Liverpool fans who lost their lives remembered at the Leppings Lane End at Hillsborough yesterday (12/04/2014)
The next few days will be about Liverpool Football Club and
those who tragically lost their lives at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. As a Wednesdayite it invokes terrible
feelings despite my being too young to remember the event. That stand I sat in
for my first game had seen horrors I still can barely imagine. My club, who I
love, were complicit in the needless deaths of 96 people.As a football fan and human being it invokes
disgust and shivers.
The Grand National has always been good to me, at 16 Amberleigh House manaaged to give me a win just before I went on holiday. The year after I was on a stag do, watching Morecambe versus Woking and on the advice of others I went for Hedgehunter (winnings were quickly spent in a Lancaster bar called Toast).
Since then I've had a rather more systematic approach to the greatest race of them all - bet on relative outsiders who more than one tipster fancies. It worked, for a few years spectaculary. Silver Birch did it's job, as did Comply Or Die and bizarrely I stuck a fiver on Mon Mome at 100-1 appropos "fuck it, I've got a spare fiver and I've heard it might do alright". Cue champagne, an impromptu open top bus tour round Liverpool and a happy NatWest student loan manager. A more arrogant individual would've assumed he was that Mr Spearfish chap from Jonathan Creek.
Yes Mon Mome you beauty!
Gladly my record in other races scuppered any idea that I was some sort of tipster, the closest I got to another big win being when I drunkenly put £20 on Sheffield Wednesday to win the derby 3-0 at Hillsborough. Three words: Leon fucking Clarke. An open goal miss cost me that little moment of glory and £600.
Since then understandably my record has regressed to the mean, with only Ballabriggs and an e/w bet on Sunnyhillboy offering the solace of a big win (in the same race).
However, I feel that the general rules for the unwary punter on The National for me is simple - don't just stick a pin in it, or bet on Shakalakaboomboom (a name so good his price is appalling), but spend half an hour reading through the various tipsters available and gradually get an uniformed opinion on who you fancy due to who convinces you and how many times outsiders' names come up - if you win you're a sage, if you don't journalism is once more in crisis. Secondly, split your bet - get three or four horses on, some each-way. Chances are one or two of your picks will be a faller or miles off the pace, but picking a few horses at least gives you a decent chance that you'll have one in the mix and give you something to cheer for. Lastly don't go on a famous jockey - inevitably a big name will have shortened the price. This policy cost me in 2010, when AP McCoy finally won the race, but it did me ok in the years before when his short-priced horse inevitably came-a-cropper.
Two Headed Sex Beast.
I'm fully expecting another year of hurt, so these will probably end up under a sheet being pored over by Alan Partridge, but my own bets are:
The Rainbow Hunter (e/w) 33-1
Mountainous (e/w) 40-1
Pineau De Re (w) 20-1
Big Shu (w) 25-1
Jade Dernbach - The worst international cricketer ever?
Jade Dernbach - officially the worst International Twenty20 (and ODI) bowler
of all time. The fact that Dernbach has the worst economy rate ever is not an
easy one to shake off. But is he really the worst ever, or merely a man put in
the wrong place by those lacking the imagination to do otherwise?
Dernbach isn’t an easy bloke to sympathise with, having the
air of a man who looks like he’s been dragged from the VIP area of a club in
some God forsaken satellite town. That’s not to mention those tattoos that make
him look like the lovechild of a lizard and a Liverpool defender.
David Cameron is deeply annoyed. Could it be
that he’s furious at the sell-off of The Royal Mail on the cheap? Or at Putin’s
territorial ambitions? Food banks even? Nope, it’s because Nike’s New England shirt is selling for £90 (the bespoke ‘match’ version, rather than the ‘stadium’
one, which actually sells for £60).
The marketing bumf that’s used to justify the price of these shirts,
essentially a piece of nylon cut into panels and then reassembled to accommodate
Wayne Rooney’s midriff, may actually be worth that on its own.
This year according
to Nike: “"Two references really stood out during the design process for
the home kit – that stunning all-white kit England wore in Mexico in 1970 and
the idea of the armour of English Knights.
Ready for war? The England team take their new kit very seriously
