Eat my words.
You know how it is. You sit down to write an article, send it to yourself at work, think you’ve got all the angles right, go to work, give it the once over, publish it and then check the internet and find that half of what you’ve been saying has been turned on its head in thirty minutes.
Which is pretty much what happened to me yesterday. I suspected that Lescott and Jagielka would start tonight and then, to my surprise, found that he had already named his team, in a complete turnaround to what he did last summer.
Capello eh? You just can’t tie him down. One hundred word team talks, giving Rio the old tin tack, reinstating the dad of the year and now giving Gareth Barry the captain’s armband for tonights game. The signs of a madman at work. But he then goes and undoes all that work by picking Cahill in central defence next to Jagielka, leaving Mr Worf on the bench, ruminating about whether today IS a good day to die.
I dare say that there are many of us that could pick an England team with at least three Bolton players in it who wouldn’t disgrace a competitive game, but the Ghana match has been labelled a ‘B’ team game, which is a bit of an insult to those that are playing, including the first choice keeper and the first choice central midfielder, who used to play for Bolton.
Speaking of Cahill, resident Arsenal rent-a-gob and ginger ponce, Ray Parlour, has said that he wouldn’t mind seeing him in the heart of their defence:
‘I`d love to see Gary Cahill at Arsenal, he`d be brilliant for the centre-half role. Whether that happens we`ll have to wait and see.’
Or wait and never see. We said last week that the probability will be that Arsenal won’t want him, being overladen with central defenders. What Mr Vinegar needs is another striker who scores and a reserve keeper who isn’t 41. Not a pricey central defender who most Arsenal fans don’t think they need.
Elswhere, Bolton scouts, as well as scouts from every other Premier League club, were in Austria on Friday to watch Alex Witsel, who currently plays for Standard Liege. A player like this sounds right up our street, circa 2004, or Stoke’s street, circa now, as he has previously received death threats for stamping on and breaking another players ankle. They take their football a little TOO seriously in Belgium. Probably due to the fact that nothing of note has happened there since they lost the local derby with Germany back in the early forties.
He’s a defensive central midfielder, plonking him right where Fabrice Muamba currently plows an ever increasing furrow. However, the names of United, Citeh, Chelsea, Arsenal and Spurs mentioned in the same report will tell you that if we do get to look at him more closely, he will be the football equivalent of the Hollywood scripts that are currently landing on Mel Gibson’s coffee table. Well thumbed by others. Not in that way.
Our other regular central midfielder, the one with the shattered kneecap, keeps on smiling. Well, you would be permanently smiling if you had been born in Aberdeen but your parents had high tailed you to Texas when you were ten years old. Decapitation would have a problem wiping a smile off your face if that had happened to you. Especially when the place you went to was called Sugar Tits Land.
Sorry, still got Mel Gibson on the mind. Best go for a shower to feel less grubby. When I was 19, I did a guy in Laos from a thousand yards out. It was a rifle shot in high wind. Maybe eight or even ten guys in the world could have made that shot. It’s the only thing I was ever good at. Well, see ya tomorrow.