FA Farce & Ireland Feelings

Hi All,
Mark here. I came across this last night:

"The FA has reduced AFC Wimbledon's 18-point penalty for fielding Jermaine Darlington without international clearance to a rather more reasonable three."

Is this ridculous or what? Why did they give them a massive ban if they are just gonna reduce it to 3? After all they are their own judge and jury. As I've said before on the podcast, expect West Ham to get off lightly for their breaking of the rules by fielding Handsome Tevez and The Monster Masch.

On a different topic - has anyone great expectations for the Ireland game tomorrow, as a sequel to Saturday, I feel the contrast will be more Big Momma's House 2 vs the original. In other words, if you thought Saturday was ridiculously boring and rubbish, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. I was offered a ticket to the game tomorrow, I politely declined by laughing in my friend's face - so you can say I'm not a real fan all you want but I'm sick of paying 30-40 euro to watch Ireland - I've better things to spend my money on, such as alcohol to numb the pain of watching them.

On a related point - it was commented by certain sections of the English media (notably the Times podcast) that we in Ireland expect too much from our football, poor little oul Ireland, we don't have the players, and that it's the media who are lumping pressure on Stan. I think, and a straw poll of football fans in Ireland would prove this - we're not expecting Ireland to beat Brazil or anything, we knew before the qualifying started that we wouldn't be top 2, but to suggest that we shouldn't be beating (and, not least, performing well i.e. passing the football to each other) Wales, Cyprus and San Marino, with 10-11 Premiership players in the first team is absolutely risable.

Mark