Sunday 4 April 2010

Whacked

This (rather bizarre) image taken from Sport-Ro.

Some time since my last post, which can partly be put down to being busy, partly to being lazy, and partly to lacking inspiration. To make up for it, I plan to do something I've never done before and post two entries today, laid out as it is like some magnificent blank canvas ahead of me.

What else could I write about today? I ask you. I was musing before the game on Burnley being the spiritual home of the BNP, and though this probably isn't entirely fair, given that Nick Griffin is sequestered in Shropshire, and that I know full well that this particular breed of English-ness (let's face it, they call themselves the British National Party, but with the exception of Rangers fans, I bet they're not too enamoured of Jocks and Taffs) has a following the length and breadth of the land - sad to say. However, there is something appropriately grim about the place (sorry, uncle Terry, I know you're a claret & blue man, but I just can't help it) which suits the Nazi bully boys.



It was with some trepidation that I approached the kick-off time in Doyle's tavern, given how well other results had gone earlier in the day, as I am of course fully prepared for City to lay on a fiasco for their fans just when they need a fillip the most. But it was not - as we are all now aware - to be. I have been subjected to mild doses of corporal punishment in my life (I received two whacks with a slipper on one occasion and a lacing from Harry's Mighty Swiper on another. The injustice of the latter will live me with me evermore, but the former was really nowhere near as bad as the anticipation of it. And please don't infer from that that I somehow derive erotic pleasure from physical censure, although I have nothing against those who do. I just can't understand it. Pain, humiliation and - for that matter - bodily excreta do not press any sexual buttons for me) but have never taken the proverbial six of the best. I really did feel for Brian Laws yesterday, until it began to seem a real possibility that the game would be called off due to a waterlogged pitch, after which the usual 'don't fucking blow this' thoughts were uppermost in my mind. It struck me as well that the pathetic fallacy seems to have been contributing to the game again, just as it did when Steve McClaren shot his load at Wembley all those millennia ago.

Image taken from the Observer.

Yet we got through (virtually) unscathed by one of the worst teams surely to kick a ball in the Premier League and have made a healthy contribution to the goal difference account as well. Onwards and upwards!

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