Not just the end of season awards, also the point where we stop talking about what has happened, and shift our focus to the Worldington Cup. But that's not for a while yet, so strap in and get ready for multiple posts and some of the most pointless, stupid and inane awards ever conceived, including the Not All There award for Nuttiest Chairman, and the ever prestigious Holy Fuck award for Best Goal against Norwich.
the You Useless Bastard award for Most Worst Striker.
Leading the nominees we have Fernando Torres, for his not even remotely impressive contribution of five Premier League goals. Robbie Soldado was ruled out of the running 'cos he got six, admittedly four were penalties, but six is at least not in the same class as the one goal genius of Johan Elmander, but then Johan wasn't nearly as costly a signing as fellow one goaller Ricky Van Wolfswinkle. They're all worthy candidates, but the award goes to a man whose achievements were particular and unique and special, a man whose team achieved a 'miracle', a 'miracle' they only achieved once they benched him, so step forward Mr Jozy Altidore.
the Michael Brown award for Nutter of the Year
This award is for 2013-14's biggest nutter. So, without further ado. Nominees this
year include Big Al Pardew for 'nuzzling David Meyler', the regular
favourite Lee Cattermole, Ruben Rayos for
'a tackle so bad it postponed Rafi Dahan's wedding', Taras Stepanenko
for 'kicking a Moldova player's face off', Diego Simeone for 'Losing it. Absolutely losing it' and Ramires for 'trying to
obliterate Karim el Ahmadi's shins', but actually the winner is certified nutjob Mohammed Al-Fayed not just for saying that moving the Jacko statue got Fulham relegated, but also for suggesting that Shahid Khan might wake up and 'ask for it back', realising his 'error' in getting rid of the 'statue', to be fair it's not like what Fulham need is more inanimate objects.
the Bebe award for Worst Manchester United Cast-Off
Without requiring (or inspiring) a lot of thought it very quickly became a dead heat between John O'Shea and Wes Clown, and though the decision was very tough, our panel (aka Me), only came to a decision on the final day, when John O'Shea got turned inside out like a sock by the mighty Marvin Emnes, and his ten month goal drought, to cap an appalling season for the incompetent Irishman.
the Demba Ba Moment of the Year award
This award is given out for the finest Demba Ba moment of the year, there are two contenders in this category - the last minute winner against Paris and the tidy but crucial finish at Anfield. After a minimal volume of mental application, we've gone for the latter. Incidentally guys, do you remember when Liverpool were odds on to win the title? Seems like a longggg time ago now doesn't it.
the All By Myself award for One Man Teams
At the end of the day, it would've been insulting to nominate anyone else for this award. People will always talk about certain teams relying on certain players, but this man really did do it all by himself. Without McCormack and his 29 goals, Leeds would've finished far adrift at the bottom of the Championship. How he was overlooked for Championship Player of the Season is beyond me : 8 more goals than Danny Ings whilst playing in a considerably more terrible team. Here's some advice; in individual awards being phenomenal in an appalling team should actually count in your favour.
the Holy Fuck award for Best Goal against Norwich
For nominees you've got Luis Suarez's belter, that Jack Wilshere goal, and Raheem Stirling's strike at Carrow Road. The problem with all these goals is the opposition, scoring against Norwich this season was as difficult as scoring past ducks. However, we have made a decision. The Arsenal goal is criminally overrated, and Suarez's goal is better than Stirling's, so there you go. Luis Suarez is our winner.
the Phil Dowd award for Most Appalling Refereeing Decision
Nominees include Howard
Webb for 'the Luis Suarez-Oxlade Chamberlain penalty cock up at Arsenal', Mike Jones for the 'Chieck Tiote offside fiasco', Andre
Marriner for 'the Gibbs-Oxlade Chamberlain Wrong Man Kefuffle', Mike Riley for 'apologising to West Brom', and Phil Dowd for 'the entirity of Liverpool vs Newcastle'. It was a tough call, except it wasn't in the end. Step forward Mike Riley, how dare you apologise for one contentious penalty decision and not for the thousands of decisions your officials got wrong up and down the country you colossal, ginormous and staggeringly incompetent arse. We don't want to labour the point, we've got a lot to get through, but just because one penalty was a bit soft, but also garnered a lot of media attention, doesn't mean you fucking apologise, and how can you apologise for one poor decision as opposed to a gillion out-and-out wrong ones? In conclusion, we're not sure why Mike hasn't tendered his resignation given that in one incident he managed to demonstrate pretty strongly how much he really doesn't know how to do his job.
