Gareth ‘Bane’ of my life

A few posts ago I accused AVB of being premature and optimistic when he likened Gareth Bale to the likes of Ronaldo and Messi.  Annoyingly Bale is doing his best to prove me wrong by averaging two goals a match at the moment.  His 90 min +  goal won Spurs the London derby at Upton Park last night enabling Tottenham to leap frog a struggling Chelsea side into third place in the Premiership.  AVB must be relishing the timing of his team’s triumph: almost exactly a year to the day (4^th March 2012) when he was sacked by Chelsea.  Who needs two fingers when you can humiliate with style!  I must admit (all true blues please close your eyes) I was an AVB fan initially and had high hopes when he first came to the Bridge and I very much missed his crouching silhouette, strapped into his Inspector Clouseau style mackintosh, when he was disposed of.  It did not take me long to move on to RDM though, especially as his appointment seemed to have such a dramatic effect on the team performance. I notice AVB has made a concerted effort to drop the slightly Euro anally retentive image at White Hart Lane, or perhaps the therapy he had after being sacked by Abramovich taught him to loosen up a bit.  Either way he is having the last laugh for now.....

And yes, Chelsea lost to Manchester City on Sunday afternoon – it is not a shameful loss on paper as Manchester City should be a force to contend with but their recent performance has not been too different from ours... erratic and unexplainable – so I was hoping for the throw of the dice to go our way – after all ‘chance’ seems to be the only reasonable indicator of our results at the moment.  We had one glimmer of hope in what was a pretty poor game for us, a missed penalty in the 51^st minute while the score was still 0-0. I was sad that Frank was unable to convert it and score his 200^th Chelsea goal thanks to a great save by an already criticised Joe Hart who more than made up for having given away the penalty in the first instance.  Mancini’s tactics of naming and shaming his team seems to be an effective one in the short term but not sure if it pays off in the end.  Dressing room emotions seem to be running high at the Etihad. The end result was a 2-0 win for City reducing the gap to United back to 12 points.  I guess that has to be the silver lining – they may still be in a position to stop a Man U landslide – not likely, but something to cling onto when all else is fading away....

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so negative and according to Juan Mata Chelsea are still in the running for the FA cup and Europa League... I can’t help thinking they are in the running for nothing but disappointment the way they are performing at the moment.

On a lighter note - I think I may be on the verge of becoming a football 'neek' thanks to my younger daughter’s boyfriend who is an avid football and Valencia fan – he has brought to my attention the concept of ‘boot spot’!!! I quote from a link he referred me to:

“For the first time since 1999, Fernando Torres has been spotted in non-Nike boots. The Spaniard, who normally sports the T90 Laser IV, was spotted in the adidas Predator LZ as Chelsea took on Wigan signaling that a permanent switch may be on the cards.”

I called my daughter to ask where her boyfriend had read the story and she asked him while I held on the phone and said: go to ‘ass.com’ or that is what I heard – she had actually said go to ‘as.com’.  Even though only a small ‘s’ separates the two sites by address, a multitude of multi coloured and different sized 'asses' seem to differentiate the contents of the two sites – so I found out when I typed in the wrong address!!!

(The more observant of you may have noticed that the above quote is from a completely different source as the whole ass/as thing got too much for me!!)

The 's' saga has flustered me so much I almost forgot to give a huge congratulations to Michael Laudrup and the Swans who made history by winning the League Cup on Sunday - it was an emphatic win and only slightly marred by Nathan Dyer's badly timed scuffle with De Guzman over who took the penalty for the fourth goal - Dyer was on a hat-trick.... Not only did De Guzman not give in and put away the penalty but he went on to score the fifth and final nail in Bradford City's coffin.....