Andy's Glasses

Using big words is not clever. Unless I do it. Using the correct words in the right place is desirable and can avoid ambiguity. The mere additionalisation of complexicated verbositage to accentualise the perceptification of intelligiencial appearances is the domain of uneducated tossers with (quite deserved) inferiority complexes, small penises, West Ham scarves and bad breath. Or ‘Russell Brand’, as its now known.

A third rate unwashed comedian who fancies himself (well no-one else does other than part-heiress, part-man, Jemima Khan) as some kind of ‘people’s poet’, some type of revolutionary leader, a spokesman for the ignorant masses, who are all, generally, less ignorant than he is.

When still a comedian (though not a particularly funny one) he shot to fame by ‘prank-calling’ an 80 year-old retired actor to tell him that he (Russell) had shagged the old man’s grand-daughter, in graphic detail. Yes, really funny. Really, really funny.

So he went to Hollywood as some kind of ‘lothario’, some kind of irresistible dream of manhood perfection, bad-boy, lock-yer-daughters-up, sex machine. Even though he’s gay. Well, even though he sounds like he’s gay and the role he plays is merely a form of public denial of the pitifully obvious.

So now, buoyed by the most undeserved success, he’s written a book, called ‘revolution’ and has entered the political fray as an anti-politicist. Which is a bit like joining a football club as the director of ballet. He has no policies, which comes as no suprise, but aspires to be the next Mayor of London. God help London. He speaks in anti-capitalist sound-bytes that have no meaning to anyone this side of Carl Marx’s death. He talks of ‘collectives’, bless him. He doesn’t understand economics. And is passionately anti-American. To the point that he is a ‘9-11-denier’, feeling that Al Quaeda weren’t necessarilly responsible for the worst terrorist atrocity of our time, he wouldn’t put it past the Americans to have done it themselves. Fuckwit.

And he feels the BBC has an ‘anti-Islmaist agenda’ because it accused the Canadian gunman in a ‘anti-jihadist narrative’. Which is a bit like calling them ‘anti-Conservative’ for calling David Cameron a tory.

I will not mention this vile person any more because I don’t wish his name to appear anywhere that I might see it. Let alone that face, which even managed to hi-jack an interview with Sam Allardyce yesterday on Match of the Day. If necessary we must ban West Ham too, for spawning such an evil. Certainly until they stop winning games.

And there are so many other important things to consider, like the European demand for £1.7 billion from Britain due to our economy being better than those of so many of our European ‘brethren’ states. The calculation for this ridiculous amount takes into consideration such measures as ‘the black economy’ and prostitution. Maybe even both. Neither of which are quantifiable, which is kind of a definition of a ‘black enconomy’. And whilst prostitution is not illegal, living off immoral earnings is illegal. Thus Britain would be party to an immoral and illegal act were we to part with our money to those horrible Franco-German pimps. My own advice about this is: fuck ’em! Not the prostitutes, necessarily, but Europe.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Ever been to Canadia? Where the Canadians live?? I have. Its a fantastic country. Well, the bit six miles north from the 2000 miles of US border; the ‘warm bit’, is great. The other 97% is a frozen wasteland fit only for seal cubs (to be clubbed), polar bears (to eat the seal cubs that avoid fur season) and the odd Eskimo/Inuit to ride around on his snowmobile. Huskeys are so ‘1965’, now its Kawasaki or nothing.

Two things strike you about Canada:

1. Its just like America
2. Its nothing like America.

They use the American phone system, they have zip codes, they drive the same cars as Americans (Mercedes, BMW, Nissan) and they eat way too much of the same excessive food as the Americans.

Yet they’re not American. They’re nicer. Sweeter. More… more.. more.. more simple. I don’t wish to imply any educational sub-normality, but if the mortar board fits…

And the wonder of the Canadian people starts from the top. Their presidents are never contentious, hateful, nasty bastards. Never morons from Texas, peanut farmers from Georgia or morally questionable Arkansarains. As long as they keep the French at bay Canadian presidents are liberal, open, warm-minded folk who support liberal democracies, hate the bad guys, side with the good and the noble and act in a manner that their electorate would want. They all have guns, but unlike their neighbours to the south, they don’t choose to use them. Not in a school-yardy, shopping-mally way.

Which makes it so inevitable and yet so depressing that it should suffer at the hands of terrorists. Shooting innocent soldiers; what does that gain?? Awful. LEAVE CANADA ALONE.

