Pandemic Winners and Losers plus more Hated XIs

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Pandemic Winners and Losers
Just because we are in the middle of a lockdown, doesn’t mean we can’t have Winners and Losers.

Here are my Pandemic Winners and Losers:

WINNERS:

Podcasts
I generally listen to Guardian Football Weekly and Totally Football Show on Mondays and Thursdays for the standard review/preview type shows.

Obviously with no actual football to watch, they have had to come up with alternative things to talk about, and dare I say it, are better for it.
With the Guardians classic match watch along and deep dives into contributors lives, to the Totally Cup and look back on Champions League seasons past, it has given all involved a chance to stretch their legs and I have found them excellent.

I have also recently found Stadio, which is a fantastic podcast where they have discussed Unplayable Player, Superhero XIs and a Football All Star Game.

I hope some of these elements are kept alive when and if we ever get to speak about VAR again.

Sunderland
And by this I mean Sunderland Till I Die. Season 2 was fantastic and was made all the better by Brent/Farage hybrid Charlie Methven.

If you haven’t seen it, the EDM scene is worth the Netflix subscription alone.

Nostalgia
With no current games, I have been watching old games and clips on YouTube.

Last weekend in Ireland, one of the channels had an All Man Utd Weekend showing the 68 Wembley Final, That Night in Barcelona ™, The Moscow Penalties and the recent Europa Cup final vs Ajax. (Obviously they only showed the finals where they won).

And it was great to watch these games back and for the 68 final, in full for the first time.

The weekend before there was a similar one with Liverpool. I didn’t watch a single minute of this but I am told it was equally enjoyable.

Us
Whether we realised it or not, we all actually needed a break from the 25 hours a day 8 days a week wall to wall football and endless discussion about it.

Football 365
Well done to you all for keeping the show on the road.

Netflix
Obviously. More on this shortly.

LOSERS:

& Chill
I really need to lay off the snacks. I am not the Adonis I think I am.

Graeme Souness
That business about the medals and his large table was all rather unseemly. But it’s been covered here in depth so I will leave it there.

Toilet Rolls
They are getting a right kicking these days.

Sky Sports News
With no 25 hours a day 8 days a week wall to wall football to talk about, or any sport at all, it really is quite saddening to see them operate without the hype.

The Transfer Market/Rumour Mill
Non existent. No harm there.

Sunday Supplement
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it actually happen?

Liverpool
It’s not going to happen is it.

Stay safe everyone.
DC, BAC

Throwback Tuesday
Like probably most of the 365 readers, I was sitting at home last night with a glass of whisky watching the full length 1973 European Cup Second Leg Semifinal Ajax v Real Madrid from an old TVE Spanish broadcast.

I wasn’t even born then but I say Hell Yes! SO much better than modern football.

Yes to a real 4-3-3!

Yes to forwards who don’t ’track back’!

Yes to defending when necessary, but not this bullish*t all press, all the time. It was so much more relaxed. The modern game is like modern life: stressed out and uptight.

And the best thing: no stoopid back pass rule. Keepers picking the ball up from a back pass! GegenPress against that Klopp!

I’m sure the Dutch probably rolled a few shags at halftime but I don’t care. Bring it all back!

Anyway, for tonight? I’m thinking Ajax v Bayern 1973. And please don’t tell me the result.
Dylan, Seattle

The Hated XI
What a great idea, hatred is fun, so let’s ave it! I am 26 therefore I shall include players from within my ‘lifetime’.

GK – Pickford: Super smug, likes a bar fight, couldn’t catch COVID if he was coughed on in Sainsbury’s and isn’t even England’s best goalkeeper. Looks like that council estate kid (I was one, so I can say that) that robs your sweets then helps you look for them (I was one, so I can say that).

RB – Danny Mills: I will admit that this hatred has evolved as he has “evolved” into “punditry”. But it goes both ways. I was going to put Gary Neville like every other boring and expected Liverpool fan would, but his punditry has changed this. How this man is paid to have an opinion baffles me. Personal favourites include loosely saying Messi would not get into Man City’s team – actually, just read this opening segment.

