Filed under: Mat Reville's Football Blog | Tags: lawro birmingham reading allardyce blackburn coppell foreigners blatter fifa xenophobia chucklevision
1. Careless Talk Costs Lives
Well, not quite, but if the British War time propaganda slogan was adhered to a messy situation could have been avoided at Liverpool this week.
Part-time pundit and full-time cretin Mark ‘Lawro’ Lawrenson appeared on an Irish radio station and claimed that the club didn’t think Robbie Keane was up to the ‘Top Four challenge, and that he would be offloaded in the January transfer window. The most obvious destination is back to Spurs, at a knock-down price.
What gives this story extra pizazz is that the big mouth feeding the info to attention whore Lawro was Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard. Even more beautiful was Lawro’s admission that “I was having a pint with Gerrard at a function last Saturday and we talked about Keane.”
Notwithstanding the fact that Lawro is purportedly a recovered alcoholic, there are a few perplexing things about this ‘function’. Firstly, why would Gerrard choose to hang out with Lawro? Surely there must be some more interesting cats at that box social.
Secondly, was the drink before Stevie took to the field against Hull City that day (3pm), before Lawro took to the sofa for MOTD (10pm), or was it during a post-MOTD bender (12pm). Either way, there is some damn fine non-professionalism going on.
I assume that Lawro has actually fallen off the wagon again, and the whole thing is a load of nonsense dreamed up in a Dublin gutter the night before. If it is not, Robbie Keane can’t really stay at Liverpool any longer after his captain has admitted it’s not working out.
Incidentally, I was sharing some Jaga bombs with Matt Fryatt the other day and he told me that not only is he about to sign a new contract, but Leicester City are going to be buying Kaka to play up front with him. That £208 season ticket is looking like better value for money with each passing week!
2. Return Of The Fat (You Lied To Me, Yes You Lied, Yes You Li-i-i-ed)
That’s what Niall Quinn will be shouting at Fat Sam, who despite his recent media gushing over Sunderland has unsurprisingly jumped at the first chance of a job that came his way.
Yep, Georgie Thompson can breathe a sigh of relief. Sky Sports News will no longer be Fat Sam’s personal platform for finding a job. He’s back in the big time, after Blackburn finally relented and agreed to bestow him with employment.
And let’s not forget who first predicted that, shall we? All we need is David O’Leary at Sunderland and I’ve won about a million pounds.
I can only imagine that Rovers chairman John Williams was bored of wading through Allardyce’s dozens of applications every time the Ewood Park vacancy comes available. (To be fair, it’s Williams’ own fault, seeing as he is the one to blame for appointing Paul Ince years before he was ready and possibly doing irreversable damage to a very promising career).
Still, after a year of phoning Sky Sports news the moment the Portsmouth/Blackburn/Man City/Sunderland/England etc job comes available, Fat Sam is finally at a club that suits him.
Blackburn will stay up under his hoofball tactics. Nobody will want to go to Ewood Park, not least the Blackburn fans. But Allardyce is a good fit for unfashionable North Western teams and he will do a good job there.
My picks for relegation this year? West Brom, Stoke and Wigan (take Heskey/Valencia/Zaki out of that team at Christmas and they will plummit).
3. The Biggest Championship Game Of The Season
The big game in old div 2 sees promotion rivals Reading and Birmingham battling it out at St. Andrews.
With Wolves storming the division and a big gap between 3rd and the rest of the play-offs, the battle for that second automatic spot back up to the Premiership is is the biggest race in English football.
The very likeable Reading team have had a quite a bizarre season, winning 4-0 away then drawing 2-2 at home the next week. Their goal difference of +27 proves what anyone with any knowledge on football knows, that The Royals are too entertaining a team to be in the second tier.
Birmingham however are the embodiment of a Championship team. They are boring, they are rubbish, and it is always, always misty at St. Andrews. Watch it on Saturday, I guarantee it will be foggy.
Reading to sneak this one 2-1 and leapfrog the blue noses into the automatic promotion places.
4. Dey Tuk Aar Jeeeeerbs!
The Football League has voted overwhelmingly in favour of implementing new quotas on home-grown players, so that 25% of all match day squads must be players from the UK.
The probable continuation of this is to implement Big Sepp’s perplexingly xenophobic plan of forcing all Premiership teams to have 6 players from the UK in their starting 11.
Obviously, this contravenes employment law (“Sorry, I can’t offer you this job cos you’re Indian…”), especially since the EU removed international boundaries to employment. Do you think the Shengen Plan doesn’t apply to you, Mr Blatter?
More pertinently to this football blog, one of the big causes trotted out by morons on football phone-ins is; “there are more foreigners since the Premiership –>we didn’t qualify for Euro 2008 –> it’s the foreigners’ fault, they are taking up too much space –> limit the number of foreigners”.
Nonsense. Firstly, there is the obvious fact that we didn’t qualify for the tournament before The Premiership (World Cup 1994), and we then qualified for the next six after it. Look at the England team that started the match against Spain just before The Premiership started.
C. Woods,
T. Dorigo, K. Curle, D. Walker, S. Pearce
T. Daley, C. Palmer, D. Platt, A. Sinton
A. Smith, G. Lineker
Quite clearly, the problem with English football is not the influx of foreingers since 1992!
Also, does anyone really not believe that the ‘big four’ would just stockpile up the best foreigners, keeping them in the reserves rather than letting them drift down to lower placed teams. Nani is not one of Manchester United’s best five foreigners (Van Der Sar, Vidic, Ronaldo, Tevez, Berbatov etc would clearly be in before the Wacko Jacko lookalike), but what good would it do Fergie letting him leave and play for Everton?
That’s what would happen in Blatter’s mind, and he is a mentalist.
Although that utopia would mean the Pontins League would hit heights not seen since the days of Graham Fenton, it would also seem rather a waste of good talent. Why not just accept the free market and enjoy some jolly good football?
Anyway, that’s more than enough for this bumper blog edition. It got a bit political, even hinted at economic theory, and I am very impressed if you got right to the end of it. As a reward, please enjoy delightful drawing of Dimitar Berbatov and Abel Xavier chilling out in a diner.
"Hey, Abel... you know what they call a 'Royale With Cheese' in Europe?"
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
Then Saturday Comes... the half decent football blog 