"You're not slinging anymore..."

We should take a second to mourn the passing of one of the game’s premier metaphors. RIP the 'David and Goliath' cup tie- crudely hacked to pieces by Jim Belgin, proving that even terms as allegorically rich as this one have their breaking point.

Many had thought it was a day we would never see, but as Jim Belgin remarked that in order to catch a loose ball, Jermaine Beckford would have had to have had ‘the sling David was using’ the analogy was finally stretched beyond all elasticity- and that’s not even to comment on what stretched to retrieving a full sized football would have done to the elasticity of the sling itself. Nor, on the further handwringing complications induced by trying to decide if the sling was active in the build up to the move and thus playing Beckford offside.

It took one back to Tottenham travelling to Chelsea earlier in the season and the claims that “the bus is running today!”- A reference to Jose Mourniho’s ‘park the bus’ jibe of years past, but one which appeared to be confusing poetic imagery for crude literalism. One positively hates to hear ‘park the bus’ in any context now, aware of how horribly mangled its interpretation his been handled by the professionals charged with covering football in this country.

A similar fate has now surely befell one of our more relied on tropes, and it has left many, mainly ITV employees, wondering where the David/ Goliath analogy can go next, as well as reflecting on its storied past.

You will remember David, drawn away against an opponent few gave him much chance with, set up with a bravely attacking formation, and against an out of sorts Goliath, perhaps playing with an eye on forthcoming European fixtures, was able to perform a smash and grab raid, with the emphasis firmly on the ‘smash’ bit, which left his opponent grounded, dazed and in serious need of a week off work recuperating in front of a House boxset.

So juicily did this relate to myriad cup games pairing premier sides against slightly somewhere south of premier sides, that many have, in the past, assumed that it was in fact an apocryphal tale designed solely with the intention of giving commentators charged with a cup game something to say waiting for a throw in to be taken. But, as that would mean it’s made up, and as it first appeared in the bible that can obviously not be true.

Others use it with a flexibility which perhaps serves to derive from the extent of David’s achievement, ranking it alongside a mid table championship side battling for a brave draw at a Premier League ground. Even on Saturday, in a period the will henceforth been known as Before Belgin, we had Leeds playing Sheffield United in 2003 as an example of “Leeds being Goliath”. We were concerned that having any team led by Terry Venables was in serious danger of making the tag ‘Goliath’ look seriously sarcastic- or at least mildly satirical. But we at least understood what was been got at, diminished at it may well have left David’s feat.

Why should we not? For sporting fans, it is a bible passage unrivalled in its infamy. Off the top of one’s head, only the “3.16” given copious air space at World Wrestling events can be seen as a genuine competitor in bible passage terms- and that’s only rose to prominence because of fortunate positioning in the middle of the book: the bit flipped to first by desperate travelling salesmen in American motels scouring to see if any passing evangelical has left $200 as testament to the power of faith in God, presumably unaware that this may strike sceptic minds as..well, cheating a bit.

So it pains to see David/Goliath sacrificed this way, pains to bare witness to the demise of football’s relationship with the bible. But, as Jesus rose again, so too, we feel can David and even, after a proper rest and a thorough head check at the nearest emergency room, Goliath. Football needs this; we need this. But first the Leeds/ Spurs repay to get through. Be vigilant, stand firm, and, most importantly, be on the lookout for any airborne and divinely powered rocks.

Wag Weekly...Elena Shtilianov

First, there was Tedi Velinova. Then came Elena Shtilianov. Somewhere sandwiched between them came, apparently- and as if my spell check didn’t need a break- playboy model Nikoleta Lozanova. You may need more than my word for it if you’ve been asked to mark him out of a Premier League game at any point this season, but, honestly: a man could lose track of Dimitar Berbatov.

Shtilanov represents his long term plans, and he has accordingly denied reports of an affair with the unjustly stunning Lozanova, once romantically linked with unused Liverpool goalkeeper Nikolay Mihaylov. We are not here to cast doubt on his denials. Why would we? On the subject of unused goalkeepers it seems only right to defer to Berbatov, something of an expert in the field, unused as he frequently leaves goalkeepers up and down the country every weekend.

But the rumours did lead him to all manner of bother, when, allegedly, he was threatened by Lozanova’s current boyfriend and Bulgarian crime boss Georgi Stoilov. The allegation was never substantiated. Nor was the other one which claimed the texts in question were actually sent during a Premier League fixture which Dimitar Berbatov was actually playing in.

