Thursday, July 28, 2005
Fantasy Football

I'm not as big a football fan as I am rugby but I do like to watch Premiershipfootball on Sky onthe weekend. So I'm not particularly emotionally invested in the game but from the outside I have to suggest the game is goin down a long, dark tunnel from which it may not escape. Before I qualify that allow me to put in the inevitable 'buts' people will think of: (1) Yes the game is the national sport of England so it will always have support, the parochialism and tribalist nature of supporting football is deeplyingrained in the very nature of the country.(2) Yes there is far too much money in football for it to ever go completely bottom up and (3) Yes it is the largest sport in the world and one of the easiest to particpate in at any age group.

Given those three factors I would like to point to the destabilising effect of Chelsea, or more aptly Chelski, on the game of football. This week they offered £60m for Andrei Shevchenko of AC Milan. It would be the largest ever deal done in the history of football by quite a margin. No club in the world can compete with that figure nor could any club resist accepting that kind of offer. So what you may say? So sport is built on the nature of competition and a level playing field. At this moment in time one does not exist in the Premiership. Chelsea can field international players in every position on the field and most if not all of the subs bench. Essentially the title was bought last season and it will be again this season. In two years Chelsea have spent over £200 million onsome of the bestplayers in the world, they are nothamstrung by finances as every other club in the league are and so they can buy any player in the world, no exaggeration. Sure you can argue that they can only put 11 men on the field at a given time but if all those players are international standard playing against men who have just come up from playing in Crewe, Hull and Stoke ( no disrespect intended but it's not quite the same as playing at the Bernabeu etc)

More than this Chelsea have the best facilities, the best trainers, coaches and advisors. It's spiralling out of control and has been since the start of the Premiership. Lots of fans from other teams hate Man Utd with a vengeance, I'm not exactly a big fan either, but they won so many titles with a lot of home grown players - we all remember when Alan Hansen said Utd couldn't win the title with kids, and they did - Chelsea and Arsenal have very few English players and those that are there have been bought with the possibility of playing few games, Shaun Wright-Phillips is a prime example. How does it help the game when Arsenal field a side with noUK player in the team let alone no Englishman?In other leagues there are similar situation, Bayern Munich in Germany and Real Madrid in Spaincome to mind, yet in both those instances those teams play in competitive leagues where the top five teams are challengers. In the Premiership there are barely three and maybe only one team in it this year, no prizes for guessing sorry. So in view of this now rant-length blog I declare the Premiership officially renamed the Fantasy football championship because it might aswell be played on the computer or paper as on a field in a stadium charging people lots ofmoney for the inevitable. What are the odds on Chelsea winning the Premiership? Don't know - the bookies aren't taking bets ;)

Posted by Owen Jones 2005-07-28 17:51:15

Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Exercise

It's amazing what exercise can do for you, it makes you sore, it makes you walk funny and it's supposedly good for you. Go figure, everything that is supposed to be good for us comes with a price. Think about it, eating healthy is supposed to be good for you yet you can go your whole life knowing that one friend who eats everything in sight, never skimps on Burger King (sorry McDonalds is crap ;) ) drinks more alcohol than your resident alcoholic - probably because they are that person and they still look better than you. They don't weight train five times a week, they don't run five miles every other day, they can't skip period. So how come that sonofoabitch ain't me? Because exercise is a lesson in stubbornness. There willinvariably be days when you enjoy it, when Ghetto Gospel or Come with me is slamming in your headphones, you have an image ofyour worst enemy lying bloodied at your feet and fifteen reps ofsix disks bench pressis easier than breathing because the adrenaline is flowing like wine at a wedding.

Did you know dolphins have to remember to breathe, weird huh? Pity some folks I know didn'thave to do the same, they wouldn't last very long praise be to the All-Humorous-One.

But those days are few and far between. The rest of the time you push yourself into the gym/onto the road/field whatever because your stubborn. When you aren't involved in training in a group or with someone else then it's just a plain slog. So suck it up there's a plate of fish and chips with your name on it and you gotta lose some to gain some.

