Filed under: News | Tags: Andy Gray, Fascists, Glynn Hurst, Richard Keys, Smoke Bombs, Zak Hibbert
Disgraced former Sky pundit, Andy Gray, has hit back angrily at suggestions that he is a vile, sexist, pig. “Bollocks!” spat Gray whilst leafing through a copy of Front magazine. “How can I be sexist? Some of my best shags have been women.”
Gray, who was paid a million fucking pounds a year to state the obvious and over hype Sky’s product, denied claims that he was in any way responsible for a boy’s club atmosphere on live football broadcasts. “There was that blonde lass, with great tits.” Gray countered. “She’ll tell you I’m not sexist. We spent a lot of time together, but I had to finish her as she was as shit in the kitchen as she was in the sack.”
Gray’s colleague, Richard Keys, resigned today amid fears further evidenced of his chauvinistic attitude towards women would be released. Speaking to a multi-award winning female journalist, Keys stated “Eh? What’s that poppet? Oh, milk and two please.” Before patting her on her bottom, and sending her away with a dismissive wave of his now hairless hand.
The removal of the duo has led to whinges from the sort of cunts who visit ‘True Lad.com – The Home of Lad Banter’ about PC Brigades, and PC gone mad, and thought police, without really having any fucking clue what they’re on about.
On the subject of killjoys and the PC liberal brigade going health and safety mad due to their organic, vegetarian, Guardianista middle-class outlook on life, the board have politely requested dialogue between fans and club in a bid to stop the current trend for smoke bombs that have cost the club money, and led to fellow fans needing medical attention. How dare they? Isn’t this *exactly* why we left Old Trafford? Where will this stop? Before we know it the club will be seeking our opinion on other matters and asking approval before carrying out plans that we voted them in to decide for us. The fucking fascists. See here: http://fc-utd.co.uk/story.php?story_id=3376 for more.
Zak Hibbert has apparently left the club to play for Clitheroe. Hibbert had a run in the team at the start of the season, and was unlucky enough to play in a series of games where we folded like a pliable napkin. Not much blame can be lumped on to his shoulders for those defeats, but Sam’s form since returning between the sticks has been as such that Hibbert hasn’t had a look-in since. Also leaving is Glynn Hurst, scorer of a hattrick in the 1966 World Cup final, who has retired to concentrate on his university studies.
Kendal castle is fucked. It sits ruined atop the imaginatively titled Castle Hill. No one is really sure when it was built, but local boffins reckon it was in the early 11oos. It was probably built by a fella named Ivo Taillebois, roughly translated as Ivor Woodcutter, which sounds for all the world like a porn pseudonym.
The castle was derelict by the late 16th Century as the Parr family who owned it fucked off to live in Northampton and London. This may have had something to do with Katherine Parr marrying Henry VIII, but I dunno. I’m just speculating here. But whatever. In its current state it’s fuck all use as anything other than a massive paperweight. As a castle it is fundamentally flawed.
Should a baying mob of North Cumbrian Separatists, or Scots, or any other army intent on occupying the scenic little town of Kendal decide to do just that, then it wouldn’t take much to defeat any Kendalonians who had taken refuge in the decrepid ramparts and battlements. Any sort of aerial bombardment would cause panic, destruction, and ultimately defeat.
We know how the fuck that feels.
I was meeting my mates in the Ring O’Bells in Kendal. I knew roughly the direction I was headed, but stopped to ask a guy in a hi-vis jacket who was smoking a roll-up outside a pub in the town centre. “Excuse me, mate.” I started, “Is this the right way to the Ring O’Bells?”
“Ring O’Bells, Ring O’Bells.” he mused. “No, no. You’re going completely the wrong way in fact. You want to be going up that way.” He pointed to the direction I’d just come from. The opposite direction to where I thought I knew where this pub was. This shook my already wavering confidence in my innate sense of direction.
“It’s opposite the Wheatsheaf…” I informed him. “I’m heading to the football ground, but meeting people in the Ring O’Bells first.”
The fella scratched his chin, took a drag on his dirty little cigarette, and muttered to himself. “Well the football ground is up there,” he pointed to where the football ground definitely wasn’t, “But I’m pretty certain the Ring O’Bells is over there.” His arms had all the consistency of a weather vane on top of Retford United’s clubhouse.
