Premier Predictions

The Premier League is back. It's like it hardly went away.

It's time to revisit those great echoing stadia and listen to the vain and desperate hollering of touchline coaches as football revisits the Lost Years. I look forward to a tumbling Aubameyang saluting plastic seating after another cool finish; to the resonant yelp of pain every time someone gets within two metres of Jack Grealish; and to the plaintive cries of Mike Ashley as he sits outside St. James's Park doing his weekly oligarch ring-round on the off-chance that someone might sponsor the Gallowgate for a couple of months. 

But there's the actual football, too. It'll be good to see England's players back in club colours after the unnervingly bland efforts in Iceland and Denmark. Watching football that turgid is like an act of self-harm. Or a Lawrence Fox tweet, if you like. Clearly, Foden and Greenwood is the main story from those trips. What on earth were these 18 and 20 year-old young men doing hanging out with attractive young women? I mean it beggars belief. 

And what were these attractive women doing sharing it on social media and having copious interviews in the British press? I mean have these youths lost their minds? Rest assured, you shameless brats, there's not a single person reading this blog - wait, smart-arses, this sentence hasn't finished yet! - there's not a single person reading this blog who would have been so selfish and naive at that age. 

I hope they go home, have a word with themselves - and in Foden's case, several words with the mother of his child - and then they go back to work.Seriously there are men in their forties and fifties bringing serial shame to this country every time they open their mouths right now and we're going to give these lads a shellacking? Priorities, my fellow Brits. 

In passing, a quick nod to Novak Djokovic, who is like a walking billboard entitled The Dangers of Chutzpah. First, his tournament gets riddled with the virus, then he takes out a line judge's Adam's Apple. The overblown hammery of that woman's spluttering near-death experience will live long in the memory. I know the theatres are closed but she's a shoo-in for a Lady Macbeth when they open again. Djokovic is a curious cove. He's so not likeable and I'm not sure it's his fault. His humility has always so practised, and it's something that, like the line-judge I find difficult to swallow. 

But enough of that. Real sport... Footy. And I should tell you who exactly is going to win the Premier League and who s going down quicker than a 2.00 am kebab. So here goes:

ARSENAL

Arteta seems to have got the message through that the players need to work hard when they don't have the ball. Not everyone can be Mesut Ozil. Improvement to continue. 5th.

ASTON VILLA

A lot depends on Watkins being as good as they hope. But they stayed up by the skin of the skin of the teeth, and it'll be the same this season. 19th.

BRIGHTON

I think they'll d okay. I like Lallana, even if his name sounds like some fruit the Telly-Tubbies eat. Potter is clearly a smart gaffer so... 13th

BURNLEY

How much longer can Sean stay? Is this season the last roll of the Dyche? There's not a club in the PL more defined by the manager. Effective, honest, not pretty. Every year and somehow he gets them into comfy mid-table. 11th

CHELSEA

Could Frank's massive cash-spaff could pay dividends? Or is it a moonshot? Yeah we're looking at furloughs and four million unemployed and somehow CFC have £250 million to spend. There's no doubt that Ziyech,Werner and Havertz are top drawer. Thiago's a useful stopgap for a defence with more leaks than an Eistedfodd. So, I'm saying 2nd. 

CRYSTAL PALACE

Like the polar opposite of Chelsea. Hodgson's ambition continues to shrink. Palace are like the rest of us. Just get to the end of the week and see where we are shall we? And then have a 'kin drink. Not this season, Roy. 18th.

EVERTON

Well, a midfield that moved with all the rapidity and vigour of an oxbow lake has been ripped out by Ancelotti. Clearly he's a boss who knows how to put a team together, it's just a question of how soon that happens. In Carlo I trust. 6th.

FULHAM

Well, I know, they can't believe it either. They have bought Anthony Knockaert, so apart from those two worldies the season looks bleak. 20th. 

LEEDS

Well Bielsa's hanging around so you can't seem them surviving. Weird that they've been out of the the top league for so long, like when you bump into an old mate on the street and you suddenly realise it's been 16 years. Not that a Boro fan is particularly pally with Leeds, like. They'll do enough. 15th.

LEICESTER

Rodgers bucked the trend with fifth last season. Trouble is Leicester are always having to offload their top players. Like Southampton a while back, it's a case of the better you do, the weaker the squad next season. Like Donald Trump's defence of anything he's ever said, it's unsustainable. 9th.

LIVERPOOL

For much of last season, they were like an episode of 24. Okayish, good production values, a tad boring at times, and then the last five minutes always left you wanting to watch the next episode. I can't see Klopp's Season 6 being so good. And I like Lovely Jurgen to do well. I think 3rd. 

MANCHESTER CITY

It's down to Pep. If he does a Champs league and skilfully outthinks himself then this could be another weird season. Ake and Laporte should give more security at the back, though. When they're anyhting like you can't see anyone beating them. 1st.

