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.