'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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