Still smoking his cigarette he walked in to the pub and asked the landlady where the Ring O’Bells is. The landlady said it was shut and had been for months. The fella said that was the Royal Victoria, and they’d built flats on it now. It couldn’t have been, said the landlady, as she’d been in there the other week. Maybe it had been the Wheatsheaf that had closed. Yeah, agreed the man, maybe it had been. Or maybe it was the Ring O’Bells after all. This went on for some time, with me stood speechless and distracted in the door. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll find it myself. It turned out to be about two hundred yards down the road in the direction I was going, and the opposite direction to where the man had told me. I vowed never to speak to another Cumbrian again.
Welcome to the 21st Century, dickheads.
(The excellent flag belongs to Voxra, and is based on an old TUC one, which is housed in the People’s History Museum in Manchester. Picture used without permission, but I’m sure she’ll forgive me…)
Filed under: Match Report | Tags: Hucknall Town, Kim Jong-il, Mick Hucknall
write a song about THAT, you round-faced twat.
I slept in and missed the train up to Manchester on Saturday, so I didn’t get to watch the shirts win their fourth on the bounce, and move up to the relative comfort of mid-table. Instead of standing behind a massive flag in the Manchester Road End, I listened to the game on FCUM Radio whilst eating a steak baguette and drinking Tyskie. If I had to miss the match, it wasn’t such a bad way to do it.
As a result of my commuting tardiness, I can give you even less of a match report than I usually do. Norton scored, so did Wright, Wolfenden, and Cottrell apparently. Sam Ashton didn’t, but he did concede one for the first time in three matches.
Our recent upturn in form has got many muttering about a prolonged unbeaten run and a place in the play-offs, which, at the moment, is so unlikely as to border on the fantastical. But who knows? Another win at Kendal on Tuesday night and the play-off bandwagon will pick up even more speed. Margy has long argued that we’re one of the better teams in this division, and we should be challenging for a top five place.
But would we want to go up? After an extensive cost benefit analysis, it seems that the main upside to promotion would be that we would become a playable team on the next Football Manager computer game, while the biggest negative would be having to play those dicks from Halifax again next term. Fuck that. I’m happy to hang around the NPL for a couple more years if that’s the reward.
Whilst throwing around the requisite Mick Hucknall jokes this week, it was pointed out to me that the pasty-faced, ginger crooner looks a lot like North Korean despot Kim Jong-il in drag. I now can’t remove the image of a silk kimono and wig wearing Dear Leader, shaft and conkers tucked back between his legs, dancing suggestively to Simply Red’s Greatest Hits in front of a mirror. It’s terrible. And probably justification for military intervention, even if it did lead to an escalation in hostilities that brought on some sort of nuclear Armageddon.
Filed under: News, Opinion | Tags: Eric Cantona, Factory, Noel Gallagher, Retford, Ronnie Wallwork, Sam Ashton, Tony Wilson
There are moments in football where you can look back and say with pride that you were there. Moments so beautiful, or so rare, that it will be a proud boast for years to come that you were there to witness it. And when Sam Ashton scored from 107 yards out against Retford, I turned to my mates and said “Shall we get another pint, or are we going to watch the match?”. Indeed, the first I heard about Sam’s goal was from a steward as we battled our way out of Retford’s club house, leaning 45° in to the howling gale. Luckily for myself, and the other few dozen of our well liquored support, the ever excellent Neil Boo caught the moment on his film-video-camcorder thingy, and uploaded it to YouTube, where so far half a million people have viewed it.
Half a million! The video has been seized with frenzied glee by the likes of Nuts, talkSPORT and goal.com, as well as the Daily Sport (oh, the humanity!) and a cameo role in North West tonight. Not bad for a lucky, wind-carried punt. Not so, says Sam – who just a week previously was making headlines against BPA in a more orthodox fashion for a goalkeeper: “No-one can believe it. The lads are saying it was a fluke, but it wasn’t – I meant it!”
But it’s not all good news. Sam’s wonder strike has now ensured we have to put up with three tedious seasons of the MRE shouting SHOOT! SHOOT! every time he gets the ball.
