[ENG] Premiership 2011/2012 (42 Viewers)
- Thread starter Dostoevsky
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THE BIG RICH PETROL-SPLURGING TWO
The Fiver is of course a massive fan of football. All things to do with football - not just one small bit, or only half of the things to do with football, or even a quarter or 75%. The Fiver is a fan of it all, all the time, without exception. When it comes to mad-keen football fandom it goes like this. Tim Lovejoy. Prince William. That Portsmouth bell-ringing man with great bouncing tattooed man-belly. Then the Fiver. Then fresh air. Then everyone else.
One of the many things that makes the Fiver one of the world's top all-football fans - rather than, say, someone who just happened to get into writing snarky things about people involved in football as a laughable, quite temporary-seeming but in fact horribly persistent so-called "career" option - is the Fiver's love of the great club games. Those timeless match-ups that seem to be a vehicle for wider forces. For example Spain's El Clasico, which pits the tiny, loveable non-corporate, sustainable wooden shoe-wearing Steve Jobs-style ewoks of Barcelona against Real Madrid's evil Franco-worshipping Death Star-building Microsoft-esque Fourth Reich. Or the Glasgow derby, which gives the hate-crazed nutcases of [insert Glasgow team here] the opportunity to shout complex historical abuse at the hate-crazed nutcases of [other Glasgow team].
So many great games, such a rich sense of cultural history - and the good news is the Premier League now finally has one to compete with the best of them. Yes, this evening Chelsea will host Manchester City in the latest, and most frothingly exciting, clash of the Big Rich Petrol-Splurging Two, a match the Fiver is confident will soon be routinely referred to as El Carbonco. Like all the great games it's very much a meeting of ideological opposites: the fossil-fuel powered newbie against the fossil-fuel powered slightly olderbie; the overpaid squad of hardened Euro-mercenaries against the overpaid squad of Euro-mercenaries; the ones in blue against the ones in blue. So many points of contrast. It's like E.ON versus npower. Do you like your transformative oil money extracted from Persian Gulf state wells? Or do you prepare Siberian natural gas?
For City this is a chance to re-establish a 19-point league at the top of table [note: Fiver's extreme football fandom prevents it from checking the exact number of points involved here]. They will have to do so without marauding Micah Richards, who has calf-knack. Plus it's also defiant T-shirt time for Mario Balotelli who is in trouble after being spotted in the wee hours of Sunday in a city-centre restaurant called, for some reason, Zouk. Chelsea must cope without David Luiz who is banned for passing 500 domestic bookings for the season.
And with that, all that remains is to settle in for the season's first El Carbonco. Will it be victory for the ones with the handsome thrusting young manager in the nice suit? The ones who used to be a slightly boring, annihilating force but are now a bit more exciting? Or the ones who have affected a destabilising mini-boom on an entire league structure in the past few years? All that seems certain is that the Fiver will be hoping for a match full of raw passion, men being angry at referees, pictures of Frank Lampard sitting down looking glum and both clubs put in a sack at the end and thrown into the Thames from the Wandsworth Embankment. The Fiver is fairly confident that it only thought that last bit inside its head.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/dec/12/the-fiver-chelsea-manchester-city
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