"I have a lot of good moments, but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan."

Eric Cantona's great, isn't he? There are a lot of things I hate about football, but Cantona isn't one of them. And I thought that, since the tone of this blog might be unpalatably acerbic for some, it might be worth showing a little generosity of spirit by talking about something I'm prepared to endorse.



"Clever of you, Rosbif."

He was the classiest thug, I always thought. Sure, he had a propensity for violence and, shall we say, 'authority issues', but he always seemed to channel his seismic fury in the right direction - directly into Evil's smirking face. So let's celebrate his greatest achievement as a footballer - nay, as a man.

In January 1995, during a match between Crystal Palace, Manchester United and Eric Cantona, the Furious Frenchman expressed his opinion of the opposition supporters in the most eloquent manner he could think of: flying kick to the chest. This might seem at first glance like a glaring contradiction of everything I've said on the subject before, but know this: Eric, in his wisdom, can see further than other men.

Because, as it turns out, Matthew Simmons, the honoured recipient of Cantona's gift of agony, was no-one's idea of an innocent bystander. His prior involvement with the National Front and BNP was dredged up by the tabloids, as was his conviction for spannering a Sri Lankan during an armed robbery.

Certainly, the man had paid whatever penance the law required from him, but it didn't appear to have softened his temperament any. That day he descended from his seat to the front of the stands, right behind the advertising hoardings, and he invited the "French motherfucker" to "Fuck off back to France." 

The reaction he got wasn't entirely unpredictable.

"Non."

It's difficult to argue with that. It's especially difficult if a frenchman is punching your head, as Simmons came to realise. And it becomes immeasurably more tricky still if, when in court for the sole purpose of 'arguing with that', you aim a flying kick at the prosecutor. That only works for Cantona, you buffoon.

But for every Matthew Simmons, there are countless more abusive fans, footballers, managers and corner flags that behave outrageously and with impunity. Eric Cantona showed that this behaviour isn't acceptable and, somehow, he showed it by behaving even worse.

And that, I think, is amazing.

Michael Ricketts: Battery's included

Conscious that I needed to fill up blog space with more entries tonight, I spent the afternoon quarrying my guy-from-Memento-esque memory for any scandalous soccering shenanigans that might serve to pad out a sheet of interweb electro-paper.


Luckily the world of football is fast-paced indeed, with scarcely a minute whizzing by without some luminary of the pitch heaping disgrace upon himself. I remembered spying a little morsel about an ex-premiership footballer who, at a restaurant with his young consort, scanned the menu and decided the Battered Girlfriend looked nice; the police, arriving shortly afterwards, opted for a Grilled Miscreant.


"Perfick", thinks I, sharpening my hatchet. After all, nothing gives me greater pleasure than reminding the few people who are duty-bound to read these scribblings that the verdant fields on which the beautiful game is played are sown with the baddest of bad seeds.


"To the Google-matic Computron!", I bellowed, shattering the concentration of the entire pottery class. I fled the room, leapt astride my horse and galloped homewards, where my trusty digital companion awaited.

">Stop feeding me jam. I can't eat jam. I eat the mains.
Now my insides are all sticky and it hurts."

Shut up Computron, nobody asked you - except me, when I told you to search the internets for 'footballer assault'.


After 0.6 seconds, you spat out no less than 15,900,000 results. 


I refined the search parameters obviously, and eventually I hit the target. Michael Ricketts was the guy I remembered, a washed-up player who carved a name for himself as part of a briefly ascendant Bolton Wanderers side a decade ago. He was back in the news for one of the only reasons such forgotten 'role models' and 'ambassadors' seem able to manage these days: an act of violence; mental decay; gross sexual misconduct. 


In his case, the ex-girlfriend he smashed his head into claimed that she had said things to him that were "deliberately derogatory", thus provoking him. As with collapsing stars like Paul Gascoine and Andy Carrol - both who have hit the presses for reasons other than their sporting virtuosity this week - it's a story of a woman making that classic error of bringing words to an idiot fight. So I got what I was after.


Yay. Drinks all round.



But to be honest, I'd sort of lost enthusiasm by that point.

Sure, the words 'footballer' and 'assault' can correlate in any number of ways, and only the widest-eyed ingenue would raise a silken hankie to their brow after reading a bunch of search engine statistics. It's just that there's so much more to go on.



Dundee striker and winner of the just-now-invented Most Ironic Surname Rosette David Goodwillie, for example, must probably now be asking himself whether the sexy funtimes he had at a party two weeks back might not have made for a better locker room story if he could honestly say the rape victim had been on board with the whole thing.

Southhampton's Liam Shelton, too, can look forward to an unusually forensic post-match analysis of his recent one-nil drubbing of amateur side Man Outside Bar.



15,900,000.



It's such an exhaustingly large figure. The constant outrages against common decency that football so reliably provides for me are actually a bit depressing. For a project conceived in hatred and fuelled by contempt, I'm surprised at how quickly its left me utterly depleted. I thought I possessed hugely abundant reserves of both resources, but I'm running a bit on empty right now.