Putting this behind them, Shtilianov and he plan to wed. Rumours that the Manchester United forward will spend the entire ceremony slouching at the altar, wearing the look of vague indifference, and leaving his partner to pick up all the slack and do the actual work, were probably began by Wayne Rooney.

Manchester City 2 1 Manchester United

The assumption of any match report is that the writer’s eye is an unfettered and impartial one, and one unencumbered by distractions. How much stock this idea holds rests mainly on who the reporter is and, more importantly, what the seating plan in the press box is. Certainly, if you’re sat next to Andy Dunn from the News of the World for ninety minutes, you’re going to be less likely to lose yourself in conversation.

Journalists happily go along with this conceit because, when you’re being paid generously to watch football and scoff on prawn soufflés at halftime, it may seem slightly like pushing your luck to be doing something else, browsing your friends’ status updates, say, or otherwise just looking in the wrong direction, when a big shout goes up for a penalty in the second half. So you rarely get a match report like this one, which begins with the confession that I didn’t actually see some of the game, as it was on the television in the corner behind the counter, and I was supposed to be working at the time.

So, 2-1 to Man City, yeah? Yeah, I just about caught that, in between a sea of fifteen year olds attempting to buy cigarettes and men asking the score and otherwise trying too hard to be interested in a cheap bid to impress their girlfriends.

City’ll be happy then, though no doubt pained by their overall failure to get Mark Lawrenson on board with the project. “The equaliser does not mask how second best City have been in this half,” he said, following Carlos Tevez’s penalty.

But surely it does exactly that? It is the purpose of goals to render peripheral, almost trifling, matters pertaining to possession graphs and amount of time the ball has spent in each half meaningless, is it not? To decry them for their entire purpose seems odd, and speaks to an obsession with analysis and ‘straight laced punditry’, which serves to miss a fundamental point, one crucial to our understanding of the game: namely, that none of that other stuff is important. When other pundits talk of the only thing mattering is what is in the top corner of the screen, they tend to not be referring to the instruction to press red for interactive options.

What the second City goal masked, you would have to ask Mark, as I was busy at the time outlining our strict no returns policy on already half drank from bottles of wine. I caught the celebration, though, and somebody really needs to have a word with Carlos Tevez. Is it just me that finds his chronic inability to move on from his rejection at Manchester United a teeny bit embarrassing? It cannot be doing much good for the City fans’ egos either.

He is like an ex in a bad sitcom plot, all extravagant gestures and attention seeking. At one point I thought he was going to jump on the lap of his new boss, only after first ensuring his old one was looking over. Carlos, be a man: tell your friends you couldn’t care less, cry yourself to sleep for a few months and spend the next three years plagued by a low key but nagging depression, the source of which must never be revealed. We’ll get you through this together, bro.

One last note, this from Guy Mowbray, with Man. Utd one up and playing well (they played well all night, I thought, Rooney was superb): “The fans have responded too. It sounds a little like Old Trafford- not much noise coming from the home fans.” Yeah, I noticed that as well. Uncanny.

Newcastle United 3 0 Plymouth Argyle

Earlier in the season, Plymouth’s trip to Newcastle was covered by the Football League Show cameras, which meant that away fans already getting up at four in the morning before making a massive journey north in the exceedingly slim hope of seeing little other than their team’s defeat, were further expected to share their sandwiches with Kevin Day.

Perhaps mindful of that, not as many showed here for the Cup game, far fewer in fact. And there was no sign of Kevin Day either. Likewise the home fans- whose attendances this season have been largely astonishing- were short in numbers; the lowest FA Cup ground in ninety years. Only a couple of thousand more than Middlesbrough managed in their third round cup game. That bad.

Among all the questions the crowd is said to have raised- short term questions relating to January transfer window and longer term questions on whether or not this signifies a shifting of priorities from fans who were always said to have an affinity for this cup (I.E, the cup where we traditionally do quite badly in, but not as badly as we do in all the others)- the thought most prominent on my mind as I took my seat was: going on forty thousand of the bastards are empty and I somehow find an obstructed one. I saw Peter Lovenkrands’ first goal- a neat little finish from a good move down our left- from over the little wall separating the two tiers
of the East Stand. I’m assured that it was very smart.

A couple of seat swaps later, and I ended up by the ludicrously self dubbed ‘Toon Ultras’. There are two schools of thought on these lads, who have made it their life’s goal to ‘bring back the noise’ at St. James’ Park. These schools of thought tend to depend on how far you are sat from them at any one time. From their usual distance up in Level Seven, they seem a hardy, and largely harmless, bunch. Sat by them and you realise how largely confused their entire remit is.

