Wake up you footy fans!!!

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 5:18 pm

Cool! Wow, that was an elaborate way of saying 'It's only the first game of the season, ferchrissakes!' I'm impressed. I can see I'm gonna make use of this one too.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 6:11 pm

Lazy morning. No life.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 7:52 am

Week 1 observations:

-Rob Styles re-confirms that he is the PL's worst referee (or at least on a par with Uriah Rennie)
-Steven Gerrard is gaining a reputation as a serial diver
-Chris Coleman will be out of a job well before Christmas
-Arsenal will have more trouble dominating teams at home this season, now that they are no longer playing on a postage-stamp size pitch
-With so many other terrible teams out there, Portsmouth will finish well above the relegation zone
-Charlton's new away kit is awful (inspired, I assume, by Dr. Seuss). See below
-Reading will be this season's Wigan. I like Sheffield United to stay up as well.

Gillibeanz · Post by **Gillibeanz** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:32 am

Good result from Spurs last night. We played like stars in the first half - not so well in the second . I couldn't believe the difference in Robbie Keane - the first half he was amazing, but in the second half it was like someone had sucked his brain out and replaced it with a morons! He was missing easy chances to score and his lack of accuracy in passing was embarrassing!!

My son has gone to Middlesborough all by himself today to see he beloved Chelsea. He left at 8am this morning and the coach gets back at 4am tomorrow morning!!!! Its also cost him Â£60 - I hope its worth it!!

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:09 pm

Boro, again?!? Groan.

oldhamer · Post by **oldhamer** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:10 pm

Oldham keep on losing and losing and losing........

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:11 pm

..but not as much as Sunderpants!

oldhamer · Post by **oldhamer** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:14 pm

That's not too difficult, though! Only won one more game than Sunderland..

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:52 pm

Keano to the rescue...

Commiserations to your son, Gilli, though it serves the sucker right for loving football's equivalent of Oliver's Army. Their heart's not in it, no real soul, just in it for the money, unlike every heroic man in an AIG shirt, who have started so well it's embarrassing, because Fergie's veins pump with footballpassionjuice, not Russian gascash.

So what do tomorrow's headlines have to say, WSS?

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 6:35 pm

What a load of horseshit.

I'm sure the headlines will be all doom and gloom and columnists falling over themselves to tell the world what's wrong with Chelsea. We'll be fine and I'll be back to rub it in Otis' face when ManU fuck it up.

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 6:52 pm

Knew you'd enjoy that one! I wrote it with you in mind.

I didn't mean the regular papers, I meant the Cambridge Herald or whatever it was called! I was wondering what that psycopath was up to and whether they'd got him sedated yet.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 8:21 pm

He's escaped and has gone into bollocks overdrive on the EC Fan Forum.

johnfoyle · Post by **johnfoyle** » Fri Aug 25, 2006 12:17 pm

This book sounds more interesting with every review ; this one even mentions Elvis!

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/book ... 221488.ece

The Damned Utd, by David Peace

Waiting for Cloughie

By Gordon Burn
Published: 25 August 2006

David Peace's new novel ends with the words with which GB84, its predecessor, began: "This novel is a fiction, based on a fact." The Damned Utd is one of those works of fiction - Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Sebastian Barry's Booker-shortlisted A Long Long Way are two of several recent examples - which come with an apparatus of "sources and acknow- ledgements". That is itself an acknowledgement of the blurred and frequently indecipherable line that now separates lived experience from invention and memory, and all the varieties of second-hand experience, and which has become the natural condition of living in modern, haywire hyper-reality.

The American writer Howard Singerman has argued persuasively that the collective memory of any recent generation has now become the individual memory of each of its members. For "the things that carry the memory are marked not by the privacy, the specificity and insignificance, of Proust's madeleine, but precisely by their publicness and their claims to significance". It is this kind of indelible memory-experience that many of us looked to the World Cup to provide. Only the French found it in Zidane's instantly folkloric, hypnotically replayed head-butting incident in the dying minutes of the final.

Only two years after his death, it is already difficult to remember the central place the football manager Brian Clough occupied in English national life: somewhere between William Connor (the sharp-tongued "Cassandra" of the old Daily Mirror) and Eric Morecambe shading into John Lennon. He was football know-it-all, socialist, piss-artist, tabloid provocateur, philanthropist, people's favourite television gobshite.

How do you bottle a hurricane? Peace's answer is that in Cloughie's case you don't: you let it fart and belch and bluster its way to burn-out, oblivious of the devastation and blow-back it is creating.

The book is divided into 44 chapters, one for every day of Clough's brief reign as manager of Leeds United at the beginning of the 1974 season: a mismatch of both heroic and farcical proportions. Clough hated Leeds ("Hateful, hateful place; spiteful, spiteful place") and he despised dirty-dealing Don Revie, their manager, who had just ascended to the only job Clough ever wanted: England manager.

To make his feelings unambiguously clear, in his first week he takes an axe to Revie's hallowed desk and chair and, together with his secret files and dossiers on opponents, makes a bonfire of them in the car park. Then he sets about chopping down the star players' high opinions of themselves and doing over the directors with the same kind of vengeful energy that the prop-forward Arthur Machin devotes to refusing to bed the chairman's wife in David Storey's This Sporting Life - a book Peace mentions in his acknowledgements.

"They are his team," Clough rants in one of many recurring riffs. "His Leeds. His dirty, fucking Leeds and they always will be. Not my team. Never. Not mine. Never. Not this team. Never." Anybody who has ever seen Peace read (and I shared a platform with him - was blown off a platform by him - this month) will be aware that he combines the attack of early, angry Elvis Costello with the percussive compulsion of one of Beckett's late monologues for the theatre.

