Pre-race tension

Okay last chance to post this workaday week since we’re off at an industry awards show. Don’t worry we’re not nominated (but organising bizarrely) and any interruptions to the all day drinking even for a quick spurt would be about as welcome as an answer machine message from Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross.

Just a quick one then to preview this weekend’s big event – nope not the latest episode of the Standford wives – but Sunday’s big race which we’re looking forward to more than we can say.


Anyway we speak of course of Lewis’s triumphant ascension to the F1 title. He can’t screw it up two years in a row can he? Course not. There’s been a lot of talk of tactical races, keeping his foot off the gas and playing it safe and driving a 'safe' race.

Pure tosh of course Lewis is a pure born racer and any attempt to do things even slightly differently will take the edge off his natural advantage.

So here’s our piece of shit advice for the tuppence fuck all it’s worth. Put your foot down, qualify first and win it from the front.

Oh and don’t blow it! We'll be watching...

Indecent Proposal

And so to Tuesday and our contemplation of Cricket’s latest attempt to prostitute itself like a five quid hooker with Saturday’s forthcoming Stanford Twenty20 match between England and West Indies XIs.

In danger of making the over-the-top gaudiness of the IPL look classy and refined, Stanford’s winner takes all greed fest tag line ‘One night, one shot, $20 million’ also borrows a Highlander-style ‘There can be only one’ to add to its patent ridiculousness.

So what’s next? A live Kurgen-style beheading for the bowler who concedes the million dollar boundary? Why not? That’s bound to get the crowds in and seems tailor made for the attention span of a modern audience.

The Stanford series was supposed to be the ECB’s sweetener to distract the England players from the lure of the IPL in February. But now the whole cricket world’s in hock to India anyway (including both the Aussies and Sri Lanka), it’s become just another cash cow appetiser, before Freddie and KP etc. inevitably depart for Lalit land anyway.

Could it get any more ridiculous? Of course it could! How about Sir Allen allegedly ‘getting close to’ as the BBC put it (or ‘copping a feel of’ as we’d say) of some of the England players WAGs while the players themselves were busy out in the field on Sunday?

It’s cricket’s very own Indecent Proposal and just the kind of story to underline the game’s credibility as it goes galloping over the horizon in a welter of black bats and ridiculous pyjamas.

Famine to Feast

From famine to feast today as a weekend’s spurting action leaves us quite literally breathless (well it’s either that or all that crystal meth we’ve been smoking).

Everywhere you turned this weekend there was spurting goodness to appreciate, from Andy Murray retaining his tennis title, to Yank football at Wembley (a much underrated game in our humble...) or even the Scousers finally storming fortress Stamford Bridge to leave the title race wide open.

Yet amidst all this spurting headlines, easily the biggest story was Uncle Harry Redknapp who went to bed Portsmouth manager on Saturday and woke up as Spurs boss on Sunday morning.

Always one of the game’s more ahem colourful characters, Redknapp is nevertheless an intriguing appointment and certainly knows his managerial onions - the effect on the previously hapless Spurs was immediate as they conjured a 2-0 win over Bolton.

Only Southampton have survived such a poor start to the Premiership without going down but with Redknapp at the helm, you have to figure Spurs’ chances of pulling a Houdini have suddenly and dramatically increased.

Becks to Milano

Well there we desperate for a story like a crack whore scrabbling for pennies when up pops the boy David to rescue us from our pre-postural tension.

Beckham is the footballer (or ‘th’uh soccer bomb’ as our US brethren would have it) who just keeps on giving, providing more interest, sensation and sheer column inches than an Osama Bin Laden-Madonna love child.

So now Becks has packed his designer luggage and is off the old folks home at AC Milan where he’s signed a loan deal from January to April while the MLS shuts down for its winter slumber.

It’ll be a rare old time for the former England skipper, sitting around in a bath chair with the likes of Ronaldhino and the ever-green Paulo Maldini and swapping tales of the heady old days when they played for sheer enjoyment, weekly wage weren't a major contributor to the credit crunch and ordinary fans could still afford to go to a game.

Still Becks and Milan seem a perfect fit, both are more about style than substance nowadays, they’ll be plenty of shopping for Posh and it’ll certainly keep the old warhorse fit if Senor Fabio’s England continue to call for the last five minutes.

So hoorah for Becks, not only will it be good to catch the occasional glimpse of the world’s greatest deliverer of a ball, writing about his continuing adventures certainly makes work for our idle hands, which when you look at it in the cold harsh light of day, can only be a good thing.

The old order changeth?

A rare blast of cricket today in the bleak mid erm autumn, where a right of old shoeing for the Aussies results in them being on the wrong end of a 320-run spanking from India in the second test at Mohali.

Now normally we’d bow to no-one in our enjoyment of watching the Aussies squirm on the rack, but strangely we didn’t get as much pleasure out of the result as we thought we might.

Now India’s a tough place to tour and it’s a fool who bets the farm on any single result, even one as statistically massive as this, but we’re suddenly wondering if this signals the start of a shift in the game’s playing as well as its financial power base?