Spurs won a football match last night. Yes, thursday night football is all the rage after that waste of time and space on tuesday and wednesday with all that champions league rubbish. Thursday night; UEFA; proper football. And we played… err… some team from somewhere in the Med, and we thrashed them. Five-one. Brillaint. Lamella, wonder-goal. A ‘rabona’ of sheer class, inventiveness, skill and showing a complete and utter inability to even consider hitting a ball with his ‘wrong’ foot. As all ‘rabonas’ demonstrate. Harry Kane hat-trick; the new Suarez.

All is brilliant down the Lane once more.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Poor Rene Zellweger has been ‘re-done’. She’s had a make-over. Though granted, this time the ‘makeover’ is more like a Dr Who re-birth when he comes back as a different person altogether. Sometimes an older one, sometimes a younger one, but always completely different. Rene chose to ‘enhance’ her 45-year old tired look with a completely new face. Not a bad face but just one that is unrecognisably different from its previous appearance. Gone are the slitty eyes, those famously puffy cheeks. Wrinkles and lines consigned to history. And in place of that stands this new, improved, near-perfect incarnation. That looks permanently surprised, if not completely shocked. And that is how it will look, even in moments of serenity, moments of gaiety, moments of rapture, joy, sorrow and anger. That’s what you get for your $100,000. A beautiful face that doesn’t work. Personally I’ll stick with an ugly old face with full function. Bladder control is something different.

Adel Taraabt is an anagram for ‘fat bastard’. But only for dyslexics. And for Harry Rednap. There are fears the Moroccan star of QPR has become’radicalised’. By Burger King. And Pizza Hut. Greggs. Pasties Are Us. Gone are the roots of his heritage, the diet of cous-cous and fresh salads, sleeping with a goat then eating it for breakfast, now he’s just piling on the pounds. According to Our ‘Arry. Who declared Adel ‘unfit; 3-stone overweight and the most unproffessional footballer he’s ever known’. I don’t know if that includes the 3 million amateurs who play our national game every weekend. Taraabt replied by posting a photo of his flat stomach for the world to see, slagging off his manager in return. In steps the boss of Milan, where the Moroccan played on loan last year, to say that Adel was wonderful, professional, fit and dedicated. Which is presumably why they chose not to invest the 6 million quid (not a lotta money for a player) and make him a permanent fixture at the San Siro. Or, at least, at the restaurants around the San Siro. The Big Boss of QPR, Tony Fernandez, has stepped in to reconcile the manager with arguably the team’s best player. Adel would definitely argue that. Never been a modest chap. And ‘best player’ is always a tricky one when you’re bottom of the league. They need someone to step in and sort out this mess. Someone calm, intelligent, engaging and charming. Where’s Joey Barton when you need him?

It is not for nothing that Real Madrid are European Champions. They visited Liverpool yesterday and won 10-nil. But only actually bothered to score 3. It was more than enough to make a very emphatic point. That Brendan Rogers either missed or is in a world of delusion.

Happy Thursday; may your face be lifted and your tagine served on a pizza.

A xxxx

We lost 2 Oscars yesterday. I don’t mean the awards, as in ‘someone else has won MY award so we have to sit smiling and pretending we’re really happy for them whilst really we’d like to rip off their false eyelashes with pliers and disembowel them with a nine-inch gold statuette’. No, 2 other Oscars.

Oscar de la Renta died yesterday, aged 82. He made frocks. George Clooney wore one of them the other week. Jackie Kennedy wore them in the 60s when husbands were dying all around her. Oscar seemed like a sweet man, born in the Dominican Republic, blah, blah, obituary, blah… Yet no mention of ‘he left a wife/lover/’partner’/3 dogs and a newt/whatever’. And that’s strange. He has step-children, one of whom runs his business. He has charities because he did seem like a lovely man. But I need to know if he was gay. To keep up the fashion designer quota of 100%. He had 2 ex-wives, but we aren’t told if these were just window dressing for less liberal decades. We shall all miss him.

Oscar Pistorius went to prison. Not for very long though. 5 years. Though actually, in South Africa that equates, for white people, to 10 months. No, makes no sense to me either. Then he’ll be under ‘house arrest’ so he can host parties and clean his extensive gun collection. Though its doubtful any ‘intruders’ would be brave/stupid enough to bother him. Is it a fair sentence? We’ll never know what really happened that night. To most sane people it was simple murder. He got up, grabbed his gun, shot someone 4 times through the bathroom door, not noticing that the other half of the bed he vacated was missing the stunning blond who had been there at bed-time. Oooops. He has to live with it every day.

nuf Oscars.

