Wednesday, 21 December 2011

'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 8


the Ferdinands always loved chooooonz

16 June, 2036
Rio Ferdinand’s estranged son, Belo Horizonte Ferdinand, walks away from a £17m-per-year contract with Charlton Athletic in order to collect musical genres. So far he has pocketed: acid jazz, acid house, acid rock, Balinese gamelan, bhangra, bluegrass, bossa nova, calypso, country & western, dancehall, death metal, deep house, Detroit techno, drum’n’bass, dub, dubstep, electro, electro-house, electroclash, funk, gabba, gangsta rap, garage, gospel, grime, grunge, happy hardcore, hip-hop, house, jazz, juju, jungle, krautrock, Miami bass, minimal, motown, new romantic, northern soul, nu-jazz, post-rock, progressive house, progressive rock, punk, ragga, ragtime, reggae, r&b, samba, ska, soul, tango, techno, thrash, trance, trip-hop, and two-step.


 "caress me"

January 2038
FIFA assent to the manufacture of sentient balls, which scream if wrongly kicked. They are to be used to train English footballers, now so unremittingly dense that the global footballing body has had to introduce a mandatory three-minute timeout after 22 minutes of each game so that they can have the rules re-explained to them.


 longballosaurus

8 March, 2040
The unveiling of the newly embalmed Sam Allardyce corpse at the Natural History Museum has a decidedly mixed reception, some people moving straight past him to the brontosaurus…


 finally, return on Wenger's investment

31 December, 2040
With ex-milkman’s son Robin van McGoogan scoring 43 goals in the first 19 games of the season, Arsenal are romping the league, looking set to secure Arsène Wenger’s first trophy in 36 seasons, perhaps even on course to emulate The Invincibles of 2004.


 over his dead body...

1 January, 2041
Prior to his 145th Manchester derby as boss at Old Trafford, Viscount Sir Alex Ferguson received his telegram from King William V, jogging across the field to greet the wheelchair-bound monarch before returning to the dugout muttering some consonantless conspiracy theory. Immediately after the game, Ferguson reaffirms that he will not be retiring until the oil runs out in the Middle East, all of which is moot as the World Ends, finally, when Mauritius instigates Nuclear War against the Seychelles, killing everyone except Lee Bowyer, who does the honourable thing and kills himself.

END OF THE WORLD: GOODBYE, FOOTBALL 


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'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 7


 bin Zayed: decent left peg

28 May, 2025
Signs that Manchester City’s owners are growing increasingly despotic and capricious become incontrovertible when Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan pulls rank on caretaker player-manager Mario Balotelli and picks himself for the Champions League Final against Anzhi Makhachkala. The fact that earlier in the week the Sheik walks into the Manchester City superstore in Abu Dhabi and purchases 9.3 million replica shirts at £65 each also raises new UEFA President Joey Barton’s suspicions that they have been circumventing the Financial Fair Play regulations. Shortly after the game, Crewe Alexandra Director of Football Dario Gradi gets the job at the Etihad, ostensibly on account of being born in Milan. City spokesman, George Galloway, says the Sheik “couldn’t be arsed to read the rest of his CV. And in any case, so what? If it fucks up, we’ll just chuck more cash at it, since everything is rectifiable by money.”




26 May, 2026
Volgograd: Manchester City lose the Champions League Final for a second consecutive year, this time to Lech Poznań, the Polish club’s surge to the top of the European game having come about within a few years of becoming superrich overnight – like Man City had eighteen years earlier – when geologists discovered that the city was surrounded by Europe’s largest untapped field of one of the world’s scarcest resources: sanity (elsewhere known, erroneously, as ‘common sense’). Anyway, well before the final rapier thrusts of the 7-1 humiliation had been dealt by the Poles, the 20,000 City fans in the stadium had turned their backs on the game in disgust, yet with their arms still around each other to demonstrate unity. Journalists are calling it ‘the Volgograd’...