MANCHESTER UNITED

Reasons to be cheerful here. Fernandes is superb. Pogba's upped his game since someone better than him arrived. Van de Beek (de Bork? de Buck? de Bleedin' 'Eck Dutch names are so tricky) is a vital improvement. If Maguire can avoid getting arrested, and the front three keep firing, well... 4th. (But not far behind 1st.)

NEWCASTLE UNITED.

Not unlike the Toon Army I've had my doubts about Bruce. But he's been great. Wilson, Fraser and Lewis are top signings. Trouble is, it's all the other shit isn't it? People know when they're working for a dysfunctional organisation. Just ask senior civil servants. Should be doing better but all that crap will trickle down onto the pitch eventually... 15th. 

SHEFFIELD UNITED

I dunno. Miraculous effort last season. I think cos Wilder's so old school about it, it's easy to ignore how skilled and savvy United were, too. The end of the season indicated tougher times ahead but a team to admire. 12th.

SOUTHAMPTON

Still hard to believe that 9-0 drubbing last season. How that hurt the heart of Hassenhuttl. Hassenhuttl's higher hurdle has to be harder however. Hassenhuttl's hopes hang on Danny Hings. 10th...

TOTTENHAM

Mourinho is a busted flush. I mean it. It's a good squad but unless he's banking up lines of four and five and grinding out draws against the big boys he's got nowt to offer. The team looks so utterly cheerless. Not Spursy. Except some bottling will occur. 8th.

WEST BROM

It all looks very boing boing. Still, out of conviction that Palace must drop, I'm giving the Baggies an arbitrary benefit of the doubt. Bilic is always good value too. 17th.

WEST HAM

Moyes remains. Even the venal pornographers in charge couldn't cast him to one side like a rain-soaked jazz-mag in a lay-by. Quite how this season is anything other than another long slog with the squad he has is beyond me. (Honorable exception - Antonio). Think they'll get away with it again. And Moyes will be gone this time next year. 16th.

WOLVES

I know why Klopp got all the gongs for last season but Nuno (or Wilder) deserved them just as much. Such a civilised soul, too. Every time I watched Adama Traore last season I was reminded of a bloke with a similar name who once ran about like a man on an uncontrolled motorised scooter at the Riverside. Different bloke though the one at Wolves. 7th. 

That's that then. You can ignore the entire season now you know how it will end. Hope that's distracted you from the cavalcade of lying law-breaking self-interested, untrustworthy fucktards that are dragging this country's name through the mud at every turn. 

Messi-Brough Here We Come

 Okay, it's been a while. But at least I've been more in the public eye than the Prime Minister. I've been on a holiday in North Wales. The tent was real and actually used. The weather was less wet than the green grass would suggest. The waterfalls were many and bleeding beautiful and the wifi was as reliable as a policy statement on schools by the Education Secretary. 

I return to find that Twitter seems more obsessed with whether wobbling-jowled Tories can sing Rule Britannia at that toe-curling tradition that is Last Night At The Proms, rather than the fact that the Government seems to have a never-ending spaff of funds to splurge out on their nearest pals in the glorified Etonian wank-circle they call public policy these days.

But this is a sports blog, and sport has ducked in and out of the showers to bring us some interesting cricket and some fascinating footie. I copped on to some wifi for long enough to watch the Champs League final which, hyped up as some carnival of carefree kickaboutery, turned out to be predictably dull. 

Of all the glorified superstars of world football I find Neymar to be my least favourite. He spends a Grealishly long time falling on the floor during matches. Yes, he's got all the tricks and flicks but I want to slap the lad and just tell him to get the f**k on with it. Indeed, shorn of all the intensity of a full stadium, the pratfalls and rolling around look even more desperate and, well, cheaty. 

More to the point, is anyone else utterly fed up with the replaying of penalty shouts where some pundit uses the well-worn phrase there was contact - as if the defender in question is less a footballer and more a 1970's predatory politician in a typing pool. Since when was touching a striker a criminal offence? Truly the modern game has entirely embraced the dishonour of going down like a sack of spuds. He's entitled to go down. You hear that a lot. It's like me getting a bloke arrest for theft cos he was standing next to my car. FFS. 

Far more entertaining was Bayern's annihilation of Barcelona. Mas que un club? The whole thing's imploding and Lionel Messi is off. If they let him. Which they must. Unless 17 years of faithful service count for nowt. 

Any road, we've had a whip-round in the Blue Bell, £62.13 so far, and we reckon Lionel'd do okay at the Riverside. Warnock and Messi? It's a perfect combination - like ice-cream and gravel - or Trump and Truth. 

Seriously though - actually I'm quite serious so maybe I mean... Realistically though, it would be bloody wonderful if he had a couple of seasons in the Premier League. I know Lineker and Piers Morgan have a tedious fake-Twitter spat over whether Messi or Ronaldo is the best ever - it's like disagreeing about what you favourite colour is and I wish they'd just shut the fuck up about it - but Messi is the one I like watching most. 

