January Transfers: Winners and Losers

After a record breaking transfer window which saw over £200m change hands, I thought it a good idea to see which teams are in better shape and which will think they could have done more. This entry will only focus on the Premiership but if you want to comment about your team’s signings, or anything else about the transfer window, then post it below.

Haiku

I’ve noticed in the news recently that a lot of famous people are writing haikus, a form of poetry that comes from Japan.

Before he was unceremoniously dethroned by David Haye, it was revealed that seven foot goliath Nikolai Valuev wrote poetry for his wife.

Similarly the new President of Europe, the overwhelmingly underwhelming Herman van Rompuy, can turn a phrase far better than he can turn heads at an EU meeting.

This got me to thinking; how hard can it be? So here are my attempts at a few haiku poems of my very own. They don't follow the Japanese phonetic style but are more of a western pattern that can be found at the bottom of this piece.

I've dedicated the first two haikus to the men who inspired me to give them a go, Nikolai and Herman:

Haiku for ‘The Beast from the East’:

Ugly gargantuan stumbles.
Enigmatic Haye celebrates and
humbles the pathetic poetic giant.

Haiku for Herman:

Unremarkable unknown man crowned.
Unexciting Belgian victorious and
defeats the unpopular warmonger Blair.

Haiku for Henry:

Clean shaven superstar cheats.
Incandescent Irishmen whale and
lambast the useless short-sighted officials.

Haiku for Tiger:

Clean shaven superstar cheats.
Expensive car crashes and
reveals the furious golf-club-swinging wife.

Haiku for Roger Federer:

Clean shaven superstar worries.
Bizarre Gillette curse emerges and
troubles the Swiss tennis player.

Hope you liked them. I only knocked these up quickly and am not sure if I followed the rules to the letter. If you want to try them yourselves then the format for doing them is posted below. Comments would be great appreciated.

Adjective adjective noun verb.
Adjective noun verb and
verb the adjective adjective noun.

USA, USA!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's the US Presidential elections tomorrow and it is going to be one heck of a close race. Barack Obama, the favourite according to the polls, could become the first black president in the countries short history. John McCain is looking to upset the odds and keep the Republicans in the White House for another four years.

But why does everyone care so damn much? Will it actually affect you, the everyday Brit, in any way, shape or form?

Obama looks like he would be a good president. He has no desires to go to war with anybody, he spreads a message of hope and he is a positive role model for young, black Americans. But he will still maintain the ‘special relationship’ we have with the States; he will still look after the interests of the rich American oil tycoon; he will still have to deal with Iraq and the ‘credit crunch’; and will always be looking over his shoulder at the Russians, and increasingly, the Chinese.

McCain, despite a lot of reports, is not as ideologically far right as people think. He is a more moderate Republican and his choice of running buddy, Sarah Palin, reflects this as her ‘gun slinging’ roots were needed to appease the more radical end of the party. But he too will inherit the ‘credit crunch’ and Iraq; he will still protect the interests of the wealthy; he will have to deal with America’s decreasing position as a super power; and he too will come over to Britain and ‘kiss ass’ with Gordon Brown.

Whoever wins will not be able to increase taxes, change policies or have a direct affect on British life. They will still be running the same country, run by the same people and will have to appease the same groups in order to maintain their position of supposed power. If you think that an Obama win or a McCain victory will change the way America and its people view the rest of the world then I think you are deluded.

The only way the race for president would interest me would be if it was run by Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell. I want an X-Factor style finals show, where McCain and Obama sing their policies in front of a live studio audience. Then the judges, Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno, Bob Dole and Donald Trump, deliver their verdicts and then it’s up to the public, who have from between House and CSI:Miami to phone in their vote.

In the meantime, previous presidential losers John Kerry, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton give a stirring rendition of the Chumbawanba anthem ‘I Get Knocked Down (But I Get Up Again)’. Then before Ryan Seacrest announces the result, George Bush gives his final performance, a tear jerking version of ‘Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iraq’.

Then the audience falls silent as Seacrest opens a sealed envelope and pauses for an annoying length of time before shouting out: “The new President of the United States of America is…Barack Obama”. The crowd hollers and whoops like only Americans can. Obama falls to his knees, floods of tears streaming down his cheeks. McCain, gracious in defeat, pats the victor on the back before being barged out of the way by hundreds of Obama’s friends and family who have invaded the stage.

Obama then has to compose himself as he is sworn in and a short video clip of his campaign highlights are played. Then, as the winner, he has to give his version of the American national anthem as red, white and blue confetti reigns down on him. That would be enetertainment.