CB – Ramos (c): Definitely the captain of this team. Just watch the documentary. Not even about Salah, when he hauled down Salah, or when he did that thing to Salah, or that Salah thing, or Salah. Just watch the documentary. Salah ❤️.

CB – Pepe: Was a toss up between Pepe or Thiago Silva. Two absolute units who go down quicker than I will once I’m allowed to see the Mrs again (lockdown etc.). Pepe also has an extremely unlikable face. Almost pug-like. I hate pugs. I hate Pepe.

LB – Ashley Young: Putting him at LB as he did play there a bit and (somehow) did for England in the World Cup. I once met Ashley Young, at a BP garage in Hertfordshire. I was an excitable young kid. I ran up to him – Ashley, Ashley, Ashley! Hey Ashley! To which he turned to me and said “F*** off kid” before getting back into his supercar and speeding off. True story. I don’t like you Ashley, you are mean.

RM – Me: I actually struggled to find a right-winger I hated. I used to my play here in my school days. And I’ve spent an hour creating this list instead of working to a deadline my boss has handed me for close of play today. So yeah I hate myself right now. Ah well. Time for a beer!

CM – Fellaini: Elbow swinging lunatic, but I bet if he played for my team I would absolutely love him. But he doesn’t, so I don’t. And I make the rules.

CM – Adel Taraabt: I don’t like you because you could have been so good. You were type of liquid sauce-spraying, nutmegging, sexy Morroccan freestyling street-baller that I loved. You could have taken over the world. Just a bit of commitment. Somehow he is still only 30, which is four years older than me. God I’ve wasted my life…

LM – El-Hadj Diouf: A drink-driving, spitting nightmare. How dare you disrespect our legends! How very dare you! As Greta Thunberg would say: “you have stolen my dreams and my childhood!”

ST – Michael Owen: It all started so nicely. And then you went and did it. You did the one thing you shouldn’t have done. You know what you did. Why didn’t you go to Stoke? Stoke is lovely sometimes. Few days a year it’s well nice. But no. No. That wasn’t good enough for the King of The World. You had to go… there. After all we did for you. Plus he thinks he is liked by Liverpool fans still. No sir. I grew up watching that god-awful show he was in, where that kid would imagine him and he would appear out of his poster or something. I was like 8 so it might be wrong but something like that. And then you go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “Man U? Where do I sign?”.

ST – Hueng-Min Son: You smile way too much. But you’re also a shithouse. But no-one remembers the shithousery because you are all smiley. You are like that kid that never gets in trouble and yet I did. You do a bit of kicking, moaning, shouting. But it’s fine right, because you smile. Maybe I’m a hideous grump (Mrs’ words not mine) but I just don’t like him.

Manager – Diego Simeone: I nearly passed out with anger when they came to Anfield. I need a break from footb…. No. NO I DIDN’T MEAN IT. PLEASE COME BACK.
Joel Turner

World and hated XIs
Enjoying the current players world XI (no shared club or country) game; but how did Bellerin inveigle his way into Silky (LFC)’s team? (And what’s with those initialisms? ‘SC: Kane’ – Stricer? Strike Centre? Odd.) Anyway, below is my corrective to both, with subs and everything. It was spoiled by realising I couldn’t have Kante and De Bruyne (Chelsea…) but it’s still fairly well-balanced:

GK: Jan Oblak
RB: Seamus Coleman
CB: Kalidou Koulibaly
CB: Virgil van Dijk
LB: David Alaba
CDM: Wilfred Ndidi
CM: Christian Eriksen
CAM: Kevin de Bruyne
LW: Cristiano Ronaldo
RW: Lionel Messi
ST: Kylian Mbappe

Subs: Andre Onana; Alessio Rogmanoli; Diego Carlos; John McGinn; Jadon Sancho; Timo Werner; Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

Here’s a quick most hated XI too – a nice mix of the personal and universal:

GK: Joe Hart
RWB: Dani Alves
CB: Pepe
CB: Ricardo Carvalho
CB: John Terry
LWB: Ashley Cole
CDM: Sergio Busquets
CM: Steven Gerrard
CAM: Robert Pires
ST: Neymar
ST: Luis Suarez

Cheers!
LW (MUFC)

The ‘and you can bring your dinner too’ XI
Hard bastards, tough nuts and shitehouses of a certain generation.

