I’m a typical fickle armchair supporter.

I’m not the only one. There are hundreds and thousands of us skulking around the edges of football. We’re defined by our intermittent love for the game, and our wavering support for our chosen team. We’re the guys who only watch MOTD when our side win. We’re the people who go to the pub for the big match, when really we’re there for the social aspect of it. We’re the curmudgeons who fork out for a ticket once every three years, then spend the whole time at the stadium moaning about the price of hotdogs or the uncomfortable plastic chairs—or the lack of hot women in attendance. We’re the people who shout about our love for (insert team) when we’re winning, and shout about our hate for (insert team) when we’re losing. We’re basically like discontented husbands.

Christmas is a time for miracles: flying reindeer, warring families reunited, a decrease in stabbings (unless you live in Croydon), and the only four weeks of the year where fat, sweaty, silver-haired paedophiles find gainful employment.

When I heard the news that Adebayor might be going to Manchester City (and thus become tenuously connected to the Sultan of Brunei), I was angry. Not because Wenger might finally be relieving Arsenal of some deadweight, but because it took him THIS long to do it, and because he didn’t have the ingenuity to angle Bendtner into the deal. It would have been the perfect opportunity to offload two underachievers, without affecting the balance of the team or the morale in the dressing room.

If you’ve ever witnessed a dying, crumbling marriage, it’s kind of depressing. It’s essentially two miserable, suicidal people, living in each other’s pockets (and panties), just taking each moment as it comes, like drug addicts—one day at a time, man, one day at a time—and doing nothing of any real substance. They basically hang in there, holding on for years and years in spite of the funk they reside in, both of them begging for that initial spark to return. But it never does.

No win situation A minute’s silence, please, for a dead profession; an imPOSSIBLE profession; a DREADFUL profession. A minute’s silence, my friends, for the only white people who can truly know what it’s like to be discriminated against based on the colour of their skin—or, in this case, the colour of their jersey: REFEREES. I’m [...]

I’m only with you for the sake of the kids

I used to love England (the team, not the country—or does that count as the same thing?). I mean, I REALLY loved them. When I was younger, England—as well as Arsenal—ruled my footballing life. I worshipped them, praised them, believed in them, wanted to be a PART of them. I had all of the authorised AND unofficial merchandise: the football stickers; the coins; the flags; the hats; the home AND away shirts, both emblazoned with my surname and number nine on the back; I even had the goalkeeper top. I revelled in anything England related; it was true love.

Proof is in the cookie

Picture this boring scenario: I’ve cooked up a basket of homemade cookies—very tasty homemade cookies, in fact—after spending years honing the recipe, tweaking and adjusting and swapping the ingredients, and now somebody’s interested in purchasing one of them. Only ONE of them, but there are already some people interested in my other cookies so it’s OK. This man asks how much for Cookie Cole, and I tell him fifty pence. The man says to me, “I’ll give you twenty-five pence plus a half-eaten apple pie.” Now this offends me. I’ve spent years making sure this cookie is worthy of a place on the England table of biscuits and snacks, and this man offers me a half-eaten apple pie?

It’s time to ditch the fake tan!

Everything about Arsenal these days is manufactured around Wenger’s ‘beautiful football’ philosophy. The problem is that their ‘beauty’ only lies on the surface; makeup, false nails, implants, fake tan—none of this makes a woman beautiful inside, nor does it form the foundations of a great team. Arsenal are a shallow ‘beautiful’ side with no substance. Once the makeup is wiped off and the implants go pop and the tan fades, they have nothing left to offer; they have no personality, no confidence, no nothing. As soon as a semi-decent team challenge them, strip back their beauty to its fundamentals, it’s apparent they don’t have a contingency plan to deal with it. They can no longer rely on their beauty and actually have to make a conversation, or engage in some witty banter—or, so much worse: do something other than string together three hundred pointless useless passes that lead back into their own box.