However, as this is politics and not reality TV we will have to make do with one of the Dimbleby’s stood in front of a 3D pie chart instead. Who do I think will win? Obama. But I don’t really care.

Is 'Going Out' All It Used To Be?

I don’t know if I am just getting old before my time but I have become increasingly disenfranchised with ‘going out’ recently. I’m not sure if the novelty of going to new places, trying new things and meeting new people when you first started hitting the town has worn off, or if I just need a big night to restore my faith. Here is a list of what I believe is the 50 worst and best things about ‘going out’:

50 WORST:

1. Hearing the same shit music time and time again, with the DJ putting in his mix tape containing 90s cheese (S Club, Backstreet Boys and 5ive), awful modern R&B (like Rihanna and Nelly Fatardo) and what they perceive as Indie (meaning the Killer ‘Mr Brightside’ and The Fratellis ‘Chelsea Dagger).
2. Your shoes getting covered in that ‘club grime’ which is a mix of sweat, vomit and cheap vodka.
3. Hideously drunk middle aged women falling about the places, screeching along to a Madonna track before ending up arse-over-tit on the dance floor.
4. The smug crowd who think that only they can enjoy themselves, and give you the evils if you even as dare to sing-a-long to a tune or have a dance.
5. Waking up wondering how you managed to empty your wallet of all its money when you had such a bad night.
6. Picking last nights clothes up off the floor and finding chilli sauce and garlic mayo in places you didn’t think were possible.
7. Hangovers that don’t kick in till exactly 3pm the next day, after which you are incapable of doing anything other than monging out on the sofa watching crap TV.
8. Being trapped as a dance floor gate – where everybody seems to be squeezing past you to go anywhere.
9. When your friends turn into Harry Hudini the second you walk into a club and you can’t find them again for the rest of the night.
10. Going to the toilet and being expected to pay someone a pound to turn the tap on for you to wash your hands.
11. Someone spilling snakebite all over your nice white shirt.
12. Picking glass out of your shoe every two minutes.
13. The awfulness of a pint of lager served in a plastic cup – it just doesn’t taste right.
14. Having to re-mortgage your house for a drink on the weekend that cost £1 when you where in on Wednesday.
15. Being charged for entry when the drinks are not free when you get inside, or having to pay to get into a bar, especially one you don’t particularly like.
16. People pestering you to sign up to receive text messages from clubs that end up costing you a fortune to receive when on holiday, only to tell you that Dane Bowers will be live on Saturday.
17. Clubs charging extra because special Z list celebs are there that night
18. Never being able to get a signal anywhere until you leave and get a hundred text messages at once whilst you’re walking past a dodgy looking gang down a dark alley.
19. Everyone has at some point been the only sober person in there group and no matter how hard you try you can’t catch up to your mates.
20. Being forced to pay a fortune for a taxi to somewhere that is five minutes walk away.
21. Waking up with permanent marker in every orifice.
22. Realising what you did last night – or in the worst cases who.
23. Finding yourself tagged in about fifty photos from the night before, including the hideously unattractive, making an arse of yourself and getting partially/fully naked. The last thing you want to see is a picture of your arse on Facebook.
24. Vomiting – plain and simply horrible.
25. Spending the night trying to get even a peck on the cheek from the cock tease you thought you were well on with.
26. Your mates being swifter than you in shotgunning there girls in a group and lumbering you with ‘the whale’.
27. Stumbling home alone – how sad and depressing are you?
28. Even though you’d practised at home and studied the technique for hours, still ending up with half the drink down your shirt when you do a strawpeedo.
29. Not being able to find a single place to just be able to sit and chat.
30. Groups of lads to whom chanting is the only way that they can communicate to each other.
31. The sometimes quiet scary memory loss that cheap vodka can have on the human brain.
32. Going out with more than enough money to have a good night but still visiting a cash machine at least twice.
33. Waking up with a big bruise on your side or a cut on your leg and not having a clue how they got their.
34. Buying someone a drink a never getting one in return. We’ve all bought an attractive girl a drink in the hope of getting something in return and then never see them again; or we’ve all got that mate who disappears like Rio Ferdinand when its time to do a drugs test when its their round.
35. Being so desperate for another drink that you pay on card – even if they are tequila sunrises and you’re on the Pride of Rotterdam.
36. Waking up to find your jeans and shirt in opposite corners of the room, with a solitary sock perched precariously on your lamp. Then when you go downstairs you remember the state you left the living room in, with half drunken lagers cans, half eaten kebabs and half destroyed tables all over the place.
37. The amazing drunken ability to lose or break phones and digital cameras almost as if you meant it.
38. The awkward dilemma of it being freezing cold outside but boiling hot inside the club. What do you wear?
39. Some tit thought it would be a good idea to go out dressed up for their birthday, meaning you have to spend the night in uncomfortable, itchy clothes, having stuff robbed off you and then wake up with face paint all over your bedding.
40. Being stuck with the drunk mate who just won’t leave you alone, chatting shit insistently into your ear.
41. Spending forty minutes plus queuing up to get the coat your wish you hadn’t brought out with you in the first place.
42. The awkward conversations you are forced to have when you bump into people you barely spoke to in school on a night out.
43. Having to walk a paralytic friend home, dragging them home, throwing them into their bed before they are helpfully sick all over you.
44. When you spend a fortune on one item that makes your fancy dress look sensational and you lose it within half an hour of leaving your house.
45. Bar staff who think that just because the person has breasts they must be served first, regardless that they just pushed in front of you in a queue you’ve been in half the night.
46. Having to order about 300 drinks for friends, family members, course mates, associates, chums and well wishers because you managed to get served.
47. Ripping your best shirt trying to scale a fence whilst being a drunken fool.
48. Not being able to wear a hat without it being stolen of you by girls all night, who seem to think it’s theirs if they bat their eyelids at you.
49. Face eaters in the middle of the dance floor – you know who you are.
50. Men who drink Smirnoff Ice. If it’s on offer sure, but not when it cost more than a full tank of petrol and taste like fizzy aids. I can’t say I have ever looked out of the window on a nice sunny day and thought ‘do you know what I fancy, a nice, ice cold Smirnoff Ice’.

