Mud, Sweat and Beers

Because I'm a pathetic specimen of a human being, I really enjoy watching The Big Match Revisited on ITV4 (or, given the normally show it about 9am on Saturday, I record it first). Currently, they're working through the 1978/79 season and it's never less than amusing to spot the vast changes we've seen in English football over the last 30 years.

For one thing, they show plenty of games from outside the top flight, which I believe was part of the contract fromt he Football League - Match of the Day on the BBC used to do the same. This means you get to see clashes like Brentford against Watford in the Third Division, where the young Luther Blissett, in the days before he was inspiring Italian anarchists, maintaining dignity (and scoring a goal) while taking sickening abuse from the crowd. Top man.

Of which reminds us of the old cliché about black players - that they were soft and couldn't handle the rough stuff. To which you can only wonder if they ever saw Cyrille Regis play? The man was built like a tank and was capable of battering his way past the overweight carthorse centre halves that most teams employed back then.

"Overweight" is certainly a theme you get from watching players back then, as plenty of the lads showing off their stuff may have wished the shirts had a little more "give", judging by the ample bellies on display. If you think Sam Alladyce has only looked that chunky since he packed in playing, think again. After all, a victory celebration of about ten pints of beer was the norm back then. Though for the losing team, commiseration could come in the form of ten pints of beer.

Luckily, the pitches of the time pretty much prohibited any kind of quick movement, with that vital ingredient of "grass" often being left out of the mix, leaving the surface looking either like Ypres 1917 or Southport beach. Though running fast wasn't an option, neither was standing still, lest you be sucked into the quagmire like in some dodgy horror film - and nobody was going to be able to pull the likes of Larry Lloyd and Mickey Droy back out, that's for sure. It makes you watch in awe that the likes of Steve Coppell and Laurie Cunningham could glide on the mud like it was a bowling green.

Viv Anderson runs with the ball, probably to prevent the onset of trenchfoot

Watching old football games can also provide a nice little sociological insight in normal life at the time. The pitchside adverts are for the likes of Visionhire - the idea of people renting a TV may seem a bit alien to people these days, but it was the norm back then. I can remember my mother paying the subs for her parents in town back in the day. Eh ba gum.

And of course, through it all, there's the magnificent Brian Moore, whose head did indeed look uncannily like the London Planetarium. The only downside is watching it in the knowledge Liverpool end up as champions! Bah!

Every Single One Of Us...

If anything was going to shift me out of my blogging apathy, it would be the retirement of the one man outside my family who has been responsible for a great deal of joy in my life.

I was five years old when Alex Ferguson jaunted down from Aberdeen to take the job of returning Manchester United to the top of English football. Anyone who knows their football history knows it wasn't easy, and there were times most of us would have happily seen him booted back to Glasgow, but in 1993 he delivered what we all wanted, and the prize of being Champions of England was ours again. Sir Matt Busby went to his grave a few months later knowing his legacy was safe.

From then on, there have been few seasons that hasn't seen some silverware brought back to Manchester, and we've even got our hands on the top European prize a couple of times. It's been one hell of a ride, with a huge cast of players passing through. He once said his greatest achievement was "knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch" - you can argue how much of that they did themselves, but the simple fact is that Ferguson nearly tripled our number of English titles. In the early 90s, such a statistic seemed the stuff of a madman's dreams. Yet here we here, from constant underachievers to the most successful team in England over the course of one man's spell in a job.

His replacement? I remain to be convinced if David Moyes is the man for the job. I hope he is, for obvious reasons, but it's going to be beyond weird at the start of next season when another man is sitting in Fergie's seat on the bench.

Tying Up The Trilogy

Having had, as already mentioned, a week off recently, I made the reluctant option to spunk around £30 on all the last three bits of Downloadable Content for Mass Effect 3. I didn't really want to do this, but the option of some extra time with characters I'd grown to love was too much.

This is what I think of all of them. Being spoiler-free on the DLC, but not on the ME3 in general.

