february 28th
After a day of birthday celebrations yesterday, spoiled only by seeing that noxious twerp Mourinho win something, I’m feeling a little delicate today so keep the noise down, please.
Not much happening this morning really. Robert Pires says he’s lucky that David Prutton’s horror tackle didn’t break his leg. He is lucky but the intent to injure a player and deliberateness of that tackle will be overlooked because of the ref pushing antics. If the FA are really serious about getting rid of violent conduct in the game they need to highlight this. If he hadn’t pushed the ref he’d be serving a one match ban for two yellow cards even though he could have seriously injured both Flamini and Pires (the extent of his injury won’t be fully known until a second x-ray is taken, AW thinks it’s just a bad sprain though). It just shows again how flawed the system is when Bergkamp and Reyes are serving three match bans for very little. I think this is the point that this bloke in the Independent was trying to make but didn’t quite clarify.
Tomorrow night sees the FA Cup replay against Sheffield United. Thierry will continue up front and we should see Jeremie Aliadiere make the team as he’s about the only other senior forward we have left. There’ll be some shuffling in midfield too, no doubt, with Pires out Freddie is the obvious replacement on the left but who’ll play right? Maybe Ryan Smith will get a go so Freddie can stay on the right or one of Eboue, Lauren or Cesc could play there at a push. It’ll be a young bench though, that’s for sure. No doubt we’ll get more on this as the day goes on. Update: Thanks to Paul for reminding me of a certain Gael Clichy who can play left midfield. Don’t know how I forgot him.
Last week I gave you the chance to win this cool t-shirt from our pals at harderthansatan.com. I asked you ‘In the 97-98 season Dennis was banned for three games for elbowing which ginger Northern Irish West Ham player in the gob? ‘
The answer was, of course, Steve Lomas, a fine elbow it was too and the Random Number Generator chose James Warrener as the winner. I’ll be in touch with you to get your address and so on. Thanks to all of you who entered and there’ll be more giveaways soon.
It’s snowing in Barcelona this morning. How weird.
