Money Shuffle

I wish I could fall out of love with football. Actually, I think I did fall out of love with football years ago, but it’s a habit I can’t quite give up; it’s a relationship I can’t quite walk away from. I am like a beaten dog that runs up to his master every time the door goes, only to once again suffer the disappointment and indignity of a boot up the arse.

Liverpool fans did not want Torres to go, because they love him so, but, go he did, and there was weeping and wailing and burning of shirts. He is a traitor, the worst kind of traitor a dirty foreign bastard traitor. Andy Carroll, who seems like such a lovely young man, left Newcastle to go to Liverpool. The Liverpool fans will never take to him because, clearly, he is a traitor, not as bad as Torres, obviously, because he is English, but a traitor, nonetheless. Similarly, Suaraez is a traitor, Charlie Adam is a failed traitor.

The fans, and some of the managers, show a very warped moral compass, and it is this that irks, rather than the daft fees. We are all entitled to be disappointed when a favourite player leaves………….I was gutted when Jimmy Greenhoff left Blues all those years ago, but it was a lesson learned………….they are all mercenary, they don’t love our club like we do, and even if they do, the club will get rid of them anyway. It was an early, salutary lesson; don’t cry over spilt milk, or you will spend the rest of your miserable life weeping huge buckets. 

Fans no longer seem able to accept that players inevitably move on, and they feel the need to parade their grief like so many Diana morons. They go to the ground, for fucks sake. To the ground! Why? Why do they go the ground? We know why they go to the ground; they go to the ground because Sky parks itself at the ground We then have the unedifying spectacle of seeing some berk of a Sky presenter, no doubt on secondment from an estate agents, talk utter drivel while a load of people with learning difficulties gurn behind him. Of all the crimes that Sky has committed against football, this is surely the greatest…….allowing the unemployable license to cavort all day and all night on our TV screens.

Which  brings me on to Nicky Campbell. I rarely listen to him, but some times, if I have been listening to the football the night before, I hear him by accident. I have a problem with 5live generally, it seems to be dumbing down at  a rate of knots and with it’s endless trails for its own programmes and the moronic beats which accompany them, it is like listening to a commercial station,

Anyway, at some early morning hour yesterday he was interviewing a protester from Tahrir square. This would have been soon after a day and night of violence, during which peaceful protesters were attacked consistently by a small army of thugs, no doubt assembled form the desperate and decaying state apparatus. Shots had been fired. People had been killed. The people in the square have shown remarkable courage. Campbell goaded the woman. He was desperately trying to get  her to admit to a liking for extreme Islamism. 

Now, I know nothing about Egypt, apart from what I have read this week. All that I have read indicates that Egypt is fairly secular and that the religious elements in the country don’t tend to be of the extreme variety. No doubt there are extremists, but in the circumstances, that hardly seem to be the point. Campbell was being a prize prick and doing what he is best at, petty, childish, point scoring. The story in Egypt is the scale of the uprising, the peaceful uprising, not militant Islam.  

What happens next in Egypt is an important issue, and it is legitimate to discuss it. It is even legitimate for Campbell to discuss it, but not with a woman who was clearly distressed and frightened, having endured a night of extreme terror and violence. Imagine being in that square, all night, in the dark, no home comforts, no toilet, no food, no possibility of sleep; rocks and petrol bombs raining down for hour after hour, shots having been fired. Imagine experiencing that, and imagine that the BBC asks you to come on the air and tell your story, and you have to put up with the idiot Campbell giving a masterclass in how to be a snide wanker. 

The new James Lee Burke. I am persisting, and I think it is better than some of his recent efforts, and, as ever, by God, he keeps you turning the pages, but, Jesus, I am having an increasingly hard time tolerating his overblown prose. He seems to be knocking out a book every year; I think he should take a couple of years off, recharge his batteries, then come back and knock us all out.

Blues have West Ham again on Sunday. Should be a laugh. I predict that we will moida da bums.