For just once, I'd like to write about something other than Chelsea. I'd like it to be about pig's head and posh knobs. But this is a sports blog. And there are no jokes left on the subject of pulled pork.
So I'll keep this brief. Diego Costa is dickhead. There. Done.
Dammit, there is more to say. I'm with Keown on this... and every time I see his ghoulish face, the eyes hidden beneath a brow that protrudes like the lip of some forbidding cliff, I think I'd never dare to disagree with Martin ... but it's the trying-to-get-others-in-trouble shit that really gets under your skin.
We've all been on school pitches or playgrounds when some infuriating twot bleats out "Sir, sir! Robson trod on my foot, sir!" (All right, pedants, your name might not be Robson, but you get my point.) And it'll be the same twot who's been wittering in your ear all morning about the dubious provenance of your family or the sexual orientation of your father. Costa is that. A friendless nark. A tick but with less of a moral compass.
There's another thing that irritates me too - the fact that pundits like to praise him as a player. As if we can somehow separate footballing ability from his propensity to dump fellow pros in it whenever he can. That 'orrible wiggle of the imaginary card at the referee... it makes me want to crush that hand in a vice.
If it were me - and let's hope one day that it is - I would be tying the snub-nosed conman to a chair and slapping him around the face with damp trout until he promises never to do it again. I'm sure there are some muppets around the football world who'll tell you that he'd be half the player without that bit of the devil in him. Good. Let's keep the good half and lob the rest of him into a wheelie bin.
Only his manager, of course, the overseer of all things and an apostle of the Law that states that We Win First and debate later, he, Mourinho, thinks the Brazilian-Spaniard bruiser was the man of the match. Yes. Pretty soon there'll be a category on your Premier League Top Trumps that says 'Nuisance Value'.
Even teammate Kurt Zouma suggested Costa 'likes to cheat a lot'. Kurt has since put it down to English not being his first language. But I'd just like to reassure the lad that he's using it with great precision at the moment.
It may be the beautiful game but there sure are some ugly buggers thriving right now.
None of this is to let Wenger and his players off the hook. Clearly he's no angel, Gabriel. Just as Santi is no saint. But neither particularly deserved a red card and it made a big difference in a game that Chelsea were desperate to win, especially given their parlous position. Costa's needling was part of a slightly desperate gameplan. (I was reminded of the mendacious Ronaldo wink.) But Arsenal were fools to fall for it. Utter suckers. I've already sent half the first team an email telling them how I'm stuck in Ukraine and they've taken my passport. I expect the money will come pouring in any day.
But on to more ennobling subjects. Firstly, Japan 34 South Africa 32. (This is rugby union, by the way, a game played in this country (England) by steroidal public schoolboys. Not long ago they would entertain themselves by shouted abuse at young women, throwing small people around bars and jumping into the sea from slow-moving vessels but that's all changed now. They're really top chaps, don't you know?)
Japan is not a country noted for the bulkiness of its inhabitants. Every time someone tells me of the health benefits of sushi I can't help replying that the Japanese are always eating that stuff and most of em look like they're wasting away.
Well in order to get together a rugby team that can compete against the muscular mountain ranges that pass for rugby players these days they've drafted in a few blokes from other places to help. Fact is, though, that they have mustered together a side that plays beautiful stuff: the niftiest hands since the Artful Dodger retired; feet so fast they make Fred Astaire look clompy; and all the stamina of the winner of one of them horrible Endurance gameshows their nation loves.
Now it may well be that South Africa have a bunch of players so long in the tooth that half of them have tusks. But Japan won through their own brilliance. And courage. And I don't think I was this happy to see a team win a game of rugger when England won in 2003. Indeed so far the Rugby World Cup has looked good. When it comes to my favourite sports rugby union comes somewhere between the biathlon and synchronised swimming, but a result like Japan achieved can't help but peak even the most sour of sports fan's interests.