Posted by Owen Jones 2005-07-27 17:54:13

Tuesday, July 26, 2005
V for Vendetta

Without doubt one of the best graphic novels ever written and never was it more powerful than now. If you missed it the papers are having a hissy fit over the fact that the movie of the gn they are currently filming - Natalie Portman with a shaved head might have caught your attention - features bombs going off in a future London Underground. Unfortunate certainly but the movie was filming a while before thebombings and the GN is almost two decades old. So why the fuss? Window dressing basically, smoke and mirrors to hide the fact thatour immigration policy and policing of it is a joke. Running up tothe election these issues were brought uptime and again, yetthe country voted to put the government back in who had 'overseen' this utter degradation of ourborder control. Only when it is too late do we look for excuses,maybe if someone in power had read V for Vendetta they would have been a lot more paranoid and safety conscious. But then that's wishful thinking too.

Posted by Owen Jones 2005-07-26 17:44:05

Monday, July 25, 2005
D.I.Y

The kind with nails and wood :) The acronym should be DETI, don't even try it. I've had a few DIY nightmares in my time; a table with three and a half legs, getting electrocuted by a fiddly light socket, shelves with a lifespan of less than ten seconds and managing to scrap a very old, family heirloom mahagony table. So when things need doing I tend to leave them needy for a while because it's not just my affable inability to do anything with 'improvement' in the sentenceaccurately but it takes so much damn effort and I have a quick-burning temper in such cases. This little intro is a prelude to another DIY horror story, shelving.

Shelving is the bane of my life. I have lots of it, I have three largeshelves full of hardback books, two of graphic novels, four of DVD's, one of games, six of paperbacks, one for CD's, one for VHS's, two for research books, one for magazines, one for weapons and one for PC software and equipment. Throw in a large cabinet thing full of old keepsakes,two clothes cupboards and a shoe rack (don't ask I am the male Imelda Marcos :)) and this is all in one room. So when a shelf breaks, as it did, then you can imagine the hassle it becomes, especially when they are all close together. There wasn't enough room for me toreplace the broken shelf, which luckily (at the time) was near the bottom of the wall. So after some jerry-rigging and the removal of the shelf above, including the dumping on my bed of far too many graphic novels (I need to stop buying them ... yeah right) I had the space to work in. Or so I thought.

I drilled three holes into an external wall and using some decent sized screws and jackets to fit one of my supports in. On the other side I had a big thick piece of wood seperating the two sides of the cupboard, so that was easy enough to screw into.At some point, one of the screws simpy won't start, sotaking my trust hammer I gave it a slap. It needed another one, onlygiven the cramped environment my second swing was a bit too Tiger-Woods. Theshelf directly above objected to being hit and promptly collapsed, jamming my hand. Two further shelves followed below and rather than being one shelf short I am now four. Bugger. Anyone know a good chippie? :)

Posted by Owen Jones 2005-07-25 18:03:27

Sunday, July 24, 2005
Storm in a teacup

Or should that be flash in the pan for England? Over the course of the last 18 months sports writers have come to extoll the virtues of the English cricket team with worrying alacrity. Two series wins over a diabolical West Indies team, including a world record score by Lara again, a healthy sweep of NZ who were minus their most dangerous andattacking bowler plus several big players out of form, a tied series in SA, which wasn't compelling stuff and Bangladesh. During this timewe have heard of the great opening pair of Strauss and Trescothick, the classy Michael Vaughan, the supreme all-rounder Freddie Flintoff, thevital bowling of Ashley Giles *snigger* and the awesome Steve Harmison.

So welcome the world champions and .... well we now know how good England are. The only batsman to pass fifty (twice) and the only player who looked unfazed by the aussies - the debutant Kevin Pietersen who made all the English batsmen look useless. 'Banger' and Strauss looked about as likely to survive thenew ball against McGrath asa pack of lemmings on the end of a cliff. Vaughan doesn't know which end to play with at the moment, he and Bell (who's playing insteadof Thorpe!!!)seem to have missed the concept of building an innings (ask Damien Martin if you have to;)), Flintoff loves throwing his wicket awaywhether it's one-day or test matches and Geraint Jones needs to patch up the holes in his gloves.

Bowling wise, Simon Jones has to be the unluckiest guy around at the moment. Were it not for the inepititude of his team mates he would surely have had a five-for and his name on the Lord's honours board. His namesake geraint dropped two sitters, Pietersen dropped Clarke on 21 (!) and Flintoffdropped a dolly offeitherDizzy or McGrath. Costly errors. Errors they were lucky to get away with because if Gilchrist had made a score or either of the openers, this may have been even worse. As it is Australia have made England look long and hard at themselves. Did someone say 5-0?

Posted by Owen Jones 2005-07-24 17:08:36