Huzzah! It's Rugger!

The rugger buggers are back, then, spreading their maxi-muscled frames across our screens like a bunch of cauliflower-eared Chippendales in nadger-nipping lycra.

Course ‘rugger bugger’ is a term we tend to aim at the chinless horse-toothed pricks who slaver into your local Pitcher & Piano in their workaday pinstripes and bray like donkeys while dropping rohipnol into each other’s pints. You can tell from a lot of what passes for banter that this is pretty much a bunch of oiks in toffs’ clothing. Thick, moneyed but not remotely vain.


'Yah he like tried to gouge out my beautiful eyes, the fucking cunt!'

‘Course that’s very much an English take on union. Your average Welshman or Kiwi sees rugby as the preserve of the working man. As indeed it is. It might also be said that of the teams that I’ve watched so far those two did the most to entertain. Having said that the All Blacks only managed it for 40 minutes – but then again that was a pretty decent 40 minutes (especially according to my missus who has decided that Dan Carter can pop it between her posts any time.)

I’m particularly impressed with Sonny Bill Williams. Not least cos he’s got over the fact that his parents obviously wanted him to be a harmonica player. His handling and ‘offloading’ (that’s knobspeak for ‘short passing’) are pretty fantastic, although any seasoned Rugby League watcher will tell you that every man is taught to fling around with that sort of dash in the 13-man code.

Wales of course did their impression of Tom Cruise at his wife’s side and came up short. Again. Defeat was followed by the habitual verbal pats on the back (‘ooh well done, Taffy old chap – good show what with you being poor and English not really being your first language, wot, wot!’) They should’ve won. They were much the better team. Hook’s kick might’ve been in (can’t they use Hawkeye? I mean it’s not like India are in the tournament is it?)

And you know what, forget Invictus – and forget how transparently pleasant Francois Pienaar is - the South Africans are still the baddies. For one, they are the holders’; for another, when they open their gobs the English language has to scurry off to a refuge home for battered vowels.

Didn’t see the Wallabies or the French – I find seven o’clock starts as agreeable as Jessie Wallace wedding day – but the most irritating bleeding aspects of the whole shebang thus far are:

1) The Scrums. Has there yet been a scrum that hasn’t had to be reset? They cave in like an elephant’s deckchair every time they engage. Play doesn’t move for ten minutes while some end-of-his-tether ref tries to get the six auditionees for Captain Caveman to just stay up long enough for the game to continue.


‘Hold! Touch! Fall On Your Faces!

Hilariously if a team finds itself unable to field a prop forward cos of injuries the scrums go uncontested. Which makes you wonder what the point of it is in the first place.

2) Running down the clock is easy. If you’re a point or two ahead with 5 minutes to go you just keep hold of the ball and flop to the floor a few dozen times and you’ve won. There’s nowt the opposition can do about it. It’s a really boring version of running the ball into the corner flag in footy. Can’t they just lose the ball if they haven’t gone forward for a couple of minutes – or summat like that?


3) The pundits. I know they’re all World Cup winners and great players in their own right but every one of ‘em looks like he’s being operated by a run-of-the-mill puppeteer. I put on my 3D glasses to watch one half-time briefing cos I was so sure I was missing at least one dimension. They make Alan Shearer look like Martin Luther King.

Oh and I might add that I hope that’s the last time we see and England rugby team wearing all black shirts. Just a shoddy, arrogant decision by a bunch of people who couldn’t give a toss about tradition. And England played like a bunch of blindfolded Sumos in it any road , so get rid.

Why so much rugby talk anyway? I hear you cry.

Well, the footy has left us with nowt to yap about. It’s business as usual in Manchester – apart from Stoke and Arsenal there’s not much about the table that’s going to change by the end of the season. And the Evertonians can protest all they like about lack of ambition and progress at the club but really all them lovely banners are saying is ‘For Chrissakes, Kenwright, you’ve been there for 7 years and you still haven’t laid your hands can on one bastard tycoon.’

'If I were you, Bill, I'd be looking at the young Iranian Ahmedinajad and failing that yer man Gadaffi must be lookin' to squirrel away a few thousand.'

I can see old Bill whoring his way around the oligarchs of the world kowtowing to anyone with a few spare dirhams like... like... well, like a Prime Minister. Or Garry Cook. Of course that chippy Manc has been relieved of his position by the FandAbuDhabi brigade. It could’ve happened to any one Garry. I’m just pleased it happened to you.

The national side may be worth a quick mention, although at the mo I’m showing as much enthusiasm for the England team as the players themselves are. I certainly don’t think that point in Montenegro is a gimme. And even Capello has finally conceded that managing this set of players has left him scratching his walnut face in utter confusion.

Poor old Rob Earnshaw (‘ooh well done, Taffy old chap – good show what with you being poor and English not really being your first language, wot, wot!’) That chance was so much easier than a sitter it was damn well prostrate.

As for who will win the Rugby World Cup – listen to the upcoming podcast!