And another thing... if Nicola Sturgeon insists on Scots getting another pop at independence could they not extend that self-sufficiency to the Davis Cup tennis team? It's fascinating that the best players of this game that we've ever produced haven't dripped out of the white-clad bore-holes of the Establishment at Play but rather from some gritty geezers from Dunblane and, 70 or 80 years earlier, Stockport. Fascinating and not coincidental.
These days the weak link in Team GB is always the Englishman but it was another exceptional effort from Andy Murray, who gets more likeable with every passing shot.
I have a problem with the Davis Cup, mind you. It's the format. It's a team competition, right? So how come one bloke can win three matches and the team wins the tie? Surely a true test of the strength and depth of the team would be if no player could play more than twice, that way avoiding the predominance of one particular player in the tie as a whole?
Obviously we'd get nowhere pretty quick, but that's not the point. A team sport should be about the team, yet Murray has single-handedly wrestled that squad through to the final.
Right now GB just need Andy (and Jamie). They might as well have me as the other player for all the difference it makes. It does not make sense.
Monday, 21 September 2015
Wednesday, 16 September 2015
Blue Days At The Bridge
What a pretty Premier League picture the table paints this morning.
First up, all hail Signor Ranieri and his fearless foxes. The quiet dismissal of Nigel Pearson was a bold move. Not least because Big Nige always has the bearing of a night-club bouncer who's just on the right sides of losing it. I saw a miffed silverback behind some bars over the summer and I swear he was giving me the Pearson glare.
Of course his dismissal - it would seem - was as much down to his errant son as anything Nige did (given he turned the tepid water of early season form into the heady fizzy wine of survival. His dismissal had more to do with his racist slur-using son - yes I'm sure some of his best friends are Thai - than anything Dad did. But who better to fill those shoes than the lovable Tinkerman?
Yes we all recall with great fondness his happy demeanour, his comical English and his mind-bogglingly changeable first elevens. Except he's not a chump, is he? He kept the same backroom staff that oversaw Leicester's amazing run-in last spring; he's identified what the team have that makes them good, namely great pace up front, terrific persistence and in Mahrez a lad with feet as nimble as Nureyev's. And he hasn't rotated the squad like they were rabbits on a spit.
Lo and behold they are playing brilliantly. It won't last though. Then again they said that about Southampton - and they were pretty much correct.
Secondly the very foot of the table has a familiar ring. Newcastle, strong enough to hold up the rest of the division, seem bound to plummet. Ashley seemed desperate to court McClaren even as John Carver looked certain to choke the life out of the club. The idea that Smiley Steve is the Saviour is a rum one - clearly Ashley would hire a fox to guard his chickens.
Just a quick glance at Derby's form in the last couple of months of the Championship could have told you that. Not even a play-off spot was indescribably bad. So far Newcastle have displayed the worst tendencies of a McClaren team, tentative in possession, unable to pick up the pace, rarely dangerous unless they're 2-0 down and there's nowt to lose. The squad looks bright enough but he needs to sort out his shit quick or Joe Kinnear will land on his shoulder like some great cockney albatross of Doom.
Of course the Big News is that Jose Mourinho's Chelsea are a bag of bona fide horse manure. There's been almost as many radio hours dedicated to their dreadful start as there has to the emergence of a socialist leading a socialist party in the UK. (I mean what the hell is this atheist republican doing not singing God Save The Queen?)
It's difficult to decide where the rifts are deeper, Walworth Road or Stamford Bridge. Mourinho's problems run deep. While his surprising humble and open post-match interview on the Beeb made you think that here was a man ready to roll with the circumstances, other factors suggest the delusional paranoia that helps to build a bunker mentality can also divorce one from reality.
The petulant hissy fit cos Martinez was answering questions before him on Saturday wasn't the act of a patient man in control of himself. More The frontline, led by a Diego Costa with all the dynamism of a narcoleptic hippo, couldn't cut through cellophane right now. The defence looks doddery with Ivanovic lumbering around like a concussed bear.
