TV VIEW: IT COULD be that we were rugby-ed out the last couple of weeks, left pining for the flawlessly roundy ball instead of the misshapen oval one, but come yesterday evening we felt we might have overdone it a bit.
By then we'd watched Aston Villa v Chelsea, Arsenal v Sunderland, Manchester United v Blackburn, Barcelona v Espanyol, Fulham v West Brom and Newcastle v Everton in the space of not many hours, and Premier Soccer Saturday, Match of the Dayand Goals on Sundaytoo, lest we'd missed anything the first time around.
Which we hadn’t because, to be brutal about it, there wasn’t a whole lot to miss.
By the end of it we thought of West Brom manager Tony Mowbray’s cutting words last week when he said: “If the experts sitting on the sofas were good enough, they would all be doing this job themselves.”
We took this barb quite personally, to be honest.
And that’s the thing; after watching that many games, and having led Inverness Caledonian Thistle to the Champions League final on Football Manager 2006, where we lost to a last-minute penalty to Real Madrid (Jock McDougall was cruelly adjudged to have handled Raul’s banana kick), we feel significantly more than qualified to do this management job ourselves.
True, if we’d got through to Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon, like “Steve Staunton” did in that hoax FM104 call, we’d probably have asked the same questions about the vacant, post-Hiddink managerial position at Stamford Bridge: “If I get the job will I be getting me own tracksuit and that, like? All the gear with me name on it, like?”
But just because the perks tickle our fancy doesn’t mean we’re not qualified for the gig.
But then we read on and realised Tony was having a go at the telly pundits, and not ourselves, so we relaxed the head, as the young people say.
We hope, though, that he wasn’t targeting Pat Dolan on Setanta because, try as we might, we cannot but love him. His double-act with Paul Dempsey, of a Saturday afternoon, is difficult to describe. But think Morecambe and Wise, Beavis and Butthead, Ant and Dec and Bo and Luke from the Dukes of Hazzard and you’re almost there.
Pat is not a man who calls a spade “a tool with a sharp-edged, typically rectangular, metal blade and a long handle, used for digging or cutting earth, sand, turf, etc”. He opts, instead, to call it what it is: a spade. And that’s why we’re inclined to love him.
Paul, on the other hand, is a man prone to describing, say, a 0-0 cup draw between Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Cowdenbeath as “exhilarating”, to which Pat, invariably, will respond: “No Paul, it was s**t.”
Arsenal’s Tomas Rosicky? Spotted in the crowd during Setanta’s coverage of Arsenal v Sunderland on Saturday. Bless him, he’s been plagued by injuries the past year. You’d have to feel sorry for him, wouldn’t you, Pat?
“He’s still alive?!!? A cross between Shergar and Lord Lucan! He last played a year ago! He’s always four weeks away from fitness!”
Paul paused for an ad break.
Manchester United v Blackburn. Later that night Jonathan Ross asked Manchester City diehard Jason Manford for his thoughts on United fans.
“They’re like rats, you’re never more than three metres away from one,” he said.
Harsh, but probably true.
Edwin “Clean Sheet” van der Sar was notable by his absence from the United team. “Tomasz Kuszczak? Is that a risk?” the Setanta man asked Tim Sherwood.
“Na, no risk, he’ll have very little to do today,” he said, and with that Tomasz plucked the ball from the back of his net, after Nani had exquisitely laid on a Blackburn goal.
The good Ronaldo, incidentally, scored a blinding goal; the insufferable Ronaldo dived in an attempt to win a penalty. The insufferable outweighs the good: may Alcatraz be reopened so that he can be incarcerated there.
Barcelona v Espanyol. We once ambled past the Olympic stadium in Barcelona and noted that a not-well-attended event was taking place inside. “An egg and spoon race?” we asked.
“Na, an Espanyol home game,” we were told.
Espanyol against the mighty Barca? Paul Jewell – somewhat inexplicably a Sky Sports’ La Liga pundit – chuckled at the prospects of Barcelona being troubled by their pesky neighbours. “I don’t think they’ll be fearful of Espanyol scoring,” he said, reasonably enough, at half-time.
Second half? The pesky neighbours scored twice, and won 2-1 at the Nou Camp/Camp Nou.
Newcastle v Everton. We don’t want to talk about it.
Mind you, after learning on Tubridy that George Hook’s ideal woman is Pamela Anderson and his “guilty pleasure(s)” are Pamela Anderson’s “boobs”, which left us with an image of him bouncing down a Californian beach, David Hasselhoff-style, towards his true love, we’ll still opt for the flawlessly roundy ball over the misshapen oval one, despite our weekend woes.