 Vaduz stadium, halfway through construction of the first tier

17 December, 2026
With mandatory hosting rotation enforcing a return of the World Cup to Europe after Qatar 2022, Israel 2026, and Eritrea 2030, FIFA grants the 2034 tournament to Liechtenstein, who promptly commission Norman Foster & Partners to construct multi-storey stadia, eight stacked one on top of the other like Lego plus one super-high skyscraping hotel for all the teams and supporters with a series of gigantic lifts and walkways transporting them to the ‘grounds’.


 Working the cabaret circuit taking its toll on St Nicklas 

7 August, 2028
For the 100th consecutive evening, louche cabaret act Nicklas Bendtner regales visitors to his bar in Majorca, Bendtner’s, with his one-man show, Bendtner on Bendtner, which begins “I was definitely better than Neymar, pre- his transfer to Anzhi Makhachkala. I was better than Ronaldo, before he disappeared into the La Mancha wilderness. It was maybe 50-50 with Messi, who was never the same after his military service”.


 Argentine soldiers go on strike

4 April, 2032
A crack Argentine Special Forces soldier in the Second Falklands-Malvinas War refuses to participate in the final third of a crucial battle on the Tumbledown – despite having been specifically asked by the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to resume his training for a top-secret mission – on the grounds that he’s unhappy and misses his family. Instead, he wanders off to Goose Green and has a leisurely round or two of golf.

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'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 6


grit and determination

4 July, 2022
Alan Hansen is frogmarched ignominiously from the grounds of St Rihanna’s Primary School after trying to inveigle his way into his nephew’s egg-and-spoon race, having repeatedly warned little Josh’s housemaster that “you can’t win anything with kids”. Headmaster Graham Valve said “It was the collars that gave him away. They just looked a bit, you know…”


 FIFA's considered response to England's bid for the 2012 World Cup

10 December, 2022
Curtain-twitching crypto-fascist rag The Daily Mail leads with the headline FIFA FO-FUM, so encapsulating with uncharacteristic pithiness – and entirely typical ire – how that increasingly high-handed ecumenical cash-hoover, in a frankly gratuitous and brazen display of their unchallenged hegemony (and thus of the not-so-new-found second-class citizen status of the sport’s ancien régime at the FA), greeted England’s expensively compiled bid to host the 2030 World Cup with the words “Fuck off”. Shame, because top designers responsible for the 2012 Olympics logo had conceived a rather catchy Mascot – a cartoon lavatory on the rampage through a city: Loo the Looter…


 do not approach this man

16 March, 2023
Roy Keane is acquitted of the brutal, cold-blooded murder of Al ‘Fingers’ Hall-Land at Knutsford Services on the M6, despite having written about it (unwisely, some might say) in graphic detail in his latest autobiography: I, Rage.

It would appear that the misanthropic, dog-loving Irishman was on his way back from Wolverhampton, where he’d been to express withering contempt, and had stopped to buy a snack. Upon presentation of his prawn sandwich at the till, there appears to have been a slight glance from Hall-Land, one that the off-his-box box-to-box merchant interpreted as “you hypocritical middle-class faggot fuck” (“there was no question that’s what he meant” said Keane to the Manchester Evening News while the case was still sub judice, thus earning himself a terse tsk from the judge, Mr Justice O’Connell). This trigger was deemed a perfectly legitimate provocation by the jury (controversially selected from anywhere but Manchester, the prosecution having been adamant that they should all come from within the city, naturally), after which Keane sat in wait on the car park for six hours (alongside motorway police, it transpires), scarcely able to think of anything else, mind a riot of vengeance, a dish that was not going to be served cold.