Nothing is working out for Jose. He blames misfortune - a couple of deflections went the wrong side of the post. Another of seeing that is that the defenders made good blocks. Everton score three from five shots. Unlucky Chelsea? Or clinical Everton. The sort of goals to chances ratio that Mourinho thrives on.
But much of it is Mourinho's making. The pursuit of Stones, nobly denied by Martinez, can't have reassured the present incumbents in the Chelsea squad. The haranguing of the team doctors seems to have left even those most self-centred of human beings professional millionaire footballers aghast at their poor treatment.
It's not a happy camp. Fabregas - a name that always sounds to me like something you take with you when you go camping - is playing like he's sprung a leak. JT just looks pissed off. Ivanovic could be replaced by a mighty oak and there'd be more difficulty getting past him.
Meanwhile the whole unseemly cesspit of cash sees hundreds of squad members being given out to the needy as if they were out-of-date sandwiches from a high-street retailer with a conscience. It's a bleeding travesty and the fact that it's not working is DELIGHTFUL. Yes, Mourinho did get one thing right. We ARE enjoying it, HUGELY.
Long may the topsy-turvy look of the league continue.
Of course some things remain the same - like Man City's European form being miserable. And football still being a contact sport with all the occasional horrors that that results in. Get well soon, Luke Shaw. At least time is on his side, but that's hardly a silver lining.
What might cheer him - and the rest of us - up is a perky 2-1 win for Maccabi Tel-Aviv tonight. It's far from unlikely. Hehehehehehe.
First up, all hail Signor Ranieri and his fearless foxes. The quiet dismissal of Nigel Pearson was a bold move. Not least because Big Nige always has the bearing of a night-club bouncer who's just on the right sides of losing it. I saw a miffed silverback behind some bars over the summer and I swear he was giving me the Pearson glare.
Of course his dismissal - it would seem - was as much down to his errant son as anything Nige did (given he turned the tepid water of early season form into the heady fizzy wine of survival. His dismissal had more to do with his racist slur-using son - yes I'm sure some of his best friends are Thai - than anything Dad did. But who better to fill those shoes than the lovable Tinkerman?
Yes we all recall with great fondness his happy demeanour, his comical English and his mind-bogglingly changeable first elevens. Except he's not a chump, is he? He kept the same backroom staff that oversaw Leicester's amazing run-in last spring; he's identified what the team have that makes them good, namely great pace up front, terrific persistence and in Mahrez a lad with feet as nimble as Nureyev's. And he hasn't rotated the squad like they were rabbits on a spit.
Lo and behold they are playing brilliantly. It won't last though. Then again they said that about Southampton - and they were pretty much correct.
Secondly the very foot of the table has a familiar ring. Newcastle, strong enough to hold up the rest of the division, seem bound to plummet. Ashley seemed desperate to court McClaren even as John Carver looked certain to choke the life out of the club. The idea that Smiley Steve is the Saviour is a rum one - clearly Ashley would hire a fox to guard his chickens.
Just a quick glance at Derby's form in the last couple of months of the Championship could have told you that. Not even a play-off spot was indescribably bad. So far Newcastle have displayed the worst tendencies of a McClaren team, tentative in possession, unable to pick up the pace, rarely dangerous unless they're 2-0 down and there's nowt to lose. The squad looks bright enough but he needs to sort out his shit quick or Joe Kinnear will land on his shoulder like some great cockney albatross of Doom.
Of course the Big News is that Jose Mourinho's Chelsea are a bag of bona fide horse manure. There's been almost as many radio hours dedicated to their dreadful start as there has to the emergence of a socialist leading a socialist party in the UK. (I mean what the hell is this atheist republican doing not singing God Save The Queen?)