And I really wouldn't care which monstrous moneybags of a team grabbed him. Except that I'd love him to pop up somewhere that's just struggling a bit: Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, Newcastle even. The sort of place that would quite simply form itself into a giant hand and spend the next nine months pinching itself with glee. It'd be like Juninho popping up at Boro but times about seventy thousand. 

I'm sure the lad has bills to pay and places to be, and maybe Saturday night down the Bigg Market isn't exactly what he had in mind, but dreams, my friends, dreams are all we have right now. 

Meantime, I've enjoyed the cricket, despite the fact there's been days when it felt like the bubble they've been played in was nothing less than a sophisticated carwash. Of most interest, beyond Zac Crawley's ludicrous 267 and Jos Buttler's return to batting form being coupled with the occasional indication he couldn't catch a hazelnut in a laundry basket, has been the never-diminishing greatness of James Anderson. 

Sometimes you have to get a cricket ball in your hand to understand how what he does is so utterly remarkable. It's like watching Ronnie O'Sullivan knock in a 147 and then missing the reds off your break-off shot when you get down the snooker club. Anderson's control, the way he sets up batsmen with forensic cunning, the fact that his averages go up and up even as he approaches 40, suggests that there's no reason why he can't carry on snarling and grumping his way to 700 victims in a couple of years. 

In a year where sport has felt remote, detached, (and, when Neymar rolls around and Liverpool players jump up and down on a podium in celebration in front of no one, it has felt downright absurd) just watching a master of his craft in action makes life a little - no, a lot - more bearable. 

I might add that it's good to see a highly competent Englishman at a time when those leading us are entirely inept too. 

Good Citizen Kane

If there's one thing I haven't missed about the football, apart from standing inside the Riverside Stadium and weeping tears of quiet frustration, it's the meticulous pulling apart of people's psyches by both national and social media alike. However I'm nowt if not a hypocrite so here's the pennyworth I'd be delivering in the Blue Bell if I could find a mask through which a craft brew lager could pass.

Exhibit 1. David De Gea.

De Gea has been for most of his seven years at United the only truly reliable performer in a sea of banality. Just think what he's seen come and go since Fergie's departure. (I say 'departure' but when you see him up in the stand they named after him, it looks more like he's floated up to some heavenly plinth, from where he, Godlike, glares down on the wrecked landscape of a beautiful world he once created. It's kind of how Tony Blair regards the Labour Party.)

De Gea's brilliance kept United competing in - and even swinning - the odd trophy here and there. He saw off the grisly horse manure that Moyes put in front of him after Fergie's Lord Mayor's show. He was a cornerstone of excellence amongst the monotony assembled by Aloysius Paulus Maria van Gaal - yes his name is almost as ponderous as the football his United played. And when Mourinho arrived with a footballing philosophy that had all the inspiration of Matt Hancock's Parkour video, still the Spaniard's keeping stayed as firm as the lacquer that still sweeps back his hair. 

But in the last two years, and lockdown's no excuse, this exemplar of goalying has gone from Master Craftsman to Mr Bean. Every arching tip round the post seems to be the precursor to an inept flop to the floor. He has the air of a man who catches a falling vase, calmly replaces it on the shelf only for the whole cabinet to collapse in front of him. 

Cliche dictates that a manager who shows faith in such a crumbling reputation is to be admired in this day and age. I disagree. Solskjaer needs to get shot of him. I'm reminded of the rapid decline of Joe Hart, and Roy Hodgson's bewildering faith in him despite the fact that he had a lot of trouble stopping hard shots to his left. Hart had been well nigh brilliant for five seasons but Guardiola didn't hesitate to sideline him. He wasn't good enough anymore. Same goes for De Gea. Romero's been good when he's stood in. Henderson has been magnificent at Sheffield United. 

Whether De Gea will recover his form is debatable, but the oft-mooted stories about Real Madrid gagging for him must be long-forgotten now. It's tough at the top, but it's even harder at the back, especially when you've been surviving the hapless contributions of Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Eric Bailly, Marcus Rojo et al. When you think about it, there's maybe a delayed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at play here. Rest and recuperation is a must for the poor lad. 

Exhibit 2 - Harry Kane

Social media in particular is full of snide remarks about aspects of his play and personality which I don't get. Kane is:

(a) Overrated
Kane isn't overrated. Is he world-class? Well he's not Government Track and Trace app world-class, no. The problem is you'd be comparing him with Messi and Ronaldo when you say that, which is like saying Andy Murray's shit cos he's nowhere near as good as Roger Federer;

(b) Greedy
Well strikers are supposed to be greedy, aren't they? It's like criticising a walrus for being too fat. England: 26 goals in 35 appearances. Spurs 142 goals in 207 appearances. Yes I know there was the Stoke goal he claimed when it brushed past a nasal hair. So what? Long Live Greedy;

(c) Too many of his goals are penalties.
Man City have flailed around with some inept spot-kicks this season. They're miles behind Liverpool too. A reliable penalty-taker is a must-have.

