Tag: Football

7 Reasons To Have Milk

1. You can play professional football. Or at least you can play for Accrington Stanley. A club whose trials – according to Ian Rush – include the ability to pass, shoot, head, tackle, swear at the referee and drink milk.

2. It stops you falling over. Milk makes your bones strong. Strong bones mean standing up straight. No one will laugh at you if you stand up straight.

3. The Milk Moustache. I don’t have to put my contacts in to realise that Elizabeth Hurley is a splendidly attractive lady. Though I did have to put them in to work out what was on her top lip in this ad. It’s milk. Definitely milk. I’ll be honest with you, it does something for me. Even more impressive is the choice of glass. Note it’s Hurley-esq shape. Clever. Anyway, drink milk to make a milk moustache and send the photos to us.

4. You’ve just won the Indy 500. Since the late 1930s, the winner of the Indy 500 has been given a bottle of milk to celebrate with. The driver even gets to choose from three different varieties. Whole, 2% or skimmed. I can only assume that caps react in different ways depending on the fat content.

5. You’ve got a banana. Don’t you just hate it when you discover a banana on your person, but no bottle of milk?

6. Play catch-up. Now, whether you think Margaret Thatcher was right to stop free milk for school children is an entirely different debate. Which is probably just as well seeing as I can only think of two reasons why it was a good idea and one reason why it was not. That’s well short of the seven reasons I need. But I digress. The fact is that Maggie did stop the milk. And as a result millions of children missed out on a pint of the white stuff every morning break. It’s time to play catch up before it’s too late.

7. You’ve been lied to. You see those white marks on your fingernails? Well that is leukonychia. The result of a lack of calcium. Or so my parents told me when I was a child of the eighties. I am now 26 and I have just found out that this was a lie. A lie! A lie to make me drink more milk. In the last twenty years I have milked dozens of cows dry just to try and get rid of the imperfections. (The marks on my nails I mean, not the cows). And today, just after I have bought another eight pints, I find out that the white marks are just a result of trapping my finger in a drawer about six months ago. I’m incandescent with rage.

January 20, 2010
7 Reasons to go to the Football Match

1. History. You get no sense of history watching a match on television. If you go to the Milton End at Fratton Park though, you can see an impressive recreation of the football experience in Victorian times. If it weren’t for the presence of “ladies” and the absence of flat-caps and rattles I would have believed I’d gone back in time. They even exhorted their team to “play up.” Nobody’s done that since colour was invented. I think I saw Dickens in the row behind me, sitting between a Muffin Man and an urchin.

2. Perspective. When you watch televised football, most of the footage is shot side-on from the main stand. This gives a good perspective on the game and gives you a tactical overview of events. You can get this at live football too, by sitting in the centre of one of the main stands. If you prefer excitement, however, nothing beats sitting behind the goal that your team is attacking. The spectacle of watching your strikers shooting at the space directly ahead of you is unsurpassable.*

*If your strike-force contains an Aliadiere or a Voronin you can replicate this experience by sitting near a corner-flag, the one furthest from the barn-door and the cows-arse.

3. Wit. There’s much wit and humour to be heard at live football. There are funny chants, heckles, pithy observations and bawdy asides. Wigan are considering signing Chilean defender Waldo Ponce in January. I may move to the North-West and buy a season ticket. It’s a name with enormous humour potential, the best since Celtic signed Rafael Scheidt.

4. Alan Green. Supercilious hectoring blabbermouth Alan Green might be at the match but don’t worry, it’s quite noisy there and you won’t be able to hear him. Also, he won’t be able to talk over everyone in the crowd whose opinion differs from his own, which is at least 97% of them – the ones with eyes in their heads and functioning brains.

5. Advise. You can’t help your team by watching the match at home. At the match you can, by shouting. If you’ve spotted something the players haven’t, or developed a new tactic that your manager hasn’t considered, you can let them know instantly. Who knows? You may even change the course of the match with your perceptive insights. Or you may not, like the man next to me three weeks ago who bellowed “Get the ball!” whenever his team weren’t in possession. He is presumably the man that warnings on coffee cups and rear-view-mirrors are for, I had wondered.

6. Pedestrians. Football matches are dangerous places for cars. Tannoy announcements often seem to consist of an endless stream of car-park calamity. “Can the owner of a silver Ford Focus (they’re all silver), registration number xxx xxxx please go to the car park as their car has its lights on/has its windows open/is parked in the way/is on fire/has rolled away/has the keys in the door/has been struck by the opposing team’s bus/is being vandalised/is playing Radio 2 at an immoderate volume. Militant pedestrians love hearing this litany of automotive adversity, it may be why they go.

7. Comedy. When you watch football on television, the cameras aren’t following the referee and often miss it when he does something funny, like falling over. I can’t think of anything that is funnier than a referee falling over, except for a referee falling over a dog…or a referee falling over a linesman…or a referee being chased by a rogue elephant…or a referee being satirised by Ian Hislop…or a referee slipping on a banana skin dropped by the fourth official…

There are many things funnier than the referee falling over. The ref falling over is still very funny though. If you go to the match, you may witness it.

