After just over a week of Premiership action being back it seems the impatient cloud that hovers over the humble football fan is threatening to burst and rain over us once more. As much as everyone wanted football back, including me, it seems people cannot wait for the results of the season to be published like a great big (and impossible) spoiler.
Explain? Ok. Shut up at the back.
Before a season starts, various pundits and ‘experts’ cast their views and opinions over each squad in any given competition. Sometimes even fans get to take part in this, but ever since Dave Mason- the Spurs representative for The Observer newspaper- predicted them to win the league back in 2007-08 the editorial hierarchy have rightly thought differently and just asked for a vague guess. ‘Reckon you’ll get relegated?’ they would ask. ‘No. I think we’ll be safe’ is the reply from MANUTDDABEST. See? The perfect mix of respect for one’s opinion and faceless enough for people to pretend they aren’t mocking a complete tard.
But when the season starts up we are subject to the same twists and turns and unexpecteds (now officially a word) that we are brought every season before and will be every season in the future. Burnley have 6 points on the board, Arsenal haven’t capitulated after the loss of two footballing humans- because that is all they are, just humans, not the Official Chance of Winning a Trophy representatives of Arsenal- and Man City have not blitzed the league and bought everyone else’s opening day points for nearly £2bn and already gone 23 points clear after 3 games.
Instead, new assumptions are being made. And if we are to believe the media and the ‘experts’, this is what we can conclude from this season:
Tottenham are and probably always have been a top 4 club, but it’s for definite this time. Stop laughing. It is. Mark Lawrenson says so. Joleon Lescott’s impending transfer will start a chain reaction of defender transfers which will eventually see Anthony Gardner move to Real Madrid. Hull bought him, so why wouldn’t anyone else? Arsenal have never even heard of Kolo Toure and rather like this new bloke called Vermaelen they have at the back. Ade-what? Nope, never heard of him. Hull will go down because they have lost 2 games, the idiots. Burnley will stay up because they have won 2 games, the genius’s. Manchester United will never, ever, ever replace Carlos Tevez, their official bench warmer, nor will they replace Ronaldo, which is quite obviously evident on the displays of their new signing Antonio Valencia, and the way some are treating the winger at the moment is not AT ALL patronising because it’s a big club and he’s an incy-wincy bit too small a fish to fill the boots of his predecessor. Liverpool are currently missing Xabi Alonso so much that after just 2 games in the league they have told Lucas to grow a beard and learn to pass to an ant’s right foot with perfect precision or don’t bother coming back. Also, essentially the same team and tactics that nearly brought them the league last year will definitely not work this year and we could be seeing the demise of Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres and Rafa Benitez, ultimately culminating in a mass suicide if they lose to West Ham away. Sunderland’s new strike partnership of Kenwyne Jones and Darren Bent is the best thing that has ever been created or indeed seen at the Stadium of Light since Niall Quinn and Kevin Phillips produced the original ‘big man, little man’ duo that brought them oh so much success in 8th place many seasons ago.
It’s only a week old.
23 August 2009
10 August 2009
Flog - Patron Saint of Pretty Pixels
First off, let me explain something.
If- and it’s a big if- you have been wondering what has happened to Flog recently, then blame Goodman’s and Sony respectively. Why? Because it’s better you bombard Goodman’s first as Sony would boil you alive within seconds of your complaint hitting the doormat, granted, but more because the combination of two of their products has transformed my life.
That’s quite a statement, considering just finding a dead toad in the street would stir such emotion within me as well, such is the lack of substance in my every day activity. However, just over a week ago, everything changed. FOREVER.
Sony brought out the Playstation 3 (if my peers’ sentiments are to be believed) thirty five years ago, making my purchase of said product such a non-event that it makes the dead toad look like Watergate. Still, it meant a lot to me, as it was the first real gadget I had bought with my own money. My own, hard earned, watermarked, Queen-faced cash being spent on a shiny brick that plays pretty lights and sounds. That, and a massive fuck-off television that allowed me to experience the full excitement.
So of course, I got FIFA 09, a game so infuriatingly addictive it ranks somewhere between cocaine and Hollyoaks in the addictiveness table. That table doesn’t exist by the way, in case you were anticipating checking it out after reading this to see whereabouts ‘sitting in your underwear on your day off’ came. It’s not real. So 9th,
I’ve played a lot of FIFA, since around 1999 in fact when John Motson provided the commentary with the irritatingly realistic/realistically irritating Mark Lawrenson and the baffling voice of Chris Waddle who always sounded like he had a sock in his mouth. Since then, Clive has come and gone, as well as Ally McCoist, and we now have the excellent Martin Tyler and Andy Gray partnership. Look kids! It’s just like watching Sky Sports but this time you control the little men! Or words to that effect.
