Voy Por Ustedes

Mark Twain once said the greatest of all inventors is accident. This is very true. True for poor Thomas Midgley who's best intentions and inventions nearly killed us all and true for Alexander Flemming who saved us all by accidentally inventing penicillin.

Ralph Waldo Emerson held to the maxim only the shallow believe in luck, the strong believe in cause and effect. I like the boy Emerson, he's says some clever things. The kind of things you can plagiarise at parties to make your self sound clever and trap off with the dumb blonde with the comfy chest furniture.

From a punting point of view, the Twains of this world would appear to be in the "it's all a lottery camp," while your Waldos' are of the ilk that stay up all night analyzing horse racing form and weather reports and generally researching the life out of a race or football match in order to find an edge.

This weekend offers a cornucopia of delicious punting opportunities and none of them involve Arsenal so there is potential here to really get myself into some financial deep waters. Thusly, I shall be using a blended gambling strategy of blind luck for the horse racing and informed opinion for the football as I don't want to posthumously upset Messrs Twain and Emerson as I know they'll be keeping an eye on me.

Using blind luck I shall be having a shilling or two on Bob Hall in the Gold Cup tomorrow. A P McCoy and Cheltenham go together like a concrete bench and piles, but I'm getting a stirring somewhere within about Bob Hall and although it may be the prawn sandwich I ate for lunch, I'm confident it's something more profound and at 13.5 there's value in finding out.






Football now and golly where to begin? It's important that one set aside all xenophobic prejudices and approach these fixtures clinically and unemotionally. This is tricky for me as I'm afraid I have a deep seated hatred for the other members of our Union. Fortunately, I couldn't give a hoot about Englands chances of qualifying so this balances things out somewhat.

When it comes to patriotism, my love or loathing of my own country does not begin and end with the England national football team and all those fans, mostly from the North with very little in the way of education, who accuse people like me of not being a true fan and being unpatriotic, do run along.

You have not the intelligence or the vocabulary to argue constructively on this matter. Just put your little flag on your van, eat your burger, give your wife a hard time and leave me alone. If being a true fan and being a true Englishman involves being over weight, toothless, wrecking whatever city England are playing in, beating up the locals and singing songs about the war, then let me never be a true Englishman.


I digress. England will not qualify for Euro 2008 simply because the players don't care about it. And nor should they. International football has become an irritating diversion for them rather than an honour. Why bust your chops playing against Austria or Andorra when you might have a Champions League game the following week against Barcelona?

If your club is paying you 100,000 bags of sand per week and you're getting appearance money and win bonuses which amount to many more bags of sand, why would you risk an injury playing for England when your only reward is qualifying for a tournament that would interfere with your summer holiday?

The idea that the large numbers of "foreign" players has evaporated the pool of talent the England coach can draw from is nothing short of Xenophobic drivel. Between 1967 and the mid 1990's there were hardly any non British players in the top division in England and the national time in that time won absolutely fuck all.

The fact that we even refer to non-UK players as foreign is pretty prejudicial in my opinion and indicative of how we view anyone not from these shores. Look up foreign in a thesaurus; "unfamiliar, unknown, unheard of, strange, alien." I might be being over-sensitive, but language matters, ask the feminist types. Incidentally, before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, my indifference to certain countries are based on real experiences rather than pre-judgements, which obviously makes all the difference, so there.

Anyways, it's money that's prevented England building on the relative success in Italia 90, not "foreign" players. Two years after Italia 90 Sky TV arrived on the scene and club football has taken precedence over the National side ever since. This is evident in all other countries in Europe. France, Italy and Germany have recent World Cup success, but with the exception of AC Milan, have been god awful in the Champions League. Spain and England on the other hand, shit in the International competitions, very strong in the Champions League.

Consequently I shall back teams that don't have a strong representation in the Champions League. Or lay the ones that do. Soooo, I shall lay Italy. I shall back Russia even though they appear to be the lay of the century. I shall also back Croatia to beat England next week because England should by then have failed to qualify and will give even less of a hoot than they may have done had it been a do or die confrontation and because Croatia have Eduardo and I love him, he is the best kept secret in the Premiership and how he keeps his hair so soft and manageable is testament to his pride and self-respect.


England v Austria - Owen and Crotchy to score 6/1
Bob Hall - Cheltenham Paddy Power Gold Cup 10/1
Israel V Russia - Russia win 1/2
Scotland v Italy - Lay Italy - Possibly back the 0-0 (11/2) or 1-1 (5/1)
England v Croatia - Back Croatia 9/2 - Eduardo to score in 90 minutes n/a