Slip of the Year
Such a tough one to call. One nominee in this category. Steven Gerrard, come on down...
This award rewards the most ridiculous presence in the 2013-14 season, the most ridiculous signed employement contract to be legally binding during 2013-14. It's understandably a very tough one to call. You'd expect us to say our winner is Alex Bruce, Paul McShane or any one of a number of Sunderland players. But in fact our winner is still contracted, somewhat miraculously, to Arsenal...can you tell who it is yet? Yes, that's right, it's the genius who thought that was a good haircut. Congratulations Nicklas Bendtner, you oaf.
We start with £26m Robbie Soldado, but he's trumped by fellow nominee Marouane Fellaini and his inflated price tag, the actual winner of this award is a striker who was outscored by Seamus Coleman whilst bagging a £13.9m annual salary. Yes, that's right, with his total failure to even partially justify it, we've finally found an award to give to Fernando Torres.
Dwight Gayle's stuff against Liverpool was pretty last minute, but it was trumped by the magnitude of Bobby Zamora's last minute play-off stuff. Paul Caddis' header for Birmingham was about as last minute as they come, while Gareth Bale's wonder goal against Barca wasn't quite last minute enough to be a credible candidate. Hamilton's last second strike against Hibs that eventually paved the way for a huge turn-around last week naturally gets itself a deserving nomination, if only for the look on Terry Butcher's face. Ousamma Assaidi's winner for Stoke was beautiful, Bryan Oviedo's last minute winner at Old Trafford was a thing of beauty, but once again this award was a no contest affair. Take a bow Sergio Ramos; because no moment really quite rewrote the story of a season like this one. Real went from failures to La Decima, Atletico went from elation to dejection, Carlo Ancelotti went from being sacked to being a hero, and Diego Simeone went from the brink of immortality to Nutter of the Year nominee.
Topping the list of nominees is Vincent Tan, the nutter who doesn't know the rules of the sport he's invested in, who sacked the much-loved Malky Mackay (at best harsh), and drafted in a random Norwegian (at best abominable), and then looked surprised when the team plumetted out of the division. Competing with Tan, we've got Shahid Khan, who took that monumentally stupid decision to get rid of the Jacko statue. Anyone who doesn't take into account nutty statues of random pop icons when considering his teams fortune, who focuses on 'buying players' and 'trying to win football matches' has to go down as a cast iron nutter (Also, right, why is the statue in colour? What kind of fucking statue comes in colour?). Hull owner Assem Allam gets an obvious nod for trying to change the name, though he was at least spot on when he called Hull City "irrelevent", even if that wasn't what he meant. He also gets extra credit in the field of nuttyness because Hull's global potential as a brand is pretty much maxed out, people in Singapore are not suddenly going to start chanting George Boyd's name just because his team sounds like it plays Rugby League. The owners of PSG get a nod for recently sanctioning a £40m bid for David Luiz; £40m for a defender who can't defend, why not just spend it on Liam Ridgewell or flush it down the toilet? But this is all just filler, there was only ever going to be one winner, a man whose grasp of economics belies the fact he isn't bankrupt. Congratulations, Tony Fernandes. You're thinking "nutty" and "Malaysian" must mean Vincent Tan, except QPR were permitted to make an £8m loss last season, and managed to just about eclipse that to the tune of £65m. Hold on, I'll get my calculator out. I mean, where do you even lose that money? £10m on players, a lot in the Championship, but what the fuck did Harry do with the rest? (he said speculatively, wondering whether HMRC have anything better to do than continuously monitor Harry's dog's bank account). It's also worth asking who has a resale value. Out of everyone bought in under Harry, who can they make some money back off of - Richard Dunne? Err, probably not. Aaron Hughes? Yossi Benayoun? Gary O'Neill? Karl Henry? Jermaine Jenas? Ohhh wait, they're all a) expensive, and b) old. Sanctioning a transfer policy that makes less sense than Emmanuel Adebayor is nutty enough for me.