The sheep worriers are still a great side, but no team can survive simultaneously losing the best spin bowler in history as well as one of its finest pacemen and it looks as this might finally be starting to filter through into where it counts - out on the field.

There's still great players there: Ponting, Lee and Hussey, but there's plenty of new and emerging talents too and its not stuffed to the gills with the of champions of old.

The Aussies' dominance has been unchallenged for so long, it seems almost inconceivable that anyone else could take the number one slot, but this result indicates they might just be mortal after all and the first rays of the dawn of a new world order may just be peeping over the horizon.

Now if there’s one thing that cricketing history has taught us it’s that you write off the Aussies at your peril, but it makes the prospect of the Ashes next year seriously interesting.

Chinese Grand Prix: So boring it was exciting

And so to Sunday where we were up at the previously un-discovered hour of eight bells to catch the Chinese Grand Prix. Not ever really a natural environment for a sports hack (except to nab a couple of headache pills before going back to sleep), it’s a cold grey murky world at that time of the day, only enlivened by a warming cup of char with a decently sized snifter nestling in it.

Still, following last weekend’s dismal showing from Lewis in Japan, we felt we had to be there live to see the drama unfold and we weren’t disappointed.

We say drama, what we actually mean is procession and as a race, this was deeply deeply tedious stuff, with Master Hamilton making a perfect start, disappearing into the middle distance and giving the trailing Ferraris a huge metaphorical finger.

The victory was as tedious as it was inevitable, so boring it was perversely exciting, as Lewis simply ate up the laps and took the chequered flag by a distance.

Hamilton’s been (wrongly) criticised in the past (and even the past two weeks) for being too aggressive, too arrogant, too much of a risk taker, but they’re exactly the qualities which make him such a great racing driver.

However on this occasion he was just glad to be grey and we’re extremely happy he was made it that way.

Enger-land versus Belarus: post-match analysis

It’s our best ever start we’ve had to a competition and we don’t mean that tenner we’ve just spunked on lucky dips for tomorrow night’s Euro Millions.

Last night Minsk was the arena for another splendid showing from Senor Fabio’s new look ie. actually pretty good Enger-land as they negotiated a tough away fixture against technically tidy opposition, eventually putting Belarus to the sword 3-1.

The old England would have been lucky to scrape a draw in a game like this not even six months ago.

A decent start capped by Gerrard's virtuoso strike was marred by a deserved equaliser for Belarus, who played us off the park for perhaps 20 minutes to pull the scores level at half-time.

Senor Fabio continued to show he’s worth every one of the millions he’s paid and possibly even a few more by turning the game completely around in the second half. Don’t know what he puts in their half-time tea, or whether he gives them the hairdryer, but whatever it’s working.

Upping the work to deny Belarus time to weave their magic worked a treat, Heskey pounded the centre backs, Rooney’s on fire and hell even Wayne Bridge looked like he knew one end of a touchline from the other. Heartening stuff.

We’ve had more false starts than Ussain Bolt’s rivals, but finally, for long suffering Enger-land fans ottimismo is no longer an untranslatable word .

WAG-ging the finger

We were raking through the ashes today in a desperate attempt to find something interesting in the spurting firmament but fortunately - and not in the usual way - the ever dependable Rio came up with the goods.

Newly born statesman, stand in captain and first minister of Enger-land Rio has opined that the England camp was a ‘circus’ pre-Senor Fabio and that our last futile World Cup bid was sabotaged by the ‘whole WAG situation’.

Well no shit Sherlock, the WAGs or ‘slags with bags’ as some of the more uncharitable elements (like us) would have them, proved a big Baden Baden distraction for the tabs, but we’re not so sure they had such a big effect on anything other than the paper’s soaring circulations.

Rio differs of course saying ‘"People were worrying more about what other people were wearing and where they were going, rather than the team."

Well it’s an interesting point, but we see the WAGs more as a symptom, rather than a cause – and of course they’re well fit too innit.

We hope Senor Fabio has taken note and will rapidly introduce the traditional cold showers and a pre-game nookie bans to keep the lads ever hungry for our next glorious World Cup fail ...er attempt.

Japanese Grand Prix – post-race analysis....

And so to Tuesday and our post-race analysis of Sunday’s Japanese Grand Prix and once again the headlines tell their own story...

“Impatience ....Lewis is chucking it away ...just like last season ...needs a calmer head ...wilts under pressure...”

What utter crap. There’s little doubt Lewis could do with a dose of Schumacher’s icy calm running through his veins but he could also do with an even handed approach from the sport itself.

Is F1 simply massively biased towards Ferrari? Well to our admittedly jaundiced eye it seems immensely so. So let’s have a look at those race incidents in order.

Hamilton made an awful start and panicking tried to undertake Raikkonen into the first corner losing a load of places. Not great, but par for the course on turn one of any Grand Prix and simply not worthy of a penalty. Lewis gets a Drive Through.

So onto lap two and Massa deliberately rams the McLaren and couldn’t have hit it more amidships if he’d been driving a U-boat. Massa effectively takes his championship rival out of the race and deserves a points deduction for such blatant gamesmanship. What does he get? A simple Drive Through.

