego Costa doesn’t fire it will again. Will be massively hard to beat, incredibly boring, but ruthlessly efficient. And Mourinho will sicken everyone with his antics, but idiots in the media will call him a character.

CHAMPIONS Manchester City
Quite simply they won the league by outlasting their rivals. If they can keep Aguero fit they will be too strong and powerful and have too many goals in them to cope with. They might even have a proper go at the Champions League as well. The ones to beat again.

#31 Red Hot Soccer Chat

Man Nuts Man In Newcastle. This Is News Apparently.
People like to rewrite history, especially when it involves making themselves look good. Any football fan paying attention to the anodyne Pol Pot Year One mutterings from the FA and media can’t have helped but be impressed by their brass neck this weekend as Alan Pardew was fined for putting the nut on some no mark from Hull.
Let’s have it right, it was great.
Having been on the end of a tongue lashing by a certain follically challenged ex Spurs winger myself I can tell you that being assaulted by a football person, verbally or otherwise, is not any different to being assaulted by anyone else. The only difference is in the reaction from other people.
In my own case I was inundated with offers of help to formulate police charges against him, or write to the club to get him fined, banned, sacked, arrested, or some combination of all of them. I declined every one. Why? Because they were bullshit; hysterical overreactions of people whose only goal in life is to be outraged on other people’s behalf. I had a pop, he had a pop. We both moved on, simple.
I had to chuckle at the treatment of Pardew though. he spends six days a week being told he’s part of a Cockney mafia running the wonderful institution that is Newcastle United. On the one day he shows that whatever his shortcomings as a manager and a Londoner he really really cares about Newcastle winning he gets called a disgrace, hit with a £100,000 fine and reminded of his responsibilities as a role model to the people of the Geordie nation.
That’s the same club who recently saw one of their own sent to jail for chinning a police horse. I think the role model ship has sailed.
But apparently he better watch out, because there are impressionable youths about, and they want them being busy being impressionable enough to pester their parents to shell out for multiple replica shirts, and any other tat they can stick a club crest on and flog in the club shop. Pardew reminding them why football in this country is so popular around the world is not to be allowed.
For let’s be honest here, English football sells around the world because it’s chaotic, mistake ridden, tribal shite.
Let’s be honest, if you can watch Lionel Messi and the rest of Barcelona putting on a masterclass in the tippy tappy shite why would you pay £60 a pop to watch Charlie Adam do it nowhere near as well? Our football doesn’t win you anything on the world stage, but we love it. Where else in the world does a fixture the equivalent of the Bristol or South Wales derby provoke the white heat that it does here? Go and find me a game at the same level that has the spite and tension of Nottingham Forest v Derby?
You won’t, because our game has evolved in such a way that aggression and passion put bums on seats and headlines in papers. Sadly, occasionally it means that people go across the arbitrary lines that the media like to create when an incident occurs. These are the same people who look back wistfully on the old days when degenerate alcoholics lolloped around creating mayhem and pine for more characters in the game. Then when they find one immediately leap on him for not setting a good example. (It would have been interesting to note how they would have viewed Tony Adams if his ‘characterful’ drunk driving had led to the death of a pedestrian).
Of course the biggest part of this hypocrisy is that if you have to rely on the likes of Alan Pardew to set the example for your children then you really don’t have any business being a parent, and should drop your offspring at the nearest foster family.

12 (well 11 actually) Years A Slave?