(d) Hasn't got nearly enough pace in the modern era
Well, he's not slow and Southgate plays him a little deeper as a creative front man particularly wen the likes of Rashford, Sterling or Sancho are haring down the flanks. Pace isn't everything.

(e) Speaks funny
Yes he does. He'd prefer to let his feet do the talking I'm sure.

(f) Hasn't got the balls to go to a massive club
Well I guess these homegrown players tend to be too loyal. Spurs seemed to be in that bracket when they opened their great new stadium and got to the Champs League final. I'm sure a move wouldn't harm his career, mind.

(g) Has won nothing
See (f)

(h) Is injury-prone
He's not Darren bleeding Anderton.

What troubles me is that even when we have a national team that's really enjoyable to watch, in which Kane is captain and a central figure, there still seems to be a campaign to undermine him. There's an idea that, as was the case with Sterling, these lads need taking down a peg or two. I don't know what more Kane is supposed to do. He works hard, gets his rewards. seems ambitious without being a prick about it. And still the snipers snipe.

It makes you fear a little for the future of wonderkids like Mason Greenwood or England's best midfielder Phil Foden. I hope when these lads get in the England team that a bit of leeway is given them.

What's more it seems that successful footballers are held to more exacting standards of morality and behaviour than the people who run the country right now. Given a choice between to an entitled vacillating racist inconstant babyfathering sickbag of half-truths and evasions and a decent footballer, I know who I'd choose.

Klopp-Clap but Never Mind That

Claps to Klopp and the empty Kop! No amount of hammering by Citeh should confuse the issue. That victory was like a lapped runner hitting Mo Farah with a rotten orange - a small victory but you’re still wayyyyy behind.

Still it whets the appetite for next season and next season will be here very soon. As a Boro fan I’d be happy if it started now. The arrival of Warnock is like a foreshadowing of death. He is the managerial version of the last chance saloon. He’s the old guy in the zombie apocalypse movie who dealt with something like this Back in ‘92 and knew he’d be needed again. 

All the scrapes he’s been through have left him with an iron will, a foolproof method and no discernible eyebrows. That method involves defending like she-lions and nodding in the odd set-piece. I reckon his man-management technique is very much stick and carrot. But without the carrot. I think we’ll stay up with him there. Whether my nerves can bear it is a whole other matter.

Meanwhile other sports are tiptoeing into the limelight and, in the case of Novak Djokovic, skipping straight off to the hospital. Djokovic has always struck me as a little up himself despite the odd nod to humility. It is often asked why we don’t like him as much as Rafa or Roger and I think its cos he has all the charm of a gatepost and hair that looks suspiciously like an otter pelt. But that’s just me. Any road, swanning about with your tennis chums and taking as many precautions as a prime minister in a Covid ward reaps its inevitable rewards. Get well soon and don’t be a twat when you get back on court.

The Conservative Party at play is revived next week too. Test cricket returns - and indeed club cricket now Boris Johnson has understood that cricket need not necessarily involve lunches and teas and shared boxes. Just as education need not necessarily involve Latin verbs, emotional stunting and the induction of a wholly unjustifiable superiority complex. I’m kind of looking forward to it, although without Root England’s top 4 has all the solidity of Norwich City stroking it around on the edge of its own penalty area.

Despite the arenas having the air of a implausibly uninhabited planet on Star Trek, the Premier League itself is shaping up nicely, now that the champs are just about keeping their crowns on straight. Beyond the Canaries, who fell off their perch a while back, there is a bum-squeakingly tight contest at the rear end of the table. Bournemouth look doomed. The club, not the twats clustered on the beach. Eddie Howe’s team have all the bearing of men not quite recovered from induced comas.

Above these two, Watford’s minor improvement under Pearson seems a distant memory, Villa have been treating the route to goal as some some of maze in a Beano annual, and West Ham miraculously found some from to grab a 3-2 against Chelsea.

Still Chelsea are hanging in there, as the foot-race to the Champions League becomes keener than some English mustard with a kick of chilli. United - with Fernandes looking as good as anyone this season - are reborn; Leicester might just have woken up in time; Wolves, armed with the superhero auditionee Adama - who unlike his days at the Boro has learn to run extremely fast and keep the ball with him, look good even with the Arsenal defeat.

On the other hand, who the hell are Spurs right now? And when is Mourinho going to take a long hard look in the mirror? (Okay, clearly he does that every day - but for the wrong reasons). Personally I think Jose’s lost it. He’s got a pretty fine squad there and yet the defence is as polite as a socially-distanced queue outside Waitrose, and the attack is utterly without a plan. Mourinho, as is the way with responsible personalities in this grievous modern age, is happy to dole out blame to anyone  who’s been within two metres of the team bus. If players lack motivation then maybe the bloke in charge of them might find ways to find that motivation. Or maybe you just sit on your hands and moan at the ref? No that’s our job, the fans’ job!

