Van; and Wheels
COMRADE5! DO NOT FEAR! Your club is in safe hands! Australia’s rugby players will finally free themselves from the yoke of their colonial masters! It is quite normal to go three years without touching a member of the opposite gender! Hmm, seems to be pretty accurate so far. Guus Hiddink will not be the next Chelsea manager! Woah! There might be a problem here, check out this news coming from Rupert Murdoch’s very own propaganda machine, Sky Sports News: “Breaking news: Ajax have reached an agreement with Chelsea over the transfer of coach Henk ten Cate to Stamford Bridge, where he will work alongside Steve Clarke as assistant to Avram Grant.”There were rumours circulating last week, you see, that Chelsea’s sporting director, Frank Arnesen, was planning to bring in Ten Cate and that Hiddink would follow as manager shortly afterwards. Today’s events - despite Grant’s insistence that Ten Cate’s arrival has his blessing - give credence to those whispers.[Fiver hits propaganda machine with oversized comedy spanner and adjusts various manifold overhead sprockets]Let’s see if we can’t get this thing working properly. COMRADE5! DO NOT FEAR! Repeating riffs is the secret of comedy, it is not a hasty way of dealing with late-breaking stories! We all have one of those hidden under our bed! Yup, working again. Ten Cate is coaching his clogs off this season! Gah! The machine’s still flipped! Ajax have been dumped out of Euro Vase and at the weekend their fans chanted “Henkie, get lost” as his team struggled to a 2-2 draw with Sparta Rotterdam.[Fiver gives propaganda machine almighty whack with the only oversized tool it can boast]Right, one last go. COMRADE5! DO NOT FEAR! Frank Lampard will put the agitator Gareth Barry in his place and pepper the Russian goal with shots next Wednesday! England will not use the plastic pitch as an excuse!Bah!* * * * * * * * * * * *QUOTE OF THE DAY”He used to have a nickname for his ‘thing’. He wasn’t very modest and always called it ‘The Hulk’. It was quite distinctive because he has a strange skin pigmentation down there, which means it’s the colours of Neapolitan ice cream” - Jermain Defoe might not appreciate kiss-and-tell merchant Rachel Cameron’s attention to detail, but it’s certainly made the Fiver feel less self-conscious about its maple flavoured cone with real walnut pieces.*********************’KARMA TODAY’ with ENGLAND’S MICHAEL OWENMichael Owen - or to give him his full given name, England’s Michael Owen - loves playing for his country. So much so that he left his beloved Liverpool with a tear in his eye and a bag of coins in his grip, and trundled off on his little wheel-shaped legs to better himself in Madrid. “Bye bye, England’s,” grinned Rafa Benitez as Owen trundled into the horizon, “and eff off! Now we can build a lop-sided team which doesn’t function properly around another over-rated local hero instead.” But things didn’t go well for England’s in Madrid, as he didn’t bother learning to speak the langua … hold on … didn’t get many games. So with his England place in mind, he drove himself back towards Liverpool - whereupon he got blocked off from the slip road for the M62 by a fat lummox in a flash car who shunted him all the way to Newcastle.Sadly, having gone to such lengths to take great care of himself, England’s then got knee-knack. Wrapping himself in cotton wool and snuggling up in a box in a cupboard under the stairs in the Newcastle treatment room, England’s spent the next few months dreaming of the Big Cup he could have won at Liverpool, the matches he could have played in Spain deputising for the subsequently injured Raul and Ronaldo, and the fact that the fruits of his self-centred career choices over the past few years pretty much define “karma” in a nutshell. And lo, his knee repaired in time for the 2006 World Cup - from which he crawled home on all fours.All of which is, even for the Fiver, a particularly convoluted way of making a simple point: that you’d think the daft get would have learned to simmer down and take life as it comes. But no. Because after coming on as a sub and scoring the decisive goal in Newcastle’s 47-46 victory over Everton yesterday, it seems England’s wants to play in, er, England’s Euro 2008 non-qualification double header against Estonia this Saturday and Russia the following Wednesday. And this despite strong suggestions that to thrash himself too hard after a quick return from hernia-twang might be daft $oddery of the highest order.”I don’t know whether two games in such a short space of time is right,” warned his boss. “I have to be very protective - that’s why I didn’t start him. He’s got to be eased back into it.” But England’s is not listening to Sam Allardyce at all. “I’m fine,” insists England’s. “It’s feeling good and I’m available for both teams,” he added, perhaps failing to realise that having played a total of 3.10473 games for Newcastle since they rescued him from his Madrid Hell, he might owe one team a wee bit more consideration than the other. “I think coming back in eight days to play for my club shows a bit of determination.” To play for England, yes it sure does. So if his internal tissues start shredding like confetti after seven minutes of the Estonia match, that’ll be another dictionary rewrite required - this time of the words “buffoon” and “myopic” - right there and then.*********************IT’S LOVEJOY! (A SERIES DEVOTED TO GEMS FROM TIM LOVEJOY’S NEW BOOK: LOVEJOY ON FOOTBALL)”Who cares if you only got into football after Euro 96? Who cares if you only supported [MU Rowdies] because they had David Beckham? Who cares if you don’t know who won the World Cup in 1938? It doesn’t matter. What does matter is at least you finally found football. At least you have been born again.” Continues tomorrow, a day for which we cannot wait.