Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? One often turns to the sage words of Walrus-toothed troubadour Mr. Mercury, who seems to encapsulate the strange emotions following the resumption of Proper Football after the dread Interlull. These enforced doldrums are welcomed only by fans of the smaller clubs of these isles who do not get to see players of high calibre every week, so to fans of Burnley or Accrington Stanley or Rotherham or Nottingham Forest, this hiatus, these doldrums do not matter a jot.
But to us, the princelings of the Premier League, they are an aberration and the Football Association should be prosecuted under the United Nations Convention against Torture. Science tells us that Interlulls cannot be measured in normal units of time; just as dog years are said to be the equivalent to seven human years, so an Interlull of two weeks is the equivalent of two months.
Yet eventually the torment ended with a pleasing, efficient and welcome win against the barcodes of the North. Heretofore, this would not have been a routine fixture. The latter years of Mr. Windsor’s tenure were peppered liberally with routine fixtures turned into sphincter-clenchingly nervous draws or losses. It seems that there is a new efficiency and steeliness to the chaps, a greater emphasis on game management, and a general reluctance to press the self-destruct button quite so happily. And for this Mr. Emery should be commended.
As to the match itself, Mr. Soccer Tits often gives the highly pleasing impression of being a thug of the first order. It has been a long time since we had such a traditional centre-half, a player who would stick out like a stool in a soup bowl in any other position on the pitch. It was for this reason that Mr. Anthony Taylor, the Wythenshawe Magoo, ruled Mr. Ramsara’s twelfth minute goal out; he simply saw Soccer Tits near Florian Lejeune and assumed that a foul had been committed.
It is very pleasing to see Mr. Maitland-Niles making the wing-back position his own, swinking up and down the pitch and getting better with every game. We would be in a very different predicament if Mr. Stephen Lightstone had been playing. It is extremely clear that his loan spell has been a complete misjudgement from start to finish. The 54-year-old right back is a spent egg and should be dispensed with immediately.
To Mr. O’Bannon then, via the Spanish Inquisition, a system of torture intended primarily to identify heretics and maintain Catholic orthodoxy in 15th century Spain. Suspected heretics were tormented until they confessed, using such methods as the garrucha, the toca and the potro. The first degree of torture consisted of showing the victim the instruments of torture; the inquisitors understood that their best weapon was terror, and often it was enough to extract a confession without bothering to heat up the irons. In the case of Arsenal v Newcastle, the instrument of torture was our striker Mr. O’Bannon, whose mere stripping of his tracksuit was enough to inspire a tactical retreat from Newcastle who were beginning to settle into a period of attacking. We had shown them the instruments and they surrendered.
Mr. Orwell has perhaps been the most enjoyably transformed player this season. Plainly there was a problem between he and Mr. Emery, namely that Mr. Emery doesn’t care if you have the breath-taking skill of the gods if you don’t apply yourself physically, and I think we can all agree that Mr. Emery’s tactic of goat testes xenotransplantation has been a roaring success. Yes, I have it on very good authority that Mr. Orwell has been the kind recipient of a pair of goat bollocks from a specimen named ‘Beardy’ from a farm near London Colney. This is why we now see a previously timid Mr. Orwell flying into aerial and earthbound challenges like a horny goat. It is because he practically is one.
We were ten points behind Tottenham at the start of February but this temporarily took us two points clear of them with seven games remaining. I’m not sure if you noticed, but Spurs have had something of a vulgar ‘remodelling’ of their ground.
We wish them all the best and look forward to their very first sell-out game.