Elsewhere, Eric Cantona has become Director of Soccer at New York Cosmos. The role appears to be as meaningful as the job of trophy polisher at Eastlands, given the Cosmos don’t have a team, a stadium, or a league to play in. Still, it didn’t stop Eric phoning it in at a press conference, mumbling some trite and meaningless bullshit about the club being a mixture of football and art, before having his photo taken sitting in a throne.
Fuck’s sake, Eric. Stop tarnishing the memory. What with your hard to justify cosying up to Rupert Murdoch’s evil Sky empire this last summer, your constant and terrible appearances in adverts, and your role as ambassador and director of an online gaming company, I can’t help but begin to wonder if you haven’t, you know, sold out a little bit?
Christ. What am I saying? Three hail Erics and a back to back viewing of the ‘Au Revoir Cantona’ DVD and ‘Looking For Eric’ will reaffirm my faith.
Former Manchester United, errr, starlet Ronnie Wallwork has been charged by the police with ‘conspiracy to conceal criminal property’. I don’t really know what the fuck that means, but it’s a sad comedown for Wallwork who looked to have a long and bright career ahead of him when, as a 21 year old, he was given a life ban from football for grabbing Belgian referee Armand Ancion by the throat.
Anyone who was in CYCM prior to that FA Trophy match against Hinckley United may have heard music journalist Mick Middles give an excellent talk about the local music scene. He mentioned the new book he had been involved in, ‘Mr Manchester and The Factory Girl’, written by the ex-wife of Tony Wilson. I’ve just finished the book and can thoroughly recommend it. It fairly rekindled my interest in the Factory story, sending me back to the four CD Factory box set, where I skipped track after track until I found something half listenable, usually by Joy Division, New Order or the Happy Mondays. Anyhoo, I was delighted when over on A Fine Lung they linked to a Granada documentary about Madchester and all that guff. From there, YouTube suggested I watch a BBC documentary about the Stone Roses called ‘Blood On The Turntable’, and within minutes the subject of Factory appeared.
Colossal professional embarrassment Noel Gallagher had his say: “All the people who worked for Factory were fucking squares. They were the grey overcoat mob. Banging on in coffee bars about poetry, and going to watch films wit subtitles. Very fucking dodgy people.”
Yeah, that’s it Noel, anyone who has an interest in literature or foreign cinema is a dodgy person, you thick as fuck, anti-intellectuallist cunt. Better to wallow in your own ignorance reading nowt more than the Sun newspaper, and endlessly watching fucking Steven Seagal films on Channel 5. Maybe if you’d tried to broaden your horizons a little, opened your mind to the great writers, artists, philosophers and thinkers of the world, you’d have produced something more than seven albums of dire, pedestrian, three-chord pub rock, you stunted, mono-browed fuckwit.
I mean, if he’d just have come out and said they were all vainglorious, ego-driven cunts, you’d have found it hard to argue. But having a pop because they’d had the temerity to educate themselves? Fuck me. Says all about him, and nothing of them.
Filed under: Match Report | Tags: Bob Blackburn, BPA, Revenge Of The Psychotronic Man
Fucking hell. It was a long time in coming, but we finally beat Bradford Park Avenue. After nine games, three draws, and six terrible, mostly heavy defeats, goals from Carlos Roca and Jerome Wright saw us snatch a 2-0 victory.
Having been informed by text that the FCUM Radio crew were suggesting our goals were against the run of play, I replied indignant that I must be watching a different game. It appears I was. Sam Ashton made a number of excellent saves, BPA had a goal disallowed, and we created nothing until Roca scored with only eight minutes left. I can only assume that my early arrival at CYCM coupled with the brain mashing punk of The Revenge Of The Psychotronic Man (and as an aside here, I know it’s only January, but I’m tempted to predict I won’t be hearing a sentence as good as “Who wants to hear a song called Felch Death Fuck Storm?” for the rest of the year) temporarily affected my cognitive reasoning and understanding of the game. The alternative is that I was haplessly drunk and know fuck all about football. I’m sticking with the former…
Speaking to a group of Avenue fans in the Swan and Cemetery post-match, we got on to the subject of their fat, idiosyncratic leader, Mr Blackburn. They were less than charmed by his zany ways. In fact they claimed that all the goodwill the club had built up over years had been immediately undone by his clumsy, dunderheaded ways, and that they’d rather be playing at a lower level without him in charge. They also said he was lazy, and did fuck all work, leaving Kev Hainsworth to do all the running around, while he attempted to take any credit. And who am I to argue with such well-informed sources?