Seasoned observers of the murder trial scene – few they be – were astonished that a particularly incriminating passage in Keane’s bilious tome was deemed inadmissible as evidence on the grounds that the book had been ghost-written by fellow volcano, Eamonn Dunphy, and could thus contain a fair degree of artistic licence. It reads: “I’d waited long enough. I fucking hit him hard. The Bill was there (I think). Take that you cunt. And don’t ever stand over me sneering about prawn sandwiches… My attitude was, fuck him. What goes around comes around. He got his just rewards. He fucked me over and my attitude is an eye for an eye.” Afterward, the dead-eyed nihilist from Cork was reported to have said “It was dark. I’m dark. I guess you could argue that stabbing the fucker repeatedly in the chest with a machete was excessive – I mean, I could have got myself booked, and that – but at the end of the day, chunks of his fucking flesh blocked my exhaust pipe and I had to get towed home.”

The AA charged Keane for bringing mobile pick-up services into disrepute.


 Neymar : remuneration of a nation

3 August, 2024
Injury-prone keepy-uppie merchant, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior enters into dispute with his employers, Anzhi Makhachkala, over the clause in his contract stipulating that his weekly salary should equal that of the annual GDP of the world’s poorest nation. Neymar claims to have been misled by the club, who failed to inform him that when such a figure dropped below whatever his current wage happened to be – which happened earlier in the year, when several African arms markets nation-states went bankrupt, so the IMF told them – then his wages would fall in step. A spokesperson for the Brazilian, suppressing the permanent Cheshire Cat grin induced by his ludicrous sinecure, said: “All Neymar knows is football. Football and giving joy. Football creates joy. What creates joy also creates profit. So, to those people who say Neymar is just chasing after a pig’s bladder, an activity which has no intrinsic worth, I say this – the Marxist theory of use-value is obsolete, you fucks. Wake up!”


 Clough prepares to do another practice abseil

14 October, 2024
Nigel Clough – yes, still sporting that Lego haircut – is arrested for fulfilling his job description, which was simply: bring the European Cup back to Nottingham Forest. Unfortunately, Clough’s quasi-autistic hyper-literalism led him to misconstrue the meaning of this message, in which it was implicit, said Sargeant Sargeant of Notts Police, they the club meant through the regular channel of qualification for, and victory in, the UEFA Champions League. Instead, Clough spent the first two months in the Forest job plotting a daring raid on the Inter Milan trophy room at San Siro (Javier Zanetti having hoisted it aloft in his 1500th game for the club). The gaffer’s consequent loss of focus was considered by many to be behind the run of nine straight defeats with which he started in the job, from those lovingly recalled honeymoon-period 0-2ers right up to the 0-11 humiliation at the hands of Derby County, the majority of which Clough spent practising his abseiling down the back of the stand bearing his father’s name.

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'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 5


target man, man

23 May, 2019
Liverpool fans hold a candlelit vigil for the tenth anniversary of their membership of the so-called “so-called Big Four,” the event taking on extra poignancy as Ke’ey Dogleash spunks yet more dollar on overrated north-easterners, including Jimmy Nail, Ant and Dec, Cheryl Cole, one of the Hairy Bikers, and the ex-narrator of Big Brother. After the ceremony, the maudlin multitude shuffles forlornly along to the nightclub of ex-player Andy Carroll for nibbles, spritzers, and optional lines of prime grade cocaine before reptilian Crewe scallies come to pick it up for distribution across the Midlands.


