Since my last epistle Woolwich have visited something of a happy hunting ground, the Sports Direct Big Fat Lad Howay Man Toon Time St. James Park Comedy Arena. Do you know the place? The one with the famous atmosphere that mysteriously seems to evaporate when the buggers go a goal down, or even without a goal? There’s nothing like the atmosphere at St. James’s, a fat man with OOR MAM tattooed on his distended belly will tell you. Well that’s odd, because having been there, in the somewhat secluded upper arse end of the stadium where they deposit the away chaps, it sounds very much like being at Norwich or Leicester or Tottenham Hotspur. Small clubs with fifty or so drunkards distributed evenly around the ground attempting to get people to sing with middling results.
I apologise for rudeness, Geordies, but I speak only the truth. The normal and expected pleasure of winning at this phoney bastion of soccer, the look on Alan Pardew’s face as the referee blows the silver snail* for the last time, was sadly denied us. Yet Mr. Carver, his replacement, has an agreeably peasantish visage and nonetheless provided a post-match visual joke.
It did seem, after oranges, that it was only Toon’s wanion that graced Arsenal with the three points. Brigadier Goring-Hildred, in the form of his life, had put the chaps two up with a brace of goals from set plays. The first from a zinging St. John Cousins free-kick, flicked on by Welé and expertly guided in via a rarely seen Stand-to-Attention** and then a delightful noggin-bobbler from a corner for his SEVENTEENTH of the season and his ninth in nine games. “Go and boil your head,” he says to Toon defender Mr. Michael Williamson as he nods it home. And he may well have had a hat-trick had not our Senegal Sir, Mr. Ramsara, not diverted a cross from his path.
How well The Brigadier links up with our buzzing little hornet, Whizzbang Saunders. Saunders is the kind of chap who likes to wear a pair of pince-nez when he plays. Not because he needs them, but because it enhances the sense that whilst he twists and turns like a dervish, he could quite easily whip out a volume of Kipling mid-sprint and still not lose the ball. Yoicks! When he gets that ball the charge in the air is as if conjured by that fiendishly clever yankee, Mr. Tesla himself.
Mr. Welé, so brutish and powerful. Freed from the chains of Newton Heath Home for Lunatics, is quite the revelation. Gardyloo, I say to opposing defenders, for here is a coal-fired battering ram of a player, and express train, a Brazilian express. You will be watching him move, you will blink, and he will be on yonside of you haring down on goal like an amphetamine infantryman after a St George’s Cross.
Second half the Humbugs were much improved, which was hardly surprising considering their rotten first half performance. Mr. Cabella suddenly remembered he was a professional foot-baller and began asking serious questions, such as who was the daughter of Keikobad, king of the spirits? (The Woman without a Shadow (referring to the Hugo von Hofmannsthal/Richard Strauss opera) and also, why is your defence still a tad iffy on occasion? To which the answer is a bit of a shrug and a point of the finger toward Whizzbang Saunders.
Wonderful to see Jonas Gutierrez back in action. I bestow upon him that rarest of honours, a Gentleman’s Name, and he shall forthwith be known as Johnny Garlinge. Have you checked your taters recently by the way? Why not do it now? More details here but essentially you hold your swinger sack in the palms of your hands so that the thumbs and fingers of both hands are free to feel your chuckles. Every man jack of you should do it.
All this talk of genitals brings me finally to the matter of Harold Kane, currently swinking away up front for Spurs and now gold help us England. This one-season wonder from Middlesex, who is this week laying hands on the sick and curing chronic diseases just by glancing at the afflicted with this strange, sinister grin. Mr. Shearer, over-rated striker for the aforementioned Humbugs, among others, has said that Harold Kane is a bit like him. This is true, in that a) they both played for small clubs – in Shearer’s case, Southampton, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United and in Kane’s case Tottenham Hotspur. How sad for Mr. Shearer that he was doomed to play for these minnows for his entire career. We only hope that a similar fate does not await Mr. Kane, for there are clubs much bigger than Spurs who would snap him up – Everton, Hull or QPR for example. We wish him (not very) well.
And so to the interlull. This evening England will struggle for a narrow victory over the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in their efforts to get to the European Championships for further humiliation. I suggest to the Football Association withdrawal from all foreign competitions and the establishment of the Empire Cup. Yet I think we would fail to win even that. Roll on April 4th and the visit of Mr. Rodger’s Frauds.
Toodle Pip!
* The referee’s whistle
** A kneed goal