50 BEST:

1. Dancing like nobody’s watching.
2. Your whole house meeting on the landing or in the living room to piece together what happened last night.
3. Finding random mates on the sofa.
4. Chatting absolute shit for an entire evening.
5. Devising brilliant plans, ideas and schemes that you know the next day you will not remember or will realise are terrible.
6. Reading some humorous graffiti in the toilets.
7. Taking advantage of someone passing out by writing all over them, balancing stuff on them and, in exceptional cases, concocting fake faeces to convince someone they had shit themselves.
8. The night the DJ seems to be playing your Ipod.
9. When you go out in fancy dress and everyone loves it.
10. Checking Facebook next morning to find yourself in a gem of a photo and commenting on it.
11. Watching your mate strike out.
12. Drunken karaoke – you can’t sing Wonderwall at the best of times but you convince yourself you are Oasis.
13. Manufacturing fake photographs – classics include the ‘laughing at a funny joke’, the ‘pointing to something in the distance’ and the ‘pretending to be deep in thought’.
14. Being so hilarious and generally class that people you only just met that night immediately add you on Facebook.
15. Staying in a club or bar till closing time, occasionally doing the ‘one more song’ chant.
16. Knowing the manager/bouncer so they let you in for free.
17. Finally managing to defeat Noel Edmonds and winning some money on the itBox.
18. Writing general abuse all over your mates T-shirts and pen raping randoms on nights like Carnage.
19. Getting into random peoples pictures, or getting a picture with a random, e.g. a random with a boss afro.
20. Cracking a joke with such brilliant timing and perfect delivery that it becomes legend amongst your group of friends.
21. Pulling out the old skool dance moves such as ‘sowing the seeds’, ‘the mash potato’ and ‘the water jet’.
22. When the DJ plays that song you haven’t heard in ages, the one you download the second you wake up.
23. Enjoying a good rave.
24. Watching a smashed mate pull something that better resembles a member of the animal family than a member of the opposite sex.
25. Playing drinking games for hours until everyone is good a smashed.
26. Pissing yourself to jokes that nobody else gets and probably aren’t even funny.

