Indifference

That poor dog is safe for another few weeks, then.

Roy Keane is back in football at another club with lots of money to waste on crap players until something, somewhere, sticks: Tobias Hysen, Roy O'Donovan, Rade Prica, Michael Chopra (who Keane bought from Cardiff for ten times his previous transfer fee) and God knows how many more that I can't remember. Alex Ferguson might call Rafa Benitez a chequebook manager (I'll come back to the hypocrisy of this statement by King Bluster) but his former captain is the new breed of money and how it talks in football. A pity, then, that all Keane can talk is absolute shit. He bottled it at the first sign of someone (the majority shareholder at S*nderland) questioning his bizarro-zarro transfer policy and the players in the mackem wastelands seem far happier without him, so why, oh why are Ipswich Town fooled by this guy? It'll all end in tears, albeit in the Premier League. Maybe.

So, the great sideshow of who will finish top of the Premier League is (more or less) over and we can talk about who is and isn't a cock-end (more entertaining when Mourinho was kicking about, this). Alex Ferguson wins! His sustained attacks on Rafa Benitez, no matter how easy it is to dislike the spaniard, are tiresome and ill-informed. Ferguson crows on that Liverpool produce no young players. Excuse me if I am smelling the wrong pot of pease pudding for a minute but, well, did Manchester United produce Federico Macheda, Anderson, Nani or Cristiano so bronze I am a statue now Ronaldo? No. One generation of (yes, exceptional, we know) British players doesn't redeem you for the lack of any since. Myopia is a wonderful thing but it is quite alarming how many managers seem to suffer from the condition these days. What would Brian Clough have made of it all?

With the mention of Brian Clough, my copy of The Damned United arrived on monday, so I think I will alternate it with reading Phil Scraton's Hillsborough: The Truth, which I mentioned last week. Yet to finish the first chapter and its already evident (as if people didn't know this already) that the events of April 15 1989 should never have happened; it makes it all the more galling that noone has been made accountable. I hope that anyone who looked at this blog last week took some time to at least peruse some of the stuff I hyperlinked and see what a massive injustice it is (if you didn't know, I know some readers are more than aware). At least a step in the right direction was taken last week. Then again, Jacqui Smith has little or no choice if she wants to stay in the job...

Newcastle United newsflash: Obafemi Martins is not the messiah, he's just very fast and a crap finisher. If Alan Shearer saves the day now, he is a genius. Let's explain, he needs to win the last three home games of the season and even then we might not survive. We've won four home matches out of sixteen this season. Easy, then.

Come back today or tomorrow and I'll look at something a little less asinine than the pricks and pantomime villains that inhabit football: ATP stage times!