It's difficult to decide where the rifts are deeper, Walworth Road or Stamford Bridge. Mourinho's problems run deep. While his surprising humble and open post-match interview on the Beeb made you think that here was a man ready to roll with the circumstances, other factors suggest the delusional paranoia that helps to build a bunker mentality can also divorce one from reality.
The petulant hissy fit cos Martinez was answering questions before him on Saturday wasn't the act of a patient man in control of himself. More The frontline, led by a Diego Costa with all the dynamism of a narcoleptic hippo, couldn't cut through cellophane right now. The defence looks doddery with Ivanovic lumbering around like a concussed bear.
Nothing is working out for Jose. He blames misfortune - a couple of deflections went the wrong side of the post. Another of seeing that is that the defenders made good blocks. Everton score three from five shots. Unlucky Chelsea? Or clinical Everton. The sort of goals to chances ratio that Mourinho thrives on.
But much of it is Mourinho's making. The pursuit of Stones, nobly denied by Martinez, can't have reassured the present incumbents in the Chelsea squad. The haranguing of the team doctors seems to have left even those most self-centred of human beings professional millionaire footballers aghast at their poor treatment.
It's not a happy camp. Fabregas - a name that always sounds to me like something you take with you when you go camping - is playing like he's sprung a leak. JT just looks pissed off. Ivanovic could be replaced by a mighty oak and there'd be more difficulty getting past him.
Meanwhile the whole unseemly cesspit of cash sees hundreds of squad members being given out to the needy as if they were out-of-date sandwiches from a high-street retailer with a conscience. It's a bleeding travesty and the fact that it's not working is DELIGHTFUL. Yes, Mourinho did get one thing right. We ARE enjoying it, HUGELY.
Long may the topsy-turvy look of the league continue.
Of course some things remain the same - like Man City's European form being miserable. And football still being a contact sport with all the occasional horrors that that results in. Get well soon, Luke Shaw. At least time is on his side, but that's hardly a silver lining.
What might cheer him - and the rest of us - up is a perky 2-1 win for Maccabi Tel-Aviv tonight. It's far from unlikely. Hehehehehehe.
Thursday, 10 September 2015
Well Done Wazza!
Congratulations to the Pie-Faced Wonder. Wayne Rooney crashed home another penalty to see him become England's record scorer. Glenn Hoddle purred that the keeper got nowhere near it. The keeper touched it on its way in actually, Glenn, but then, with your hotline to God, you do see things move in mysterious ways.
It is undeniable that Wazza is now the greatest striker England have ever had. Then again Margaret Thatcher was PM for 11 long years but that doesn't make her the best we've had unless you're a proto fascist fuckwit with all the empathy of a tapeworm - or George Osborne to give that worm its proper name.
Certainly those of us that witnessed the manchild's brawny arrival on the international would be unsurprised to have been told 11 years later that the lad had surpassed Sir Bobby in the legion of goalscoring greats. At that time Rooney looked capable of anything. Three Weetabix, a cow-pie and a liaison with a forty-something hooker... and it's not even nine o'clock.
Since then, like many an English prodigy he has slipped slowly back into the ranks of the Merely Very Good at a time when the Very Best are, when it comes to Messi and Ronaldo, Bloody Ridiculously Good Like You Might Be If You Were Having The Most Wonderful Dream Ever.
But even in the company of England's finest finishers, he's a little bit wanting.
Jimmy Greaves was the finisher supreme, they tell me. Fleet of foot, lithe and slippery, good on either side. And he did all this on pitches that halfway through October turned into the sort of pasture a herd of cattle might turn its nose up at. Those eyes that were once cold and ruthless lost their lustre in the perennial post-playing battle with the booze. He had a massive stroke recently but somehow football and its fans have mustered the £30,000 necessary to pay for his physiotherapy, possibly by asking every Premier League player to contribute 0.00001% of his weekly salary to help the greatest goal-taker the top division has ever seen. Or not.
Bobby Charlton took the record from Greavesie of course. He had much in common with the man who beat him at Wembley. They both played for Man U, both scored 49 goals from 106 games, both had humble beginnings and both were at pains to deny their baldness.