Left Sky and Dry

One of them strange weekends when your average non-Sky subscriber feels like a cave-bound hermit in the sporting wilderness. I was settled in to baby-sit the grandson on Friday night – I do my bit y’know but the sooner they get the young lad down a boxing gym the better. If you can’t jab with the left at six years old there’s little hope for you.

Any road, no Sky at this place so I’m scooting through the TV guide for the highlights package. Nowt. Nada. Murdoch hasn’t even seen fit to relinquish a glimpse of The Thatched One bagging his brace. And now it turns out that Tony Blair is godfather to Grace Murdoch. I tell you some days I’d happily feed the contents of my arse into the inner workings of every Skybox in the sodding country.

You tight-fisted misery!

Nevertheless I hear, via 5Live and the easily nettled Alan Green that it was a good victory for England, punctuated by the dropping of one Frank Lampard, halle-fuckin-lujah. There’s a phrase in football – let your feet do the talking – and I’ve noticed with Lamps in an England shirt that his feet are positively garrulous. He takes more touches to complete one pass than the number of passes Xavi Hernandez completes in an entire game.

Refreshing then, but a bit bewildering, that Capello, his job clearly up in a year’s time, finally finds the bollocks to pick the right team. Not sure what they’re doing with that new kit, mind you. There’s summat about the phrase ‘black shirts’ that makes me uneasy.

I’d like to think that Andy Carroll might be a top international striker, but he needs to start treating his body more like a temple and less like a back-alley rock venue.

So in the Murdoch-induced absence I shared the pain of Scotland’s draw with the dodgy Czechs. A blatant dive wins a match-saving penalty. Berra’s riposte – a poor enough performance to earn a walk-on part in Taggart - earned him a yellow card. Cue spurious arguments about the fact that the ref – a Dutchman called Kevin – gave one spot-kick when it wasn’t and so should make the same mistake twice in the interests of balance.

Hmm... that way madness lies. I reckon if they’d had another ten minutes of that game left, each team would have had all its outfield players rolling around in the opposition penalty box with tears in their lying eyes.

And this is where football gets it so bloody awfully wrong at the moment. There’s this tacit approval of conning the officials within the game. The times you see Steve Bruce, Mick McCarthy (or indeed any one of them managers at whom Lady Luck is always flicking the V’s) saying ‘we had one go our way today... that’s football.’ The referee always gets the flak but surely the only one to blame is the sneaky bastard who threw himself to earth in the first place. Or am I being naive?

It was left to the athletics to lift the soul this weekend – and in the form of young Mohamed Farah, the Robbo spirit soared like an eagle attached to umpteen thousand helium balloons.



Denied in the 10,000 metres by the latest lad off the Ethiopian production line, Farah hit the home straight in the 5K with the same death skull grimace on his face. Lagat, chasing him, looked no less in fear of his life. In fact it was hard not to imagine a bloody great lion looming up in the background.

And that’s why I love athletics. No bikes, motors, gloves, pads, just a lad or lass in his/her vest with his eyeballs out, going for it. OK you have to exclude Usain Bolt from that description as the lad just flows across the track like a duster across a newly-polished floor. Whereas, currently, the UK sprinters move like wonky-wheeled shopping trolleys on a cobbled street.

If I’m honest, I tend to enjoy the lads’ races more than the lasses. There’s summat about a female athlete’s body that’s intimidating and well just not sexy. Them six-packs for starters.

Put em away love!

On balance I prefer the hour-glass figure to the brick shithouse when it comes to your lasses. Still, despite the fact that they’re barely wearing owt, they’re not there for my delectation are they? And that Aussie hurdler Sally Pearson would just tonk me in the gob with her leading leg if she read this. She was just magnificent.

And that’s where athletics seems to embrace a good swathe of the assortments of humanity. Scrawny little Kenyans, gangling Croatians, women the size of wardrobes, men the width of the Wirral, all seem to have summat they can have a crack at.

But the sprint finish off the back of a middle distance race... there’s nowt to beat it.

Footy resurfaces tomorrow with England at home to the 115th ranked team in world football. Yes, Wales come hunting a shock, this time armed with the left-wing wonder-monkey that is Gareth Bale. A bigger test for Smalling you might think than some scurrying Bulgur egged on some racist thicksters from the terraces.

I shall be watching it on ITV, bless it, with his dough-faced host the saggy Baggie Adrian Chiles. An Eeyorish attitude suits watching England games, I reckon, so I’m looking forward to the old grouse’s presentation.

He’ll no doubt be accompanied by a whole welter of former Middlesbrough managers – and I think Boro’s current position in the English game is testimony to how much these blokes know.

I see A narrow England win – 2-1 – but that’ll be enough to start gearing ourselves for another let-down over the summer. England fans have sat through more anti-climaxes that the neighbours of my Uncle Keith after he married that Croatian nymphomaniac. We’ll see.

But temporarily at least, with Rooney at the top of his game, there’s a tiny flame of hope for the England team again, even if it has all the permanence of a lit match in a hurricane.

I 8-2 inform you but...

Arsene, Arsene, Arse....