Leviathan

So, call comes through, our man Shepard is told some science bod may have found a whole new grade-A weapon against the Reapers. Well, we gotta have that, right? So begins an only-vaguely interested series of jobs, too many of which involve hanging around the scientist's gaff. There's precious little new content in terms of your crew outside EDI, Cortez and a little bit with Vega.

I think it took me around three hours to complete it. For the money I paid, that is frankly pathetic. It does provide some interesting background on the Reapers and their origins, but you can see all that on youtube if you so wish.

Omega

Of course, Aria L'Toak was one of the best characters in Mass Effect 2, a totally amoral bitch who didn't give one about anything bar her own status and power. By the time of ME3, we all know Cerberus booted her off her own kingdom and she wasn't happy about it. Thus, we now get to help her get what she lost back.

This is obviously a good thing, as is that you get to scrap against Aria and someone left behind on Omega, a female Turian (the first we get to meet) named Nyreen. Having read the comic book chucked in with the special edition off the original ME3, I had some idea of what was going on here. Others won't be so lucky, as it doesn't offer much in the way of explanation. The basic gist is to kick Cerberus arse, essentially. You can't bring any of your team - Aria doesn't trust them, apparently - which is a wee bit of let down.

It's a fun little diversion, but still not enough to justify paying a tenner for, given the length of play. One particularly annoying trait was the bigging up of a new kind of enemy as being some unstoppable killing machine, only for them to not be much tougher than yer average Reaper forces.

Citadel
This is more like it. Admiral Anderson orders the ship and crew to dock in and enjoy some R&R. It all goes guns akimbo in no time, natch, as Shep finds a plot to have him knocked off by a mysterious new enemy. All part of a normal day, really.

There's a hell of lot more than just that, though. For starters, you can get Wrex back in your squad if he's alive, which is very cool. You also get use of Anderson's somewhat swanky flat, to which your crew will pay visits. Bizarrely, if you've romanced Tali, she'll sing some weird musical number to you. On top of that, you get a arcade, casino and combat simulator to play in.

The central plot of the DLC is solid enough, with plenty of chuckles. If you've managed to avoid everyone alive to the end of ME3 (just prior to the attack on the Cerberus base) then you'll get the full worth of the content - don't play through it before you've resolved everyone's issues. As a reward, you'll get to enjoy the sights of pretty much all your friends from over the series having a bit of a party and getting a tad wasted.

Citadel is the only piece of ME3 DLC that I would put down as a "vital". The other two are fine, but only worth getting if you have plenty of cash spare. Citadel, however, is a nice little "see ya" to the series, and a wee bit of compo for the lousy ending. 

Forty From Ten

Recently, I was asked to compile a list of my top 40 albums of the 1990s for NoRipcord.com. An easy task, you might think, given that decade saw me go through just about all of my teenage years.

Alas, not, but I finally managed the task to find one band conspicuous by their absence. Want to guess? Oasis? Nah - they had two good songs (Live Forever and Slide Away), plenty of average rockers and a load of shite. No, it was Radiohead that failed to make my own Pick of the Pops (1990s edition).

Strange, in a way, as I love me a bit of what I will call "miserable bastard music": Joy Division, the Smiths, Depeche Mode and the Cure all provided a soundtrack that made my mother worry that I was bound to hurtle myself off St Bees Head one day. Radiohead were in there too - after all, isn't Creep the perfect adolescent boy song? At least, those of us who scored no luck whatsoever with whoever we fancied. Tough times. But Pablo Honey was an average album at best and somehow its famous song hasn't aged very well, especially when compared to something like Boys Don't Cry, which works perhaps due to a charming simplicity. The line "you're so fucking special" merely sounds derisory 17 years on from the first time I heard it.

The Bends was better and got a fair few playings, then there was OK Computer, which is widely praised to this day. Yet, something must have happened as I've not listened to either album in a decade. The latter has too much I find too self-indulgent, the latter I just seem to have grown out of.

Seems strange that I would do so, given all the other bands I mentioned still get a good blast on the MP3 player on a weekly basis.

Going back to my top 40, I expect very few of them to make the NoRipcord total, bar a few obvious exceptions. After that goes up, I may well print up my list for the sake of completion.

