Colours

Look here chaps, I’ve had a headache for two days, not all of which can be attributed to a hangover or the effects of the flu that kept me indoors over the weekend. I still think most of my splitting headache is what comes of watching the Liverpool - Barcelona match on a big screen. Luminous yellow is not a team strip. I say it’s an advantage.

I’ve thought this last year, watching them beat Chelsea. Chelsea’s blue strip must give them no advantage, assuming that it blends in well with the background colours. In contrast, no other team has such a high visibility strip as last year’s European champions. Has nobody asked if it’s totally within the rules of the game? Does nobody but one old football pundit think it’s much of an advantage?

Yet consider the facts. Teams are often forced to change strips to prevent too close a clash with their opponents. In the modern game with advertising forming so much of the background, some kits are certain to stand out better or worse. And surely the colour of a teammate’s shirt can give an advantage. Barcelona have a strip that ensures that any player can easily pinpoint his teammates. Even seen in the corner of their eye, they’d spot that bright yellow strip.

I’m not saying that they aren’t a team of great players but surely there has to be a limit to how bright a team’s strip is. Okay. Enough said. I’ve come out of my hangover long enough to type this and I can type no more. Now won’t somebody pass me the paracetamol?

By A Whisker

Mystical forces were at work tonight. They’ve been at work for the last ten years. Biblical forces, such as those that began to give the Labour Party victory when they started to get rid of their chinwhiskers.

Alastair Darling and Peter Mandelson first took razor to throat and others followed. There were a few that held out: Charles Clarke, David Blunkett, Margaret Beckett… But there is a truth of political life that maintains that the clean shaven face is more electable than those with a beard or moustache. We now have equity in the shaving stakes. That’s why the sensible money is going on a hung parliament at the next election.

Tonight, my lucky bottle of rum ran out at half-time of the Barcelona Liverpool match. I didn’t panic. I knew my bet was safe. I knew that one team would win and I was certain it couldn’t be the home side. You see, there are rules of football like there are rules of life. It’s that same rule as runs in politics. Men who don’t shave stand less of a chance.

Barcelona arrived at the ground looking like a team of Mexican banditos heading for the border to rustle themselves some meat before a night with the tavern whores. I’ve never seen a squad of professional footballers look so unshaven. What is it about today’s players that make them avoid the razor? I fancy it’s too much dogging and drinking tequila with IT girls but don’t you think it strange that footballers are always advertising shaving products that so few of them seem to know how to use them? Bobby Charlton never played a match unless he’d had a shave and the same was true for the great Stanley Matthews. I never saw a whisker on his chin.

Yet Barcelona seem to have taken their cue from coach Frank Rijkaard whose snake-tressed appearance makes him look like he’s fallen straight from the pages of Greek myth. And before you go saying anything about me, Forks may have a beard but it's well groomed. You could enter my chin into a dog show and it would come away with best of breed. That’s more than can be said about Deco’s chin.

Some of these footballers need less time with their WAGs and more time with some WAG – water and Gillette.

Got Up Late, No Fit State To Write

My mood is foul. I woke up half out of bed, lying sprawled across the remains of last night’s TV dinner, and with my legs tangled around Matthews, my five year old labrador. Everything about last night’s game had dried around my mouth. The anger, the disgust, the despair, the corruption made real. We need weeks like this to remind us who we support when it all comes down to the wire.

Tonight we have to make another stand. Are we for the red or are we for the blue? We’re all partisan to one side or the other. Some of us just don’t know it yet. Tonight’s matches in the European Championship marks an important moment in world affairs. Are we for Russia or the USA? Liverpool play the current champions Barcelona, while Chelsea take on FC Porto, the team once managed by their current manager José Mourinho.

Anti-American sentiments might make it hard for some of us to support Liverpool now they’re owned by two American billionaies, one a close supporter of George W. But are we really so naive to think that supporting Chelsea is to support good old fashioned football virtues? Roman Abramovich, friend to Putin, or Tom Hicks, friend to Bush? Or do we try to support the little island in the middle? Hard choices. Big outcomes. The world in balance. And that's before we've even put in our bets.

But isn’t it this that makes it such an exciting yet funny old game?