The Charlton comb-over fooled no one. Indeed the smallest breeze left Bobby's pate glisteningly free while the strands flew in his wake like a plume of smoke from a steamboat's funnel. (C.f Alan Gilzean, Ralph Coates - what the hell were they thinking?)
Rooney of course bought himself a topweave which to this day looks a little like it belongs to someone else. Frankly, footballers shouldn't give a shit whether their heads can be slapped or not. It's of no bloody consequence whatsoever and a bit pathetic and vain to think that it is.
Similarities between Wazza and Chazza end there though. Charlton was a barnstorming midfielder whose gentle demeanour was at odds with the dynamite in his boots. Rooney's dynamite is as likely to emerge from his brain as his boot. Cristiano Ronaldo can tell you that.
Michael Owen seemed destined to overhaul Charlton but ended up falling short. Well, writhing in agony on a touchline, really, as, once again, hamstrings overworked in his late adolescence by unthinking staff at Anfield twanged like so much perished elastic. Owen is now the least charismatic football pundit in living memory and I wish him every success with the gee-gees instead. Indeed any one of his gee-gees could make a more inspired contribution to a half-time review on BT Sport.
Before Owen we had the saintly Gary. Now there was a crisp finisher. He barely set foot outside the box, and now he's barely off it. Except for that penalty he would have joined Bobby. Rooney's penalty v Switzerland was struck with all the vehemence Lineker's lacked. For a man so wonderfully clinical in front of goal it is a moment of unrivalled embarrassment for Gaz: it's the football equivalent of Heston Blumenthal burning the toast or Darcey Bussell falling on her arse.
Each of these surpassed goalscorers seem to be better at scoring goals than Wayne. There are numerous reasons to downgrade Rooney's achievement then. His performances in major tournaments have been woeful since 2004. He has neither the predatory skill of Lineker or Greaves or the midfield drive and purposefulness of Charlton. But does that really actually matter folks?
In his defence, Rooney has often, both for club and country, had to 'do a job' for the team - which translates as having to be plopped somewhere because teammates are less adaptable. The current England dressing-room seem to admire him enormously - and like him too - which I'm imagining is less likely if you have to hang your coat on the peg next to the Gelled Winker Cristiano, or a truculent narcissist like Ibrahimovic.
Furthermore, the lad, regardless of whether he's having a stinker (and sometimes he looks like he's wearing cotton-wool boots), puts in a hell of a shift every time. Beckham had his limitations, many more than Wazza, and yet you could never doubt his commitment either.
So, while comparisons are odious - I haven't even mentioned Lofthouse and Shearer, who to my mind is still the best English centre-forward of my lifetime - let us not be so bloody churlish. I've heard people moan that Andy Murray is well boring (he sort of is), or that Stuart Broad is an arrogant sod (he can be), or that Lewis Hamilton is a massive cock (he is, he so is) but that doesn't mean we downgrade their achievements. And any road, Wayne seems to me like a decent fella.
So. Raise a glass to the lad, hell, have a fag too. He would if it were you
It is undeniable that Wazza is now the greatest striker England have ever had. Then again Margaret Thatcher was PM for 11 long years but that doesn't make her the best we've had unless you're a proto fascist fuckwit with all the empathy of a tapeworm - or George Osborne to give that worm its proper name.
Certainly those of us that witnessed the manchild's brawny arrival on the international would be unsurprised to have been told 11 years later that the lad had surpassed Sir Bobby in the legion of goalscoring greats. At that time Rooney looked capable of anything. Three Weetabix, a cow-pie and a liaison with a forty-something hooker... and it's not even nine o'clock.
Since then, like many an English prodigy he has slipped slowly back into the ranks of the Merely Very Good at a time when the Very Best are, when it comes to Messi and Ronaldo, Bloody Ridiculously Good Like You Might Be If You Were Having The Most Wonderful Dream Ever.