Their idea to bring back the noise is a valid one, but one governed not by their own match going experiences, but by the experiences of older fanzine writers. This is evidenced by their rather needy desire to be moved around to the ‘old corner’ for home cup matches such as this one. The corner was once a focal point for Newcastle United fans of a certain type but has been, for the past fifteen years, as bland an area in the stadium as anywhere else. Getting in there seems like a craven bid to assert their own identity on the match day culture, but so muddled is this said identity that the best they can do is cling to somebody else’s from a time long passed.

And the lack of any organic personality of their own leaves them little more than a collection of charmless clichés- a group of bores doing what they think they’re supposed to do because it’s what you used to do at the football, before they ever actually went to the football. In truth it would be easier, and to their and the rest of the stadium's vast benefit, for them to go to matches with their friends in 2010 and sing whatever songs they want to sing, without being overly concerned about impressing any passing True Faith writer.

I saw Lovenkrands’ two further goals sat with them- a header and a half volley- before the chants of ‘Get your tits out for the lads’ forced me to move. And not just because I drank and ate more than I should have over Christmas and was worried the chants were being directed at me either.

Wag Weekly...Jessica Lawlor

Jessica Lawlor first appeared on The Simpsons as the rapscallion daughter of Rev. Loveloy, voiced by Meryl Streep, with whom Bart fell in love. Or she didn’t, but she has a vaguely similar name to Jessica Lovejoy, who did, and this is something which was probably a source of pride back when the show was good and popular.

Now the show is aged and saggy, the comparisons are unlikely to cause much as much gentle mirth- outside of whichever Botox agency tasked with perking her up anyway. But still, with Denise Van Outen- perennially linked with footballers but never quite able to finalise personal terms and pass the fitness test- married and out the game, Lawlor would appear to be our best chance of having a wag whose name resembles a character out of The Simpsons, if you squint a bit as you read it. Which must count for something. Unless you did eventually get around to seeing the film, in which case it probably counts for a fair bit less than that.

She lives with Stephen Ireland. “He is a real home bird. He would rather stay at home than go out partying with the lads,” she says. I think at this point we are supposed to nudge one another, in a strained display of ‘who can blame him?’ type shared camaraderie, yeah lads? But it need not be a grand statement in favour of the company of Lawlor over the company of, say, Craig Bellamy. Maybe Ireland isn’t the going out type. Partying with the lads is, like Simpsons box sets past season ten and International football, not for everybody.

Are you board yet? (10th Jan)

It was difficult to work out exactly why Birmingham City’s manager, Alex Mcleish, was so enraged by the six minutes added on at the end of his team’s game at home to Manchester United. And equally why the board was greeted with mass catcalling and boos by the home support. Outside of those parked on a pernickety meter, I would have imagined the home support welcoming such an extension to the game. Or at least being neutral on the matter.

Consider: Birmingham City, in an absurdly rich vein of form wherein even Lee Bowyer has began to play a bit, and playing at home are offered six spare minutes which to nab a winning goal against a beleaguered Manchester United, themselves still reeling off the back of a home defeat to a League One side last week and otherwise seriously spluttering. A Manchester United side, don’t forget, being forced to play, on the back of Darren Fletcher’s red card, with ten men. Or nine, if we include Wes Brown.

Afterwards, Craig Burley, on Radio 5, commented that “They’ll be disappointed to have not won this one. These are the type of games you should be picking up three points in if you to win if you want to win the Premiership.” And he’s right, of course. But nobody at Birmingham City will be getting ahead of themselves just yet. 40 points first lads, McLeish will have surely been imploring his players, and then we can start thinking about winning it outright. Even so, to be actively settling for a home point with six minutes left? Against a seriously out of sorts Manchester United? Burley is right, I’m afraid, to suggest that this is not the stuff of champions.

It seems in keeping with the current trend to lament whatever time added by the referee in as vitriolic as way as possible, with booing and chants of ‘Fergie Time’ and, no doubt before the season’s out, streamers and choreographed dance moves. This is amusing in many ways. Or amusing in one: to see the cowered figure of a fourth official as he holds to board to mass derision is to study the face of a man who had mistakenly believed work today was going to be a largely menial based doddle discovering how truly wrong he was.

Again on Radio 5, it was noted that at one point during the second half, with the amassed coaching staff, managers and officials on the touchline it resembled something of a mother’s meeting. But few mother’s meetings end with one mother on the receiving end of sustained abuse for suggesting they hang on for a couple of minutes extra and perhaps order another pot of tea. Even with bus schedules to consider.

