In the past month alone, their numbers have been decimated. They have been culled like badgers, like diseased cattle. Thrown onto a farm bonfire and left to burn, baby, burn. They have been defenestrated. Decapitated. Hung (and drawn, and quartered) out to dry. It’s a wonder some charity purporting to ‘stand-up’ for endangered species has not become involved. National DisgraceIt’s a national disgrace our puffin-faced PM, Diddy David Cameron, has not erected himself in the House of Commons. Slapped a heavy, gold-bracelet-weighted wrist onto the despatch box. And told us we’re not having it. (Or maybe that we might be having it in a few years time: don’t listen to those rebel back-benchers.)It defies belief a national day of mourning has not been called. We should, right now, be lining the streets, hats clasped to our chests,
trousers at half-mast. Clocks should be stopped, drums muffled. Muzzle that dog who wants a juicy bone.
For they are... Well, they’re not dead, but they’re as good as. They are not Premier League managers any more. They have gone gentle into that good night, or they have raged against the dying of the light, but, ultimately, it has come to nought. When they wake up this morning in their mansions. Scratch their bollocks and take a shit.
Shake open the tabloid on breakfast table while the serving wench prepares a breakfast. And get that pang. I do not matter
anymore. I am not on the sports pages. My raison d’etre has been beasted.
Sir Alex Ferguson, Rafael Benitez, Roberto Mancini, Tony Pulis, Jose Mourinho (though he got a reprieve), David Moyes (him too), Alan Pardew (Geordies can only hope), Roberto Martinez. We shall never see your like again. Or maybe we will in a day’s time, when you rock up at another club.It’s All the Fault of the Bloody Foreigners
It’s been described as a managerial merry-go-round, or perhaps - flippantly - the sack race, but really it is a ‘Game of
Thrones’ at this vaunted level. It is the battle for primacy, for supremacy, for hegemony in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of
Westeros. And some could argue football - at least at Premier League level - has about as much relevance to our miserable, Dickensian-poor, workaday, snotgobbling lives. We’re crawling through the muck in Flea Bottom, and the Premier League lords it over us like royalty. But that’s just simpering. What matters is these men, these culled badgers, and their fantastic, inhuman, inhumane, Tourette’s-triggered treatment at the hands of fate.Exit, I sniff, Ser Alex Ferguson’s “tribal chieftain” as described by Jon Snow-a-like Russell Brand (of all people). Him from “north of the wall”,from the land of snow and ice. Enter Gollum (okay, not strictly a character from ‘GOT’, but these fantasy realms can bleed into each other,can’t they?) Exit Rafael Benitez. They took your cock like the sinister eunuch Varys. They called you “fat Spanish waiter”. They would notfollow you, despite the silver you delivered. And now you are gone. Enter Jose Mourinho, that puffed-up Targaryen dragon of spite andspecialness. Exit, through those revolving doors, the Tyrion-tempered Roberto Mancini – “Bobby Manc” as you were heralded by yoursupporters - and enter Pellegrini, the not-so-funny, not-so-wayward Tywin Lannister of Manchester City Football Club.Even at Stoke City, those perennial ‘crows’ of the watch, managerial changes have been made. Out of the door marked ‘Prithee Exeunt’ goesRoose Bolton (Tony Pulis). At the time of writing a successor had not been named.It’s Carlos Kickaball and them lot to blame (so says TV nice-guy Sir Alan Sugar)Even amongst those scrapping to be amongst the ranks of those sat at the high table, there has been a plethora of switcheroos. The
promise of gold, and silver, making trigger fingers itchy. Brighton, who appear to have dropped the suffix ‘and Hove Albion’, also look set
to drop their boss Gus Poyet. As I write, he has been placed on indefinite gardening leave (perhaps at Highgarden) and asked to
naughty-step-think about his behaviour when he sent that email out to staff asking who the hell had shat all over the opponent’s
dressing room prior to a crucial play-off joust. Thankfully not at Crystal Palace, however, where the badger incarnate, Ian Holloway, a
man who once compared himself to a “badger in mating season” when asked to pinpoint the ‘number’ of his ‘happiness’ on the
Joy-Richter Scale, has remained in the hotseat. “When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.” So observes the soccerball fanatic George R.R. Martin in his
loosely veiled satires on the English Premier League (indeed, some critics have suggested the entire series is a kind
of ‘Secret Footballer’ whistleblowing peeeeeep, like that of a tiring referee, on the state of the game today). And the
Game of Thrones continues relentlessly, remorselessly. Forging narratives, plots, and subplots. Ruthlessly discarding
much-loved characters. Witness the retirement of Liverpool’s Jamie 'The Hound' Carragher (although, a more apt
comparison might be Carlos Tevez and t’Hound). Or that of David 'Jamie Lannister' Beckham. In the books, and the
HBO TV series, Jaime Lannister only had his hand cut off, but in real life, it was much worse: he was symbolically
castrated after trundling around for Paris Saint Germain his last ever football match. Or that of wee Michael Owen, a
man as dull as Davos Seaworth...
Postage Stamp - Top Corner
The Game of Thrones continues. At House Liverpool, with their sigil the Biting Man. The club a case model for how to
make ‘history’ history. At House Chelsea, where the oligarch owner makes sport resemble an infinite money cheat on a
computer game: “An Abramovich always pays his debts”. At House Arsenal, perching high upon a pile of gold they are
saving for a rainy day, where their manager, Arsene Wenger, as financially astute as Littlefinger (Petyr Baelish) never really
gets the girl.
At Manchester City. The lazer blues resemble King Joffrey in ‘GOT’. They cut a sulky, seething, sometimes silly, always selfish figure. They enjoy harpooning ladies of the night in their bedchamber. Barney Ronay, in The Guardian, described City’s ‘personality’ under the petro-billionaire ownership ofSheikh Mansour (a feller who has invested over - finger crooked to the lips a la Doctor Evil - one billion pounds in the club, andwho has only bothered going to watch them battle once) thusly: “To the billionaire, sport, with all its glorious uncertainty, issomething to be tamed and killed, machine-gunned with money, until even the grandest football club begins to resemble somestretched and burnished trophy wife, muzzled beneath a paste of high-end slap and stitch.”Seemingly oblivious to the myriad PR disasters which had occurred under their ‘watch’, City suits saw fit to boot out manager Bobby Manc - in fine style too: rumours of his departure first, surfacing like a shit that wouldn’t flush on FA Cup Final day - just before the conclusion to the season, stating
their desire for a more “holistic” approach from the next manager.
I looked it up in my official ‘Game of Thrones’ dictionary. It summarises “holistic” like this - Holism (from ὅλος holos, a Greek word
meaning all, whole, entire, total), is the idea that natural systems (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental,
linguistic, etc.) and their properties, should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts. This often includes the view that
systems somehow function as wholes, and that their functioning cannot be fully understood solely in terms of their component parts.So, in other words, vacuous nonsense (just like the brand of nonsense Brendan Rodgers would spout, likesome unholy concoction of a teakettle and a bluskythinking book on CD which you can listen to in the Mondeoon the way to the next appointment). And yet they expect us to believe it.Football has become high fantasy. We speak in tongues. So do commentators, players, managers. I just hope George R.R. Martin is already working on the script for next season, because I for one can’t wait!Woohoo! LOL. LOL.