1. Les Sealey. Injured, with a gashed leg, in the 1991 League Cup final. Refused to leave the pitch.

2. Benjamin Massing. A one-hit wonder but what a hit.

3. Stuart Pearce. Once tried to run off a broken leg.

4. Julian Dicks. Pushed him inside. He’ll cope. Graeme Souness described him as ‘my kind of player’.

5. Wally Downes. Often cited as being the main instigator of the Crazy Gang spirit at Wimbledon.

6. Chic Charnley. 17 sendings off over a 20 year career. Once attacked in a Glasgow park by two men wielding samurai swords. Chic won.

7. Graeme Souness. Where to start?

8. Terry Hurlock. Terry Warlock. Party piece involved ripping a door off its hinges.

9. Ray Harford. Cold dead eyes.

10. Phil Stant. Possibly the only person to have been awarded both the South Atlantic Medal and a fourth-tier winners medal.

11. Billie Whitehurst. Hobbies reportedly included bare-knuckle boxing.

Manager: John Sitton

Imagine trotting out in 1990, onto a pitch that had clearly seen better days, and seeing that lot waiting for you?
Rob, Birmingham

Most memorable season?
Mikey, CFC posed the question on Monday of everybody’s most memorable season. Rather than answer that question through the lens of tribal bias, I figured I’d try and pick out the most important season or definitive Premier League season. After toying with 94/95 (final 22 club season, first instance of a sugar daddy club), 2007/08 (the peak of English clubs in Europe) and 2015/16 (Leicester, simultaneous collapse of every top side, multiple “big club” relegations) I figured 2003/04 has left the largest legacy on the top division.

Arsenal claiming the title without defeat has left a marker that every title winning side seems to be measured against; many other sides have gained more points and scored more goals but the fact that we still debate which is more impressive shows the scale of their achievement. Just behind them Chelsea’s first season after the Abramovich buyout helped to break the Man Utd/Arsenal duopoly that had been in place the previous six years and arguably prevented the Premier League evolving in the same way as La Liga. With Man Utd and Liverpool rouding out the top four this season was the birth of The Big 4™ and helped to set in place a golden period for English clubs in Europe, paving the way for increasingly lucrative TV deals.

Further down the table this was the season Leeds United were relegated, giving us the term “doing a Leeds” and finally signalling the end of the local benefactor owner and the rise in unscrupulous businessmen as the true impact of overreaching was realised. This season was also the collective highpoint for British managers: Alan Curbishley, Sam Allardyce and Steve Bruce all had top half finishes, with other Premier League stalwarts such as Harry Redknapp, David Moyes and Mark Hughes also gaining varying degrees of respectability. There was even Steve McClaren winning a trophy, the last such time an English manager won a domestic trophy. Finally there was the birth of Wayne Rooney as a superstar, with his form this season leading to his explosion onto the global seen in the Euros and helping to fill the commercial void after David Beckham’s departure in the summer.

Can anyone else think of a season in the Premier League that did more to define the top division for the following years than 2004?
Kevin (I’m guessing 2019/20 will fill this role in 10 years time), Notts

On new and old castles
We are now at the point of the conversation when someone brings up how other clubs money is not squeaky clean, this is deflection 101 from the handbook of excuses.

Before I touch on things I want to say outright I would love to see Newcastle get a break and get given an owner/plan with the clubs best interest at heart. Much like Man City, this is not the fans responsibility nor should they be regarded as enablers. We all know fans have some pull i.e. ticket prices, manager sackings or most recently the reversal of plans to claim government money but to believe that once the figure involved for profit/loss is 2 million plus, the fans opinion/influence is that of 5 year old persuading their parent to let them eat a tub of ice cream in its entirety at 3 o’clock in the morning. NOT HAPPENING SON!