27. Waking up with a random balloon, flower, pair of sunglasses or any other type of cool steal from the night before.

28. The wonderful sensation of winning a drinking race.

29. Watching your mate tell a girl he would ‘shag her brains out’ because you were playing the ‘Tell Her’ rule.
30. The rare occasion the DJ plays your request or reads out your shout-out.
31. Getting good and sweaty, taking your top off and banging into each other in the Drum n Bass room.
32. Stealing a traffic cone or road sign – you must do it at least once in your life.
33. Waking up with your phone and a wallet that still has money in it.
34. Watching scatty kids from four years below you get ID’d as you stroll in unchallenged.
35. Dancing in a big group.
36. Being ‘asked kindly to leave’ by bouncers because you’ve been found asleep on the club stairs.
37. Knowing the bar staff and getting free drinks. Best example of this was a mate who was leaving his bar job and moving away so he gave us bottles of wine free all night.
38. The ‘what happened last night’ text.
39. Going up to a group of girls and being the one who manages to pull the fitty.
40. Seeing someone fall flat on their face. Even funnier when it’s a girl, and even funnier if you know them.
41. Clinging onto each other belting out whatever anthem is playing. A demonstration of solidarity and awful singing.
42. Bumping into someone you actually like and haven’t seen in ages.
43. Over bumming somebody because you’re drunk and for some reason think they are the Messiah.
44. Getting ‘the mate who doesn’t come out much’ blind drunk.
45. The very rare instance where you are the one who get chatted up.
46. Being the drunkest of your friends. Or the drunkest people in the pub/bar/club.
47. The hungover phone call the next morning where you tell people how big a tit they made of themselves, and they tell you how big of a tit you where.
48. Challenging another group of lads in the pub to a drinking contest and winning triumphantly.
49. Having gotten totally sloshed the night before, getting up and getting straight back on it like a true champion.
50. Striking gold and pulling someone universally regarded as a ‘fitty’.

I write this contemplating whether or not to go out tonight. What to do?

Please comment if you agree with any of my loves or hates and tell me your favourite/worst things about ‘going out’ too.

Hallam's hockey too hot for Uni

*Hockey names again in brackets after real names for members of The University of Sheffield Hockey Club

The University of Sheffield Men’s Hockey 1^st team were comprehensively beaten 5-1 by Hallam at Abbeydale on Varsity Finals Day.

Hallam were in complete control of the game almost throughout as Uni gave an unusually lack lustre performance in front of a noisy crowd.

The first fifteen minutes were poor with both sides guilty of some fairly sloppy passing. Uni had a few half chances with forward John Hamilton (Lambrini) and Captain Richard Beeching (Popeye) sending reverse stick shots wide.

But in the sixteenth minute Hallam got on top. They won a penalty flick and a weak effort from Hallam’s Dafydd Charles’ crept agonizingly between Uni keeper Sam Harrison’s (Shitbreak) legs.

Things got worse for Uni moments later when a long corner saw Charles get his and Hallam’s second goal, firing in from a tight angle.

Uni tried to respond with Rob Miller (Nailgun) steering a shot wide from a Carl Ward (legless) cross, but Hallam dominated the half.

Uni’s frustration was clear to see when substitute Tom Oliver (Buca) was green carded for a rash stick tackle before half-time.

Being 2-0 down at half-time left Uni looking for a foothold in the game and they almost got a goal back two minutes in, Ronak Patel (Boyzone) and Chris Abbo (Smash) unable to steer in a free hit.

Uni did get a goal back five minutes into the second half. Beeching’s (Popeye) short corner was cleverly worked by Miller (Nailgun), whose cross was flicked in by Hamilton (Lambrini) to make it 2-1.

Hallam responded instantly when Captain Alex Bailey turned in Charles’ short corner just minutes after Uni had pulled one back.

With the score at 3-1 Uni had to attack, changing formation to play three at the back. However, they could not turn their possession into chances and the sloppy passing that plagued them in the first half began to creep back in.

Hallam always looked composed on the ball and a danger on the counter attack. They added two more goals before the end, with a cheeky lob from Andy Mills and a breakaway goal from Tom North.

After the match Hallam Captain Alex Bailey said: “After being 3-1 up at half-time last year it was a killer blow to lose. When we came in 2-0 up this time we knew we wouldn’t let it slip.”

Frustrated Uni Captain Richard Beeching (Popeye) gave his post-match thoughts: “We’re disappointed but it was their year. You could tell they were better trained than us and we need more coaching if we are to compete.”

Line-up:

• GK – Sam Harrison (Shitbreak)
  
• RB – David Harvey (Tripod)
  
• LB – Carl Ward (Legless)
  
• CB – Matthew Harrison (ASBO)
  
• CB – Chris Abbo (Smash)
  
• RM – Ben Hearne (Ringsting)
  
• LM – Richard Beeching (c) (Popeye)
  
• CM – Rob Miller (Nailgun)
  
• CM – Oscar Evans (Poo Leg)
  
• CF – John Hamilton (Lambrini)
  
• CF – Ronak Patel (Boyzone)
  
• SUB – Chris Hazell (Pistachio)
  
• SUB – Joel Harrison (Swede)
  
• SUB – Tom Oliver (Buca)
  

Goal Scorers: Hallam – Dafydd Charles 2, Alex Bailey, Andy Mills, Tom North; Uni – John Hamilton (Lambrini)

Man of the Match: Uni – Oscar Evans (Poo Leg); Hallam – Dafydd Charles