I don't know. I think I'll feed Computron and then retire for the evening.

To bed; to bed.



>I'm not hungry. He doesn't care.



David Milliband - The Shame Spiral

Apparently, losing the Labour leadership contest has hit David Milliband harder than it initially appeared.

So hard in fact that the bottom has fallen out of his sense of personal dignity, sending Britain's favourite human-faced wonk plummeting from a highly-esteemed position at the pinaccle of centre-left politics and down, down into stygian depths of venality, moral turpitude and the magic sponge.

David? Is that you?

Yes, I'm afraid David intends to trade his soul with the dark gods of football in a Faustian effort to revive his Cheyne-Stokin' fortunes. He's made unbidden overtures to Sunderland Football Club to explore the possibility of becoming that rabble's "public voice" around the world.

It's not such a leap, to be fair. As foreign secretary, "Brains", as he was known to party insiders, orchestrated and developed policy decisions that affected millions at home and abroad; his input was so highly regarded that it even extended beyond his explicit remit and into matters at the highest level of leadership; he even had steamy politisex with Hillary Clinton.

David? Is that you?


As a spokesperson for Sunderland Football Club, he will be the "public voice" of an "institution" that has "nothing to say" about "anything at all". Because it amounts to little more than a highly exclusive leisure centre with spectator seating.

A natural transition - who could argue? Once he recovers from the ice-water shock of plunging from a world in which things matter into another where they don't, and once he learns to ignore the phantom limbs of power and importance that still tickle at their bleeding joints, I'm sure he'll find himself right at home.

Good luck, Dave! Back of the net!

"I tend to just have cereal before a game, probably a bowl of coco pops. The normal ones, not the moons and stars."

Hidden away amongst last week's thrilling dispatches from the front lines of football was a genuinely spleen-blowing news story, yet it passed from public consciousness without so much as a raised eyebrow or flipped-over breakfast table.

Here's a brief run-down of recent events - see if you can spot the revelation.

Firstly, Portsmouth FC went into administration, before heaving itself out of the grave and back onto its feet. It turns out that kicking a leather ball around on a grassy field can be a high-risk venture, so if you ever have a yen for a kick-about I'd recommend putting aside £135m to cover possible expenses. Portsmouth didn't, and are now teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Good work guys.

Fact fans: having entered the search term '£135m' into my Googlematic Computron...

">hello"

...I now know that such a sum might pay for two 2.7km tunnels in Hong Kong, the “greatest extension to the British Museum for almost a century”, or Greenstar UK, the largest recycling company in Britain.

Or alternatively, it could bring an ailing football team's balance sheet back up to zero, so that they can continue to put shorts on and frolic in the fresh air whilst an assembled crowd applauds them.

Hardly a choice, really.

Then, Wayne Rooney's vacillation over whether he would stay with his current employer or move to a different one gripped the nation by the balls and just wouldn't let go. Change jobs? Not change jobs?

OH GOD, JUST TELL US WAYNE.

How do you expect us to get anything done while you're idly musing aloud about which direction to take your career in? He scratches the crown of his ape-like skull with one dangling paw; the other drums across his silently muttering lips. Finally, ponderously, a word coalesces at the forefront of an otherwise barren mind: “Buuuuurrrr...stay? Stay.”

Boss/twat-herder Alex Ferguson then realises that Rooney is the Kasparov to his Karpov; he has been outplayed by the master. As Wayne shields his eyes against the obscenely bloated wads of cash that Ferguson is now pelting at his face, we can imagine him thinking smugly to himself 'check mate, sir...check mate.'

In so doing however, we are already imagining a world in which Wayne Rooney has played chess and understood its rules, and where he is also capable of maintaining some kind of interior dialogue. In reality he was probably making a hopeless attempt to divide £15m by the hourly rate of Jennifer Thompson, his favouritest prostitute in all the world.

So, he stays.

At this conclusion, the group of protesters who had been camped outside his mansion howling into the void of his indifference stopped and looked at themselves, then at each other, before slinking off back to their homes. As they do so, each concocts in his head some fantastic lie that will explain his absence to the normal people back home when they ask him why he missed work/dinner/his parole hearing.

Finally, Newcastle United striker Andy Carroll was charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend. Stay classy, Andy! But not just you – please join the supporters of the Serbian national team in the showers as they too have been red-carded, their violence towards Italian players and fans at a recent 'friendly' match disqualifying them from a game I like to call 'conducting yourself with a modicum of propriety, so that your parents needn't be ashamed of you'.

That is what passes for news in a packed week of ball-footing. Now, if you're anything like me (and pretty much everyone is), one particular juncture in the article prior you'll have spat a mouthful of cognac all over your manservant as he read it to you, dropping a lit cigar onto your crotch in the process:

This man owns a mansion