This picture on the BBC website had me wondering what the hell Batman was doing fraternising with the enemy! For those not in the know thats Ribery and Demichelis of Bayern Munich.

The real Batman:

The real Two Face:

That got me thinking about other footballers in this game who relate to Batman characters, mainly villains.

Poison Ivy + Scholes – look at his hair, need I say more?

Scarecrow + Alex Ferguson – my dream that his mouth would be shut like this…

Penguin + Rooney – Fat fecker with a stupid face.

Bane + Vidic – Angry chap, only there to cause damage.

Robin + Gary Neville – Boss’s lapdog.

Can you tell I don’t like Man U?

Part of the Sports Relief show on Saturday night was a sketch done by James Corden, where he is pretending to be “Smithy”, who receives the Coach of the Year Award at Sports Personality. This then turns into a rant at the nations best athletes, well mainly rant, except for the flirting with Victoria Pendleton.

Some of them took it a lot better than others, Dame Kelly Holmes and Paula Radcliffe looked like they were going to cry / kill him. Freddie (I mean Andrew, but who cares?) Flintoff had a similar reaction, but from the work they have been doing together recently on Sky One he is either in on the gag and knew it was coming, or can’t have minded that much.

Nice timing on the Pendleton piece, she currently has a spot on our living room wall, she is the FHM calendar girl for March.

Thoughts?

In a surprise move so late in the season, the Real Madrid president Florentino Perez has announced that Manuel Pellegrini has been sacked as the manager of Real Madrid with immediate affect. He will be replaced by the more experienced Colin Mercer.

In an announcement made at the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu earlier Señor Perez blamed Pellegrini for Real’s current league position and lack of success in cup competitions, stating:

“…a change of personnel is required if we are going to turn this season around…”

Mercer has had successful Football Manager campaigns at Liverpool, Monaco and Barcelona to mention just a few, most recently taking Liverpool to the Premier League title and Champions League final in his 2nd season in charge.

It is rumoured that he will look to bring players from his previous clubs like Torres, Gerrard and Messi to the Bernabéu.

This news comes as less of a surprise to the panellists on Revista de La Liga who predicted Pellegrini to be on the way out yesterday.

Most people with a passion for football or sport in general will have heard about the debacle that was the Republic of Ireland’s exit from the World Cup a couple of weeks ago. If you’re Irish I suspect you think this is the biggest injustice ever, if you are French you will probably be thinking this a massive overreaction and entirely inconsequential and the rest of you just won’t really care. Of course, you could be Roy Keane (who I hope is reading this) and be Irish and not give a damn, in fact I think his exact words were ‘get over it’.

Let me run you through what happened as a recap… after being awarded a dubious penalty against Georgia Ireland made it through to the World Cup qualifying playoffs, and were drawn to play France. I say ‘drawn’ but thanks to the genius (ludicrous) ranking system it hardly counted as a draw, more accurately FIFA trying to pick who they want in the World Cup. The first leg at Croke Park finished 0-1, with Ireland squandering a number of decent chances. The second leg saw Ireland equalise and take the tie to extra time, once again having squandered a number of decent chances. In the dying minutes of the 2nd half of extra time a cross found its way to the back post where Thierry Henry controlled it, intentionally, with his hand twice and squared the ball to Gallas who shouldered it in.

Now, there are a number of angles this article could go down, talking about how this is not the first time Henry has cheated to get ahead, how this is not the first controversy to surround the French national team, or how everyone who has ever played for Arsenal ends up being a cheat. But no, instead I want to talk a little about the Irish’s ridiculous claims for a rematch and now even asking to be the 33rd team in the tournament. Straight away, though it pains me to do so, I have to reiterate what Roy Keane said ‘Get Over It’. You do not have precedence for this, the stated Bahrain case is totally different, where the ref didn’t know the laws for encroachment on a penalty. Similar I guess to the LFC vs. SFC beach ball incident, where once again the ref didn’t know the rule. I cannot back this up with evidence, but I am pretty sure that Mr. M Hansson knows the handball rules (not to be mistaken for the rules of the separate sport ‘Handball‘), and just did not see an infringement, the same goes for the assistant. The ball travelled a long way through a very crowded area.

Just imagine if FIFA decided that the best plan was to replay the game, what a terrible state football would then be in, and worse how it would look going forward. A season would never finish, we would be stuck in a time warp of footballing hell, every single week Alex Ferguson and David Moyes would demand their matches replayed because of minor errors by the officials. Finger pointing and accusations of ‘you didn’t give us that penalty, replay!’, ‘he was onside when given off, he was through and would have certainly scored, replay!’, ‘you can clearly see his foot over the line, therefore a foul throw, replay!’. Then in the replay, do both teams have to field exactly the same team? If I was a manager with injury worries for a big game I would make sure that the game was replayed later on when more of my players were fit, something which would be benefiting LFC this season.

There has to be a line which can be drawn under incidents, I am all for getting the right decision all the time but it cannot have a too bigger impact on the great game. The idea of Ireland being the 33rd team in the World Cup is also totally open to abuse, as Sepp Blatter states, there are other teams making claims, namely Costa Rica. I suspect Croatia are probably making a claim too after our clearly unfair destruction of them, twice.

If you haven’t seen the Roy Keane interview you have got to check it out on YouTube, the whole thing is a highlight but make sure you pay close attention when the journo’s phone rings.

News just breaking on BBC news, via Reuters, Chelsea have reported fired manager Luiz Felipe Scolari.

More when it’s official I guess.