What the hell is going on? That’s the first time he’s ever selected a first XI using a tombola. I’m not sure what the team instructions were either... Let’s keep it shite for the first hour? Go out and depress yourself? It struck me that while United played a fluid 4-4-2, Arsenal played a 0-10-0 with everyone in the hole.
Wenger had his head in his hands before the game started.

Seriously though, I’ve never seen owt like it. You might say the senior players never really came out of their shells at Old Trafford. Of course invertebrates live in shells and this was as spineless a performance as you are likely to see from any team this season.

Arsenal’s great strength – passing, moving, creating – the chief architects of this at present are Arshavin and Rosicky. Like a stampede of horses being fronted by a couple of fat, gelded Shetland ponies.

Andriy and Tomas take a break during training

I’m just guessing that they sit around at training until Pat Rice looks over at ‘em and then they hurriedly break into a bout of gentle trotting til he buggers off again.

Arch victim of Sunday’s debacle was the lad Carl Jenkinson. He’s 19, and looks like he’s been left at Paddington station with a note a round his neck, bless ‘im. Walcott railed at him at one point, which must’ve made buoyed him up. After all there’s not enough space in the universe for what Theo doesn’t know about defending (witness the trip on Evra).

At least Jenkinson was trying, mind, until he became the third straight red card for Arsenal in the Premier League. Each one of them was making their full debut, I believe. Which suggests that the wearing of an Arsenal shirt involves some sort of Faustian pact in which you have to surrender 90% of your brain function.

There was a mitigating circumstance (not, mind you, the one about our boys being tired after midweek – Arsene goes to that option faster that an Allardycean centre-back goes to hitting it long).

No there were eight players out – or eleven depending on who’s doing the maths. Of those the big miss was Vermaelan, the only tent-peg in Wenger’s wind-blown canvass of a defence. Even the Belgian couldn’t have covered for the dithering of Djourou. He’s got all the strength and positional sense of a fledgling sparrow that’s fallen out of the nest.

Van Persie tried to look forward to the next game – home to Swansea, which has banana skin written all over it – and said the team gave of their maximum. Really? That’s the best they could do? Jeez, that might even call an audible ripple of discontent at the Emirates Library.

There was no Song, Wilshere and Gervinho; and Sagna, Gibbs and even Squillaci might’ve helped. But United don’t have Ferdinand, Vidic or Rafael available either. It just so happens that Ferguson has bought replacements – and good ones at that. And that is why this sorry drubbing leaves you pointing the finger at Monsieur Obstinate.



His squad has no depth, except in the matter of tiny midfield tippy-tappers. He’s had the whole summer to line up his targets in central defence, central midfield, centre forward... and he’s signed the Ivorian with the head of a river dolphin and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain who sounds for all the world like one of them promising English sprinters who turns to shite when he hits his twentieth birthday.

The good news is that Wenger has signed a South Korean who was very much on Fulham’s radar a couple of seasons ago. That’s where he’s at now, picking up Fulham rejects. South Korea must be the most recreational of countries – there’s Parks bleeding everywhere.

So, three days to get back on the trail of some decent players. Somehow you’ll be surprised if he manages to muscle Cahill or Samba over to the Emirates, whereas you just know Harry Redknapp’s going to be standing in front of the press on Thursday morning conjuring footballers out of every box, top hat and sleeve while Kevin Bond plays his Debbie McGee.

Not that Spurs haven’t got a worry or two. Two thumping defeats from Manchester outfits and Harry’s been bleating like a forlorn lambkin about all the transfer speculation surrounding Modric and Crouch. My heart bleeds, H. And Spurs being such a poverty-stricken club n all.

Daniel Levy appears to be the only person left in the country who thinks Modric is going nowhere. £40 million quid you’d get for him, Dan. It’s not like the money’d be wasted, is it? I mean you haven’t got Wenger for a manager.

Still while we crow about North London’s plight – HA! – it all means that the Manchester stronghold on English football has grown all the tighter. Those of us expecting Dzeko to turn from Ugly Duckling into Ugly Duck have been rudely surprised. Mancini’s got that side by the scruff of its neck and in Aguero, Silva and Nasri he’s got a little triangle of delight to rival any that you might have come across while late-night googling.

Meanwhile, Fergie’s latest vibrant rebirth, with Rooney very much at the delivery end, is a joy to behold. I’m not entirely sure about the success of the Wazza barnet, mind you. It still looks like a child has filled in the gaps with a felt-tip to me.

You can't help feeling if a comb-over was good enough for Sir Bobby then... respect the traditions, Wayne

It’s true to say that City’s success is built on obscene wealth while Fergie’s success is built on perceptive purchases and a canny youth squad. Oh, and obscene wealth.

Only Dalglish’s Liverpool threaten the Mancunian dominance, and even then that’s as a nettle threatens a carthorse. It could be a long few years for the ABM brigade.

Oh and re Usain Bolt’s false start and how we might have to change the rules... Bollocks, Mr KFC knew what the rules were and he fucked up. End of. Unless we want to give him his gold medal BEFORE the final and treat the race as his coronation.

As we say on Teesside 'Hard fucking cheese, you dopey bastard.'