UP THE ARSE!

Thirty years on from the monochrome days when Kenneth Wolstenholme introduced the armchair millions to the pleasures of “Association Football”, these deathless notes are still a clarion call which send a shiver through the innards, a promise of fun and games to come, not to mention the resumption of civilisation itself after the barren Summer hiatus.

In 1994, Association Football is a bit sexier than the fare which was served up in the days of Alan Gilzean and Pop Robson and Brian Labone.

With their designer jerseys and flamboyant “celebrations” and challenging haircuts, the footballers of today have embraced the values of show business in a way which would have been alien to hardy men such as Chopper Harris and Dave Mackay.

This Premier League also has a pleasing multi-racial ring to it, with mercenaries from many lands setting out to prove that they can hack it in the brutal cauldron of English football without resorting to displays of “temperament”.

There is certainly an unprecedented optimism about the forthcoming campaign, with the first series of games yielding up an orgy of goals for the fans in their comfy seats . . .

As traditional as the Match Of The Day theme itself is the annual Foul Play predictions, honoured throughout the football world for their extraordinary perspectivity, and the fact that they are not hidebound by dogma.

Foul Play’s predictions are couched in the pragmatic terms required by the modern world, and are subject to certain revisions, in accordance with the enigmatic turn of events.

I will not allow myself to predict things with one hand tied behind my back, which would be the case if I nominated a certain team to win the Cup, and they got knocked out in the Third Round.

Defeatist pundits will bury their heads in the sand at that stage, just when Foul Play is getting a second wind, and forming a second opinion, thus offering, all in all, a far more comprehensive tipping service.

If I were to select Manchester United to win the League, for example, and they became inadvertently involved in a plane disaster, losing their entire squad in the process, I would surely be entitled to nominate a reserve team to take the pennant for the most compelling of reasons.

As it happens, I am not picking United this year, though I think that they will win the League. If you get my drift.

I am opposed to United in principle, not through any lack of admiration for their swaggering, uplifting style of play, but because I am completely fucking sick of their marketing machine, particularly the cans of United Coke, and the fact that everyone under the age of fifteen supports them, causing me to mourn for the tragic lack of derring-do in our young people.

Rarely do pundits allow principle to colour their prognostications, but Foul Play will make a stand here, and say, fuck them. The bastards.

No, I will instead take the plunge on behalf of that other shower of bastards, The Arsenal. The way it looks to me, Arse have a pretty mean machine at their disposal, strong throughout the park, Brian.

Blackburn Rovers will not want for supporters in the S.P. Offices with their Shearer/Sutton weapon and Spurs will score goals by the hundred, hampered only by the fact that they will concede them at the other end by the thousand.

With a heavy heart then, I urge you to take all your money, your worldly goods, and your children down to the betting shop, and plonk them on the sinister Arse.

For the Cup, it must be Chelsea. Scientific analysis has shown that teams are always losing a Final one year, and bouncing back to take the trophy soon afterwards. This is the surest footing on which to make a forecast on something, about which I don’t have a clue one way or the other.

Liverpool, who I have supported through thick and thin, perhaps a little less through thin, might do the business in the so-called Coca-Cola Cup, but the Red Devils of Manchester are probably entitled to at least one lump of silverware this season, and it may be this one, much to their chagrin.

The European Cup will dominate their activities like an ogre, or a giant octopus, and I fancy they will go a long way, if Cantona can arrange to be available for playing duties, rather than sitting out one of his suspensions in the stand, like a spare prick.

Europe, meantime, has been a little unkind to our native practitioners of Association Football, dragging them to obscure outposts of that volatile continent, and denying them their fundamental right to get stuffed by one of the top British clubs, and to acquire a lorry-load of loot in the process, to waste in whatever way they see fit.

Reigning champions Rovers did not advertise the domestic game in an altogether flattering light, and will have to be in ebullient form to bore a hole in the seven-goal deficit which they picked up against those Gornik people.

The gardens of Europe are closing down for our local stalwarts. The lights are going out all over Europe for Rovers, and St. Pats, and Drogheda United, and all of that merry band of pranksters.

It is, in one way, the end of civilisation as we know it, and in another way, a beginning.