The Dot2Dot shuttle bus came and picked us up from the Park Plaza hotel at Victoria, from there it was 5 stars all the way to the ground. Then the ground itself is certainly 5 star, even though there are numerous rumours about the integrity of the arch and other parts of the ground having been defaced with club logos/slogans by piky builders.

Onto the game, that was FAR from 5 star, maybe 1 or 2 at a stretch. Another (!) lacklustre England performance, only qualified by the poor standard of the opposition. Once again proving that we do not have the quality up front to break down a defence if they are not coming at us. Heskey as a lone striker knew not what to do, he made some relatively intelligent runs in behind the defence. Either his team mates didn’t have the confidence in themselves to knock the ball over the top to him, or if they didn’t have the confidence in Heskey not to screw it up I don’t know. Either way the ball was rarely played for him to attack. Croatia is a perfect example, we hit them on the break over and over with the pace of Theo and Wright-Phillips.

For the first 30 mins Theo looked by far the best player on the pitch, but this wasn’t tough, I’m sure (even with my knee) I would be a contender. After this he was almost a spectator. Rooney, the famous left winger, was non existent as was fat Frank.

0-0 at half time vs the 152 ranked club in the world, good work, luckily the second half brought some goals. Nothing special in the first 4, couple of free headers from 6 yards put away (Rio and Rooney), tap in from Rooney from 4 yards and an OG. England’s 5th came in the dying minutes after a nice flick from Heskey set De Foe through on goal to slot one past the keeper, finally a nice goal. I wont mention the boo’ing that Ashley Cole got after getting the assist for the Kazakhstan goal, Rio has certainly got to take some of the wrap for this, what the **** is he doing walking away looking the other way as the ball is being passed amongst the back four. Poor.

The game finished 5-1, a very flattering score line for England’s sake, however, keeps them top of the group and flying high. Lets see if they can keep it going this time!

This originally seems to come from here.

Only other blog I can find who has picked this up is the Top Of The 18 blog here.

The big write up… Exciting changes for this week, instead of sitting on the train to London with “less ginger than Rich”, “Vicky Pollard in Disguise” and “Stolen Donnas desk” I am in fact on the Oxford Tube (Bus) heading to London with “Ginger”. This makes less difference as I trust those who played were adequately sore. I know for a fact that “Bobby Charlton” is having troubles sitting down today due to a freak meeting on a dark and cold night between his arse and some concrete.

Moving swiftly away from talking about “George Best”’s sore arse, and onto the match at hand. Crazy levels of confusion over the teams building up to the game, lots of swapping and changing, players becoming available and players becoming unavailable. Also, I didn’t have time in my busy schedule to send a team sheet email around yesterday, so accept my apologies for this. We almost had everyone there on time to kick off at 6:30 this week, Brendan was running slightly late and “Old Man” was still driving back from the airport. However, the real reason we had to delay the actual kick off wasn’t either of these, someone, during the warm up had put one of the two balls we own onto the roof of the sports centre. So we had to wait for “belly broke the sofa” to beg the Pleasure centre to go out and get it back for us, successfully may I add.

We kicked off with numbers even, the usual suspects on each side, STUDio were missing “Impressive How You Get Your Name Mentioned When You Don’t Play”, Topvile had picked up Brendan and were temporarily missing “Getting older”. “silent but deadly” was also missing due to holiday, not to mention “Aslan”’s absence, but who wouldn’t rather go on a date with Jack’s Mum than play football with your mates? “Roll with it”, “going to be saying roll with it soon” and “G” were also absent for Topville.

STUDio took a 2 goal lead, totally against the run of play, the first was a swift break by “my brother is hot” , after intercepting the ball just inside his own half he travelled the remainder of the pitch before putting it past new goalkeeper “Jussi Jaaskelainen vs Liverpool”. Admittedly I have done the same as a few weeks ago, my memory on the scoring order is a little bit flaky Strangely though I remember that I got the 2nd, a ball across from “my new housemate likes to watch people sleeping”, terrible first touch from me seemed to take the keeper by surprise (not sure why) and I mishit it into the corner. What a great goal, lolocopter oclock!

At this point “Knows what a Combine Harvester is” jogged up (in the wrong kit!), yikes even Brendan managed to wear the right colour shirt. Giving Topville the extra man for the last ten mins of the first half. This didn’t stop STUDio, who lead by their illustrious captain scored a 3rd, flick down the wing from “love rat” to me, who volleyed into the far corner from distance (EGO EGO EGO). Topville got 2 back before the end of the half to take us in at halftime with scores at 3-2 to STUDio.

A predetermined initiative, decided upon by the remaining football council (we missss youuu Witthhheerrss) was announced at half time, this was to try and counter the advantage given by having extra men on one team. Basically, in this example “Paul Robinson vs Croatia” swapped sides 10 mins into the second half. This meant that both teams had a man advantage for about 20 mins of the game. GENIUS no? Well in hind sight maybe not, this man advantage meant that STUDio flew away with the lead. From being 4-2 up at the swap, it finished 9-4. On the way to this score line there were some class goals scored. Quick ball out from the keeper to “Chimeo” on the right, who slid the ball inside to me, a cheeky back heel flick from me onto “Knows what to do with a screwdriver” on the left, left him open to plant the ball in the far corner. Also mention “cheese” blasted finish into the near top corner for another one of the goals and “Not fussy”s well placed strike into the far bottom corner.

The shame wall this week only has one booking on it, and that’s for “facial hair” for his sliding tackle on “hot stuff”.