 Brazil u-17s remain united after the suffix distribution 

June 2019
The original Two Ronnies, Corbett and Barker, were bad enough for sowing confusion everywhere, what with their fork handles skit and out-of-sequence Mastermind answers, but that’s nothing compared to Brazil’s Two Ronnies… It’s well known that, originally, Ronaldinho gave himself the diminutive suffix –inho so as to differentiate himself from Ronaldo (Fenômeno), who was known in Brazil as Ronaldinho (on account of there being another, less famous, Ronaldo). When he (Ronaldo to us, Ronaldinho in Brazil) went to Europe, he dropped the –inho, allowing Ronaldinho to drop the Gaúcho. Anyway, their success in the Japan-Korea World Cup of 2002, the Penta, led to a rash of parents calling their kids Ronaldo. By the time of the 2019 under-17s World Cup in Afghanistan, the entire Brazil team is comprised of Ronaldos and thus necessitates all manner of compound suffixes: diminutive and augmentative (Ronaldinhão: ‘Big Little Ronny’) or double-diminutive (Ronaldinhito: ‘Little Little Ronny’), even tripartite suffixes such as ‘Big Little Little Ronaldo’ (Ronaldinhitão) and ‘Big Little Big Ronny’ (Ronaldãoinhaço). A veritable nightmare for commentators and shirt-sellers alike. The Brazilian FA lauds the “nomenclatural responsibility” of parents calling their sons Müller, Socrates, Hulk and suchlike, drawing a slightly overstated parallel with China’s one-child policy.

 Becks: whipping 'em in since 1994

November 2019
At the conclusion of the MLS season, veteran ball whipper-inner, David Beckham returns from what is essentially an $18m per annum modelling gig to turn out for Dagenham and Redbridge, keeping himself at the forefront of the thoughts of England gaffer, Neil Warnock, in case he should require someone to fizz over a few corners. His Royal Hairness is now sporting a homage to former mentor Sir Bobby Charlton’s famous comb-over, a style that is copied (ironically, of course) by the vacuous hipsters of Hoxton and Shoreditch – just as quickly as their hair-growth permitted, of course – while also, oddly, becoming de rigueur in Minsk (albeit sans irony).


 Malvinas Flytraps

17 February, 2020
Tragedy in the port of Buenos Aires as the latest Europe-bound consignment of phenomenally precocious, twinkle-toed Argentine #10s is drowned en masse when their ship, Malvinas Flytraps, sinks in the viscous brown slurry of the River Plate, watery grave for so many of the country’s young.


 boy done good: from Crewe Alex to the inspiration for an indoor ski centre in UAE

11 September, 2021
Incredible scenes of devastation engulf Abu Dhabi as irate Manchester United-supporting Amish fly planes into the Emirate’s petrodollar-funded skyscrapers. US Security forces fail to deduce that there is anything particularly suspicious about modernity-rejecting people enrolling on a course to pilot commercial airliners, nor about the incongruity of these idiosyncratically-bearded boys’ replica tops. Targets for the post-ideological, fitba-motivated suicide attacks included a 1312-storey mosque bearing domes alluding to the Premier League trophy, plus a vast indoor ski centre whose glass carapace was modelled on David Platt’s head.




'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 4


  "visionary"

17 January, 2018
Having quit football to take his dead grandmother to bingo, Stephen Ireland regales the crowds at the Limerick Film Festival at the premiere of his widely lauded directorial debut, Jumpers for Goalposts, a neo-noir allegory of a football-flavoured totalitarian delirium starring Phillips Idowu and Jonathon Edwards.


Mithered

3 June, 2018
There’s a low huggermugger of discontent outside the Etihad stadium as some unctuous no-mark management gushspout brassnecks his way through a press conference announcing that Manchester City are to have 19 different home strip designs for the 2018-19 season, and that only fans who buy at least half of them will be allowed entry to the games. Some died-in-the-wool City fans have half-thought about a protest, while Steve Greaves of CityFans (est. 2008) said “I ain’t mithered by it. We’re lucky they haven’t taken the club to London”.


Nostalgia for the Luzhniki stadium spreads in Moscow

21 July, 2018
Only 17 public tickets go on sale for the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow. Principally, this is because Russia’s kleptocratic political elite and their lackey organizers constructing a media centre covering 99.78% of the stands in order to accommodate compliant lickspittles of mainstream media and blogosphere alike – anyone, that is, who is prepared to help forestall seditious stirrings in the masses and sniff out activity bent on the Russian people re-appropriating the gigantic booty-divvy overseen by a pissed-up Yelstsin (and that Vlad Putin’s pretty chillaxed about). However, for anyone unable to acquire a ‘propaganda pass’, as they’ve become known, despair not – there is one extra-special ticket available, and at the fairly reasonable price of $48m. Its location? In a papoose on the referee’s back. FIFA have ratified this, provided they take 80% of the cover charge.


