Boss Radio

...In Rio.

Title courtesy of 'Tenuous Titles R Us'.

There's a footballer with a backwards name. I think when he was being Christened the preacher had the surnames first on the card, and when he called out "Rio, Ferdinand" his mother misunderstood and said "No. The other way 'round you fool".

Whatever. The point is that with my total ignorance of anything even remotely sporty (Even Sporty Spice) I was unable to tell the difference between one imported sportsman and another. I thought he was the one who has just been sold by Manchester United to some other club for £80 million. Actually it appears it was some stupid old tarParis Hilton's new boyfriend, Cristiano Ronaldo. Still. 80 mill for one guy, whatever his name is... and I heard it on the news so it's gotta be true.

The next thing I heard on the news was that the workers at the Vauxhall and LDV motor vehicle companies shouldn't expect the government to bail them out.

You know what's coming next. If footballers are worth that much why don't we just sell Man. U? The money we'd get for the whole set would more than pay to keep what's left of Britain's manufacturing base for the duration of the depression and then some, and it's not like we actually need them. We have footie teams coming out of our earholes. They're everywhere. All we'd have to do is to shuffle all the other teams up one to fill the gap. I guarantee, no one would notice.

Then after a few polite months grace Stockport County could change their name to Manchester United, The Chapel St. School XI could become the new Stockport, and next year's input can be the new Chapel St. FC - which they would have done anyway.

And the world thinks Gordon Brown is the financial genius.

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Note to self. Remember to change the title before posting.

'Dirty' Diego Maradona has defended his foul-ball goal against England which it seems we've still not forgiven him for by pointing out that we won the 1966 World Cup on a disputed goal which he reckons everyone could see didn't go over the line.

I believe you've all got the hang of my inability to understand the appeal of competitive sports by now? Agree with me or not you can't have missed that I know slightly less than next-to-nothing about any sport on the planet.

It must therefore be obvious to everyone on the planet that if even I can see the fault in his logic then it should be fairly obvious to Maradona as well.

Well, unless he's back on the cocain and ephedrine anyway...

Firstly, even I know that we won that game 4-2, so if the goal hadn't been allowed we would still have won, and secondly it was just a disputed goal. The ref made his decision and both sides accepted it, there were no declarations of foul play, just heated discussion about whether the ball crossed the line or not. Maradona on the other hand (No pun intended) was watched by the whole world flicking the ball into the net with his hand. Even he doesn't deny it. The only three people who didn't see it appear to have been the linesmen and the referee. People are still arguing about the 1966 goal, no one disputes Maradona got away with one giant foul. Indeed certain people actually applaud it.

There's the Argentinians, obviously, who saw this as some kind of revenge for the Falklands conflict, but then there's the Scots, who it seems will celebrate anyone or anything that puts one over on the English. I think they're just miffed because eveytime one of their kings ruled Britain he promptly became English... To me it seems like a kind of strange thing to do, to celebrate the fact that the only way to beat us was to cheat seems rather like admitting that we were better than them, but what the heck? Like I keep saying, 50% of the people watching any competitive sport are going to come out of it feeling bad.

Where's the fun in that?

Why then do I get so much pleasure out of shouting "Handball, Maradona!" at every suitable opportunity? I even wrote a song in which those two words were the whole lyric. I must be unique. I'm the only person in England who's getting any kind of pleasure out of being cheated out of our place in the World Cup.

I think I've made my position on competitive sports pretty clear in the past, but just at the moment there's no getting away from the English football team losing to Croatia. I mean, c'mon, there's people dying out there, there's banks collapsing before our very eyes, there's two CDs of confidental information appertaining to almost 50% of the population of the UK, and football kicks off the news? (No pun intended.... really....).

Our typically British solution to this debacle is to sack the manager.

Just how brainless is this nation? The manager is the guy in the middle. He's not out there on the field playing like a tortoise with a wooden leg and a drink with his name on it back in the bar, and neither is he one of the guys with the money who run English football. Why aren't they sacking a few of the players who made such a pig's earhole out of what the newsreaders maintain should have been a walk in the park? And not just any park either, a really, really nice one with lots of flowers and sunshine in it.

Then again, who picked this guy to be the manager in the first place? Are any of them about to walk the plank? Is the sweet FA entirely populated by dimwits who seriously believe that although they picked the wrong man for the job, it's not their fault? Am I going to have enough question marks to finish this blog?

I'm getting the impression, just at the moment, the we just look for excuses to blame people we don't like for stuff they have little or no control over. It's not the manager's fault that a load of expensive players who everyone agrees should have walked it, didn't walk it, or even crawl it on hands and knees, any more than it's Gordon Brown's fault that some twit despatched two CDs full of sensitive information out into the wild blue yonder.

If a bunch of "European peasants" (Not my description) can beat a bunch of English millionaires, maybe the solution is to dock the millionaires some of their millions. Bring them a little closer to peasanthood maybe?

And I'm talking about the FA as much as the players here.