UKIP are no longer content to have a team comprising racists, misogynists, paki-bashers and homophobes who believe the flooding last year was divine punishment for allowing gay marriage. Nigel Farage has formed a ‘bloc’ in the European Parliament with a Polish Euro-hater who said that beating wives makes them better people. Though in Poland this is what passes for ‘a joke’. And the party he represents in that land is headed by a holocaust-denying, racist shit-head. So in fact, a pretty good fit for UKIP. Nigel maintains that by having this ‘bloc’ he stands to win more time to speak, AND gets a million pounds extra Euro-cash for his party. Some party that will be. I don’t understand European Parliament.

40 goals scored last night in 8 European Champions League matches. The most significant 2 were the ones Man City allowed in an empty stadium in Moscow after being 2-nil up. Bayern Munich’s 7 against Roma were important because of the humiliation they caused for Ashley Cole, who had to be substituted on competence grounds. Cheryl must has been smirking at that one. Chelsea score 6, even without Diego Costa and tonight Liverpool host Real Madrid. Just think how much better that competition would be if Spurs were playing in it. Its their loss.

Happy wednesday

A xxxx

I was walking down the Strand yesterday morning when I heard music. Not just noise, but music. Chanting. Drums. It was a protest, I could see as I neared. Or a support group. I couldn’t tell. What was fantastic was that this merry little group of Rwandans were chanting along to drums in unison and it was very pleasing. You wanted to dance. Most of the Rwandans were, in fact, dancing. Some of the police were even shuffling their size 13s as well. Their banners seemed to declare love and support for their president. Who, I can only assume, must have been staying at the Savoy Hotel just opposite.

There’s a protest going on somewhere in London every day. Outside the High Courts there’s always groups with posters, sometimes chanting, but always in a dull and dreary manner. “WHAT DO WE WANT??” “MUNNNEEE!!!!” “WHEN DO WE WANT IT??” “NAAAAHHHHH!!!” (repeat ad nauseum). Maybe Rwandans are just inherently more rhythmic than nurses from Cleethorpes, Council Workers from Blackburn, librarians from Southwark, but this little demonstration was great. Put a smile on the face of the passers by and brightened our Monday mornings.

Unlike Ed Balls. Our Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Or, ‘NOB’ for short. Maybe ‘TOSSER’; I’m a bit dyslexic when it comes to acronyms. He wrote a column in the Evening Standard last night about the proposed ‘mansion tax’, should Labour (heaven forbid) win the next election. Assuming they have a majority and always dependent on whether their Scottish contingent will be allowed to vote on such a south of the border issue. Because there are no 3 million pound houses in Scotland. Only Balmoral. And there aren’t many outside the M25. Thus Unlikely Ed wrote in the London newspaper to ‘explain’ this most unholy of taxes to those who it actually affects. Most of whom have their butlers read the paper to them. And, trying and obviously failing to be clever, Balls tried to equate the mansion tax with the survival of the National Health Service. Implying that any resistance to this new tax can only be by the sort of bastards who would want extended waiting lists in hospitals and bleeding coal miners (do we have any coal miners any more? must check) to sit in corridors outside jammed full A & E units (do we have A&E unites any more? must check) contracting MRSA during their 84-hour wait to be stitched up.

Houses between 2 and 3 million will ‘just’ have to pay about 3,000 a year. Just. Above that and it gets really heavy, up to about 28,000 a year, so they reckon. Or about 50k a year has to be earned by a UK tax-payer just to pay the extra tax for living in a nice house. The lower rate, for homes between 2 & 3 mil, will raise, they estimate, 162 million a year in tax. What is known, in our age of ‘billions’ as ‘a piss in the ocean’. 0.16 billion quid. Massive though that seems to impoverished scum like you, to the government its actually of no value. The cost of paper clips for 7 weeks in Westminster.

The only redeeming feature is that if you assume that a massive proportion of very expensive homes are owned by people who don’t pay UK tax, this will be a way to at least recoup something. They avoid income tax here, they avoid stamp duty on buying their properties by purchasing through offshore companies and they rarely even occupy their homes. They just collect them.

