The Goal Mouth

Double Fantasy August 4, 2009

Its two weeks before the start of the new season, which means two things: a flurry of transfer activity and setting up your fantasy league team. Although if you’re Real Madrid manager Manuel Pellegrini, the two events are much the same.

The last few weeks of the transfer window are a strange affair. It’s all clammy-palmed anxiety, furtive glances, and ‘my mate fancies you’ exchanges between clubs and agents. It’s nearest parallel in wider culture is witnessed at around 1.50am on Saturday night at nightclubs across the country, as drunken men prowl the dancefloor, all too aware that if they don’t pull in the next ten minutes it’s pot-noodle-and-a-wank time for another week. Freddy Shepherd in the mid-nineties would have been familiar with both the reality and the metaphor. Although in the case of Freddy Shepherd he’d be more likely (in a metaphorical sense) to enter the club at 7pm, buy all the girls champagne, and then watch as all the fit ones went off with other blokes, leaving him with all the chavvy tarts, a massive bar bill, and Kevin Keegan asking to share a cab. I once heard a great joke about Ken Bates standing in a butcher’s, about to buy a pork pie for £2.99, only for Freddy Shepherd to run in, slap a grand down on the counter and run off with the pie, cackling. Although given the lardy-ness of the two protagonists, that might actually have happened. Trouble is, there are loads of Shepherds in the game at the moment, and it’s all a bit daft. Just pity the poor sod that wakes up the next morning in the same bed as the female equivalent of Titus Bramble.

Speaking of Titus, I have him in my fantasy team this year. I had to, since I refuse to run a fantasy team that doesn’t feature Gerrard or Torres. As objective as many people try to be about their choices, you notice that (mainly in the case of supporters of the ‘big four’), favourite players creep in. I’ve often thought that fantasy football favours people who support rubbish Prem teams. Not only can they be more objective about the top players, but they presumably have a better knowledge of the teams lower down the table. Of course, those who support non-Prem teams are even better. We’re talking REAL football fans, yeah? They support REAL football. As opposed to the purely imaginary football and imaginary fans that you see in the Premier League. The players, stadiums and fans you see on MOTD don’t actually exist. It’s a collective hallucination. League football is where it’s REALLY at. Leeds didn’t exist until they got relegated. Man City were imaginary, then the existed, then they REALLY existed, then they just existed, now they don’t exist again. Technically all Premier League teams are fantasy teams.

But I digress. My team this year consists of Gerrard, Torres, Anelka, and a bunch of makeweights, mostly made up of Everton players, Man City reserves and recently promoted strikers. Basically all I need is for Ebanks-Blake to have a stormer, Liverpool to win the league and all of Man City’s first XI to get crocked and I’m a shoe-in.

Then there is the issue of what to name your team. A mate of mine called hers (that’s right, she be a lady) ‘Lobbing Seaman’, which I sniggered at. Job done. Another mate called his ‘JT’s Suspicious Bonk-On’, inspired by the semi-turgid erection that John Terry seems to sport whenever leading mascots out onto the pitch. My more Chelsea-hating friends take this to prove he’s a paedophile, but I would suggest (for libel purposes if nothing else) that he’s wearing a jockstrap. Or else is very well-endowed and has to coil it around in his shorts. Not at all that he likes to boff kiddies. In all honesty, only his outing as a child molester would be enough to oust him from his role as England captain, so entrenched is he. I’d suggest he has pictures of Capello in a thong, but we’ve all seen those in the News of the World already. Gerrard tried valiantly to usurp him – after being a model professional and the best player in the country didn’t work, he (allegedly) decked a Man Utd fan in a bar, but to no avail. Maybe he should wait for a terrorist atrocity and then ridicule grieving relatives – that seemed to work for JT.

But worry not, Stevie G, I’ve made you captain of my team, with all the double-point glory it entails. It might not be Three Lions, but a key injury this season and don’t bet against leading the England team out in South Africa. A few more injuries and some bizarre deaths and Titus Bramble might be involved too…