Even cold on the page, his prose has the incantatory power of the single, spotlit, spitting mouth in Not I. Weirdly, for a writer whose subjects to date have been the reign of terror caused by the Yorkshire Ripper in the late Seventies and the 1984-85 miners' strike, Beckett is a clear influence. The sections narrated in the second person, which alternate with Cloughie's mad, biblical, first-person eruptions, clearly take their cue from Beckett's most autobiographical novella, Company.

Beckett once conceded that he wrote Company for company towards the end of his long exile in France. Peace is a Yorkshireman who for a number of years has lived in Tokyo. The geographical distance seems to have propelled him towards a place and a culture - the old industrial areas of Britain in the era of Thatcherite decline - which were disappearing around the time he was born.

Significantly, perhaps, at the time of his death Clough was one of the last public figures in Britain to be regularly photographed wearing the once-traditional badge of class membership of the British worker, the cloth cap. If the English novel still needs the kick up the pants that everybody regularly insists it does, then now, with the arrival of The Damned Utd, is time to consider it wholeheartedly kicked. From deep inside a singular obsession, Peace has pulled out a brave and startling, barely house-trained thing.

Gordon Burn's new book, 'Best and Edwards', will be published in October

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0571 ... 9&v=glance

Boy With A Problem · Post by **Boy With A Problem** » Sat Aug 26, 2006 3:07 pm

I went to my first Premiership match today up at Craven Cottage - Fulham v Sheffield United. Nice little walk from the tube to the grounds through Bishop's Park along the Thames. I walked up and was able to buy a third row seat! I sat in the Johnny Haynes stands and they gave out Johnny Haynes t-shirts to everyone. I bought a hot dog and beer and took my seat - eventually a security guy came over and told me I couldn't drink a beer in the stands (is this true everywhere?) - 1-0 Fulham on a nice goal from Jimmy Bullard who was very impressive overall. I should have started Rosenior today for my fantasy team. Anyway - great day out and I'm sure I'll be going back - and it looks like I may become a Fulham supporter by default.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Sat Aug 26, 2006 3:12 pm

That's a great ground BWAP. I love that walk through the park along the Thames.

Boy With A Problem · Post by **Boy With A Problem** » Sat Aug 26, 2006 5:49 pm

and they've just shown me as the fan in the stand lead-in for the Fulham/SU highlights on Match of the Day..... man, I have to drop a few pounds if I'm going to be on tv again....

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Sat Aug 26, 2006 6:11 pm

Oh man, I'll have to be sure to tune into the highlights show tomorrow!

verbal gymnastics · Post by **verbal gymnastics** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 4:30 am

Boy With A Problem wrote:and they've just shown me as the fan in the stand lead-in for the Fulham/SU highlights on Match of the Day..... man, I have to drop a few pounds if I'm going to be on tv again....

The camera adds pounds BWAP

My TV series link cancelled itself for Match of the Day after only one week!

Sorry BWAP. Was it the moment when you dropped your hot dog onto your lap?

Gillibeanz · Post by **Gillibeanz** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 5:36 am

verbal gymnastics wrote:

My TV series link cancelled itself for Match of the Day after only one week! Sorry BWAP. Was it the moment when you dropped your hot dog onto your lap?

BWAP: I would have liked to have seen you drop your sausage on tv - any video clips??

I see Spurs are attempting to make their usual panic buys after all the best players have been snapped up. Selling Young and Defoe and interested in Downing and Chimbonda? - whats all that about? I'd like to see them get rid of Davids - the man is a liability!

Nice to see they have bought Mido back to the Lane - I really rate him

Good to see king will be back against Man U - boy will we need him! We have really got to shape up if we are going to get anywhere this season!!

verbal gymnastics · Post by **verbal gymnastics** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 10:16 am

But Gilli, I thought the Premiership was wrapped up by your pre-season form alone

Gillibeanz · Post by **Gillibeanz** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 1:28 pm

VG: Now listen here you cheeky person - this is just a glitch - just like my terrible form in Fantasy footie. We will both come good you'll see! And if we dont come good we will have had fun trying....oooh errr mrs!!

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:13 pm

West Ham land Tevez and Mascherano. What a day for them and their supporters! Good stuff.

..and Gallas/Cole switch possiby back on, with Â£5 million going to Arse in addition. Chelsea supporters already working on variations of The Jam's "Billy Hunt" for Arsenal derby days.

invisible Pole · Post by **invisible Pole** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:38 pm

You mean the Tevez ?

Still four hours before the transfer window closes so we could see a few more surprising signings.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 1:03 pm

invisible Pole wrote:You mean the Tevez ?

Yes, a permanent deal too, not a loan. Unbelievable!

Jackson Monk · Post by **Jackson Monk** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 4:12 pm

Sorry, but there is something not quite right about that West Ham deal. These are two players who should be playing champs league at Barcelona or Real Madrid...........and they go to Upton Park

In May, the president of MSI, said: "Tevez will leave Corinthians if a team pays the contract's release clause, which is between Â£69m and Â£83m." That's just Tevez! West Ham don't have cash like that.

Mark my words, they won't be playing there for long.....and there's more to come from this piece of business. Very dodgy.....and where does it leave the very talented Reo-Coker? Javier Mascherano plays in his position.

On the Spurs front, I'm delighted we've signed Chimbonda as we've been in need half-decent full-backs for ages. Pity Lee Young-Pyo chose to stay...he's bloody awful and I'll be glad to see the back of him! Anyone who really watches Spurs can see that Lee and Stalteri were serious weak links last year.

Malbranque is a quality midfielder, but our midfield overload is becoming a tad embarrassing.