It’s not fair, not at all, not the jackpot lottery win but the pressure put on fans to condone and stand by the decisions of their club. We seen with Liverpool two weeks after their owners renegaded on their plans to use furlough, that the overall sentiment was not that the owners had done something bad but the fans had, that “what would you expect from *insert poverty related insult* “. But I guess that’s just people for you, any excuse to slander and abuse. Arseholes are arseholes and unfortunately arseholes are more attracted to football than any other sport (with the exception of politics, which lets be honest is has now turned into my team against yours). So to Newcastle and City fans I want to let you know we all get it from opposition supporters regardless the the topic, you’re not unique, we have all been there at some point (unless you support Southampton who are literally saints). But am here to talk about the other supposed antagonist.

The one aspect of this I can’t wrap my head around is the disdain towards journalists who report on issues of, for want of a better word billionaires fuckery! “You can’t say that” what why? ” Well you drive a car don’t you so you have no problem given them your own money” or ” The paper you work for well XYZ has a 0.02% stake in it so your a hypocrite”. Lets set the record straight, you’d be hard pressed to find someone in any walk of life whose paycheck isn’t linked to some evil bastard somewhere, that doesn’t mean you have no right to an opinion, that doesn’t make someone a hypocrite, its probably makes them braver than you to be so outspoken knowing this could cost them their job or worse. You don’t have to agree with what they say but by not agreeing you also aren’t obliged to send abuse and to scramble for irrelevant whataboutery. These lads are doing their job, that’s it.

I think one major issue that is being completely overlooked in the Newcastle vs the academic community debate is the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, he was journalist, murdered, actually butchered for reporting news……let that sink in…..can you put yourself in the shoes of a journalist and tell me you’d be OK with these guys coming to your house for tea? These guys aren’t the thief’s or bandits at the start of the film that get apprehended in the first 20 minutes, these guys are “final boss”, the evil lurking in the back who you don’t unmask until the 3rd installment. Christ they’re going to make City’s owners look like Santa.

So I guess what I am trying to say is don’t be ashamed for wanting success at your club by any means possible, certainly don’t be shamed into thinking you have any sort of control about who comes in either, but please don’t go after the people who go after the evil bastards if we lose them then we become trumps america! Man City have spent the last few years defending theirs aggressively, I suggest being delighted about the the future of the club whilst not feeling obliged to make excuses for these people, you don’t, they certainly don’t give a shit about you.
Luke

…I appreciated Mark, MCFC’s missive in yesterday’s Mailbox. As a long-suffering and -abused supporter of Newcastle United, I’m not particularly interested in suggestions that I should stop loving my club if a bastard buys it. Mike Ashley may not have ordered the murder of a reporter on US soil, but he *has murdered a lot of my dreams, and gotten away scot-free. And — perhaps more saliently to an outside observer — he remains morally repugnant, as his furloughing of club staff suggests. IMO, PIF ownership of Newcastle would represent a change in degree, rather than in quality.

Like Mark, I am not unaware of or immune to the concerns of Amnesty International and others, nor do I deny their validity. These are real-world concerns, and they’re more important than sport. But one doesn’t just get to pick a new club. That’s not how the heart works: not my heart, anyway. If you want to know my plan: it’s to keep on supporting my club and enjoy whatever successes come along while quietly feeling a little bad about myself. I think I can live with it.
Chris C, Toon Army DC

Defending Ozil
I know there will be plenty of mails depicting Ozil as some kind of greedy villain. While his uneven performances deserve scrutiny, can we not separate player from man. This man has paid for operations for thousands of kids, given food to hundreds of thousand of people and has constantly done charitable work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t flow with his greedy, lazy image so it doesn’t get much media.

As for his choice not to take a pay cut, that is his prerogative. From what David Ornstein has said, it seems it is because he wanted to wait and see how this would impact the club. But even then, that is his choice. This pay cut could have impacts on his charity work, we don’t know. And we shouldn’t be too quick too judge.

Which brings me to my final point. The delusion of some of these former players such as Carragher and Souness. It is easy to comment when you are not the one taking a pay cut. When your biggest achievement has been spitting on a 14 year old girl in the past 12 months, maybe you should learn humility and not judge others. The best thing about confinement has been muting these idiots.
Guillaume, Ottawa