Gary got on with Michael like a house with rising damp
With the Premier League winding up this weekend, attention
will soon shift to The World Cup and everything that goes with it. Of course it’s
the football that matters, but it’s impossible to ignore the media paraphernalia
that goes with it, of which the primary example is of course the World Cup
song.
For this year’s effort the FA have shown their usual
imagination by roping in the one man ‘Can I have a Knighthood?’ campaign that
is Gary Barlow, and the result is like every electron in the former Take That
man’s body – bland.
Despite the fact that it’s not even a new song or a
substantial reworking of an old one, ‘Greatest Day’ seems to perfectly fit our
footballing era. Like most things involving Barlow it’s ever so slightly
insipid – Our Gary’s default expression being that of a man who’s mildly narked
that you haven’t used his favourite brand of tea bag. Like most X-Factor montage songs, any inspirational qualities it may have once had have been destroyed by a thousand saccharine shots of teary meetings with elderly relatives. Rather than a battle cry to go into battle for Harry and St George, it’s
the sort of song that might inspire you to do your tax returns early (or possibly not in Gary’s case).
Greg Dyke cutting the tape at Brentford, where he was once Chairman
So the FA commission has met, and come up with proposals to
ensure that the England football team turn into world-beaters. The centrepiece
of this is an attempt to create a new 'League Three' of Premier League B-Teams between
League Two and the Conference, with these teams allowed to be promoted up the
pyramid to League One.
What’s clear is that the problem it’s intended to solve is a
very real one - young players who find themselves signed to top-tier clubs tend
to be shut out of making first team appearances, hindering their chances of
progressing to another glorious penalty defeat. Yet Greg Dyke’s proposals are at best a reward for terrible behaviour that misses the point –
and at worst a folly that could entirely destroy the English game as we know
it.
The Premier League and its clubs seem to regard the
behaviour of Cartman from South Park towards his mum as a model – they behave badly and against
the interests of the England team, then the FA offers to reward them by
changing the rules to attempt to justify and mitigate their actions. Any
suggestion that things shouldn’t work in their interest would no doubt be
greeted with a “But Greg….” Followed by a tantrum after which they’d get what
they want.
The Premier League's negotiating tactics
Yet to explore why this isn’t just a bad idea bounced around
a boardroom one needs to go back to the start of the Premier League, the
promises made and what’s happened since.
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
Ah the Winter Olympics, the home of the elegant, the
dangerous and the downright daft. Predictably for an event which largely
consists of people sliding down or across frictionless particles of frozen
water Sochi 2014 has been a veritable festival of sub-zero speed.
Certainly this fortnight it’s the freestyle skiiers and
boarders who so far have collected the headlines with their flips and tricks
and endless whooping.
For my money though you can keep their backside 1080s,
Tomahawks and Slopestyle because the most fascinating action has not been
whizzing down a mountain but on the more sedate surroundings of the curling sheets.
