Let's start with a 'definite penalty'. West Ham lump it into the Stoke box, Andy Carroll smashes Marc Muniesa in the face, and while he's being smashed in the face the ball hits Muniesa's arm. Well that's definitely handball, just like if I buy some crack and plant it on someone I don't like and call the police they should definitely put that person in prison.
With definite penalties out of the way let's turn to Antonio Nocerino, he's that stocky Italian midfielder who used to play in the San Siro with Mario Balotelli and who now plays at Upton Park with Kevin Nolan, Carlton Cole, and Sam Allardyce's tactical ingenuity, which probably won't be a completely bewildering experience. Not so much pass and move as punt and smash. In fact watching West Ham United go toe-to-toe with Stoke City is a bit like watching glorified Sunday league (or the SPL as some people like to call it).
Another player going through an interesting time (presumably) is Luciano Becchio, once a hero at Elland Road, now that guy who can't get on the pitch behind Ricky Von Wolfspenis and goalshy iceman Johan Elmander, which is like being told your job application has failed because they've given the post of head of accounting to a cubicle door or a pineapple.
Roy Hodgson spent Saturday afternoon watching the team he'd most love to manage, as he paid a visit to St Mary's to keep tabs on as many of England's starting XI as he thinks he can get away with. Jay Rodriguez impressed, and Rickie Lambert continued to be Roy Hodgson's favourite player, not all fancy and talented like them Cristiano Ronaldo's and Lionel Messi's, but someone who is almost as good at football as he is at stacking shelves, who fits in well when what you're trying to create is a team that's about as fluid and mobile as quiche.
At Goodison Park David Marshall continued to be the only reason Cardiff City have any points at all as he pulled off about 97 saves to limit Everton to just 2 goals, while Ole came about as close as he's ever Gunnar come to actually getting a point away from the Cardiff Shitty Stadium.
Now I've put it off long enough but let's talk about Chelsea. I wonder if Willian will get sent off when we show this independent highlight of him receiving a yellow card amidst no other action. Will he? Will he? Oh yes, look, he has. Well done Match of the Day, watching your show blind it wasn't at all easy to predict what I was about to see.
Chelsea lost on the road, Jose got sent off, Willian got sent off, Ramires tried to kill Karim El Ahmadi's leg, Chelsea lost their 'grip on the title' and Fernando Torres continued to be slightly less useful on a football pitch than a box of matches, a cheese grater or Emile Heskey. This is a guy being paid millions of pounds every year to look as interested in football as blind people look interested in art galleries. Let's count the ways he could be more useless; if he was actually physically dead, or in a coma. That's about it. Being a useless sack of shit should become a sackable offence.
There was good news for Sunderland as they didn't lose (or win), bad news for Swansea as they did somehow manage to lose, while Bayern Munchen are now 50 games unbeaten in the completely competitive Bundesliga.
In this next segment we reflect on Match of the Day, so we're calling it Watching Match of the Day and Commenting on Bits of It...
The show started by referencing something I hadn't previously been aware of. MOTD 'pundits' Alan 'I'm as interesting as warm water' Shearer and Robbie 'I'm noisier than a flock of geese and half as insightful' Savage, for Sport Relief, sat on some chairs. They went to a stadium, it might've been Wembley, and then went into the MOTD studio and complained that moving round a stadium sitting on all the chairs was really really difficult. Maybe we should just give all the money they raised to them both as compensation. Better still let's give it to the viewers, as compensation for the mental trauma of being able to remember what it was like when Robbie Savage wasn't on the television.
I'm just going to recap quickly, to raise money for Sport Relief, Alan Shearer and Robbie Savage sat on some chairs. Who thought up that ingenious money-raising strategy? It's the sort of thing one of your stupider friends would suggest in the pub that would get him denounced as a daft cunt.
On chairs. Sat on some chairs. For charity. Oh forget it. Dear humanity, I give up on you.
Chairs, for fucks sake. They went to a stadium and sat in all the chairs. What the fuck even is that? What kind of a world is this in which people think that is any kind of a way to behave? What the fuck? I really want to know, what the actual fuck? They sat on all the chairs. Not building a new school for the disadvantaged kiddies so they can learn to read, sitting on chairs. But not just some chairs, all of them. That makes all the difference.
Chairs!
For the love of Christ what is happening to the world?
Alan Shearer. Robbie Savage. All the chairs. Going round, sitting on all the chairs. Sitting down, getting up, moving to the next one. For charity. As if it's not totally mental. As if you aren't all asking 'what in the name of fuck?'.
Later in the program it asked fans to pointlessly vote on whether George Boyd's pointless dive in the City-Hull match should have had the consequence of a penalty. Voting has now closed and the verdict has come in and it seems that not only was the incident slightly less debatable than a debate on whether there is or isn't rain, but also it has happens to have turned out that nobody gives any kind of a shit and the vote could only have had less consequence or meaning if it hadn't actually happened at all.
I mean seriously, what is it for? Why would you even bother? Why would you vote? He did dive, it's not up for debate. And what does it change? What is the effect of the vote? What is it actually for? It's just voting for voting's sake, because that's where we've got to as a species. It's like going into a football stadium and pointlessly sitting on all the chairs. As if that's a thing people do. As if that's a normal endurance challenge.
Also on MOTD we found out that Tony Pulis has spent 22 years as a manager, and 'over 200 hundred of them as a Premier League manager' which officially means that if you manage Stoke it doesn't actually count.
Right, that's enough of that, I'm not mentioning chairs again, or Match of the Day, or how intolerably useless Robbie Savage is at everything.