Speaking of football and hypocrisy, Sol Campbell has a book out. In it he details his gripe about playing for England 73 times and only being captain for 3 of them. He claims it’s because he’s black. I claim it’s because he’s a selfish duplicitous blame shifting cunt.
There are people who will tell you that there is something to this. They are people who don’t get Sol Campbell. When you decide, as we have in England, that captaincy is imbued with a certain mysticism that only certain people are capable of harnessing and using to improve the side, then you start to look for these qualities in the candidates for the job. You ignore that in most countries the captaincy at club and international level is simply given to the person with the most appearances, trusting that his experience will allow him to transmit calm and authority to the rest of the side simply by his mere presence on the field. You begin to examine how a player carries himself, both on and off the pitch, and his relationships with fans and other figures in the game, particularly the players he aspires to lead. So let’s do it.
Sol Campbell got into the Spurs side at a young age, and was given the captaincy once it became apparent he was the best player in the side at that time. Can you remember a single Churchillian moment of breast beating oratory or onfield motivation that got the over the line in a tight game? you could argue that Michael Dawson does more leading of the side than he ever did, and you wouldn’t have him leading a side on Championship Manager, let alone the World Cup.
Captains, even if not vocally evident, have to show in some form a mental toughness that allows them to keep up their standards and try and haul their side through a truly bad performance. Picture Roy Keane, yellow carded against Juventus meaning he’d miss the European Cup final, slogging his guts out for a game he’d never play in, and being astonished when praised about it by Sir Alex Ferguson in his book as if there would ever be a game in which he wouldn’t put up that level of performance, or at least try to. Watch Sol Campbell having a fucking shocker of a half against West Ham, shipping two, and fucking off on holiday before the second half started. Yeah, real mental toughness there.
A fan must feel that a captain is with them. They don’t expect them to get the bus to the ground with them anymore, but they do like to think that they feel the same about their team, and their enemies. So here’s your candidate (in his own head) for the England captaincy demonstrating his unique bond with the fans by sneaking off to their biggest rivals on a free transfer. Further, he showed off his unique brand of self-awareness by asking Les Ferdinand ‘it’s not that big a deal is it?’ as another derby rolled around and the abuse became so vitriolic it made him pass the ball into touch the first time he got it with no Spurs player near him (there’s that legendary mental toughness again).
Let’s add in the selfless nature of a captain, often playing out of position or slightly injured to show the side that they are all in it together and that the cause, not personal comfort, is what counts. It’s telling then that David Pleat will happily recount the fact that he would never play for Spurs unless he was 100% fit, or at least felt that way. As if any player spends much of a season not carrying a bump or knock. By that rationale he would have only played about 15 times for England.
Finally, picture Paul Ince (black) charging around the midfield giving it all in a white shirt, proudly wearing the armband and leading his nation. Oddly enough Ince never alleged racism on the part of the football establishment, at least not until he was exposed as a bang average manager.
Was there a big groundswell of opinion on this subject at the time? Did the media or other players and managers put his name forward? If he had a testimonial how many Spurs or Arsenal fans do you think would turn up, of any colour? Do you think Arsenal fans love him, apart from the fact he screwed Tottenham over?
Why is it that this legend of the game (in his own head) has had, until the serialisation of his book, nothing to say on his lack of captaincy opportunities?
It’s baffling isn’t it? It’s almost as if everyone sussed he was a good player but a bottling selfish wanker, and didn’t give it another thought.
I’ll leave you with a picture that seems to sum up how Sol sees the England team.

“Hmm, it IS moreish isn’t it?”

Next time, more rubbish, and maybe the racing stuff I promised. Or maybe not…..

#19: The Emperor’s New Tweets

Before we start, the Cribbins count is 4 this week. Add in the fact that someone got here by Googling ‘Fern Britton Sex Pics’ and you’ll understand why I’m leaving Ian Watkins the fuck alone.

 

So light was let in on tragic this week when detailed allegations by Charles Saatchi emerged about Nigella’s drug use. The tenor of the rumours was that she was so off her conkers on coke she let two Italian sisters spend what they liked on the company credit card as long as they didn’t tell her then husband what she was hiding in the icing sugar. While it’s tempting to have a grudging respect for someone who can spend all day getting spangled and still have dinner on the table at six a serious issue did actually emerge.

As the drug allegations seemed to provide an alternative explanation for Saatchi’s actions in those infamous photos (checking for signs of cocaine use rather than just your general douchebaggery domestic abuse, the usual suspects started the hashtag #teamnigella, as if there was actually a reason to take sides about it. Here’s the simple explanation to illustrate this.

Women aren’t subject to domestic abuse or rape because of lifestyle, dress, being drunk/high or any of the other myriad reasons people use as excuses.

These things happen because some men are cunts.

Given that backdrop is there really any reason to go online and align yourself with Ms Lawson? To proclaim yourself as being against domestic abuse and the demonization of someone just because she’s done a bit of toot? As if there’s a #teamcharles side, where chinning your missus for burning the dinner or powdering her nose is acceptable or even encouraged.

Again and again on social media people I’ve previously thought of as halfway intelligent have shown themselves to possess staggeringly low levels of self-awareness. Last week a guardian columnist threatened to get a correspondent fired from their job. Their crime? Having the temerity to write something in the comments section under her column which was a joke at her expense. Until she protected her tweets (presumably because she was subject to a torrent of incredulity at her crassness) you could almost feel the sneering superiority complex in every word. She accused her ‘tormentor’ of following her around the internet, when she’s put the offending comment on and replied to one of her previous tweets. It was mind blowing.

Another media type who simply doesn’t get how this all works now was Paddy Barclay, who tweeted that Adnan Janusaj was the greatest ever uncapped player of the Premier League era. Now if he’d said that in a pub surrounded by mates from other papers it would have been ‘that’s really insightful’ or ‘great point Paddy’. Unfortunately in the real world, where you can get replies from people who aren’t up your arse, Twitter gave a collective ‘what the fuck?’ to this gibberish. One person even pointed out that he isn’t even the best uncapped player at Manchester United; that’s David de Gea.

