Chicken Kiev jokes!

I guess it had to be done. Some newspaper just had to print a Chicken Kiev headline and today the winner is the Daily Mail. clap… clap… clap…

A quick bit of housekeeping, I mentioned yesterday that the match starts at 11am PST, which is wrong. The match actually kicks off at 11:45am PST but the Shitanta pre-game show starts at 11am. Unless you’re in to puppets and Muppets I’d skip the pre-game and show up at the kickoff. Which is 11:45am PST. 11:45.

Pretty much right after I published yesterday the boss named his squad and the only change from the team that drubbed Rovers 4-0 is that Carlos Vela is in and Kieran Gibbs is out. That means no Nasri or Silvestre tonight, which is a shame, I really enjoy watching Nasri and am kind of excited to see what Silvestre can offer. The squad the boss named also means that Eboue has miraculously recovered after being stretchered off on Saturday.

Since I get this question all the time, let me just say that this is one of the reasons I dislike Eboue. He’s a faker of the worst sort who, like the boy who cried wolf, is now raising his fakery to ever higher levels in order to make the “injury” look real. The tackle that saw him stretchered off did look as if he suffered a blow to the back of his knee, which we all know is painful, but unless the physio detects some kind of rupture of the ligaments why can’t he get up and walk off the pitch himself? The only thing I can imagine is that Eboue played the “precaution” card and said he didn’t want to take any chances. (eye roll)

The good news is that these antics are drawing close to their zenith with his stretchering off on Saturday. In order to fool any of us again, he’ll need a medivac chopper to descend on the pitch and a team of doctors to perform “precautionary” field surgery before airlifting him to the nearest hospital. Regardless, he should get the starting nod today, which means that the lineup is unlikely to change from Saturday.

Almunia
Sagna     Toure     Gallas     Clichy
Eboue     Denilson     Fabregas     Walcott
Adebayor     van Persie

Meanwhile the boss has said that Dynamo Kyiv is the kind of team that can score a lot of goals and that we need to defend well… oh god. The facts are that we’ve been lucky with our defending as of late. Yes, the sheets are clean, but after the game the underwear are not. I am hoping for another clean sheet today and this time on the back of a really convincing defensive performance, rather than relying on the opposition’s profligacy in front of goal.

Up front, Adebayor’s desire to win burns with the intensity of a thousand suns, or something.  Just score goals big fella, just score goals. This “scoring” just so happens to be my winning strategery for the day: Arsenal need to score goals and the more, the merrier. So, come on you big oaf, “balge the auld ernion bag.”

Manchester United, Sponsored by the American Taxpayer

When the “small government” conservatives who are ruining (oh I mean, “running” e.d.) this country announced on Monday that they would be bailing out AIG I wondered what would happen to Manchester United, after all they are getting something like $122m from AIG to prance around in their logo. But then I realized… oh nevermind they will just get some other business to pony up $100m to sponsor their shirts.

It is fundamentally disgusting to me though that the American Taxpayer is bailing these companies out and if I were in charge, the first thing I would do is cancel AIG’s world-wide sponsorships, all of them.  Make Man U sue the US Government for breech of contract, then we could invade Manchester, set up a puppet government and start drilling for oil.

John Terry Tackle, More Fallout

This whole thing is about to make my head explode. First, JT performs a tackle that would make an American Football coach proud of his strong safety. For which he is rightly sent off, because if it isn’t “serious foul play” (a red card) to ARM TACKLE your opponent then what the hell is a red card? Then, he and the rest of the team do their normal Chelsea thing and surround the referee and berate him for the decision, which was supposed to have been stamped out this year. THEN… JT takes his sweet time leaving the pitch while arguing with the fourth official and abusing the fans.

All of those above things could have and, given what they did to Aliadiere last year, should have resulted in at least a three match ban if not a 4-5 match ban (for a frivolous appeal and for failing to leave the pitch in an orderly fashion). This should have been the FA’s chance to really show the footballing world what they meant by this new “respect” campaign.

Instead Chelsea, as I predicted, win the appeal because the FA doesn’t actually give two f*cks about the “respect” campaign. Worse still, Mark Halsey (the referee who made the right decision against Terry) is being demoted. DEMOTED. For standing up for what he saw on the pitch, the referee is being demoted and will now referee in the 2nd division. Owch.

Basically, this decision means that the FA has instituted video replay for all matches and if you have the money to pay the extra fines that might amass from frivolous appeals you might as well appeal every single red card. Which is basically what Chelsea already do, cheat and then appeal.

It’s a sad day for English Football.

Right, now I have to go to work.  Cheers and let’s see a positive result from the Arsenal match today.  How about “Adebayor scores 13 goals?”

0 comments

  1. The menu in Kiev was not as good as expected, we drew 1-1.

    Found a new site, veetle.com which works in Mozilla after downloading a video player. Excellent video and audio quality. Apparently it’s out of Stanford University.

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