HURLING A COMPRESSED AIR CYLINDER INTO SKRTEL'S JAWS
Showbusiness, as the Fiver knows all too well, can be a perverse and demanding mistress. One minute you're down. The next minute you're still down, or maybe even slightly further down but dogged by a false sense of having peaked about 12 years ago when the world seemed young and football was yet to become self-satirising but was there to be mocked and chided from the uncrowded fringes. It is truly a rollercoaster existence and many a promising teatime email career has been derailed by fame, money, debauched orgiastic costume parties*, disillusionment, old age, the deadening effect of endless repetition and the natural process of not being very funny anymore.
Happily this has never been a problem for light entertainment's Mario Balotelli, who always seems to have something fresh to offer. The Fiver is thinking particularly of the times when Balotelli threw a dart at a youth-team player, let his friends set fire to his bathroom, inserted a family-sized Toblerone into the exhaust of Joleon Lescott's Renault Espace and caused part of Manchester City's training facility to explode after using it to conduct small-scale thermal energy experiments using radioactive plutonium, spray string and a colony of syphilitic vermin*.
Imagine, then, the Fiver's excitement when it emerged during yesterday's 1-1 thrashing by title-chasing Liverpool that Balotelli had managed to get himself sent off. And imagine also the Fiver's subsequent disappointment when it turned out that this involved nothing more interesting than a shirt-yank kerfuffle with moon-faced, sad Glen Johnson and a tame collision with the side of Martin Skrtel's impenetrable dinosaur skull. Frankly, this isn't good enough. In madcap antics terms it's like the Fiver turning in 1,000 carefully reasoned words on what's gone wrong with the Chelsea back-line, or Jeremy Beadle recording a Saturday evening TV show where he simply gives people parking tickets, or tows away their caravan and destroys it, without at any point suggesting that it's a prank, or that this is all on TV and things will all be fine, but simply walking off sullenly at the end after a job well done.
How hard could it have been to have added a little magic? Balotelli might have disabled Skrtel by encouraging him to take part in a moped chase down the M62, or hurling a compressed air cylinder into his jaws and shooting it with a rifle, causing Skrtel's head to explode memorably. Instead Balotelli fans will have been left echoing the feelings of kindly Roberto Mancini this morning, when he described Balotelli's sending off as "nothing" and blamed Liverpool players for pointing out that Bad Mario had just done a bad thing rather than blaming Bad Mario for doing a bad thing in the first place. The Fiver is inclined to agree with King Kenny's verdict that "sometimes, if you look in the mirror, you get the answer" - but only if that answer is a response to the question "what does King Kenny look like staring straight at you quite close up?"
The good news for City fans is that Balotelli will now get to serve his suspension during Tuesday's historically irrelevant 2-1 second-string Carling Cup defeat by the jinking hype-sprites of the Arsenal third team. The bad news is that this leaves plenty of time to bounce back from what has been, frankly, a hugely disappointingly weekend of non-zany antics from no-longer-that-madcap Mario.
* Not true
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/nov/28/the-fiver-gary-speed-mario-balotelli
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