Finally and most conclusively later in the race Massa comes haring down the start finish straight and rams into the hapless Bourdais who’s blamelessly holding the inside line as he exits the pits. A clear cut case or apparently so, but instead it’s Bourdais who’s punished and Massa who picks up a bonus point on top of the one he’s already purloined.

What further tricks can F1 conjure up to help tilt Ferrari over the line to another undeserved championship? We’ll see 08.00am Sunday we guess.

Enger-land - the eternal dilemma

It’s probably only an England fan that could look at a 5-1 pasting of Borat’s brethren and see the down side, but alas even with Saturday’s spectacular scoreline still reverberating around our foreheads, all is not well in the state of Denmark this Monday lunchtime.

Sven, Steve Mclaren they both tried it to make it work, so we suppose Senor Fabio deserved his chance too, but surely Saturday’s game proved once and for all that Stephen Gerrard and Frank Lampard can’t be accommodated in the same midfield.

We have two world class players who play in exactly the same role, sure it’s an embarrassment of riches, but call it what you will, two does not go into one in this case and the blend of the team is suffering when they both play.

It’s an old cliché but the best players do not necessarily make the best team.

We’d probably give Stevie G the slight nod as the better all around player, but ‘Fat’ Frank played very well against Croatia and whoever he picks now, Senor Fabio has to choose one and leave the other warming the bench.

As for Ashley Cole’s mistake: good player but very difficult man to like.

We’d probably have booed him anyway.

The battle for Cricket's soul - part the umpteenth

The battle for cricket’s soul continues today with heartening news that the England versus West Indies Stanford sponsored pointless, tasteless, greed fest record breaking Twenty20 has run into trouble after a sponsorship dispute went the wrong way in the high court.

Listen carefully and you can almost hear the steady drip drip of our heart’s slowly bleeding.

FYI Sir Allen Stanford’s the US millionaire who out of the absolute goodness of his heart and love of a game (which he’d scarcely heard of beforehand) has stumped up a million dollars a man for a Twenty20 slog fest in the Caribbean in November.

In case you missed it the spectacle of Sir Al (as we like to think of him) flying in to Lord’s with a million bucks in a box was surely the least savoury thing since a sugar-coated kilo of sugar in a sugar wrapping.

Of course it’ll eventually be worked out, money doesn’t so much talk as scream at the top of its voice, but it’s sad to see the summer game bowing down before almighty mammon in such a and pointless way.

And you thought we hated the IPL? We’ve got a special bottle of vitriol mixed with bile in store for this one.

The UEFA Cup: A cut out n’ keep Guide

Ah the romance of the ...erm UEFA Cup. The losers consolation runners-up cup, used to be a rare old source of fun, a kind of ‘let’s see what you would’ve won’ solace for those big boys knocked out of the Champions League proper.

Nowadays it’s a bit more serious than that, with the second tier Premiership sides mixing it with Europe’s best and erm, well, lesser well known.

If fact half of the attraction nowadays is spotting the European sides who are so obscure they hardly dare speak their name, as one mainstream sports hack recently found out.

So by way of an intro here’s the Spurt’s cut out and keep guide to some of the more fanciful sides Portsmouth and Man City could be knocked out by this season.

Mentalist Karkiv
Much fancied Ukranian XI who are known to field a starting line up of in-patients and the occasional lycanthrope in goal. They’ll fancy a run to the semis if the medication holds out.

FC Cluggor
Second division Romanian outfit known for their robust, hefty and occasional life-threatening tackling. The FO advises bringing along plenty of substitutes, spare blood supplies and even pre-packed donor material.

Upstart Vladivostok
Noveau riche Russian side formed from the ashes of the USSR’s Spetnatz brigade. Supporters paint their arses blue and bare them for the famous Upstart Roar at kick off. Carefully positioned rooftop snipers makes timing your run on goal just that little bit extra tricky.

Club FC Naughty
Highly sexed Swedish side best known for their casual approach on the pitch and swinging approach off it. The post game ritual of communal hot bath and ‘Swedish smelling salts’ is apparently best avoided, especially by the unwary.

AC Onanism
Horny handed Morovian masterbationists XI who are much fancied to knock out some decent results ...That’s enough club sides – Ed.

Normal service...

“You fucking ...fricking ...fracking ...frocking ...freckers."

“You bunch of ...cunts ...cnuts ...scunts ...tuncts."

"Why should I believe you wankers ...wonkers ...winkers?"

You bunch of bastards ...bistards ...bustards."

“I’m not coming here to have the piss ...pass ....puss taken out of me...

And now putting it all together...

“You can Fruck off your fricking fruckers. You’re all a bunch of cnuts. Write what you like you bustards, you’re all a team of winkers anyways. I’ve not come here to have the puss taken out of me you frockers. Now frack off!’”

Splendid, it’s finally finished!

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the prolonged absence, we’ve been hard at work on a real-life swear filter for Joe Kinnear.

Normal spurting service or what passes for it will hopefully resumed tomorrow.