We now turn our beady eye to tomorrow's soccer. Arsingham face Tottenhal, and Liverwank play Manshitster. We'll start with Arsingham...
I think we've all been shocked to see that Tim Sherwood's incredibly sophisticated managerial masterplan of not coming up with any tactics and just shouting quite a lot doesn't seem to be working out quite as planned. I for one was impressed with the way he recognised, quite correctly, that Nabil Bentaleb is actually the best player in the world and not an intensely average waste of space. I've also been impressed with how he manages to manage a team competing in European competition as if he was actually managing Swindon or Farnborough.
What is interesting is that tomorrow it will be straight-talking Tim against anything but straight-talking Arsene Wenger. Expect, regardless of what happens, Arsene Wenger to deny that it ever did, and Tim to blame it on character rather than a hopeless lack of tactical awareness.
You'll have noticed how, in the build up to the Bayern game, Wenger asked for the referee to 'give Arsenal a fair chance', and he did, in fact, he did all he could to give them any chance whatsoever, like by not penalising Lukas Podolski for shoving over Philip Lahm and by only giving one penalty against them. It wasn't like Arsene Wenger was trying to coerce decisions out of the ref and it definitely didn't work (he said to cover himself against highly improbable legal actions).
Arsene Wenger also built up to the game by listing all the decisions that have stopped Arsenal from winning any silverware at all since 2005. He referred to the Jens Lehmann incident in Paris in 06 when Jens got a red card when in fact what he should have got was a red card, and he referred to the Wojciech Szcecczzezsney red card which should only have been a red car...well, actually, only having one decision go against you in 8 years is actually pretty reasonable. That didn't stop Arsene Wenger from using his post-match press conference to blame the Sczczesnezsny red card, Arjen Robben, Twitter and Russia for Arsenal's latest failure to make any progress towards their ultimate goal of not being shit anymore.
But seriously, it is all a massive conspiracy. It's not the lack of any kind of back-up tactic, it's not the fact his lone striker can't control a football or that his main centre-back looks like he carried Merry and Pippin on his shoulders in Lord of the Rings, it's not Arsene Wenger's fault, it's the conspiracy. UEFA, FIFA, WHOEVA, all of these organizations, and more, are involved, and their sole aim is to stop Arsenal from collecting the silverware that is rightly theirs (and which hasn't just eluded them solely because they don't fucking deserve it).
I'm not gonna get bogged down in rambling on about who did (or definitely didn't) do what to who. Let's just agree that Arsene Wenger is a cunt and have that be the end of it. Let's agree that his plan of not bothering to come up with any kind another plan, of being tactically outwitted by refrigerators and car alarms, is absolutely fucking genius.
Now, in a to-be-short-lived segment it's time for news from countries which do play football but which aren't England...
German national hero and Bayern Munchen Presidente Uli Hoeness has
admitted defrauding the German tax authorities out of 'shit loads' of
money, saying that he 'would do it again', that the entire country is
'wank' and that the prosecutors could stick the case 'up their arse'.
Though in hindsight I did those translations myself and, on reflection, I
don't actually speak German.
Also in Deutschland, Werder Bremen's
Aaron Hunt has been praised for owning up to a dive and stopping his
side being awarded a penalty in game they'd already won. HOWEVER, using
my extensive German vocabulary and my amazing lip reading skills I can
tell you that what Aaron Hunt actually said to the ref was 'your mum is a
filthy crack whore', the ref then subsequently reversed the decision in
a symbolic gesture believed to be in support of his mother who, he
says, is not filthy but just misunderstood.
Aaron Hunt did
basically, and without me needing to translate it, say that if it hadn't
already been 2-0 to Werder he probably would have let the penalty
stand, but that's not important. He only dived in the first place, and
then confessed, now he's a hero. It makes perfect sense to me.
And, for those of you who have been attempting to induce nausea, this
happened in Israel at some point before now, and is one that Michael
'turn your pants' Brown would probably call 'a bit racey'. While in
Greece people get away with a yellow card for this. And that's enough of this week's people kicking the shite out of each other segment.
But oh wait, I haven't mentioned Ramires' placid and reasonable attempt to splinter Karim El Ahmadi's shins. There you go, segment over. Actually if you're into that sort of thing I just accidentally found this, this, this and this. The first is Wes Brown trying to pretend he's still a professional footballer, the second is Michael Brown narrowly missing the ball, the third is gentle ITV pundit Roy Keane ending Alf Inge Haaland's career, and the fourth is nice guy Roy Keane's response to ending Alf Inge Haaland's career completely deliberately. And now it's over. Lovely bloke is Roy. Not a psychopath. Not at all. Lovely bloke. Lovely, lovely bloke. Just wouldn't want to meet him down a dark alley. Or at all. Because he's a prick. If I hadn't already made that clear. One of the worst human beings who has ever lived. It goes Hitler, Pol Pot, Roy Keane, Adrian Chiles, Stalin, Heinrich Himmler.
And if anyone tells you he didn't end Haaland's career, that's bollocks. That injury did for him, and without Roy Keane inflicting it, that injury wouldn't have happened. That's how stuff works.
To quote a legal expert 'prison is there to keep people who are mental away from people they might attack', and I am warning you all now that Roy Keane has the psychological profile of a cold-blooded killer. So don't say you weren't warned. It's time to take the precautionary measure of locking him away forever in some sort of specially made chamber, before he murders people. If we do nothing, then aren't we complicit in his forthcoming murderings? When he flips out and stabs Lee Dixon in the throat with some scissors, then aren't we to blame for not dealing with Roy when we had the chance?
Some of you are thinking 'he won't definitely kill someone', but I'm here to promise you that he definitely will.
