Beef Bagel

I’m not infallable, I’ve got things I’m ashamed of, for one, despite disliking you all intensely but I feel some kind of companionship.

I too, have an affliction. You see, I too suffer from eternal optimism. That ‘next season’ syndrome isn’t a spud exclusive.

My burden is England. She pains me so. I liked Sven, he was pop, he shagged Ulrika - come on, there was a time when we all would have loved to - but he was too soft. Beckham led the charge of players who believed the hype was more important than the results - that wags issue during Germany 06 was too much - and the players should have been concentrating on England. They weren’t.

But I did like Sven. He was a change from the succession of triers we’ve had since Venables. El Tel had it easy. He didn’t need to qualify for a tournament when all his games would be at Wembley. Dammit, it doesn’t come easier than that! But, didn’t he do a great job? Is anyone gonna forget that summer of 3 lions? I won’t, I was there.

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We were sat 20 minutes in the Yucatan, waiting for some bloke who has the key to some office in the back to return, so that they could change some channels and finally get the Tottenham game on for us. And we were not the only table of twitchy Yiddos trying to lip read Matt Le Tissier on one of the many screens in the pub as he sat above a graphic reading “Derby 0-0 Tottenham” on Soccer Saturday. The trouble is the viewing was neither more comfortable nor entertaining when a few of the screens eventually flicked onto Pride Park from some unidentifiable Middle-Eastern league fixture we’d just been watching.

It took another ten minutes or so to work out that not only had we started with Sergei Bent in place of Dimitar the Great but that Younes Richards was playing too. We’d missed Safety First’s injury, which has now revealed itself to be a muscle tear to his thigh that’ll see him out for the next two weeks, and instead assumed the starting XI was just some sort of grand insult to the Premiership’s lowest standing club. The more I saw that Derby was made of Robbie Savage and ten complete whos and the more the camera flicked to Paul Jewell and his swelling head - soon to be challenging Sam Allardyce and his planetoid noggin for “Celebrity I’ve got a bigger bonse than you 2008″ - the happier I was that Juande was metaphorically pulling down his pants in front of the home dug out, flopping out his old chap and tea-bagging his opposite number in front of the world.

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It’s like watching the fall out from a natural disaster. My body is in shock, I’m sick to my stomach and my mind is bending with thoughts to large for it to fully understand. I sit agog staring at any screen I can; reports flickering across my eyeballs, reading of the casualties, the extent of the damage and trying to find the essential truth behind the story of the Premier League’s desire to take our football abroad.

The UK fans have been unanimous in their distaste. You can hear the uproar from every corner of the world wide web, every column of print in the press and even the smallest crackle of radio static carries hatred for the corporate side of the game. What have we done?

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Ok, that’s it. The guy needs a bloody song. It’s starting to get embarrassing. JJ scores a goal and we sing for the person who set it up. Admittedly, last night’s tap-in wasn’t exactly the kind of stuff to earn him his place in Valhalla but now even the England fans are going to begin to take notice in the works of our much improved midfielder. What happens when they come up with chant before we do? Shameful.

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Hi all, I’ve found some blog hacking software - as you can see, it’s rather good!

So, here’s my opportunity to tell you the way it really is.

Let’s start with a bit of background - without revealing my age, I can tell you I remember the League Cup win over the rapidly declining Liverpool team of 1986-7, vaguely, and remember losing to Luton the following year.

Those days were tough times for us Arsenal fans. We were, as a team, methodical, workmanlike, proper working class footballers, supported by proper working class geezers, it seemed to fit. You could respect the game and the players, you could empathise, but also you felt frustrated, there were many times during the early days that I thought that I could easily replace Lee Dixon, I could plod through a game, hold a line, make a decent tackle and hoof the ball to Alan Smith.

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Apologies for my absence but it’s been all systems go at the Bakery for a little while. There’ve been buns flying out the door, flour dust quite literally all over the shop, the ovens have only just started to cool and, as seems to be the way at the mo, I’m k-nackered.

I’ve promised myself that I wont write a full match report on Saturday’s gut-cruncher of a fixture but I’ve a feeling that my fingers will get the better of me as I continue.

It was a relief to be at the Lane on Saturday; a nice gentle 3 o’clocker against Man U. After the stresses of the last game we saw it was something of a massage for the soul to meet the crew with all the talk of Wembley and just where we grabbed our seats in the booking frenzy that was. I was even late to the game didn’t make much difference. You see, United at home is one of the best games of the year. You get that rare experience watching a fantastic team close up without really bothering if you lose to them. A solid and plucky display resulting in an ultimate defeat is usually the order of the day and one which ends in the warm knowledge that we can send Fergie and his men off with another three points towards the cause of stopping arsenal and Chelsea winning stuff. Everyone’s a winner. But not today.

Damn it, I knew this was going to happen.

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It’s the waiting that really gets me.

I gaze over at the clock. The luminous hands tell what I already know, only this time they have moved a whole five minutes: 3:45 am. I turn my head the other way and observe the enormous, dark mound next to me. It’s MrstheYid. Eight hours earlier I had been greeted with the words I have been preparing to hear for the last 8.9 months:

“I’ve had this back pain all day, I think it may be on its way.”

A thousand thoughts run through my head but one really sticks, drowning everything else out – Your baby is on its way, Toby.

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