Basically, I’m all in favour of taxing rich foreigners but leave hard-working Brits alone. Or what happens to aspiration?

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

I went over to Slightly Dangerous Alan’s house on saturday to check out his new toys. His new hobby. Having grown bored of Counter Cross Stitch and flan-baking, he moved on to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Implements of Death. Nice. As a car dealer he obviously upsets a lot of people. There again, if he was a priest he’d upset a lot of people; its what he does best. So needs protection. And never one to stop short of any kind of excess, this is the result. The really scary thing is that its all legal and available at a ‘good’ sports shop near you. Sadly, no psychological evaluation is required preceding the sale. Otherwise the picture would have been one of me holding a nice cup of tea.

And what’s with all the penalties? Every match seems to be decided on penalties these days, like World Cup quarter-finals. There were 4 penalties awarded at the tragic match on Saturday between Spurs and Man City, 3 of them against Spurs. And in yesterday’s game between Swansea and Stoke there were two more. Screams of ‘unfair’ and ‘cheating’ and ‘diving’ and ‘horrendous refereeing’ ring round the post-match interviews as well as everyone’s favourite: ‘refereeing inconsistency’.

We need the same rules for everyone, said Mark Hughes. Everyone named Ryan Shawcross should be exempt from penalty decisions because the refs are biased against him. Is that, I wonder, because of his reputation, or because he is a bear-hugging thug who hurls people to the floor in temper at every corner kick? Victor Moses dived!!! screamed the Swansea coach. He cheated, dived, won a penalty, the ref should be shot. Blah, blah, blah.

Players cheat. Or perhaps that’s rather indelicate. Maybe ‘attempt to gain an advantage in a not totally honest manner’. Cheating. Diving. Going to ground if any contact is made with the far reaches of their bootlaces. A caress on the shoulder results in any striker plummeting to ground like a dead hippo. Other players kick out, trip up, haul to the ground, headbutt. What is the ref supposed to do?

So the only ‘consistency’ that remains is this:

If its their players doing it (fouling, kicking, diving, ‘simulating’) then they are fucking cheating, scummy, thuggish, diving BASTARDS. If its our players they are the victims of some kind of abuse or tarnished reputation and were innocent of all crimes so the referee made a mistake which cost us the game/goal/league/parking fine.

I hope that’s cleared matters up.

Happy monday

A xxxx

Southampton beat Sunderland, eight to soddin’ nil
that’s a score indeed, magnificent total thrill
(unless of course, Gus Poyet is your name,
in which case, never mind, what a bloody shame)

And Chelsea just keep rolling on, vile though they are,
but just too good for everyone else, Fabregas again the star

They put lowly Palace to the sword, even without Diego Costa,
who got banged up playing for Spain, got taken off the roster

Morihno’s pissed, quel surprise, for losing the prodigal son
The Brazillian Spanish traitor has been his major big gun

But I shed no tears for the boys in Blue, they have many in their ranks
I save my sorrow for my beloved Spurs, who play like total w-ubbish

We can’t defend, we can’t hold the ball, we fail to score more than one
we give the ball away eagerly, miss passes all the time, and foul just for fun

Without Lloris we’d be bottom of the league, he’s the only one to stop the rot
We can’t even score from 12 yards out with the ball on the fucking spot.

I’ve given them their time, their chances one and all,
let them settle, be very patient, more time on the ball

But 100 million quid we spent, on players from wide and far
and all they do is fall to the ground and hit the bleeding bar

Well, middle of the table, eight games in, ain’t so very bad
but once more aspirations shot down at the bastard Etihad.

Don’t talk to me about West Ham, evil little thugs
4th in the league, won’t last long, but maybe its time for drugs.

Arsenal once again come up late in a match they failed to win
in a home game against Hull, gave 2 points away, just threw them in the bin

But the Arse aren’t my problem, they’ll get there in the end
its Franco fucking Baldini who drives me round the bend

Our ‘director of football’; what does that even mean?
Ahhh, but he has a plan, a devious little scheme

He’s like a ‘youth opportunities programme’ for Europe’s orphaned dross
100 million wasted and he couldn’t give a toss

If he chose those players, disasters one and all
why is it the managers consistently take the fall?

He should be removed from his post, chained to a wall
ceremonially beheaded, disembowelled by one and all.

And on that cheery note, the season carries forth
now our team has come back from the north.

Happy sunday

A xxxx

Is this the face of a rapist?