Professor Danielle Lloyd

28 September, 2018
A landmark in British Education as WAG Studies is offered as a degree course for the first time at Romford and Basildon Polyversity, as well as the Birkenhead Institute of Blag. Emeritus Professor Danielle Lloyd, convener of the popular Introduction to Mega-Shopping module, squealed: “I’m made up that we’re finally being taken seriously. Being a young, ambitious, working-class girl, pouring yourself into high-street cocktail-type dresses, and draping yourself sluttishly over the furniture of trendy metropolitan bars five times a week ain’t easy, I can tell you.” University Chancellor, Sir Jeremy Clarkson, added: “We’re here to provide a shortcut for girls hoping to escape their grotty backgrounds and live a life of credit card joyriding and vapid semi-fame.” Meanwhile, Professor of Poutology Victoria Beckham had a robot say on her behalf: “It can be really, really hard. Your fella sometimes has to go away for a long time. You have to put up with things like that.”


Moyesy: borrowed time

22 May, 2019
Everton fans stage a 48-hour sit-in demonstration in protest at the club’s stagnation under David Moyes after back-to-back third-place Premier League finishes with a skeleton squad of just 14 full-time pro’s, of whom four are Byelorussians on the minimum wage, one a blind paraplegic, two schoolboys, and one an anchorite prone to trip over his 7-foot long beard. “We need to go to the next level, like,” said Craig Pike, the pronunciation of his name sounding like white noise.

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'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 3


McGoogan's last drop-off before Wenger's 4-year punt on his semen

25 August, 2016
Citing the “disaster” of Per Mertesacker and ‘Fab-lite’ Mikel Arteta, neither of whom had legs suited for one of their primary functions (respectively, maintaining upright posture and locomotion), Arsène Wenger flatly refuses to add experience to his squad, and instead announces that the club have signed an embryo. Scouts had been monitoring the cell division over a number of weeks to discern traits amenable to Wengerist philosophy: the achievement of trophyless frugality while exuding moral superiority through a high-tempo passing game. The following week, with the window closing, Wayne McGoogan sensationally quits his job – delivering dairy products to the people of Hertfordshire – when the glint in his eye from the bright summer sun is handed a 4-year contract at the Emirates as he drops off the two pints of semi-skimmed for Le Professeur, who suddenly looked decidedly happy about the Gunners’ prospects in 2040…


Pulis: stentorian

9 May, 2017
Stoke City win the Premier League after a quirk of the fixture list computer and a set of coincidences with the weather allows them to play all 19 of their home games on wet and windy Wednesday nights. They take a maximum 57 points at home, which, allied to the 25 they pick up on the road (seven wins, four draws) was enough for the title. Both Manchester City and Arsenal forfeited their games at the Britannia Stadium – their respective managers, José Mourinho (on the eve of a prison sentence, it will transpire) and Arsène Wenger, reckoning the inevitable loss was best done without any of their players being maimed. Four-time World Town Cryer champion Tony Pulis is begrudgingly credited with having formulated a tactical masterstroke, namely: hiring a Finnish javelin coach, then signing Slobodan Statić and Darko Tactić from the Montenegro basketball team.


 Jose offers Leo an insincere apology for the latter's upcoming military service

11 June, 2017
Political scandal erupts in Argentina when it emerges that, in the somewhat murky 2015 presidential elections, hardline conservative nationalist Lucho García Pugliese won office having been bankrolled from overseas accounts traced to West Kensington, Lisbon, Madrid and Milan. The man behind this illicit funding was none other than ex-Real Madrid boss José Mourinho. It seems he was at the end of his none-too-lengthy tether having failed to win a single La Liga title in five attempts. Campaign funding provided by the Portuguese was furnished on the basis of a quid pro quo for Pugliese’s re-establishment of compulsory, retroactive military service for males between 18 and 22, this political favour thus taking the scourge of his dark arts, nemesis Leo Messi, out of the footballing equation, at least for a couple of seasons. Mourinho was happy to vouch for the fact that both Angel di Maria and Gonzalo Higuaín were conscientious objectors. After winning the title by 28 points, he leaves for Manchester City.