My Old Man Said Follow That Van

Using up my last days of leave to take a well earned week of slobbing around was interrupted by helping a friend move home. For this task, suitable transport was required and a van was procured for the afternoon.

Now, when visualising myself behind the wheel of such a vehicle, I imagined myself thus:

You're humming the theme tune right now, yes?

Tearing around the streets of, umm, Southport, chomping on a cigar alongside a short-tempered slab of muscle, a man with serious mental issues and a man obsessed with getting his end away. We'd have moved all the plates and books using some kind of cannon constructed from farm equipment. What larks!

However, the reality is that I looked more like this chap:

The terror of the Greendale highways

Oh well. Mind, Pat was rock and roll in his own way, wasn't he? The amount of tea he knocked back of the course of every episode, I bet he would stay up for days on end, bouncing off the walls. No wonder he drove in that erratic manner, taking tight turns at breakneck speed. Look at him! Even in that picture, we can see he needs to carry his own stash, lest he go "dry" between stopping off at Ted's and the Vicar's.

What I did work out is that van driving isn't for me. Despite the paintwork being mainly white, I didn't honk the horn at one woman in a short skirt or low-cut top all day, nor buy a copy of the Sun to keep on the dash. I'm best leaving it to the professionals in future.  

Next Time, Keep Your Mouth Shut

So William Roache, who has played "Sad" Ken Barlow in TV soap Coronation Street since the Roman Invasion, seems to have finally cracked and declared victims of abuse are being punished for sins in previous lives. For obvious reasons, this has pissed a lot of people off. 

All we can do is label him a complete idiot and wonder if spending most your life pretending to be somebody else has finally snapped a twig keeping vital parts of his brain in some semblance of decent working order. Or perhaps some acid he took in 1967 has a pretty time-delayed second hit? Not too long ago, he was stating he used a "pet psychic" to try to find out why his dogs were always fighting. 

It reminded me that a friend and I sketched an idea for a comic strip based on one "Len Farlow", who after years living on the same street, feeling that he has wasted his unrecognised genius, cracks and transforms into "Ubu Len", a hulk of a man who goes on a rampage of murder, cannibalism and insanity that ended up him fighting a breed of mutants unleashed by a mad scientist from underneath the sewer farm at Urmston. 

As I remember, eventually the government sealed off Manchester from around the M60 and Ubu Len had to team up with nemesis (Inspector Colin Partridge, who was naturally days from retirement and "too old for this shit") to save the city before the nukes landed.

Compared to Bill Roache's inane ramblings, I don't think we were being that silly.

Battle of the Bulge

I've not written in this here blog for some long time now. Mainly because I'd always said I would only do this gig as long as it entertaining for me to do so.

Recent months have meant it wasn't, because of the rather worrying spectre of the ax falling over my employment prospects. I've been unemployed before, and the idea of doing so again put a somewhat black cloud over my mental state of mind.

Yet, somehow, fate has rolled in my favour and it seems the pull of the dole queue has been avoided once again. In a bigger farce of events, I've somehow managed to get put forward for a promotion, making me somehow who could well benefit from the global recession. Figure that one out.

To take a further self-pitying stance, I recently turned 32 and realised I was horrendously unfit and in great danger of becoming a fat bastard unless I changed my ways. I've long suspected our bodies have a kind of warranty that lasts till you're about 25. To that point, you can eat, drink, take whatever you like and you should be fine, as long as you're not too stupid. Beyond that, it's payback. The scales show in the last ten years, I'd managed to put on the best part of three stone in weight (say 18kg for you metric dudes), most of it onto my belly.

This is a crisis, at least in my pathetic life. Thus, I've had to take up more walking as part of my daily routine, starting with 30 minutes after work. It's not too much in the way of fun, but I recognise it's a necessary evil if I'm to avoid the pitfall of becoming a fat bastard.

Anyways, I'll try to sort my sorry arse out to return to regular blogging soon (if anyone cares), with the usual brand of pointless bollocks, banal musings and crap excuses for wasting my life away. Yay!