December 17, 2009
7 Reasons Sports Personality 2009 Was A Joke

1. Andy Murray. Where was he? If Andrew Strauss could be on a live link, then why couldn’t Murray? He may have had a legitimate reason, but as things stand he has just made it slightly harder for me to like him again. Goodness me, that boy’s an effort.

2. Coach of the Year. Yes, Fabio Capello has done a good job with England – I say good job, it’s actually a sad indictment of English football that it takes an Italian coach to make the players England possess play well together – but what did he actually coach us to? Top spot in the qualifying table. The last time I checked that meant sod all – apart from that it is part one of the proper job. Have the panel ever heard of Ross Brawn or Declan Kidney? How did they not even make the shortlist? Muppetry.

3. Team of the Year. Well, the pundits got this half right. The sport was right, sadly the team was not. England Women’s Cricket Team should have won this. What more did the pundits want them to do? They won the Ashes. They won the World Cup. They won the Twenty20 World Cup. That’s really quite a big clue. More muppetry.

4. Kelly Holmes. What the hell was she wearing? If I was a girl I am pretty sure that would have been the kind of outfit I would want to have worn when I was about twelve and going bowling with my friends Bianca and Stace.

5. James Corden. For a minute I thought he had just wandered into the wrong studio, but then he appeared on stage. And then he presented an award. If the BBC wanted him to present an award they should have had him on BBC2 getting ready to handover the Pukka Pies UK Snooker Championship trophy.

6. Andrew Strauss. Personally, I think he should have won – for reasons I have outlined before on this website – but not even coming in the top three is bizarre. He single-handedly dragged a team that was humiliated in the West Indies to winning the Ashes just five months later. It wasn’t like 2005 when England had beaten everyone in the past eighteen months. What more do our sportsmen/women have to do to please people?

7. Ryan Giggs. Yes, the big one. How the bloody hell is Ryan Giggs Sports Personality of the Year 2009? I am still trying to work it out. Yes, he had a fine year. Yes, he is a fine player. Yes, it is refreshing to have a footballer with humility in a sport where there is severe lack of it (not that that should be grounds for winning SPOTY). But seriously? He did not have a better sporting year than six World Champions. He did not have a better year than an Ashes winning captain. He did not have a better year than a tennis player who reached the ranking of number two in the world. He did not have a better year than a six-time Tour de France stage winner. Give him a lifetime achievement award someday, sure, but no one can tell me he deserved to beat the other nine contenders this year. But as you voted for him, please try. I really need to understand this.

December 14, 2009
7 Reasons The British Know Thanksgiving Must Be Important To Americans

1. Where the hell is Wichita? Whole Hollywood movies are based around the theme of trying to get home for Thanksgiving and feature scenes in which the lead shares a bed with John Candy. Most other films with the theme of trying to get home, feature daring escapes from Colditz and shenanigans with a French Resistance fighter called Michelle in a bunk-bed somewhere outside Paris. So yes, if they make films about Thanksgiving, we know it’s important.

2. Happy Thanksgiving y’all!!! Such words are dominating Twitter at the present time. We haven’t seen the like of it since Balloon Boy didn’t fly. Even that naughty Britney girl is having a day off from following people. Oh hang, no she’s not.

3. He’s over the 40…the 30…the 20…no one’s going to catch him! Touchdown! That’s right, the football is on. And it’s a Thursday. Everyone knows the football (the kind you use your hands to play) is a Sunday and Monday night sport, so playing it on a Thursday must mean it’s a special day. We liken it to the Boxing Day Test Match – a much more delightful event that doesn’t include spiking.

4. Phone in now. If you’ve been listening to Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 2 this week, you’ll know he has been celebrating Thanksgiving by getting people to call in and tell him what they are thankful for. I have no idea why he’s doing this. Simon Mayo is not American. Neither are his listeners. But anyway, if Britain’s most popular radio station is celebrating it, it must be big. Though incredibly frustrating for someone like me who very much doubts that American DJs ask people to call in on St. George’s Day and tell the nation about the last time they fought off a dragon.

5. The one with the Thanksgiving. Yes, in at number five is the ever popular sitcom Friends. Every sixth episode of Friends features Thanksgiving. E4 are almost certainly showing one of them right now.

6. Another slice? We all know that Americans eat everything, but Pumpkin Pie? Seriously? That is some commitment. Especially when you consider that just four weeks earlier, the pumpkins had been used for Halloween. It’s full of molten wax and wicks and all sorts.

7. Oranges. It’s bad enough that Americans have swapped perfectly acceptable English words for their own made up nonsense. Pavement for sidewalk. Trousers for pants. Boot for trunk. But at least they kind of make sense. On Thanksgiving though, logic apparently goes out of the window and any old word is perfectly fine. ‘Orange’ instead of ‘aren’t’ for example. What is that about? And why is it funny to some checkout girl called Rose? Only in America. Over to you Mr. Hanks.

November 26, 2009