Sputnik Volgograd's new home and its perimeter of piss 

September 2017
The contempt of plutocratic football club owners for lowly fans plumbs new depths as Russian club Sputnik Volgograd’s gazillionaire owner Ivan Rypyulotov builds a new stadium ahead of the 2018 World Cup which the fans can only reach by swimming through an underground lagoon of piss. Piotr Tikskinsy, one of the 67,000 in attendance at the venue’s inaugural fixture, said: “It’s not ideal, certainly, but at the end of the day I love football and my life would be utterly meaningless without it” – thus seemingly misunderstanding that the ongoing existence of football is not contingent upon him attending the match. He continued: “Last year I allowed my daughter to be gang-raped by the squad when it was mooted that it gave them a 12% better chance of winning”.

Reich
Not all the 67,000 crowd were delighted, however. Indeed, Grigori Peev was stabbed to death outside the ground by Rypyulotov’s compliant thugs for reciting through a megaphone the following passage from a strange text by the name of Anti-Oedipus: “[The] fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ How can people possibly reach the point of shouting ‘More taxes! Less bread!’? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike.” Sputnik Volgograd release a statement saying that they will not be releasing a statement. 



 Universitat Craiova supporter

31 October, 2017
A coven of Romanian Satanists torch the Universitat Craiova stadium. They are watching Man2Man Marking TV (football porn, not gay porn) when the State broadcaster’s transmitter malfunctions and the images freeze just as soi-disant tactical guru, Ludo Statuescu was explaining, in an excessively top-down, functionalist manner, the radical tactical advance of their team’s 4-1-1-3-1 ‘Crucifix’ formation over the Pentangular midfield. Police believe the wanton destruction may have had something to do with them having just boshed a merry fistful of psilocybin mushrooms… Even so, their fourteen-hour marathon of gently pulsating chalkboards was going well until a lactose intolerant devil-worshipper threw a hot pan of full-fat over the chief witch, provoking a psychotic episode in the latter that ultimately eventuates in the arson attack. BBC World Service run the headline: CRAIOVA SPILT MILK ARSON.

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'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 2


1-8 down at half-time, Coyle salutes the fans 

11 November, 2013
Following a record 13-1 loss at home to Man City, slightly oikish enthusiast’s enthusiast Owen Coyle opines, earnestly (obviously): “I thought we started the game really brightly and were sharper than they were for those first 47 seconds… Anyone who was at the ground today, they will tell you we were by far the superior side in that period. But if you don’t take your opportunity to touch the ball before the opponent scores, you’re going to be in trouble. Goals change games. And four in the first 10 minutes gave us a mountain to climb, having shot ourselves in the foot. And climbing a mountain is difficult enough at the best of times, without a bullet wound in a major limb. I can’t fault the players for their honesty and we certainly came back into the game – dominating it for long periods while Balotelli, Silva and Agüero had that game of poker in the second half, as I think anyone who was at the game will tell you – but we’ve simply got to be more clinical about turning three-pass moves into opportunities to get one pass away from a speculative 30-yard strike on goal. We’ll get back to the training ground and work hard, don’t you worry about that,” Coyle finished, before nipping off to the doctor’s in his wee shorts to have his sinuses drained. A-fucking-gain.