It looks like neither ourselves nor BPA will be getting promoted any time soon. And this is good. Despite the arrival on the scene of Halifax, and their odd yet slightly touching obsession with us, BPA remains the most anticipated fixtures of the season. The prospect of another two games against them next year, especially if we continue beating the bastards, is a good one.
Filed under: News | Tags: Football 365, John Ogden, Mediawatch, RAWK, Twitter
Interesting one from Football 365’s Mediawatch today. It seems they picked up on a story from unintentionally hilarious Liverpool FC message board ‘Red and White Kop’ regarding John Ogden’s twittering, describing him as ‘FC United keeper’ – which was presumably news to Sam Ashton, being dropped just day(s) after thwarting Bradford Park Avenue with a seemingly endless parade of match-winning saves. Yet on the thread in question, he was clearly described as ‘ex-FC United goalkeeper, now playing with Ramsbottom’. Indeed, Ogden only played twice for us, back in 2007.
Still, why bother checking facts and reporting the truth when the made up story is so much more exciting?
I don’t remember much of our friendly against St Pauli. In fact, I don’t remember much of the trip at all. This is largely down to me being an uncooth charlatan who ignored the many cultural treats of Hamburg in order to stand outside a shop drinking bottles of Astra that cost a euro.
Apparently the game finished 3-3. St Pauli’s motley collection of septuagenarian, propped up by Bolton’s Ivan Klasnic who scored a hattrick, were more than matched by our beloved boys in red. Who were wearing blue. But as ever with these things the match was of a secondary importance. Something far better was occurring in the chilly stand where 800 or so FC United fans were gathered.
There’s some controversy over where the chant started, but at some point during the match someone decided to start singing The Carpenters’s ‘Top Of The World’. It was picked up by everyone, and was blasted out for long periods of the second half, and for about thirty minutes after the game had finished.
The handful of St Pauli fans who had made our end their home stood and shook their heads in disbelief as we refused to leave the ground, instead preferring to stand and serenade at first our team, and then the empty pitch, with our newly discovered anthem. The place was rocking. I stood, currywurst spilled all down my coat, beer in hand, thinking that things rarely get better than that.
“I’m on the top of the world lookin’
Down on creation and the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I’ve found
Ever since you’ve been around
Your love’s put me at the top of the world”
Leaving Spotland on Bonfire Night, I was asked to be interviewed for some website. They wanted to ask some simple questions about the game, best player, best moment, crap like that. It showed a remarkable misunderstanding of everything that had just unfolded before us.
Asking for a favourite moment from that game is like asking for a favourite brushstroke from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, or for a favourite note from The Stone Roses album. It was a spectacle that had to be viewed in entirety to fully appreciate. The story arc was perfect, like a tale from Ancient Greece. Hope, followed by triumphalism, followed by punctured hubris, before a final explosion of delirium. I can’t imagine a more perfect way the game could have gone. I even accept that the smashed shins, and the elbow I took to the mouth during the orgiastic explosion that erupted following Cottrell’s goal were a necessary part of the narrative.
I didn’t give an interview to the website. I had nothing even approaching coherent to say. My only form of expression was a puffed out cheek exhalation, followed by blasphemous profanity. I was, quite literally, speechless.
It took a long time to process what we’d all seen and been involved in. Days, running in to weeks. I contracted what top doctors called Michael Norton Syndrome: an inability to concentrate, spontaneous laughter, and waking up in the middle of the night experiencing auditory and visual hallucinatory flashbacks. I never want it to end. I don’t think it ever will.
Queuing for Brighton tickets outside Gigg, the consensus was that Rochdale away was up there with Barcelona in ’99, Rotterdam in ’91, and for older Reds, Wembley in ’68. This viewpoint was roundly pooh-poohed in a letter to RedIssue (despite being somewhat undermined by the letter writer’s inability to correctly identify our opponent in the game) but they weren’t there. We were. And there’s nothing about that night I would change. It was as close to footballing perfection as I can imagine.
It'll Be Off 