The Mailbag

We’re back from Kiev to deliver another Mailbag. This one contains Malaysian fans not caring what’s going on, a Ramble widow producing a pretty good analogy for the Spain midfield and a man who appears to have emailed us by mistake but we’re not sure why. Read on!

Hello those who ramble, my girlfriend invented an interesting analogy and possible title for the formation employed by Spain at the euros. She deemed their use of three midfielders and three strikers constantly rotating as: ‘the Lazy Susan’, after those dip containers you get when you have a lovely curry.

I thought this would be a good name for their experimental formation and picked you to tell about it, I initially wanted to email ITV so Adrian Chiles could broadcast it using his everyman charm and his conversational pinache, but I thought he’d be too busy trying to befriend Roy Keane and patronising Roberto Martinez to take notice.

Pray continue rambling,

Alex (but credit goes to Libby)

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Euro Ramblers, gather round!!

Greetings from Malaysia!

Why from this far flung land I hear you ask!?

Purely and simply because of poor honeymoon planning!! It was only after having booked the flights&hotels that I realized what poor timing I had! The wife is not happy with the midnight and 3am kick off times, but alas, in true English spirit, dig in!!

Despite this poor planning, it has allowed me to witness a couple of strange footballing things out here in Malaysia….

1) If you ever wondered where Tony Cottee and Viv Anderson are these days, and don’t we all, they are football pundits out here. And there’s a good reason why they’re out here, if you thought John Barnes was a terrible pundit, you should see these two. Ridiculous.

2) Having settled on a German bar, obviously, to watch the midnight England France game, I was delighted when Lescott thumped in his header, I was dancing and singing with the Malaysian fans of Kuala Lumpur, they loved England, I loved England, it was 9 minutes of pure happiness!!

Until the French scored.

Those same fans who celebrated with me, cheered the France goal as well!! Unbelivable!! Probably even bigger celebrations too!! I know they love football, but come on! The next hour was spent trying to tell them they had to support one team, without any breakthrough. I felt dejected, rejected, not for the first time on this holiday. You try creeping back into bed at 5am after watching two games of football stinking of beer.

Cheers

Brad Clarke

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Ramblers,
Any chance of some love for Barnet FC, possibly the most indestructable football club in the known universe? With the lowest budget in the football league and the lowest attendences (due to us being surrounded by some notable North London giants), on Saturday we survived relegation from the football league on the last day of the season for the third season in a row.

Every summer we get stripped of our best players and have to draft in almost a completely new squad. With the cut in youth development budget, tv rights and league cup money, there would have been a decent chance that we would have gone out of business if we went down but somehow managed the impossible yet again. Somehow, I don’t know how, our next competitive fixture will be a Football League one.
Keep on rambling
Ganesh,
Barnet, N.London

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Hi,
If you got an email from me earlier please ignore it. I did not send it. I think my account was hacked.
Thanks,

Ganesh

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In this week’s Mailbag, we’ve got another tragic (and ridiculous) injury, an unsolicited picture of Allan Nielsen half-naked and Josh from Guildford attempts to find out the Unofficial Premier League Champions without making any effort whatsoever….

Hello The Rambleratti,

With all this talk of freak injuries on the last couple of shows, I keep waiting for you to mention the legendary Michael Stensgaard – the one time ‘new Peter Schmeichel’ who warmed Liverpool’s bench for some of the 90s. A lot of people know he was injured in an ‘ironing board incident’ but most people forget the awesome detail of just how he did it.

Stensgaard was carrying his ironing board, dropped it, used his AMAZING goalkeeping reflexes to CATCH IT before it hit the ground and in-so-doing, dislocated his shoulder. What absolute fuckery.

Ned, York

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Dear Ramblers,

In your latest show I believe you briefly mentioned former Spurs player and Danish international Allan Nielsen. Well, that got me thinking that you might enjoy this picture of Mr.  Nielsen posing in an ad for cheap underwear with his new wife. (who btw is a horseback rider known for her participation in the Danish version of Strictly
Come Dancing).

Enjoy, lads, and behave!

Chris Voss

Er, thanks Chris!

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Ramblers!

Whilst discussing Sepp Blatter’s stupid idea of scrapping pelanties the other day, me and my friend were trying to come up with a few other concepts for football contests. It got us to thinking about what football would be like if titles were fought up in the same style as boxing…. - no, not punch ups between Barton and Balotelli, even though I know we’d all like to see that! We were thinking more along the lines of a team gaining the title from beating the previous winner in a one-off match, and then each game they play after that is to try and retain the title, until they lose, and it is passed to the conquering team.

After a quick search online, it seems that this already exists and is known as the Unofficial Football World Championships. The first ever champions were Scotland, having beaten England in the first recorded international match back in 1872. The title has obviously passed through a number of nations since, and currently resides with North Korea, who wrestled the title away from Japan back in November. Since then they have managed to retain it despite having faced the great footballing powerhouses of Kuwait, Tajikistan, The Philippines, India, Palestine and Turkmenistan.

This led to me try and work out who the champions of English football would be. I planned to try and work this out by looking at fixtures dating back over a hundred years, before realising this would take far too long. I then decided it would be better to try it from the inception of the premier league in 1992. Again, I realised this would take too long, so I decided to just start it from the beginning of the 2011/2012 season, with Man Utd starting with the title, having won the league the previous year. They held onto it until the 6-1 defeat to Man City, and the title then changed hands between Chelsea, Villa, Swansea, Sunderland, Arsenal, QPR, Man Utd (again), Wigan and Fulham before finally resting at Everton.

So there we have it, Everton are the Unofficial Football Premiership Champions 2011/12 - a great honour for David Moyes to achieve in his 10th year in charge!

Josh, Guildford.

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Ahoy Ramblers,

I have a magnificent story from Eastern Europe…no, it’s not from Romania, but from Hungary. Ex-Swansea and QPR manager Paulo Sousa is the current manager of Videoton. As it is portrayed in the QPR documentary ‘The Four Year Plan’, he is quite the man when it comes to football shenanigans. Recently, in a charity match between Hungarian celebrities and journalists, he managed to headbutt an opposition player, Zizou style.

The victim was taken to hospital, and his forehead had to be stitched together. Afterwards, Mr. Sousa had this to say: ‘I am sorry if he got injured, but this accident happens in every football match!’

Ábel Lőrincz
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A mention of ex-Middlesbrough midfielder Phil Stamp on a recent Ramble reminded me of an incident that happened to my friend at a Hearts calendar signing (where Stamp was playing at the time):

My friend looks A LOT like Phil Stamp, and at the signing said to him, ‘Cheers Phil, I’ve not had to buy a drink in Gorgie for a while, cos I look like you.’

Stamp replied: ‘Yeah? Does it ever help you with the ladies?’

My friend: ‘No. I look like you’.

Laughter from Hartley and other Hearts players. Stamp left to look totally dejected.

Scott Donaldson
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Hi Ramblers,

I discovered this quite incredible tee-shirt on the West Ham website today.

Anyone who wears the twitter name of David Sullivan’s son is surely a knobhead.

I cannot work out why anyone would design such a weird top.

Have any other Ramblers seen a worse piece of merchandise than this?

Ed Mancey

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