Beef Bagel

A much needed and quite unexpected three points. Certainly wasn’t part of my calculations last week but then nor was Portsmouth beating Liverpool or Bolton scraping a point and the paint off the Chelsea machine. If, like me, you spend your weekends condemned to Match of the Day 2 then here’s a closer look at the action from the Riverside…

Let’s not dwell upon the goals against but the step closer to European comforts and the awesome partnership that is Berbatov and Keane. Long may it last.

And the result should ease the players’ minds as well as ours, with MJ’s threats looming large earlier in the week. If, God forbid, we should finish outside the top 7 then, like Dorothy we’ll be calling for Toto - the Intertoto, named after the German word for the pools, which is one of the main reasons why the competition was born, so people can continue to gamble in the summer. Beautiful, eh?

The competition, touted as “the cup for the cupless” or “hope for the hopeless” more accurately, gives the 11 teams, who make it through three ties, a spot in the second qualifying round of the UEFA Cup. Clear as mud. In other words, you get a chance to qualify for the monkey cup; “a monkey for the monkeyless”. If the Uefa Cup is this…

…then the Intertoto is this…

Sounding like a parent with the threat of bad exam results, MJ would cut short the Tottenham family holiday to Asia for his team to come and take their Intertoto resits back in June when the competition begins. I would imagine they’d be grounded as well.

“We are still considering whether we are going to Asia, but it all depends on whether we qualify for the UEFA Cup,” said MJ. See what I mean?

The other “option” is the UEFA Fair Play League but any club relying on that is clutching at thin air rather than straws. At last calculation, after 30 games in the Premiership, we were indeed top of the English fair play table with an average of 8.54. 8.54 what I don’t know? Fouls per game? Studs showing on all tackles? No idea but Villa are hot on our heels with 8.53.

Whoever actually wins the thing goes into a hat with all the other winners in all the European leagues. The first three drawn out get a place in the UEFA Cup. That’s not a backdoor into Europe, it’s a cat flap. Good luck Villa.

So, the big news is for the Big Face. Sam Allardyce has quit OAP Bolton. It’s somewhat sad that I’ll have to hate Bolton a little bit less now. However, there’s already rumours linking O He Of The Giant Noggin to Man City as part of an enormous cashed up take over. So the Sky Blues can look forward to having all their club money spent on the finest set piece takers and headers of the ball known to man. It is his mission to ruin football in the Premiership. Watch out arsenal if Wenger does decide to leave.

The good news is that assistant head Sammy Lee is more or less sure to take over at Bolton and no doubt he’ll pick up the mantle of boring football fans to death and look…

…his head’s not dissimilar either. Not as large though as Dr. Sammy Lee who is certainly no stranger bonse blubber…

All these cash injections into teams around us does make it more critical then ever to invest in some top talent ourselves. Now, as prompted by Wilson, The Bagel here took a little time to have a look at a little Mexican by the name of Andres Guardado. By his stats and brief description, that for all I know could have been written by his mother, this 20-year-old from Guadalajara could be Little Aaron’s long lost, left-footed twin. He’s 5′6″, about the same mass as one of Tom Huddlestone’s bogeys and his head looks rather like this…

…ok, here’s the real one…

…alright. Here’s his head…

…on an invisible Van der Graaf generator.

This young lefty has been looking quite special for both local team, Atlas, and the Mexican national side. You may remember him scaring the shit out of the Argentine full backs in Germany last summer. There’s not a lot of footage of his apparently explosive runs but there’s a few stunning left footers from outside the area. This is my favourite, purely for the coverage, which leaves you in little doubt of what he scored unless you’re deaf, in which case you’d think that he’d just neeted a Corona and was then hit my an exploding football.

Useless footage though. Try this…

It’s hard to tell how this kid would fair in the more physical game that is the Premiership and there’s a very good chance we’ll never find out. Like all Central and South Americans his real name is actually much longer (José Andrés Guardado Hernández - he’ll probably chang it to ‘Bob’) and like most of the rest he’ll move to Italy or Spain rather than coming here and bitching about the climate.

Looks like an exciting player but it’d be quite a coup to sign him ahead of PSV, Athletico Madrid and even Man U.

Speaking of PSV, who clinched the Dutch title on goal difference after a 5-1 on the final day, there’s a rumour doing the rounds that we’d like a piece of their much respected, Chelsea owned, centre half, Alex. Does anyone have £14m to spare? Good to see we’ve got more irons on the fire than just Curtis Davies but I’ve got a feeling the Blue’ll be taking him to the Bridge next season for their four-pronged plans for world domination in 2008. Having said that, the reason he was loaned out in the first place was that he couldn’t get a work permit for UK and I don’t really see what’s changed since 2004, except perhaps most crucially, the Home Secretary. Still, all the same, here’s his head…

…apologising before he kills you.

They call him “The Tank” and you’d never guess why at over 6′2″ and a whopping 14.5 stone, which is about the same as one of Tom Huddlestone’s gall stones. He’s superb in the air and in answer to A Tribe Called Quest…

…yes, he can - at over 100 km/hr.

Signing this geezer would be an even bigger coup than Little Andres but with our Dutch connections you never can tell. The only problem is he’s Brazilian. Not only does that mean that we have no connection to him at all but even if we did, he’d bitch about the weather. Have these players not heard of global warming?

In the mean time, we’re doing out best to steal Newcastle’s entire squad with Kieron Dyer now set in our sights. Come to JJ, Kieron, come to your friend. The two major stumbling blocks over this deal could be:

1) Do we want to buy an injury prone player?

2) Would he take a 50% wage cut to come down south? I seriously doubt it.

Dyer earns £80,000 a week up there, whereas our top earner is Keano on £40,000. The reason is obvious. Who on earth wants to live in Newcastle? Actually, I’ve only been there once and The Bagel had a damn good time but it’s just too remote and at the risk of sounding South American, the weather really is abysmal up there. Doubt this one’ll happen but how about Scott Parker?

Dimitar the Great slotted a rather special one over the weekend and has clearly caught the attention of a different special one altogether. Yes, today it’s Chelsea’s turn to talk of fanciful sums for the services of our beloved Bulgarian. £25m is the offer today but I reiterate: He is going nowhere yet and expect this story to bounce between United and Chelsea and the price to rise to around £35m. Roll on September.

Another player staying in the fold - well according to his agent - is Didier Zee.

“I have had no contact with any clubs and Didier is very happy at Tottenham. He likes playing in England. I don’t think Tottenham would want to sell him and the player does not want to go anywhere.”

Fair enough. Zokora doesn’t want to leave but if we sign two stunning centre mids, I wouldn’t be surprised if we cashed in on the Ivorian while we could but my prediction here is that we’ll sign one slightly better midfielder, whom Didier will out perform next season anyway.

There were a couple of things that tickled The Bagel over the weekend. The first was the description of our fourth choice striker’s injury trouble on the BBC website:

“Mido is struggling with a groin complaint”

…well you would, wouldn’t you? Most things are a struggle with a groin complaint. When my groin complains I try not to move at all until the feeling passes. I do sympathise, Hossam.

The second, courtesy of Caroline Cheese (good name) on the BBC’s match tracker, was when she described the Chewing Gum Machine’s celebrations at Goodison Park as “jumping around like an old fool”. Most amusing but better the old fool than an ageing Paedo or Bobby Robson’s ex-translator.

One win down. Three to go.

We shall fight them on the bagels,

The Bagel.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Bagel News, Transfer 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.