So, sporadically amusing, then. But also, surely, utterly illogical, particularly when done as a stock reaction, showing scant disregard for the shape of the game and the pattern of the play. And showing even scanter regard for the presence in the centre of the opposition’s defence of Jonny Evans.

It speaks to insecurity, for one thing. I have been in crowds reacting negatively to the amount of stoppage time added, and cringed at what a physiological boost was being casually handed to the opposition. If nothing else, you’re giving them a few ideas. It also serves to deplete whatever momentum your own side may have been gaining. It’s easy to imagine yesterday, for example, Cameron Jerome noticing the minutes added and avowing to have a real go at them, before hearing the reaction the announcement provoked from his team’s support and wrongly assuming that his goalkeeper’s arms had dropped off at some point in the second half without his realising, and that he’d be best off getting back and helping out that way.

The people that do it: do they consider these things? Furthermore, how loaded are they that they can be so blasé about a bit more Premiership football than their initial outlay had necessarily entitled them to? At St. Andrews is it like at my local leisure centre’s five a side court, where any incursion into the second hour will see you charged for the entirety of it?

If so, consternation at added time would be understandable. As it was it seemed simply undignified. And ultimately self defeating. Or, I suppose, self drawing. Which is as bad as it really gets against Manchester United these days.

Wag Weekly...Sophie Houghton (10th Jan)

If you’re not too busy doing something thrillingly modern and 2010 appropriate involving hover boards or Matt Smith, take my hand and journey with me. Journey with me to a long and forgotten time; a time of great upheaval and strife, but also a time of hope, and competitively priced box sets. Let us travel back to 2009.

Some of the older ones may remember it: A party called ‘Labour’ were in power, ran by a man named Gordon Brown. In cinema, ‘The Hangover’ was rubbish, ‘Star Trek’ wasn’t, and Inglorious Basterds may have been decent if it hadn’t lasted nineteen hours and starred Brad Pitt doing a bad impression of the already quite bad cameo he made in that episode of Friends (‘The One with the Really Quite Bad Cameo by Brad Pitt’; season 8, episode 9).

Over on television, the BBC scheduled ‘The Thick of it’ against Match of the Day, clearly reasoning that if a volatile and increasingly deranged Scotsman was still refusing to give them post match interviews on one channel, then Malcolm Tucker on the other would have to do. A new music starlet, Lady Gaga, emerged amidst an explosion of pyrotechnics and self consciously quirky wardrobe. Jade Goody and Michael Jackson died. And Liverpool were considered genuine contenders for the Premiership title.

Sounds crazy, eh kids? And yet there we were, and there we may well have remained had it not for Federico Macheda, who came on to score the type of late goal for Manchester United for which they were at the time famed. This was the time, you see, before they lost home games to teams like Leeds United and the entire club was swallowed whole by the debt necessary for their purchase in the first place. (Hey, who remembers when the Glazer family bought Manchester United? I’m sure somebody explained it at the time, but em, what was going on there? Why was that allowed again?)

Macheda scored another crucial goal in the run in- away at Sunderland- but it quickly became hilariously apparent that he was terrible, leaden of foot and with the type of feeble gait that must make walking in this snow we’re having a nightmare for him. But, as a footballer of some repute of the time, he secured a Wag, The Wirrel’s own Sophie Houghton. Houghton is the current Miss Intercontinental Liverpool, however that’s supposed to work, and the pair met on Facebook, which was a popular website at the time.

That's not an understrength lineup, they always look like that...(2nd-3rd Jan)

Saturday, apparently, marked a watershed of cup competition based tediousness, with absolutely nothing of note happening, until the Reading/ Liverpool game, where, actually come to think, nothing much of note happened there either, but at least they got a few through the doors.

To quickly recap: weakened teams across the country, even weaker than usual in Blackburn’s case, played out a series of dull and eventless fixtures to predictable and middling outcomes. A home win here, a replay a week on Wednesday there. West Brom won, as did Manchester City and I think Stoke did too, though don’t quote me on that. I’d have to double check.

Shockingly low crowds too, even if they do allow us to put the Aston Villa and Middlesbrough numbers together and count that as one, which I don’t think they will. The attendance at Wigan for their game against Hull, 5,335, was especially worthy of comment. Put it like this: when Newcastle United changed the name of their stadium, they were titters along the lines that they now play at an email address. They will take heart in that fact that, unlike Wigan yesterday, they are yet to play to a crowd with fewer people in it than the average Hotmail contact list.