*********************THE RUMOUR MILLThe cut of Sporting Lisbon left-back/centre-back/midfielder Miguel Veloso’s jib is currently being admired by staff at the MU Rowdies, Arsenal and Liverpool.Martin O’Neill has a bag containing %26#163;10m in readies and will give it to Liverpool if they let him keep Scott Carson for ever and ever.St Etienne attacking midfielder Pascal Feindouno might decide to leave the Sarah Cracknell-fronted indie-pop darlings when he hears Rafa Benitez wants to bring him to Anfield.And if Roy Keane has his way, Rowdies loanee Ryan Shawcross will swap the red-and-white stripes of Stoke for those of Sunderland.* * * * * * * * * * *STILL WANT MORE?That scratching sound you can hear is David Pleat writing “Sunderland’s advanced full-backs and wingers gave the Gunners a scare” on his trusty chalkboard.Sick of people telling you not to pick your nose? Pick the Score instead.There was lots of football played in Spain over the weekend, which is a good thing for Sid Lowe, as he’d have nothing to write about otherwise.And there was lots of football played in Germany over the weekend, which is a good thing for Raphael Honigstein, as he’d et cetera, and so on, and so forth.And in tomorrow’s %26#163;0.80 Big Paper: Frank Keating returns; Steve Claridge casts his scouting eye over an 18-year-old from the New Den; and Ron Cox delivers his tip of the day.* * * * * * * * * * *NEWS IN BRIEFPeter Taylor has become the latest manager to be sacked by tikka-tinged and painfully shy Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan. “Crystal Palace announce that Peter Taylor’s contract has been terminated with immediate effect,” quipped a statement on the club’s website.Uefa has opened disciplinary proceedings against Milan and their Brazilian chea … sorry, goalkeeper Dida, who was stretchered off after being gently caressed by a Queen’s Celtic fan during his side’s Big Cup defeat last week.Wigan chairman Dave Whelan has demanded the return of about %26#163;293,000 he claims some footpads, trading under the name Greater Manchester police, overcharged him for policing matches during the 2003-04 and 2004-05 seasons. Chief Constable Michael Todd, Greater Manchester police’s, er, chief constable, told the high court the charges were reasonable and entirely lawful. And he should know, it’s not as though the police ever do anything wrong.Coventry City have announced that catchily-named American consortium Manhattan Sports Capital Partners Limited have withdrawn their interest in taking over the club.Dinamo Kyiv boss Josef Sabo has blamed his players’ Wags for poor team performances this season and ordered the squad to a training camp away from any distractions. “We went to the [training] base, because women in football are a scourge,” he explained, skating adroitly around any charges of rank misogyny, before losing his balance and falling spectacularly backwards into them. “They do not understand that men need to work, that they have a hard job to do.”Fifa is to review the %26#163;3.3m pay-off given to its former general secretary, Urs Linsi. President Sepp Blatter is reported to be angered by the amount because football’s governing body had renewed Linsi’s contract only months before his departure.Wales’s non-existent hopes of qualifying for Euro 2008 have been dealt a mild tap with the handle-end of a heavy screwdriver now that hip-knack has ruled Wolves goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey out of their qualifying games against Cyprus and San Marino.And the DVLA expects ‘WE57 HAM’ to fetch a near-record price for poncy personalised number plates when it is auctioned later this month. With a reserve price of %26#163;4,000, it will need to top the %26#163;36,000 that someone paid for ‘AR53 NAL’ in 2004.* * * * * * * * * *FIVER LETTERS”Re. an address for Lee Sharpe fan mail (Friday’s Fiver letters). I’m not sure where Jemma will find Lee’s web page, but she might find Lee himself in the VIP section of the Palace disco in Manchester, where he spent most of his ‘playing days’ at the MU Rowdies” - Anthony Hassall.”BBC 6-0-6 was already bad, but I didn’t think they’d stoop so low as to lift straight from The Fiver. See for yourselves” - Damien Neva.”Re. Carl Weathers/Billy Dee Williams/Blade (Fivers passim). So who was the black guy in the A-Team?” - Paul Bockett-Pugh.”The sort-of return of TV %26 Radio (Friday’s Fiver) brought back fond memories, but left some unanswered questions: What time does Off The Ball with Ger Gilroy start? And can you get it as a podcast these days?” - Chris Bond. [Gilroy no longer presents Off the Ball since being 'promoted' to Newstalk 106FM's breakfast show. On his occasional visits to London he drinks in the Hawley Arms, the Camden local of fellow celebrities Amy Winehouse, Peaches Geldof, Johnny Borrell and Noel Fielding. Gilroy's changed - Media In-Joke Ed.]“Re. the sort-of return of TV and radio. Gentlemen, please don’t toy with my emotions. If a girl who broke my heart six months ago suddenly called one day just to have a chat, I’d expect her to keep calling. Or else I’d say she’s a selfish cow who’s messing with my head” - Chris Giles.”I can see that 20 Benson %26 Hedges (Friday’s England squad) causing problems for the opposition: heart attacks, lung cancer, strokes, bronchitis, emphysema, leukaemia, cataracts, pneumonia, cancers of the cervix, kidney, pancreas and stomach, blocked blood vessels, impotency and blindness” - Richard Cassar, from atop his high horse.Send your letters to the.boss@guardian.co.uk.* * * * * * * * * * *’YORK, ORIGINALLY’
Tags: ajax, avram grant, boss, cars, cate, chelsea, euro 2008, flavour, ford, henk, hero, hiddink, job, lampard, pace, rotterdam, rumours, sam allardyce, steve clarke, ten cate