I think these people honestly think that their timeline should be an endless parade of backslapping and praise. Genuine criticism of their views is met with confusion, and occasionally spite. Barclay pointed out that only a few of his 100000+ followers had a problem with his assertion. Perhaps he ought to realise that just because people follow you doesn’t mean they have seen what you’ve written, and if they have they might not be that worked up to want to reply or comment. In this case I think most people read it and dismissed it as a poor attempt at trolling.

The Twitter Silence showed the disconnect between certain columnists and commentators and the people they think they represent. I don’t think some of them have recovered from the shock. Their reaction has been to redouble their efforts to prove they care about things more than we do, rather than accepting that when someone expresses a differing opinion or criticises you it isn’t because they’re too dumb to understand the issue but because they understand it and just don’t agree with you.

The only saving grace in all this is that Barclay’s generation will soon be retired, and the younger ones will have the chance to learn how social media can enhance rather than entrench their opinions and outlook.

Here’s hoping.

 

OK, let’s tell a fairy tale. We’ll write it together.

Take the nation’s favourite sport. Add in shady far eastern gamblers. Now let’s pretend that match and spot fixing is a problem limited to the lower levels of the game, and that the Premier League is unsullied by such behaviour.

Are you buying it? Really?

Here’s the thing. We know that in other sports dodgy betting scams are only able to work with the collusion of players. In the case of cricket and the spot fixing cases that ended in two players going to prison they were working under threat of harm to their families. Other players have been unable to resist life changing amounts of money for bowling a few no balls or the odd wide.

Now obviously in the rarefied heights of modern football salaries the chance that a player would involve themselves in a betting sting for relatively modest sums is a lot smaller than it was decades ago. Having said that, when a player this week confessed to betting £30k a time on the team bus, the idea that a gambling debt to the wrong people could be cleared by collecting a ‘needless’ yellow card at the right time isn’t that farfetched.

Also, as Matthew le Tissier revealed in his autobiography, it was going on nearly twenty years ago. In his case it was spread betting on the time of the first throw in. He excuses his behaviour by saying that it wouldn’t materially affect the game. I’m kind of buying that, but the idea that players are pure as the driven snow at all other times is frankly laughable. They dive, they cheat, they bite, they racially abuse. AND THAT’S JUST LUIS SUAREZ.

The whole game is littered with low level cheating. Players routinely claim throw ins and corners that they know aren’t theirs. They wave imaginary cards and roll about as though they’ve been shot. They feign injury to stop the game when a team is breaking on them and they are stretched. It happens all day every day in the Premier League, and yet when the notion that some of it might be for more than just gaining an advantage in a game is put forward it’s like you’ve advocated throwing a puppy in a threshing machine for a laugh.

The simple fact is it’s perfectly possible for match and spot fixing to occur at the highest level, and the fact that the FA have refused to even acknowledge the possibility means that when it is discovered their reaction will be too little too late because there’s none so blind who will not see.

Just like always.

 

Last word goes out to anti horse racing types, who think that they don’t have a mind of their own and just go along with it because an eight stone Irish midget is whipping them. I suggest you google ‘Mad Moose’.

I rest my case, and everyone who likes racing is smiling now….

You’re So Dave, You Probably Think This Blog Is About You…..

…but you’re wrong*…..

So, football eh? Willian’s agent has hawked him around the Premier League like a Punjabi dad with an ugly daughter. Gareth Bale is keeping his head down (apart from being on every other bus shelter and those BT ads). Arsenal are trying to get so many old players back they may have to invent a time machine. And through it all the fans continue their relentless charge toward idiocy. A video is currently doing the rounds from some Spurs fans. The crimes compound on each other. OK, so making a video about your favourite team is acceptable I suppose. there are some pretty good montage efforts out there. This isn’t one of them. It features two (admittedly young) men. They are ‘singing’ a song. It’s by Blue. They have changed the lyrics to be uplifting messages of support to the club.

Unfortunately for them this involves stating that they don’t want to be in the Europa League. Well that’s a noble ambition, until you realise they replace what is effectively the UEFA Cup (a competition Spurs have won twice) with finishing in the top 4 (which Arsenal celebrate every year like they’ve done the fucking treble, but has no actual trophy to go with it). Add to that their declaration that ‘Ledley’s knee will survive’. What exactly? He’s retired. All it has to survive is a day being a club ambassador and a night in Faces. They’re wearing replica shirts too. It’s sickening.

Add in the planks who they’ve roped in to guest star in the video, and you’ve got an insight into the kind of berks who are currently infecting clubs with their gibberish. It’s this kind of nonsense that makes Spurs feel bold enough to charge SIXTY ONE POUNDS to sit in the East Lower to watch them against West Ham. That’s right, not Real Madrid in a Champions League quarter final, West Ham, a club that only exist to hate Spurs, Millwall, and Frank Lampard. And people will pay it too, that’s the tragic bit.

