So, the time has come - or, at least, it will do in a few hours' time - for Sherriff Benitez and the showdown at the Anfield Alamo. Rafa's got his uniform on, silver star buffed up and shining brightly and top lip only slightly quivering, as he puts the final touches to the game plan that, he hopes, will be able to bring down Inter Milan tonight on Merseyside and potentially be the making or breaking of his job. Quite how he's going to mastermind beating an Inter Milan side which are serious tips for the Italian and Champion's League titles this season is anyone's guess but his, but if he goes out of the final trophy his side have a chance of winning this year, I sincerely doubt he'll be around to try again next year - they'll keep him on until the end of the season but that'll be that, as his performance thus far has in no way justified the £60m he's spent on players thus far; I think he'll have to win the Champion's League and win it emphatically to realistically keep his job.
Elsewhere in football, Richard Scudamore has been busy telling everyone who will listen that his plans for a 39th game played abroad are 'not a dead duck'. Am I going to be the one to have to tell him, or will you? With the way he looks like he's about to burst into tears, I just don't have the heart. Franz Beckenbauer has weighed in, but it looks like Richie Rich just isn't listening, even though Der Kaiser reckons that the Premier League going head to head with FIFA to make a quick buck could cost England the World Cup 2018 bid. Given the Premier League's sociopathic disregard for everyone else, I don't think that's going to stop them, but it will give the FA food for thought when they meet next week to potentially nix the idea before it even gets started. Fingers crossed, eh?
Dead duck? Surely not.
Oh, and Chris Coleman's just taken over at Coventry. Good luck, Cookie, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Premiership again soon. Fulham and that sour-faced cretin al Fayed were wrong to replace you with those boring cunts Sanchez and now Hodgson, and you can prove it by stuffing them twice next season on your march to the Premier League. Maybe after that you can take the Ricoh faithful to Nanjing to lose a relegation decider to Chelsea in the newly-instituted 39th round, then go and lay one on Scudamore's smug face. I'd like that.
In the real world (well, Wales), not another teen suicide has occurred in Bridgend, marking the 17th such suicide in the last year or so. Bloody hell, it's like the village in the Midsomer Murders, wouldn't you just fucking move? If 17 of my mates had topped themselves in the past year, I'd be out of there kicking and screaming before you could say "Black Parade". Maybe that's where MySpace UK's servers are located? Food for thought, I suppose, to inexplicably overuse a phrase. It would certainly explain the quite serious spate of "nobody loves me" going around the place. Maybe they should move to Okinawa, Japan, where people routinely live to over 100, which just goes to show that a diet of fresh fish and weekly battles with mutated undersea lizards does keep you fit and healthy.
Elsewhere, in a fantastic stamp of approval for airport security in the wake of terror alerts (oh fuck, I can't believe I just wrote that sort of sensationalist tripe myself, but moving on), Gatwick airport have managed to not notice that, for three years, there was a homeless man living in their south terminal. I expect if he'd had a beard or was slightly brown he'd be spotted right away, but no, three years, eating, showering, sleeping and generally living in an airport. I wonder what the staff thought when he wandered into the restaurant twice a day, every day, for his meals? "Fucking hell, for a smelly bloke, he doesn't half travel a lot"? More importantly, have you seen the prices of meals in airport restaurants? That's a lot of busking, that is, unless he was surviving on tiny complimentary packs of butter wrapped in cheap gold foil. Probably more nutritious for you than an £8 cardboard 'beef'burger with wilted lettuce and a dour waitress, anyway. Staying with airports, the Palestinians have been getting uppity again about the Met's refusal to arrest Israeli Major General Doron Almog when he went through Heathrow back in September 2005. Apparently he's guilty of destroying 50 Palestinian homes in Gaza in retaliation, campaigners admit, for a Palestinian attack on civilians. I'm sure you all know my opinion on this, but here it is again: If you don't like what the Israelis do in what is Israeli territory, fuck off out of it. Go and live somewhere else. If you hadn't been a bunch of insane baby-killing militants, they wouldn't have knocked your bloody house down. Piss off.