In short, I reckon it’ll be United and Chelsea to nick out Leicester. And Norwich, Bournemouth and Villa to go. Be glad when this season’s  over and we have no rest 

The Admirable Marky Dashford

That Daniel Rashford eh? One minute he's bigging up the trans community, the next he's getting the government to make a U-turn on their policy of hiding in big houses while poor children starve. 

Of course Twatt Mancock's a busy fella and it's easy to make mistakes. Like standing right next to someone in parliament when you've been banging on about social distancing for three whole months you dozy prick. Or like Turkish PPE. Amazing how we were lied to about the Turks coming into Europe in 2016 and now we're so desperate for cheap gloves and aprons that we'll buy any old shit off them. 

Still xenophobia is a go-to solution when you've run out of credibility. There's still a market for it, if we look at the Churchill-in-a-Fred-Perry-Looky-Likey Competition that occupied Parliament Square on Saturday. Sexy men though, eh? Everyone just ripe for the wank-bank, ladeez? Lager, hair-loss and spittle roughly thrown together in humanoid form. Lush. Mind you, don't let these Grim Gurgles of Reflux distract you from the racists who manipulate, inflame and then abdicate all responsibility.

Black Lives Matters is here to stay, I hope. As a response 'All Lives Matter' just makes me want to stove in the television. Here's an analogy that might appeal to your average Daily Telegraph bigot. 

Say you want to renovate a tumbledown mansion. And Kevin McCloud says to you "I expect you'll start with the foundations in the Great Hall: the damp course has been neglected and the floorboards are rotten." And you turn to Kevin McCloud and you say "Kevin, ALL THE ROOMS MATTER!" And Kevin says "Well, yes, but if you don't fix the foundations then the whole building's in trouble." And you say "ALL THE FLOORS MATTER, KEVIN!" And Kevin says "You're two of the biggest wankers I've ever met" and you say "ALL WANKERS MATTER, KEVIN." 

Now of course if you're a poor white person you might find it hard to understand why rich brown people like Raheem Sterling are getting all the attention. (By the way it's cos although he's extremely wealthy and very good at his job, people still shout obscenities at him). But of course while this is an issue of race it's also an issue of poverty.

Which brings us back to Marcus Radcliffe. 

Darcus Rashworth's greatest strength in all this - and by God if he can lead the line for England with the same skill and fortitude in 2021 I'll be grabbing the Queen by the ermine and demanding his knighthood be presented on the pitch there and then - but, yeah, his greatest strength is that he's been there and he hasn't forgotten. He was that hungry kid: raised by a devoted but hard-working single parent but without the recourse to family wealth that will no doubt help the children of other more notable absent fathers. Like PM Norris Johnstone. Jernstern treats difficult political issues like he does the offspring of his own carefree spaffing - he heads indoors and hides for a couple of weeks and reappears when Cummings tells him the coast is clear.

Despite the media saturation of  Marius Bashful's call to feed hungry children rather than wait for them to devour each other, Johnson only heard of it yesterday. Which begs the question, what the f**k were you up to? 

Turns out he was busy recording a video to celebrate a brand spanking new trade deal with Australia. As Liz Truss put it, her oratory as uplifting as a seal cull, it's a long-established relationship - we gave Australia some steel to build a bridge and they gave us Edna Everage. See that Europe!? Yep we're in the financial and cultural big league now. Swapping sickening biscuits and salty spreads. And they systematically abuse brown people too! 

(Also Bernice Whoreson was onanistically splurging £960,000 on the prime ministerial plane - it's going to be covered in Union Jacks as it pollutes its way into foreign lands. A sort of airborne hooligan, full of shit-for-brains and begging bowls and on its way to a quasi-dictatorship not very near you.)

Anyway once Marvin Duxford made BJ aware of this iniquity the PM quickly donutted his Limousine of Indifference and headed back towards the foreign country that is Common Decency. These U-turns are becoming as regular as disappearing scientists these days. What Doris Jenson and his breezy sidekick Mitt Handsock tend to do these days is name a figure or a date and then find out later whether any of that is feasible. I'm sure as a flaxen-haired junior gargoyle Beavis Jizzbomb would often declare to anyone that was listening that he'd love a crown and a cloak to swan about in 'and by Tuesday it will be here' and lo and behold some lackey had made it happen otherwise the immigration authorities would have been made aware of his potentially illegal presence in the home of a wholly unaware toff. 

It may be how the world works in Downton Abbey but government policy requires consultation and time - two things Bernice DimSum has no concept of. 

But at least we have distractions to comfort us ordinary mortals. Yes we look around the world and think 'Why are we in the top three stupidest countries in the world?' but forget that - the Premier League's back on. I though I'd be utterly unmoved by the prospect but, actually, I can't wait. In fact we're half an hour into Sheffield United v Villa and I'm writing this pigging blog! 