The shock, as it was, was one of your common or garden, low wattage variety of shocks, the type kids at school give to each other using low voltage batteries. The news of Coventry’s draw at Portsmouth drew nothing, on Radio 5, but dim acknowledgement that there had been a game at Fratton Park that afternoon and that yes... it had indeed finished 1-1. At one point it was described as a ‘credible’ result for Coventry, presumably to the embarrassment of the person getting out the bunting and the champagne still left over from New Year’s Eve.

We were, as a nation, left profoundly unmoved and it led to the inevitable talk of a ‘bad draw’. It seemed hard to disagree. It’s fair to suggest that Sunderland’s game against Barrow, say, would have worked better, as a plot device, had the Non League side been at home. For one thing we may have had a shot at getting a bigger crowd in. And for another, it would have given Barrow a bit more of a chance. There may have even been a famous upset- which would have been ideal, obviously, particularly for those of us that don’t support Sunderland.

It took us back to Jose Mourhino and the time when he, then managing Chelsea, suggested that the Premiership teams should always be away in the early rounds to help preserve whatever fleeting notions of ‘romance’ mad people often want to ascribe the FA Cup. This was, to my mind, the exact moment Mourinho lurched into a hapless self parody from which he is yet to fully escape. But, however many years later, the plan got some tentative backing on 606 last night too. Which I can only imagine touching Jose- assuming, anyway, that you can access Radio 5’s listen live function in Milan and also that his plans for dinner had fallen through and he was at a bit of a loose end as to what to do with himself.

But surely, if we are to disregard the concept of The FA Cup as a competition and view it as more an arc based and juicy narrative- if we are so lustful for magic that we are willing to dispense with one of the key components of both the magic and the cup itself (the luck of the draw) - this big team away from home idea is a bit of a weasely compromise. I say go the whole hog, and for each stage of the competition invite a different auteur from stage or screen to give the weekend their own distinctive touch.

For the first three rounds, you will have your own thoughts. But the name I keep coming back to is Ken Loach. His brand of gritty, kitchen sink realism would be the perfect mood setter for the early stages and the heavy involvement of the non league clubs for whom a gritty kitchen sink would actually represent a marked improvement in facilities.

Improvisation would be encouraged, which would make pre and post match team talks fiery, if not strictly decipherable, and which would hopefully mean an end to those goal celebration clearly conceived to award the scoring team lengthy coverage on the evening’s highlight show.

Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia, Loach always shoots scenes in order, believing it only fair to the actor. I’m thinking aloud here, but this method of filming would rather scupper my other idea to spruce up the cup: play the final first, sometime in June, and leave the rest of the competition a mad scramble to draw, and then defeat the winner, thus claiming their crown as your own. But that one needed a bit of work anyway, in all honesty.

The quirk factor in rounds three through five could be ramped up by the hiring of Diablo Cody, writer of Juno and that other one, the one that’s a bit like Juno. What others struggle to say using believable dialogue, Cody is content to say using a vaguely ironic soundtrack and deathly unfunny pop culture references. Luckily, ITV’s punditry panel is perhaps the only place in this galaxy- or in any other far, far away ones- that would be improved by a five minute segment of snarking centred on the plot holes in the original Star Wars trilogy. Or, at least, not unduly hindered by it.

For the quarters to the final, well, I say go all out, and get Russell Davies, now formerly of Doctor Who. Per David Tennat’s last episode, we could expect most games to overrun by a good twenty or twenty five minutes. And it seems unlikely we would make it through the entirety of the final without at least one cameo by Billie Piper. But, on the plus side, where nowadays we have to content ourselves moaning on and on about close offside calls, with Davies at the helm we would be left debating the feasibility of a late twist involving a Time Lord coming on off the bench and saving the game for Bolton Wanderers. This, appropriately enough I suppose, seems like infinitely more fun and less like a gigantic waste of time.

It also offers the thrilling prospect of Alan Green- whose attempts to project an aloof incomprehension whenever Twitter is brought up on his show grow ever more strained- being forced to get to grips with and his head around a sonic screwdriver, at least one romantic subplot, and an alien baddie crossed over from The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Something needed to be done, and then Sunday and Leeds at Old Trafford, and, somehow, without any outside manipulation or a ludicrous bit of ret-conning, something was done. Leeds were excellent. Robust in defence, and slick in attack, they harried and chased with a zest so composed they could have been a stain removing washing powder. At one point, around the sixtieth minute mark, I almost forgot that they were, you know, Leeds United.

“Leeds are back,” sang their fans, and for a mad moment you believed them. Then, for a further mad moment, you wondered if this need necessarily be such a bad thing. It does things to you, this competition, and not always good things. Perhaps we’re best not pressuring it to do these thing when it simply doesn’t feel like it and being aware that it may choose to do them when we least want it to.