The Stuff of Fantasy - Week 4

As a top-flight fantasy football manager, you may scoff, or roll your eyes, or bang your head against your keyboard on reading my weekly whinge, comparing my lot, to that of my material, reality-based contemporaries. My problems rank lowly on the wider social scale, I grant you. But plaiting players' trimmed pubic hair, in order to reduce the escalating sweeping-brush re-weaving costs, is a thankless task, and I think you will agree, a valid gripe.


Some amongst my peers, who snobbishly refer to themselves as actual managers, claim to envy me and my kin. They point to the guaranteed 100 million we spend at the start of each season, but overlook how every August, we must rebuild our squads from the ground up and have no money to facilitate the day-to-day operating costs of a top-flight fantasy club - I pay my players with Tea Time Express cakes. The Chocolate Sandwich being the most coveted.


Football folk love to complain - fans, managers and players alike. Just last week, one of the boys came to my office seeking my council. Admittedly, we got off to a bad start, as he walked face first into my glass pane sliding door (I like to give the impression that I'm one of those managers, whose door is always open, but in fact I can't stand most of the whiny brats). Once the smelling salts had done their work, he proceeded to unburden himself   - "I can't bring myself to make love to my pregnant wife, my dog keeps trying to lick my balls. Should I let him?.. blah, blah, blah." In the great tradition of King Solomon, I recommended he smear some Pedigree Chum on his wife's knickers and stop being such a tightwad and splash out on a hooker. You can't always put others first, I told him.


Some ten minutes later, having resuscitated him for the second time, I decided to put one of those marks, that folks who live in high-rise apartments, put on their windows to stop birds flying into them.


By now, most of the lads had gone to join their International squads, in preparation for the coming Euro 2012 qualifiers. With this lull in activity, I decided to settle back in my Concorde Executive Chair - with eight-motor pulsar massage system and built-in happy-ending technology - and occupy myself browsing the web (ahem).  I had only just set the massage control wand to my desired configuration, when the door slid back and Doughnut, my assistant, threw a copy of The Sun down on my desk. I thought it was just another instance of him anticipating my every need, until he thumbed through the paper, past page three and settled on an article with the headline:

"I feel sorry for Gillett 'n [sic] Hicks"

My heart sank (and that wasn't all), as my mind grappled with the words, Harry Redknapp and columnist. As I scrolled deeper and deeper into this repugnant bilge, from; "[a]ll they seem to have done is plough a fortune into the place and they stand to lose a fortune when they sell it," to the concluding piffle; "I'd love to know what the two Americans have done that is so wrong," every shard of his credibility disintegrates, until it is nothing more than a toxic pulverulent, to be greedily snorted by the moronic footballing status quo.


All this from a man, who has left in his wake, category 5 shit-storm levels of financial destruction, from Bournemouth to Portsmouth and back again. Some of you out there will see this as nothing more than a personal attack. Some of you may point to 'Arry landing the Nintendo Wii commercials at my expense (by falsely claiming that it was he who first introduced Wii Fit training regimes at club level, when I had done it at Quannegowes the season before) as the catalyst for this tirade. The Swiss Ramble is far more comprehensive and analytical in its determinations. For those of you who love football (and have an IQ above 75) I urge you to reject the unquestioning, vegetative and asinine tabloid culture that blights our understanding and the development of football in this country.