Compare and contrast this with the attitude of the hordes of Scotland fans who descended on London to watch their heroes at Wembley. I first became aware of their advance parties on the Monday. They caused tensions at the big railway stations. There was a turf war at Kings Cross, as all the resident tramps in their 1982 replica shirts felt put out thinking the early birds were muscling in on their patch. These were the hard core. they’d been waiting 14 years for this. I saw one who may as well have had “Ye think ye’re greeeeet but ye’re no” tattooed on his forehead wandering through Covent Garden. You could imagine him in a pub, striking up a conversation with one of the fin haired pointy shoed suburban mummy’s boys who think their dormitory town friends are impressed that they work ‘up West’.

“Y’all reet there wee man? I see ye’re havin’ one of them mincy seethrough drinks. I tek it ye’re no’ going to the fitba naw? Ah bet you work in that PEEEEE AAAAARE or whatever”

Jamie (they’re ALWAYS called Jamie) has already begun to struggle to control his ringpiece by now. This s a bit too ‘real’ for him. Big Tam is only being friendly though. It’s like when your mate’s boerbul starts humping your leg. Sometimes it’s best to fake an orgasm……

On Tuesday you could definitely get a sense of their numbers growing. This group were led by the middle aged men who came down in 1999, but were now hampered by teenaged sons defiantly wearing skinny jeans rather than kilts. Everyone looked uncomfortable. There was a lot more of a touristy vibe, with photos being taken and God awful tat being bought (London has the worst tourist crap of a major city in the world bar none). By all accounts pubs in WC2 were a bit more lively that night, but that was the calm before the storm….

On Wednesday central London went to DEFCON 1, with hordes of kilt clad meatheads pouring into the capital. The Co-op on the Strand is a 24 hour operation. I exited Charing Cross station at 8.20 a.m. and saw my first thirsty Scot piling into a 4 pack. Impressive. At lunchtime one worker complained that she had been on duty since 6 a.m. and was meant to have finished at 12, but had no idea when she would be able to leave. it seems that as the staff arrived from the stock room with trollies laden with more beer to replenish the shelves they were being accosted by people taking them straight to the tills. It showed no signs of abating. it now seemed that Scottish national dress involved a kilt, a replica shirt, a flag over one shoulder, and a 24 pack of cheap fizzy piss over the other. They weren’t animals though. They were eating too. Across the road Tesco had sold out of pork scratchings by midday…..

The numbers were now swelled by London based Scots. These were people called Crawford and Finlay; part time Jocks who only came alive when the 6 nations rolled round, for whom Easterhouse is just an old band, and had no idea why there’s an extra bank holiday north of the border for Hogmanay. You could tell them because they had hip flasks rather than beer, and took discreet nips whilst navigating to Trafalgar Square, where the action was. Fairy Liquid in the fountains was already turning the place into a foam party (nice touch), and people were clambering all over the first level of Nelson’s Column, and the lions (I’ve got up on one of the lions; it’s not as easy as it looks). As the drink flowed the atmosphere became more Salmondified (it’s a word, look it up). It just needed Mel Gibson to rock up with a loudhailer and vials full of skag to pass out.

According to the daily mail police were threatening to confiscate beer from anyone caught drinking in public. Accompanied by photos of lots of hammered Scots necking Carlsberg merrily in the street. Clearly filed by some mug from their desk because they’d have needed every man and woman in the Met out taking cans off people. Ridiculous. Mind you, science will tell you that a drinking culture will eventually need to be a toilet culture, and soon this was proved, ironically by a load of patrons of the Sherlock Holmes weeing on the Korean cultural centre nearby. Free hands across the ocean I suppose.

Anyway, the point of all this was that no matter what the result they were determined to actually enjoy the occasion. I’m sick of people who can only talk about how bad their team is. Sport is meant to be fun, and rather than making poxy videos and phoning TalkSPORT the Scottish fans were out there having a laugh despite the fact that their team is awful. Did a few play up? Certainly. But they more than made up for this by having a laugh, turning drinking into an Olympic sport, and bringing a bit of colour and excitement to town. They also scared the crap out of lots of tourists. you could see loads of them wandering about with expressions that said “What the hell is this? Where’s Hugh Grant? What language is that?” Heartwarming stuff, I think you’ll agree.

Please God the FA get this game on every other year. Then people down here might get the idea that your first job as a fan is to have fun. You never know, it might just catch on……

*trust me, to about five people this is hilarious

If you’ve enjoyed this please join me at @BAHAB2012 for more sweary opinionated crap. If you haven’t go to @piersmorgan to vent your displeasure……