But even in the company of England's finest finishers, he's a little bit wanting.
Jimmy Greaves was the finisher supreme, they tell me. Fleet of foot, lithe and slippery, good on either side. And he did all this on pitches that halfway through October turned into the sort of pasture a herd of cattle might turn its nose up at. Those eyes that were once cold and ruthless lost their lustre in the perennial post-playing battle with the booze. He had a massive stroke recently but somehow football and its fans have mustered the £30,000 necessary to pay for his physiotherapy, possibly by asking every Premier League player to contribute 0.00001% of his weekly salary to help the greatest goal-taker the top division has ever seen. Or not.
Bobby Charlton took the record from Greavesie of course. He had much in common with the man who beat him at Wembley. They both played for Man U, both scored 49 goals from 106 games, both had humble beginnings and both were at pains to deny their baldness.
The Charlton comb-over fooled no one. Indeed the smallest breeze left Bobby's pate glisteningly free while the strands flew in his wake like a plume of smoke from a steamboat's funnel. (C.f Alan Gilzean, Ralph Coates - what the hell were they thinking?)
Rooney of course bought himself a topweave which to this day looks a little like it belongs to someone else. Frankly, footballers shouldn't give a shit whether their heads can be slapped or not. It's of no bloody consequence whatsoever and a bit pathetic and vain to think that it is.
Similarities between Wazza and Chazza end there though. Charlton was a barnstorming midfielder whose gentle demeanour was at odds with the dynamite in his boots. Rooney's dynamite is as likely to emerge from his brain as his boot. Cristiano Ronaldo can tell you that.
Michael Owen seemed destined to overhaul Charlton but ended up falling short. Well, writhing in agony on a touchline, really, as, once again, hamstrings overworked in his late adolescence by unthinking staff at Anfield twanged like so much perished elastic. Owen is now the least charismatic football pundit in living memory and I wish him every success with the gee-gees instead. Indeed any one of his gee-gees could make a more inspired contribution to a half-time review on BT Sport.
Before Owen we had the saintly Gary. Now there was a crisp finisher. He barely set foot outside the box, and now he's barely off it. Except for that penalty he would have joined Bobby. Rooney's penalty v Switzerland was struck with all the vehemence Lineker's lacked. For a man so wonderfully clinical in front of goal it is a moment of unrivalled embarrassment for Gaz: it's the football equivalent of Heston Blumenthal burning the toast or Darcey Bussell falling on her arse.
Each of these surpassed goalscorers seem to be better at scoring goals than Wayne. There are numerous reasons to downgrade Rooney's achievement then. His performances in major tournaments have been woeful since 2004. He has neither the predatory skill of Lineker or Greaves or the midfield drive and purposefulness of Charlton. But does that really actually matter folks?
In his defence, Rooney has often, both for club and country, had to 'do a job' for the team - which translates as having to be plopped somewhere because teammates are less adaptable. The current England dressing-room seem to admire him enormously - and like him too - which I'm imagining is less likely if you have to hang your coat on the peg next to the Gelled Winker Cristiano, or a truculent narcissist like Ibrahimovic.
Furthermore, the lad, regardless of whether he's having a stinker (and sometimes he looks like he's wearing cotton-wool boots), puts in a hell of a shift every time. Beckham had his limitations, many more than Wazza, and yet you could never doubt his commitment either.
So, while comparisons are odious - I haven't even mentioned Lofthouse and Shearer, who to my mind is still the best English centre-forward of my lifetime - let us not be so bloody churlish. I've heard people moan that Andy Murray is well boring (he sort of is), or that Stuart Broad is an arrogant sod (he can be), or that Lewis Hamilton is a massive cock (he is, he so is) but that doesn't mean we downgrade their achievements. And any road, Wayne seems to me like a decent fella.
So. Raise a glass to the lad, hell, have a fag too. He would if it were you
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