Friday Sermon

I went to bed last night with a mild sense of unease. Awoke with a full on pain in my shoulder and then it dawned on me. My goat. The goat was gone. I’d not switched on the TV for more than a few minutes and it everything fell into place.

Sluralix had got my goat.

“You hope you get a really strong referee in games like this, it was a major game for both clubs and you want a fair referee, you know … You want a strong referee, anyway, and we didn’t get that. I don’t know why he’s got the game. I must say that, when I saw who was refereeing it, I feared the worst.”

So he’s been hit with an improper conduct charge. What a pity it wasn’t strapped to the front grille of a speeding and out of control rubbish truck. Tied with a bow around on of those blackened strapped on teddy bears from the 1970’s. Mad Max meets The Sopranos meets the FA.

The petulance of Sluralix appears never ending. Just when you think that the self indulgent Scotchman couldn’t possibly be any more self absorbed he effortlessly demonstrates his conceit comes from a place so low even the cockroaches have hunchbacks.

Ferguson has refused to be interviewed by the BBC since 2004.He’s a Premiership football manager. Not some mad animal loving biddy  who’s issued a fatwa on Look North East because their weather girl innocently said it would be raining ‘cats and dogs’ one night 30 years ago.

This was after the broadcaster had the gall to ‘probe’ the business activities of his son, Jason who was then operating as a football agent in a documentary called, ‘ Father And Son.’  Sluralix gave the show both barrels bemoaning the unfairness of being picked on by the BEEB an organisation notorious of course for operating above the law…

“But it is such a huge organisation that they will never apologise. They don’t even care if you sue them or whatever, because they are so huge and have insurance. They carry on regardless and it’s breathtaking.”

Hang on, Snowy. Run that by me again. In fact don’t. Just answer one specific question. Yes or no.

Q: Did the BBC get sued?

A: Err, no.

I don’t know about you, but if one of my nearest and dearest had been subjected to snide, unfounded and outrageous slurs and I was a multi millionaire mischief maker I’d have them up before the Beak before you could say, ‘Two large Bushmills, love.’ What’s that phrase, ‘Sue or be damned?’ There were allegations of ‘brown envelopes’ to quote the Manchester United supremo himself. Hardly a passing swipe at hunky Dunc’s suits.

A press release from the BBC on Father And Son is HERE.

But that was only one instance of the monsters that lurk in the shadows. There are plenty more. Let’s look at the case of  Darren Ferguson. Darren Ferguson is a football manager. I can’t tell you if he’s a very good one.

But I can tell you Dunc had a riches to rags career as a player. He started off at Manchester United and as time went by he worked his way down through the ranks to Wolves, Wrexham then eventually … Peterborough. Funny that, most players find their career paths take them in the opposite direction. Can’t work that out. Oh well.

It was at The Posh that he became player manager. He had a good run in his first season. His second wasn’t so hot and he left by mutual consent with his side scrapping against relegation.

Dunc then became manager at Preston North End in January 2010. No one in their right mind could rewrite that debacle as even a vague success. By the September he’d not only picked up his own FA charge of misconduct (funnily enough after a verbal bust up with a referee) but been branded one of the worst managers to have ever mismanaged the club in it’s history. His stats were: After P 49, W 13, D 12, L 24.

It wasn’t the sight of Dunc being fired out of a cannon from the Wirral area that caught the attention of football fans. It was the fact that his precious father recalled three Manchester United players – Joshua King, Ritchie de Laet and Matthew James – from Preston with immediate effect. You’d have thought that the departure of such an abysmal manager would have been a positive and Sluralix might have even extended their loans as a consequence.

So we’ve learned that one of the most successful football teams in the world is being managed by a seventy year old child.

It’s a sorry reality that no matter how many fleeting glimpses we get of the monsters, no matter how deep the debt becomes, no matter how many laws and good practices are trampled underfoot the Fuhrer’s bunker just becomes more and more lavish. Let’s hope it’s fireproof as surely the only stunt left for Sluralix at this stage is spontaneous human combustion.

I just want my goat back. Uncharred.