Guus and Roman as the Dutchman's boat is about to set sail from Kiel

18 June, 2014
In the aftermath of two-time Premier League Champion Andre Villas-Boas’s acrimonious departure from Chelsea, Roman Abramovich once more tries to cash-woo Guus Hiddink for the Stamford Bridge hotseat, an appointment that gains even more urgency in the light of the easygoing Dutchman’s ongoing success in the international game, first guiding Russia to the final of Euro 2012, then getting Thrace (seceded from Greece, which collapsed in a heap of city states in early 2012) to the 2014 World Cup final. Hiddink tells ‘Red/Blue Rom’ that he’s just nipping off for a cruise of the Baltic Sea with the missus and he’ll be in touch in September. –Ish.


 The Up'ards high pressing game contrasts markedly to the Down'ards long-ball style

7 July, 2014
The clamour among the world’s oligarchs to claim a piece of the creamy, glamorous, prestige pie that is English football reaches new heights (or depths) when Uzbeki energy distribution magnate (and European government blackmailer), Sergei Smokaskov, pays a cool £165m for the Royal Shrovetide football match in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. With origins stretching back to the twelfth century, the game sees townsfolk born either side of a river – the Up’ards and the Down’ards – face off and attempt to score at millstones functioning as goals situated three miles apart and separated by hedges, ditches, and rivers – obstacles that militate against the sort of flowing, tikski-takska football presently flourishing in Tashkent.

The half-a-dozen or so rules circumscribing what is essentially a yokel melée are fairly straightforward and self-explanatory: there is to be no murder or manslaughter, for instance, while extreme violence is “frowned upon”; players cannot carry the ball in a motorised vehicle or “hidden in a bag” (the rules are ambiguous as to whether it can be carried in a bag provided it isn’t hidden); the game cannot go beyond 10pm (one in they eye for TV companies, no doubt); while cemeteries, churchyards, and the town memorial gardens are strictly out of bounds. Traditionally, the event kicks off with a dinner in The Green Man Hotel, when the bloke that starts the game (the “turner-up”, a post once bestowed upon Brian Clough, no less) is hoisted aloft the players’ shoulders and taken to the starting post – all of which Smokaskov plans to eradicate post haste.

Having been impressed with a more or less end-to-end encounter in 2013, a game he enjoyed even more once it had been helpfully pointed out to him by the correspondent of the Man2Man Marking TV channel that the Up’ards were deploying a revolutionary 923–1–786–1,235 formation (with Mayor Grenville Bozzerk-Clagging in the Makélélé role ready to pounce when the ball broke from “the hug”), Smokaskov decided there and then – impulsively, some might say – to build a state-of-the-art 4,000,000-capacity stadium, each seat kitted out with a telescope, fold-out mattress, and stash of heroin. Rumours of a Champions League have been mooted, with the claw-toothed, in-bred custodians of other similarly pointless traditions said to be keen to take some of the mad fucker’s illicit cash.


Herr Blatter dummies returning the errant ball

2 April, 2015
Increasingly bonkers FIFA supremo, Sepp Blatter, noble custodian of the game’s grass roots, yesterday flatly refused to throw a ball back over the fence to his next door neighbour, a 13-year-old whippersnapper with a bionic foot (how else would he have cleared the gigantic electrical barrier that encloses Sepp’s de facto sovereign fiefdom?).


'Arry: dog lover. And money.

24 June, 2016
CEO of the UAE FA at long last gets his man and appoints Harry Redknapp as coach, having finally allayed his fears by removing the last major reason for not taking the £750,000-a-week post: wanting to walk his dogs along the beach at Poole harbour of a morning. The ruling sheiks duly have a to-scale replica of the Dorset town constructed especially for their new ghaāfa, who thus now sets himself to what he does best: wheelin’ and dealin’ (although don’t suggest that to him). While only belatedly cognisant of the fact that he couldn’t simply buy a team, Redknapp nonetheless ducked, dived and generally improvised, and now has flunkies hanging around outside the school gates in several South American cities, offering young boys a sizeable package in exchange for accepting UAE citizenship. The sheiks’ architects, meanwhile, are busy building de luxe favelas backing on to Arry’s Sandbanks simulacrum. 

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