Anyway, while I seem to have segued into international politics, let's get a couple more stories out of the way before I move on. Cuban ruler Fidel Castro has announced his retirement from the leadership of his country, saying it's time to pass power on to younger rulers. Of course, as expected, George W. Bush quickly came out to announce that this should mark the start of a transition to democracy for Cuba, which we can only imagine really means something along the lines of 'resistance is futile'. Frankly, I'm tired of America's insistance on democracy at all costs; look at Iraq - they have democracy, of a sort. They might be at daily risk of being blown up by militants on one side or another, but at least they can vote. Haven't America got better things to be doing than taking petty snipes at Cuba? Oh wait, sorry, my mistake.
Speaking of American interference, in the Balkans, Kosovo, the 'state' created by America after the Bosnian war, has declared itself independent from it's parent Serbia, which has, quite justifiably, driven the Serbs into a frenzy. Russia are claiming that doing such is threatening to dangerously destabilise the region, and they're not wrong, seeing as the last time the Serbs got themselves all worked up, they had quite a good go at wiping Bosnia off the map until they got too big for their boots and had a pop at someone who actually had an army (namely Croatia). Hand grenades have already been thrown at various embassies, both in the Serbian capital Belgrade and the ethnic Serbian sector of the largest city in Kosovo, Pristina, which just about shows you the situation in the region - if Scotland declared independance from the rest of the UK tomorrow afternoon, there might be quite a few scraps in the border pubs, but I doubt anyone would start chucking explosives about. It's a dangerous time for the Balkan region as the Serbs continue to lose territory after Montenegro dissolved their partnership with Serbia in 2006, and with a hard-line nationalist movement growing in Serbia led by Radical Party leader and recently defeated Presidential candidate Tomislav Nikolic. Belgrade: Not somewhere to go for your holidays.
And finally, back in the UK, however much I wish it wasn't, we have the story of the worst excuse for a disgustingly perverted crime ever given. Mark Dixie, accused of murdering aspiring model Sally Anne Bowman, has made the morbid and bizarre excuse that he didn't murder her, he merely came across her body in a pool of blood on her driveway and had sex with her. He says he didn't know she was dead, and I don't know, maybe I believe him. I mean, I can see how that could happen - many's the time I've come across young models in the middle of the road in a viscous puddle of their own gore, and none of them have been dead. They've all just been laying there, quivering with anticipation, waiting to be seduced by some sort of necrophiliac rapist freak. Seriously, what are the chances of their being a murderer and a necrophiliac in the same place at the same time, outside of a Tobe Hooper movie? Poor attempt. Ten out of ten for creativity, but minus several million in the 'not making yourself look like some sort of extreme sexual deviant' category. Idiot.
Anyway, that's it for today. Football later.
Goodnight.
Elsewhere in football, Richard Scudamore has been busy telling everyone who will listen that his plans for a 39th game played abroad are 'not a dead duck'. Am I going to be the one to have to tell him, or will you? With the way he looks like he's about to burst into tears, I just don't have the heart. Franz Beckenbauer has weighed in, but it looks like Richie Rich just isn't listening, even though Der Kaiser reckons that the Premier League going head to head with FIFA to make a quick buck could cost England the World Cup 2018 bid. Given the Premier League's sociopathic disregard for everyone else, I don't think that's going to stop them, but it will give the FA food for thought when they meet next week to potentially nix the idea before it even gets started. Fingers crossed, eh?
Dead duck? Surely not.
Oh, and Chris Coleman's just taken over at Coventry. Good luck, Cookie, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Premiership again soon. Fulham and that sour-faced cretin al Fayed were wrong to replace you with those boring cunts Sanchez and now Hodgson, and you can prove it by stuffing them twice next season on your march to the Premier League. Maybe after that you can take the Ricoh faithful to Nanjing to lose a relegation decider to Chelsea in the newly-instituted 39th round, then go and lay one on Scudamore's smug face. I'd like that.
In the real world (well, Wales), not another teen suicide has occurred in Bridgend, marking the 17th such suicide in the last year or so. Bloody hell, it's like the village in the Midsomer Murders, wouldn't you just fucking move? If 17 of my mates had topped themselves in the past year, I'd be out of there kicking and screaming before you could say "Black Parade". Maybe that's where MySpace UK's servers are located? Food for thought, I suppose, to inexplicably overuse a phrase. It would certainly explain the quite serious spate of "nobody loves me" going around the place. Maybe they should move to Okinawa, Japan, where people routinely live to over 100, which just goes to show that a diet of fresh fish and weekly battles with mutated undersea lizards does keep you fit and healthy.