My favourite feature on the new FIFA is the improved online play which not only gives you the chance to play people from across the globe but also gives you yet another reason to give up on life completely, usually after being beaten by a 10 year old Israeli child who has had the game before it even touched the shelves. It’s a horrible situation to be in, knowing someone somewhere is literally laughing at you trying to pass an electronic football, but as I’ve said in a previous edition…it’s not real. But damn is it close.
So along with the new Sony With-hell-to-life-station 3 I was treated to a viewing delight on the huge, high definition television to watch in between the occasions that I’ve smashed the controller over my headboard.
It is truly stunning. Flicking through channels, I found Sky Sports News was part of the package I had bought, and after cleaning up the egg-o-plasm that had shot out in the excitement, I settled down to watch some pre-season.
Football, in HD, is outrageously brilliant.
You see every blade of grass, every roll of the ball, every sideways pass Michael Carrick plays in perfectly defined pixels. Every time Jermaine Jenas loses the ball- you see it as If it happened in front of you. Every chance Cameron Jerome misses happens as if you were a team mate on the pitch, throttling him yourself. It’s a work of art, and I take it all back about not caring about HD television. I do. I care a lot. In fact I may ask to become patron saint of HD. Saint Tom of Pretty Pixels. Sold.
So that, children, is why.
If- and it’s a big if- you have been wondering what has happened to Flog recently, then blame Goodman’s and Sony respectively. Why? Because it’s better you bombard Goodman’s first as Sony would boil you alive within seconds of your complaint hitting the doormat, granted, but more because the combination of two of their products has transformed my life.
That’s quite a statement, considering just finding a dead toad in the street would stir such emotion within me as well, such is the lack of substance in my every day activity. However, just over a week ago, everything changed. FOREVER.
Sony brought out the Playstation 3 (if my peers’ sentiments are to be believed) thirty five years ago, making my purchase of said product such a non-event that it makes the dead toad look like Watergate. Still, it meant a lot to me, as it was the first real gadget I had bought with my own money. My own, hard earned, watermarked, Queen-faced cash being spent on a shiny brick that plays pretty lights and sounds. That, and a massive fuck-off television that allowed me to experience the full excitement.
So of course, I got FIFA 09, a game so infuriatingly addictive it ranks somewhere between cocaine and Hollyoaks in the addictiveness table. That table doesn’t exist by the way, in case you were anticipating checking it out after reading this to see whereabouts ‘sitting in your underwear on your day off’ came. It’s not real. So 9th,
I’ve played a lot of FIFA, since around 1999 in fact when John Motson provided the commentary with the irritatingly realistic/realistically irritating Mark Lawrenson and the baffling voice of Chris Waddle who always sounded like he had a sock in his mouth. Since then, Clive has come and gone, as well as Ally McCoist, and we now have the excellent Martin Tyler and Andy Gray partnership. Look kids! It’s just like watching Sky Sports but this time you control the little men! Or words to that effect.
My favourite feature on the new FIFA is the improved online play which not only gives you the chance to play people from across the globe but also gives you yet another reason to give up on life completely, usually after being beaten by a 10 year old Israeli child who has had the game before it even touched the shelves. It’s a horrible situation to be in, knowing someone somewhere is literally laughing at you trying to pass an electronic football, but as I’ve said in a previous edition…it’s not real. But damn is it close.
So along with the new Sony With-hell-to-life-station 3 I was treated to a viewing delight on the huge, high definition television to watch in between the occasions that I’ve smashed the controller over my headboard.
It is truly stunning. Flicking through channels, I found Sky Sports News was part of the package I had bought, and after cleaning up the egg-o-plasm that had shot out in the excitement, I settled down to watch some pre-season.
Football, in HD, is outrageously brilliant.
You see every blade of grass, every roll of the ball, every sideways pass Michael Carrick plays in perfectly defined pixels. Every time Jermaine Jenas loses the ball- you see it as If it happened in front of you. Every chance Cameron Jerome misses happens as if you were a team mate on the pitch, throttling him yourself. It’s a work of art, and I take it all back about not caring about HD television. I do. I care a lot. In fact I may ask to become patron saint of HD. Saint Tom of Pretty Pixels. Sold.
So that, children, is why.
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