Any road, whatever else with this footy bonanza let us not forget the magnificent contributions from the footballer Marcus Rashford - not to mention the brilliant and capable young fellas like Sterling and Mings and Sancho - who are proving that players of the beautiful game have smart and beautiful minds too. 

I'm going to watch the match now (well the second half any road). I'm going to cheer like nobody's watching. Where's that lager? 

And we're off! Sort of!

And we're off!

Sport begins in the UK on what people are calling Happy Monday. (Tomorrow is Rueful Tuesday, then its Wait-A-Minute Wednesday, Think-Again-Thursday, F**k-This-Friday, and Stay-At-Home Again Saturday.)

For every life that's being lost during this crisis there's a couple of hundred thousand pounds sterling that's way more important. and anyway it won't half cheer us up! Bye bye Granny, hello French 2000 Guineas! Woohoo!

Yes the first reentry into the sporting calendar is that perennial yawn horse-racing. You remember that, right? It was the bits of Grandstand that you used to turn off every Saturday afternoon. Little men sitting on mighty beasts and cracking them on their flanks is not my idea of fun. I've even stopped having a flutter on the Grand National cos £10 of my money is riding on your back, Neddy,  then you're  more likely to see a curtain being drawn around you than the finishing line.

Incidentally if they shot the jockey too, I swear to God they'd be jumping those horses over those fences with a bit more care.

Horses, I'm told, love horse racing just as much as we do. Really? Funny how they're never in the crowd watching isn't it? They might have helped at Cheltenham - if we could've kept everyone a horse-width apart we could saved 10,000 lives right there.

Anyone, the gee-gees will be galloping around some empty acres for our amusement and penury from today and that's just grand. And it's as meaningless as a Matt Hancock stat.

Snooker is starting too. What you need when a respiratory infection grips the globe is a small room with a few blokes coughing in it just to reassure you. Okay there'll be no audience, but they'll still be taking all the necessary precautions. Washing your hands between every shot is going to take its toll but for those of us old enough to remember it'll just feel like Dott v Ebdon.

Of course the German footy has been going for a bit now and I have to say there's been nothing more impressive than the likes of Sancho and Thuram using their platform to express their support for #BlackLivesMatter and justice for George Floyd. Of course there's nothing condemning a racist assassination for getting you an instant yellow card. Nice one, ref. If Trump has his way you'll get sent off in the MLS for wearing a t-shirt that says 'That Hitler? Not a big fan.'

People will always say keep politics out of sport. Bollocks. Sport is a brilliant platform for political statements and so it should be. Ask Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and Peter Norman come to that. Ask Jesse Owens for God's sake. Ask Colin Kaepernick. Ask the entire country of South Africa.

There are now young black sportspeople pointing out that Floyd's death is the ghoulish and wicked extreme in the everyday world of casual racism that dogs not just the US but here too. Rashford, Brewster, Cori Gauff, Naomi Osaka. They are not sucking it up and neither should they.

And Lewis Hamilton (yeah, I know Formula 1 isn't really a sport) but Hamilton has addressed this head-on and pointed to the silence amongst an almost exclusively white world of motor racing. His fellow drivers have responded.

Others have suggested that the hashtag #blacklivesmatter is somehow unacceptable. These 'reasonable' folk who say 'No, no, no ... ALL lives matter.' As if by pointing out the atrocious inequality of their income and treatment, and the recurrent obscenity of cops killing black men, they are somehow privileging themselves. As Rhian Brewster tweeted 'We don't want special privilege. A level playing field is all we've been crying for.'

'All Lives Matter' is just people unaffected by prejudice, and unaware of their own privilege, telling black people to go away and get a better slogan and then we can talk. It's patronising, irrelevant bullshit.

Meanwhile back in Blighty and all is well. Thanks to Dominic Cummings and his litany of gutless apologists - do these men have remotely activated electrical filaments in their urethras or are they just gutless worms? - Britons can get back to being proper Britons again, using our British common sense. We can throw ourselves into the sea and summon an air ambulance. We can crowd onto beaches, disperse a bit more Corona and then leave said beaches looking like Carrie Syminds front room after she'd confronted Boris Johnson about the Arcuri affair.

We can do what we like because Dom can. For a while there we were all pulling together, keeping our two metres, thinking of others, not least the poor sods we clap every Thursday night. Then we realised that we don't really care about other people. Rules are for other people, right?

We look at our sportspeople - often they are young, inexperienced, brilliant and well-paid - and when they f**k up we haul them over the coals. If they're black and they f**k up, even worse. They're role models, you see. They should be using their position to encourage goodness and decency.

But if you're in government, you don't need to worry about being a role-model. You can lie, relentlessly; you can father children and abandon them; you can hang out with European neo-fascists; you can take an infected person the length of the country and make up the most laughable excuses for driving them out on a birthday trip and it's fine because what you do doesn't particularly matter. You're not a 20-year old footballer with ten England caps.