Once again the ugly subject of rape tarnishes our otherwise pristine and perfect world. Phah! Yet rape is evil, is horrendous and is always a violent crime even if no apparent ‘violence’ took place, because it is an assault on someone’s body. So if Judy Finnegan thinks its not rape if no-one gets punched, kicked or threatened with weapons, then she needs to rethink things. Possibly before she decides to opine on things other than her book club or the latest recipe for quinoa extra-virgin gluten-free cup cakes.

Ched Evans, footballer for Sheffield United, was released from jail yesterday after serving 2-and-a-half years of a 5 year sentence for rape. His mate found an incredibly drunk girl in a kebab shop, took her to a pre-booked hotel and texted Evans to tell him ‘I’ve got a bird’. Evans turned up, the mate was already in flagranti… already involved, Ched joined in, the girl woke up naked and alone in the morning, probably with a seriously sore head, and cried rape, even though she could remember nothing of the evening. Though was more concerned about the loss of her handbag than anything else.

None of which makes it automatically rape. If the incident is forced by threats, it is rape, if forced by alcohol, which achieves the same end of rendering the victim powerless, its still rape. But the alcohol was self inflicted. In this case. And although standing in line for a kebab in Rhyl, North Wales is yet another invitation to bodily abuse of a different kind, that still doesn’t make it rape.

What makes it rape is lack of consent. Or even lack of ability to give consent due to unconsciousness. You need unambiguous consent before… well, before anything.

And the final question, the last past of this rather sordid little puzzle; should Evans be welcomed back to Sheffield United to play football? When he has shown no remorse, other than to maintain his story that it was not rape, backed up by the fabulous ‘evidence’ or at least ‘mitigation’ that ‘footballers are rich and fit and every girl wants to shag one’ in not so many words. If that were the case, why didn’t he take his pick whilst at the bar? Why wait for your mate to find one so out of it that she didn’t know a footballer from a Premier Inn £29.50 special weekend room deal?

None of which is very ‘hollywood’, its more ‘the arse end of Cardiff’. Ched’s girlfriend ‘stood by him’ to claim it was not rape. Yet oddly was seemingly unpurturbed by her boyfriend engaged in sex with a drunken bimbo along with his mate, whilst being filmed by a couple of other mates on their phones.

I make no judgments. (Yeah, right). But simply wish to raise a few points for consideration of this indelicatley delicate matter.

1. ‘Consent’ is a tricky one. Can’t it be implied? Does it have to be stated before 6 witnesses as many seem to imply? Whether drunk or not, if a woman is willing, eager even and passionately engaged in preceding events, cannot, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that this is definitely a ‘game on’ situation?

2. Evans has served his time for the crime, has he not repaid his debt to society? Should he be further punished by not being allowed to play football? If he was a policeman, lawyer or schoolteacher, I could see a point. Even a politician. Positions where trust is required, where morality is assumed. But he kicks a fucking football in the lower leagues. Half his team mates are rapists, and worse, they’ve just never been caught.

3. Should all of Wales just be shut down? On moral grounds.

4. Will any of this affect how Spurs fare at Manchester City today? And is there any possible way we can abandon the match in protest? Against Chad? The sentence? The victim? Anything??

Happy Saturday… so far.

A xxxx

‘Multi-cultural Britain’ started in the 1950s when immigration started from the West Indies. Because many West Indians lived in British colonies and were entitled to come here and live and work. Which they did. Encouraged to do so by shortages in many work sectors, they brought their music, their food and their fabulously laid-back attitude with them which, despite the inevitable racism that would have greeted their arrival, enriched our country. We now had reggae. This was followed in the 60s and 70s by massive immigration from India and Pakistan. Again, decent, hard-working people bringing something new, something desirable to our country (in this case: curry, which has changed all our lives for the better) and introducing us to yet another rich and fascinating set of new cultures.

As Churchill said: think not what your country can do for you, think what you can do for your country. Bloody Tory.
Somewhere along the line it all went pear-shaped and tits-up. Because people entering Britain were coming to a welfare state. In which they would all be housed, educated, fed and given free medical care and free BBC. And a penny dropped. Ahhhhh, they thought, or whatever the Albanian/Thai/Bangla Deshi/Scottish is for ‘ahhhhh’; we can go to England, do nothing and be provided for. Why stay in Albania/Bangla… etc, and earn nothing for doing nothing when we can go to England and live like kings and queens doing absolutely nothing. Look at their queen; she does it. 3 palaces, 400 servants, kept by the state.