This is for the player who contributed nothing in 2013-14 and yet will be out there wasting space on the biggest stage in world sport. Let's begin with big Shola Ameobi, because he's in Nigeria's initial 30-man squad, but last I checked Sunderland weren't actually going to the World Cup, so who's he going to score against? Also getting a nod here we've got Adnan Januzaj, because in spite of his age is 4 goals and 3 assists in 27 games really worth a place in a pretty special Belgium squad? Is it really worth a place in any half-decent squad, I mean would that even be good enough for a lesser nation like Uzbekistan, or England? I'll move on to more obvious candidates, like bloated ageing rockstar Niko Kranjcar who will be facing the hosts in Group A, Ben Foster who mysteriously displaced John Ruddy, Giorgos Karagounis who once had a sit-down lunch with Aristotle, Karim Rekik who is both anonymous and in the Dutch squad, Park Chu-Young whose impact on last season was as impressive as Margaret Thatcher's, Fernando Torres who is as deadly these days as a stuffed dolphin, and recent winner of the Michael Ricketts award, Jozy Altidore, who couldn't score a goal with an infinitely large net, an infinite number of footballs and an infinite amount of time in which to try. However in spite of these excellent candidates, there was only ever one likely winner for this award, give a big hand for the risible talents of Nabil Bentaleb; in the Algeria squad even though Tim Sherwood isn't the manager. I assume Vahid Halilhodžić is the Bosnian equivalent; expect his World Cup to consist of a lot of shouting and even greater quantities of coming up with the most appallingly lame-brained, half-arsed 'tactics' ever conceived by humankind (I would like to stress that wasn't as much a pop at Vahid Halilhodžić, which is just a name to me, as it was a pop at that incompetent boob whose name rhymes with Pim Cherwood).
Kicking us off, it's burn victim and top quality Juve striker Carlos Tevez, omitted from the Argentina squad at the expense of Franco Di Santo, the only striker in history to make Ricky Van Wolfswinkle look prolific. Considering the man who made that call will actually be managing Argentina at the finals, I probably wouldn't bother having a bet on them (though at least it isn't Diego Maradona this time, a man who is to tactical ingenuity what John Terry is to the renaissance). France will be going without Samir Nasri, or a hope in hell, they've also left that behind. Let Samir finally reach the peak of his powers, and then decide no, actually, we're going to take Clement Grenier, a player who plays the same position but with a lot less talent, skill and class. Also, let's leave behind Gael Clichy, we'd rather have Paris Saint-Germain's second choice left-back at the finals. The USA leave out a player with more World Cup goals than anyone at the finals apart from Klose and Drogba, Landon Donovan, in favour of a striker who has fewer EPL goals in 53 EPL games than Dwight Gayle has goals in the last 15 minutes against Liverpool on the 5th May. Brazil leave out Atletico Madrid heroes Felipe Luis and Miranda but do select in their places ageing Paris full-back Maxwell and some guy who played 10 games for Napoli last term. They also significantly omit Lucas Moura, but think Man City reject Jo is good enough to put in an appearance at a farmers market let alone a World Cup. Still, look, someone has to get this award, and we're going for Samir because it's the first name that came into my head when I started typing.
The award goes to the single nominee, Mr Dyke. League Three, there's an idea. Let's invent a league. Fuck you Southend, Northampton, etc etc. We're going to make up a league, then we're going to invent some meaningless teams no-one gives a fuck about, and we're going to ruin your competitions for the sake of some not even remotely tangible ends. Let's ruin the football league for everyone, let's make that competition totally unwatchable, so that maybe Liverpool get a slightly better holding midfielder who they don't have to pay for. Let's have a competitive league, but then let's draft in some teams that aren't allowed to win anything and expect that to make sense of itself. The problem isn't coaching, not at all, the problem isn't a very very poor standard of youth coaching, nope, the problem is that we haven't invented some teams and artificially transplanted them into the football league. And who else was on the crack team charged with saving English football, when English football needed help, who did Greg turn to...Howard Wilkinson? That may be a surprise to those of you who forgot he existed when he drifted into irrelevency in 1902. Rio Ferdinand? The only human being on the world less articulate than a desk lamp, a man who thought that a football version of the fucking Oscars was a good idea. Danny Mills? Notable for being a) bald and b) Robbie Savage's mate, and of course Glenn Hoddle; A man who said "The karma is working from another lifetime" - It really is a miracle these recommendations turned out to be such total fucking horse manure, but then again maybe it's just karma coming round to fuck football up 'cos of something it did when it was just peasants kicking farm animals through the (fucking) village.
*(if you were thinking tall, lean and athletic then you're parkin up the wrong tree).
