Back with a bang, well a headbutt…

Alright folks,

Well, that took longer than expected – after a few weeks of generally being fecked off with football (Blatter breaking his tiny balls laughing at Ireland, everyone else having difficulty holding on to their pints while laughing at Liverpool) alongside a bunch of pre-Christmas work and selling the story on Mark’s Tiger Woods affair to the highest bidder (headline: Tiger Hits Blogger Bogey), the blog has been left to gather dust.

Though, in fairness ye shouldn’t give a rat’s arse about the above, so I’ll march on and try to keep up a better ratio of blogs this month, which should be easy enough considering stories of Premier League Christmas parties usually involve enough material for a book never mind regular 500-word updates including links back to John Terry/Rio Ferdinand/Jermaine Defoe’s previous discretions.

It’s a solid tradition of highly paid professional athletes embarrassing themselves upon going within 100 yards of a beer for the first time in months. Liverpool’s fancy dress party has seen all manner of idiocy over the years, from David Burrows deciding the world was ready to get over that whole ‘holocaust thing’ by dressing as a Nazi to Jamie Carragher’s contretemps with a stripper also made for funny reading. There was also Man Unireh’s genius ‘ten women to every man’ party planning genius of a few years back as well so hopefully the festive season brings a few gems such as these.



This year, Stoke got things running earlier than expected as manager Tony Pulis apparently nutted James Beattie in the dressing room at The Emirates as the latter bitched over having to work on Monday morning after the players’ Christmas Party on Saturday. Ignoring the fact that this must rank as a certain form of achievement in getting the Christmas party scandal out of the way before the actual party itself, and ignoring the bigger fact that Beattie always comes across as a complete cock in interviews, in this case I think it was the player that was right.

Pulis, a manager who prides himself on appearing to be a no-nonsense, sensible man manager may well have lost the dressing-room having attempted to behead last year’s top scorer; the £3.5 million punt that covered up his enormous ginger failure Dave Kitson. With Beattie seen as somewhat of a leader in the Stoke side (well that’s according to several news reports anyway) Pulis now finds himself trying to placate the talented frontman or else get rid. The latter may see the side struggle towards the end of the season and Steve Coppell can tell him all about second season syndrome resulting in relegation if Pulis fancies a chat.




How the whole situation plays out in the Christmas period – where Stoke face both Aston Villa and Man City - will be interesting. Beyond their travails though the collected mishaps of Christmas parties across the Premier League are most likely coming to a dirty redtop rag near you soon.

Any guesses as to what Terry, Lamps, Ledley ‘can someone help this man to the door’ King and Steven ‘he wouldn’t play me Phil Collins la’ Gerrard will get up to?

JJ, ODF