And if this is sounding a touch ‘ukip’, a soupcon ‘Farage’ then I can only hold my hands up and say: ‘mea cupla; I’m a fascist bastard’.

And what turned me was reading last night’s paper. A proper paper, the Evening Standard, which is a London paper. No-one else is worthy. And in it was yet another article about the horrible homeless people situation in Park Lane. Which, according to the Monopoly board, is the most expensive road in Britain. And there is a recurring problem with Romanian homeless living in cardboard boxes in and around that part of Hyde Park. And they’re threatening, or they’re begging, they’re pick-pockets, petty thieves and they smell bad. Business suffers in the area and they use the underground walkways as their toilet. Eeeeeuuuuuwww.

And when approached by the police (who move them about every other week) they cried out yesterday: ‘we are EU citizens; give us homes and we won’t be here’.

Tragically the best advert for UKIP you could ever create.

Though I would never, ever vote UKIP.
“Give us homes”. Like they grow on trees. Or near trees. Like we have room for every European destitute to come here just because they want a better quality of social benefits.

The jews had arrived here in numbers from the early 1900s. Before there was a welfare state. And instead of culture, they brought herring. And they blended right in so you could barely tell them apart.

Happy not-voting-for-ukip Thursdasy

A xxxx

Great Tai Chi class last night. They’re always great but last night Grandmaster Lazlo was away so Guru Graham took over and gave his own take on the finest that eastern philosophy and mystical karma can aspire to, whilst inflicting serious damage on any possible assailants and causing pain and suffering to any would-be attacker. Job done, take a shower, sit down with a cup of tea before bed and just a quick flick through some mindless tv channels (Mel tries to hide the remote but I’m telepathically bonded with it and have a special in-built gps tracker in my head to find it every time) and found The Fast and the Furious. Oh my, that’ll do.

I mean how totally anti-zeitgeist can a movie be? In 2001 they should have been making movies about low-emission vehicles, about electric-powered Noddy cars, about cars so pure and environment friendly that they use trees for power by converting horrible carbons into lovely, pure oxygen for virgins to inhale into their pale and pure lungs. Aaaahhhhhh.

But no, they made a film about car racers. There is a story in there somewhere but its facile, childish and totally irrelevant. I mean, how much of a story can there be if you use Vin Diesel to act it out? The man simply can’t act. He can only smoulder. And brood. And get angry, violent, ripple a few muscles and then smoulder some more. He likes smouldering. He’s good at it.

And he smoulders in some wonderful American Muscle cars. Others in the movie use neat, clean little Japanese vehicles, but not Vin. He only drives US and V8. He’s a bad boy hero in the Clint Eastwood mould. Or smould. An anti-hero. A criminal, a thief, a baddie that you really wouldn’t want your daughter bringing home. “Hi Dad, I’ve brought Vin home for a quick smoulder before we go the movies in a very muscle-ripply way. Sorry about the noise, that’s his new 17,000 horse power Camaro that emits 3 tons of carbon every hundred yards”.

Yet its precisely because its such an awful film (6.2 on IMDB; not catastrophic but not The Godfather either), is why I want to watch it. Because it doesn’t matter if I leave it half way through and go to bed. I know what happens. Nothing happens. But whilst nothing is happening, just turn up the volume and enjoy some truly fabulous rolling metal.

Nothing happens in Rugby League either. Well, not in my life because I don’t watch it. I won’t watch it. Its a horrible game, a brutal, violent, northern cousin to the ‘real game’ of Rugby Union. Which is a gentlemanly, intellectual, considered brutal violent game played down here. (OK, its not strictly geographical, as it used to be, but I’m just making a point. And inventing stuff that fits that point, like all good research). And in the Rugby League Supercup on Satruday, the Wigan prop, Ben Flower, punched an opposing player so hard he knocked him almost unconscious. But rather than leave him there to get over it, as they would in Rugby Union, obviously, Ben bent over the supine and semi-comatose man and punched him again. And that’s just not cricket. Obviously, its Rugby League. And sucker-punching a prostrated invalid is arguably giving the spectators what they want. Its what they like in the North. A 6 month ban from the game? He should have been man-of-the-match. Only on the pitch for 3 minutes but its given that awful, God-forsaken game more publicity than its enjoyed in the last 20 years.

Happy brutal Wednesday

A xxxx