Except that's not true. If the person who makes the rules breaks the rules then the rules stay broken. Because trust is broken. We all know that. No amount of horse-racing will take that fact away.

The EPL - Football's Indifferent Masters

Well Sport is slowing stirring, opening one eye, peeping out from under the continental quilt of Covid-19 and looking for ways to find some sort of rebirth. 

Sports bodies could do worse than ask Matt Hancock to come up with an arbitrary target – 100,000 sporting fixtures by May 15^th, say – and then it will definitely happen. Okay so half the footy matches were played on FIFA, the British Grand Prix was nothing more than Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel sharing a socially distanced Scalextrix and the County Cricket Championship just carried in as normal cos no one bothers to watch that any road, but hey 100,000 is 100,000*.

But the football authorities are looking at ways to get things moving again. Behind closed doors seems to be the most likely first option. Of course Arsenal fans will notice very little difference in terms of atmosphere, save that they won’t have to endure Piers Morgan braying his criticisms of Meszut Ozil from out of the posh seats. 

The rest of us will watch from our sofas (or behind them if you support the Boro) and wondering when if ever, you’re going to get back to that glorious match-day routine:

The pint in the pub, the whiff of onions and salmonella from the hot-dog stands, the moral crisis as an adjacent fan offers up another racial slur as banter, the slow unravelling truth that the dreadful performance of a fortnight ago is not looking quite so bad in the light of this week’s effort; and finally the post-match pint-packed moan, the slammed front door, the catflap swinging cos your moggy knows better than to hang around, and the all-too-understanding wife looking up from her Netflix nonsense with a face that says ‘I am sorry for your loss.’

Some fans might enjoy it. West Ham fans will feel closer to the action if it’s on the telly than they do at the London Stadium. Man United fans will enjoy the Scousers’ inability to fully enjoy the moment of their Premier League resurrection (but not as much as the wholesale abandonment of the season altogether).

As for the players themselves, well there’s talk of cooping them up together for six weeks of quarantine, before the season kicks back off again. It sounds hellish. It’s bad enough being incarcerated with your own family. In our house, home schooling has become home shouting followed by home sulking followed by the type of atmosphere that you could microwave potatoes in. But being cooped up with your workmates? Is there a space in the country big enough to house the collective egos of Paul Pogba and… well, anyone. And where will Man United house all Pogba's hairdressers?

I suppose all the players will need testing too although when it comes to Jordan Pickford why bother? He hasn’t caught anything all season. Gordon Taylor, Middle Earth’s only successful export, was on the radio saying all the players will be ready by mid-June, which is easy for him to say when he’s not going to be man-marking Jack ‘Reckless’ Grealish in the near future.

Taylor also suggested games might not be the full 90 minutes – well surely they can make that retrospective? Liverpool would be 20 points down if they took the scores from 80 minutes across the season. In fact Man Utd would be a few titles down if they took it further back. The Vulcan-like mind-melding of Sir Alex and the match officials in order to extend a game to indefinite lengths would be of no use in this new 40 minute a half world. Fergie Time be gone!

(I can't help thinking that there was a time at Buckingham Place when the two words Fergie Time must have sent an icy shiver down the collective spine of the Royal Household. Mind you, if you can still tolerate her ex-husband, then maybe not,)

Any road it's at times like these, some dimwits ask if 'football really matters'. Surely just knocking the season on the head and starting again like they’ve done in France makes sense. Well PSG get the trophy before the season starts, so that’s hardly relevant.

And there are livelihoods involved here. It’s obscene for the richest clubs to even consider not keeping as many workers on the payroll as they possibly can – so obscene you might call it Bransonian. The poorer clubs… well there’s a case for arguing that a small town club does more to bind a community together than any other single entity. There’s a case for arguing that without them clubs, all British football becomes is Have-Way-Too-Much FC vs Have-Way-Too-Much FC second XI. Then again, this is precisely what the Premier League was designed to do. Slice off the money-making top tier and let it serve itself first and the national game as a whole a very distant second.

Indeed, you might want to draw a parallel across the country generally. If you create an elite (based almost exclusively on wealth) and your main focus is to maintain that elite even if it means broadening the gap between the rich and the just-getting-by (remember how Theresa was going to help us there? In fact, remember Theresa at all?) then at a certain crisis point, only those members of the elite will be able to withstand a catastrophe. Now, if that elite was in any way interested in sustaining the wider community above and beyond its own narrow interests it might consider using its accumulated funds to support, maintain and benefit those weaker than themselves, until the catastrophe passes on and we can all rebuild again.

But then again, notions of ‘the greater good’ carry little weight in the murky upper echelons of business and/or government, where private firms are helping themselves to NHS contracts, even as the government stallholders clap the endangered souls brave enough to keep going in to work to clear up the debris of their indifference.

