Beef Bagel

Did you go through yesterday with an odd craving, an itch you couldn’t scratch? Were you caught red handed by you partner or flat mate by the light of a midnight refrigerator with crumbs around you mouth and little more to say in your defence than noises similar to the mumblings of Robbie Keane?

If this morning you felt rather sheepish and the tension of every single scrape of the spoon against your cohabitants’ cereal bowls and the piercing stares from the butter dish and the angry, angry jam jars, as the spent and savaged bread wrapper lies accusatorily, prosecution exhibit ‘A’, in the middle of your morning spread sans toast, then fear not. To make up for yesterday’s lack of contact, today I shall make sure you go home with your arms full of bagels.

Well, well, well another big day is here. The UEFA Cup group games are upon us and we start our campaign with arguably the trickiest fixture of the lot, away to Besiktas. So apart from the fact that the name of the club sounds like somebody sneezed, what do we know about tonight’s opposition?

Well, after Galatasaray and Fernerbache, they are the number 3 club in both Istanbul and Turkey, although I wouldn’t recommend saying that to any of their fans, who sit in the equivalent of the Park Lane, probably called the Kofte Kop Krew or Shish Street Massive or something. They are though, Turkey’s oldest club and traditionally the working man Istanbulian’s choice of team. Nicknamed the Black Eagles, making it some sort of cock fight (we’re the one’s with the spurs), they’re rather a passionate bunch and that’s by Turkish standards. Sir Les recalls a time when he played for them on loan from QPR and 30,000 came to watch them train. That’s more than Bolton get in an entire season.

Take a look at this lot…

http://www.fanatical.hu/category/besiktas/

Now, obviously, we know that this passion my may be expressed in a negative way and with more black than white players likely in our starting XI, the crowd could start to sound more like an enclosure at London Zoo but let’s hope they’ve got more sense than that. Let’s also hope that the traveling Spurs fans have a little more sense than they did on the last Euro away day. A quick glassing in Wenceslas Square will seem like a picnic compared to a few hours of being gently roasted and shaved layer by layer, as they rotate impaled on a hot, greasy donner spit.

According to Robbo, who played there with Leeds the atmosphere is simply awesome to behold and apparently they even have speakers at the pitch side with some of the fans attached to the microphones. The noise is, in fact, so loud, says Dimitar Berbatov, who played there with Leverkusen, that you can’t actually hear your team mates not two metres away. I’m quite gutted I’m not going to be there. It sounds like a world of difference from the silence of Slavia Prague.

The most important part though is of course, the football and the big question of whether our strikers can start to find the onion bag. Word has it that the Little Yiddo took a knock to his foot on Tuesday, so with Mido back in London nursing his wound and his ego no doubt, the front two may have selected themselves. Neither Dimitar and Keano are on any kind of form whatsoever. In fact, they’re not even on the chart. They’re not scoring for us, they’re not scoring for their countries, as far as their Scrabble games are going, there’s not even a double letter they can score. Keano tried the word ‘MMMMMMMMMM’ claiming he always uses it. The maneuver was rejected. So, where are they scoring? Well, certainly not off the bloke outside of Camden Road Station, who seems to think people want to spend ‘just a few quid’ for a few joints of his potpourri.

Thankfully, the midfield’s looking strong with Little Aaron ready if we need him to join JJ, Didier Zee, Danny M, Man Mountain Tommy H and Eddy D. They sound rather like the rhythm section of free form jazz collective. Ledders and Daws are both good for the back. Safety First has removed all stars and tweeting birds from his head and presumably someone’s given Ledley a cloth for that fluid. Chimbondabonda’s over his calf but good old Calum is suffering from his broken schnoz but at least is available in general since his red card was resc… recssin… ress…whatever Cha Ma Wu said the other day…

http://beefbagel.com/reports/2006/10/aston-villa-vs-spurs/#comments

As for Besiktas, well they’ll be no slouches with the much underrated Jean Tigana as head coach and a couple of familiar Brazilian faces in their side, namely Kleberson and Ricardinho. Let’s hope those two have the same impact on our team as they did on most other English sides. The rest of the squad are almost entirely Turkish nationals. It is in fact a rule of their FA that they can only have six players without Turkish citizenship. Their team will be a cohesive unit and with three victories on the trot behind them, used to winning as well.

Legend has it that the first bagel ever made was given as a gift by an Austrian baker to King Jan III Sobieski of Poland for thanks in repelling the Turkish invaders. Now admittedly, it’s the Turks who are being invaded this time but with The Bagel on their side and my lucky pants firmly secured, I don’t see how MJ and the boys can lose tonight.

Baklava vs. bagels

The Bagel.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Bagel News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.