Elsewhere, in a fantastic stamp of approval for airport security in the wake of terror alerts (oh fuck, I can't believe I just wrote that sort of sensationalist tripe myself, but moving on), Gatwick airport have managed to not notice that, for three years, there was a homeless man living in their south terminal. I expect if he'd had a beard or was slightly brown he'd be spotted right away, but no, three years, eating, showering, sleeping and generally living in an airport. I wonder what the staff thought when he wandered into the restaurant twice a day, every day, for his meals? "Fucking hell, for a smelly bloke, he doesn't half travel a lot"? More importantly, have you seen the prices of meals in airport restaurants? That's a lot of busking, that is, unless he was surviving on tiny complimentary packs of butter wrapped in cheap gold foil. Probably more nutritious for you than an £8 cardboard 'beef'burger with wilted lettuce and a dour waitress, anyway. Staying with airports, the Palestinians have been getting uppity again about the Met's refusal to arrest Israeli Major General Doron Almog when he went through Heathrow back in September 2005. Apparently he's guilty of destroying 50 Palestinian homes in Gaza in retaliation, campaigners admit, for a Palestinian attack on civilians. I'm sure you all know my opinion on this, but here it is again: If you don't like what the Israelis do in what is Israeli territory, fuck off out of it. Go and live somewhere else. If you hadn't been a bunch of insane baby-killing militants, they wouldn't have knocked your bloody house down. Piss off.
Anyway, while I seem to have segued into international politics, let's get a couple more stories out of the way before I move on. Cuban ruler Fidel Castro has announced his retirement from the leadership of his country, saying it's time to pass power on to younger rulers. Of course, as expected, George W. Bush quickly came out to announce that this should mark the start of a transition to democracy for Cuba, which we can only imagine really means something along the lines of 'resistance is futile'. Frankly, I'm tired of America's insistance on democracy at all costs; look at Iraq - they have democracy, of a sort. They might be at daily risk of being blown up by militants on one side or another, but at least they can vote. Haven't America got better things to be doing than taking petty snipes at Cuba? Oh wait, sorry, my mistake.
Speaking of American interference, in the Balkans, Kosovo, the 'state' created by America after the Bosnian war, has declared itself independent from it's parent Serbia, which has, quite justifiably, driven the Serbs into a frenzy. Russia are claiming that doing such is threatening to dangerously destabilise the region, and they're not wrong, seeing as the last time the Serbs got themselves all worked up, they had quite a good go at wiping Bosnia off the map until they got too big for their boots and had a pop at someone who actually had an army (namely Croatia). Hand grenades have already been thrown at various embassies, both in the Serbian capital Belgrade and the ethnic Serbian sector of the largest city in Kosovo, Pristina, which just about shows you the situation in the region - if Scotland declared independance from the rest of the UK tomorrow afternoon, there might be quite a few scraps in the border pubs, but I doubt anyone would start chucking explosives about. It's a dangerous time for the Balkan region as the Serbs continue to lose territory after Montenegro dissolved their partnership with Serbia in 2006, and with a hard-line nationalist movement growing in Serbia led by Radical Party leader and recently defeated Presidential candidate Tomislav Nikolic. Belgrade: Not somewhere to go for your holidays.
And finally, back in the UK, however much I wish it wasn't, we have the story of the worst excuse for a disgustingly perverted crime ever given. Mark Dixie, accused of murdering aspiring model Sally Anne Bowman, has made the morbid and bizarre excuse that he didn't murder her, he merely came across her body in a pool of blood on her driveway and had sex with her. He says he didn't know she was dead, and I don't know, maybe I believe him. I mean, I can see how that could happen - many's the time I've come across young models in the middle of the road in a viscous puddle of their own gore, and none of them have been dead. They've all just been laying there, quivering with anticipation, waiting to be seduced by some sort of necrophiliac rapist freak. Seriously, what are the chances of their being a murderer and a necrophiliac in the same place at the same time, outside of a Tobe Hooper movie? Poor attempt. Ten out of ten for creativity, but minus several million in the 'not making yourself look like some sort of extreme sexual deviant' category. Idiot.
Anyway, that's it for today. Football later.
Goodnight.
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