We open today with a new segment called 'the Opposite of What I Think'...
David Moyes is doing really well, Arsenal are going to win the title, Mesut Ozil has lived up to his price tag, David Meyler was asking for it, Peter Crouch is just excellent at football, Alan Pardew's not in any trouble at all, Luis Suarez is rubbish at football, and Tomas Rosicky's hair is fantastic.
Oh, did Arsenal lose away to Stoke? No way. You're kidding. I don't believe you. I made Arsenal favourites to win the league all along and I am just amazed that they're crashing out of the Champions League and have now lost at Stoke of all places. Jack Wilshere (the genius behind these 'comments') thinks Arsenal deserved to win, and they did, just about as much as I deserve the Nobel Prize in Physics and Jeremy Kyle deserves a knighthood.
Elsewhere Alan Pardew is in 'huge enormous massive massive trouble' (Jeff Stelling's own words) after nudging David Meyler's chin with his forehead. Savage thinks it makes his position untenable, and I actually kind of agree with him. In other words, reinforce the windows, take the kids into the basement, the apocalypse should be coming to a town near you in the not too distant future.
Dan Sturridge, in the meanwhile, didn't get to show off his modern, more refined dance style as Liverpool cruised to victory over Turdhampton at St Margaret's (this isn't really a news item, it's just an excuse to watch this again and again and again; he's so happy he's forgotten how to dance).
One of the goals of the weekend came from the boot of Dave Jones; the jug-eared, baldy headed former Manchester United youth player who looped a perfectly judged volley in off the bar to open the score in the big Championship clash between Burn Lee and Darbee Countee (naturally I wouldn't let you down by not providing a clip - so here it is - I can only apologise that it's not a clip of the goal I'm talking about, but I couldn't find that on Youtube so I just substituted one David Jones for another, hoping you wouldn't notice but now I'm just going to assume you will notice the absence of fans, the presence of houses in the background, the absence of pitch markings and the presence of a fat man in orange lumping a ball across a recreation ground).
This next segment is called while we're on Youtube and will only really work if you can follow the links...
There's this legendary piece of reporting from Kammy, the endlessly brilliant 'nobody wants to be a Gary Neville', and then there's this which I just can't stop watching.
The Carragher-Neville MNF clip is the reason I always give out to the BBC's 'punditry' team. Carra & Nev have chemistry and character, getting Carra & Nev together to analyse football is like getting Hitler and Stalin together to analyse wars, it's like getting Richard Dawkins and the Archbishop of Canterbury together to analyse the bible, whereas getting that Chapman bloke, Kevin Kilbane and Danny Murphy together to discuss anything is more like sitting your teddy bears around the kitchen table for a tea party - only with a lot of imagination is it ever going to resemble entertainment.
Elsewhere it's the League Cup final this afternoon and I still couldn't tell you why we have one. Germany doesn't have a second, crappier cup competition - neither does Italy or Spain or any decent, civilised nation. Why on earth we think we need something that is slightly worse and finishing in March to pointlessly occupy teams is beyond me. We have a premier cup competition, and then a second one that nobody wants to win. Someone seems to have just said 'lets play more football' and then come up with this shit way of managing to do that. Besides, if we scrap the shit one there's only one domestic cup left and people might give more of a shit about that once you force all their eggs into a different, smaller basket.
I've decided to rush this out before kick-off, so let's have a look at the line-ups: City are in good shape apart from hampering their own chances by shoving Costel PantyLemon in goal. Sunderland demonstrated last week that they're there for the taking, and rather than learn their lessons from last year (or as we shall now know it 'that Wigan debacle') and not getting complacent, City have decided to start with a circus freak instead of a professional goalkeeper. Pellegrini also manages to make what should be a comfortable win slightly less predictable by selecting ticking shitbomb Martin Demichelis, a defender whose only flaw is his inability to defend.
Sunderland, meanwhile, seem to have gone with tiny Italian Flabbio Borini as a lone striker, and so actually probably will get spanked worse than what Bradford did when they visited Wembley at this stage in last year's equivalent futile kickabout to see who gets to take home the prize fund of an office chair and a muffin basket.
'What people have been saying' : in this segment we look at exactly what it says just there in quotations...
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has said that he makes the footballing decisions at Cardiff, he's been advised, however, to take credit for some less deplorable decisions like deciding to maim some farm animals or burn a bunch of schoolchildren.
Tory MP Robert Halfon has labelled Sunderland fans 'scumbags' on the social networking site Twitter, and while this might be highly complimentary the man is a Tory MP so it is, essentially, a spade labelling a spade a spade
This next segment is about money...
Leeds are, FL approval permitting, going to be took over by twice convicted Italian fraudster Massimo Cellino. The word is that MC is pretty minted, whereas GFH are the only Arab banking house to have ever invested in football without having any money to invest with, the alternative is some people who've done nothing but prove they can't afford to service United's apparently mounting debts. So, to put it simply, Leeds fans don't have a choice, and they've accepted that. They've acknowledged that it's better to have some random nutter with loads of money in charge than to be vying for promotion out of the Skrill Premier with Nuneaton, Alfreton and Salisbury. Now Cardiff City, they have their own nutter, who thinks that putting £100m or more into Cardiff is worth it for all the revenue he's going to get from changing the shirts to red, and it is only a matter of time before all of Asia is cheering on Peter Whittingham. Now this particular nutcase has not only saved the club, he's financed promotion and he's bankrolled the signings of Gary Medel and Steven Caulker, he's pumping money into the club like Harry Redknapp (allegedly) pumps money into offshore banking ventures, and yet I saw men at a Cardiff match holding a sign inviting their savior and financier to go home. That's like someone giving you bags full of cash and loads of nice stuff in exchange for you occasionally having to cook dinner or wear a jumper you don't really like much, you could tell him to fuck off, but then you'd have to go back to living without heating or electricity. What I'm saying is either you can keep Vincent Tan, or you can stop being in the Premier League, it's up to you.