But I digress. It’s only footy innit? Just a game. An indulgence, a little luxury on the side. Well no. It’s a living. It’s a passion. It matters. Enormously. It’s more, to me at least, than just another commercial sector that lives and dies by market forces. It’s time for the Premier League to represent more than itself. Lecture over.

Oh shite! BJ’s back!

Right. Who’s had enough of this?

Who’s fully intending to just blow this all off and see if we can’t try this herd immunity theory for ourselves? Or shall we stick with our Prime Minister’s strategy of Not Seen and Not Heard Immunity?

Some say this lockdown is bringing out the best in people. Me, I’d say it’s bringing out the truest spirit in people, and not always for the better. If, for example, you achieved a lot of success through craven mendacity then it’s very unlikely that that will change when you’re put under pressure. Every time a government minister potters out in front of those flaccid Union Jacks I feel that the nation has turned into an overly tolerant headmaster who’s giving them all one last chance to ‘fess up before we expel them from our collective rears like the foetid balls of gas they really are.

While Johnson recuperates in his elegant sty, and his expectant fiancée wonders how this perennially late responder was so premature on that one occasion, we have been led by one Dominic Raab. D-Raab, as the legend on the cardboard packaging read when he first arrived at the Foreign Office. There’s been a reasonable amount of sympathy for a man who looks (and occasionally talks) like central casting’s go-to-Nazi Uber-Lieutenant. How can you possibly fill in for the Blonde Bullsh*tter? Well, turns out you can massage figures and creatively lie in less flagrant a way.

Boris is back now so God knows how Allison Pearson’s going to cope without slipping off to rub one out every five minutes. In fact I envisage Andrew Neil leading the Daily Telegraph in a sponsored Spaff For The NHS to greet the Second Cummings.

Sadly that won’t mean less of Matt Hancock. Matt, it seems to me, possibly cowed by the situation, talks utter bullocks, gives us more and more bum steers and gets less bullish by the day, the dozy ‘effer. Dreadful cattle puns aside, therewas a time when he smoulders as if he imagined he was Aidan Turner playing Matt Hancock in the movie adaptation of his autobiography HANCOCK: THE MAN THAT SAVED A NATION. Time and the terminal decline of far too many human beings seems to have restored a wretched back-catalogue of platitudes that you can boil down into three pithy soundbites:
‘This is unprecedented’
‘Our amazing NHS staff’
‘We’re ramping up the PPE/Ventilators/level of deceit*’

*delete as applicable

Of the others only Michael Gove seems ready to poke his puckered package of processed piss over the parapet. Gove has been practising social distancing from the Truth for his whole adult life and so is a safe if slippery pair of hands right now.

Meanwhile Priti Patel tells us shoplifting is down on last year. That’s probably because shop-opening, and indeed shop-owning, is down on last year, but you know, some people will make any stat look bad won’t they?

Liz Truss has said very little, so no change there. Even her longest orations contain as much substance as a cheesy wotsit. As for the rest of ‘em, well I’m not saying this cabinet is thick, but there are actual cabinets, fully functioning and made from finest English beechwood, that have higher IQs than the lot of them put together.

Meanwhile people die in their hundreds every day and Premier League footballers invite their mates round. Latest Numpty is Moise Kean, the best teenager playing in Europe (after Mbappe) this time last year, and until recently struggling to ease the agoraphobic Theo Walcott out of the first eleven.
Kean, who has spent his entire time at Goodison socially distancing himself from the first team, took it upon himself to host a party in his apartment. Now don’t get me wrong, he’s on top dollar every week so chances are his apartment is like a flaming national museum compared to the eight people two rooms horror some families are going through. But I fancy that the old two metres apart is hard to sustain in an environment like that.

But once again we are hoping that footballers like Kean, Grealish and a collection of Arsenal halfwits are going to lead by example and well, they’re not. Not if the PM is shaking hands with Covid-19 patients, not if toffs left, right and centre are blithering on about the impositions on their personal liberty and how appalled they are by it. I’d love them to try other ways to limit their freedoms once this is all over. Things like poverty, zero hours contracts, reliance on food banks, see how they seriously hinder your ability to have fun. I mean I’d love to be gallivanting about infecting the relatives of vulnerable old people too, but I’m just not that much of a self-centred c**t.

Of course, sport would be a wonderful distraction from all this. And I fear that this season is going to be written off, which only the most shite-minded fan would find acceptable given Liverpool’s majestic form. If they have to finish it behind closed doors I wouldn’t much mind. If they can’t, we could just say Liverpool won it anyway. Cos they did.

 Having said that, I wouldn’t mind everything just starting from scratch. We could even have the Brexit vote again, given that the unintended consequence of the Government’s hopeless handling of this whole crisis is the death of the age group most likely to have voted Leave.

Mind you, they were right though, eh? Imagine being part of an organisation that cooperates over testing and ventilators and PPE provision? We’d be in a right state now wouldn’t we? We’d be losing as many citizens as Spain or Italy and we’d be relying on foreigners to pick our fruit.

Thank God we’re doing it our way.