A Week In Football – The Life And Times Of The Lizardman | Manchester United News

A Week In Football – The Life And Times Of The Lizardman

A Week In Football – The Life And Times Of The Lizardman

As I write this the “Transfer Deadline Day – Sponsored by Sky Sports News” is in full swing, the world of football thrown into a maelstrom of lies, deceit and panic buying. Imagine hearing on the radio that there will be a very bad spell of weather, maybe a hurricane or a meteor shower, or perhaps even a volcano erupting in your area in about two months. Then spending every day thinking, “I will go and get some essentials from the shop one day. I will need some things for my general consumption when I am taking shelter in my underground bunker”. Then suddenly finding yourself on “Volcano Eve” without anything to take into said bunker; what would you do? You would have no choice but to rush to the nearest shop and try and buy the rag tag shit that was left on the shelves. The shopkeeper would see you dashing across the street, lava-proof umbrella in hand, and he would think to himself, “Look at this cunt, left it right until the last minute and is desperate for my wares, I am going to rob him blind”. You would eventually leave the shop, having spent far more than you should, clutching a load of crap that nobody else wanted, and then you would spend the time in your underground shelter waiting for the volcano to subside wishing you had bought Ashley Young.

As far as this window goes it has been fairly uneventful for United. Lord Alex of Football got his business done early on and then sat in his underground volcano bunker laughing at everyone else. He is probably still laughing at Arsenal after his young team attacked them like savage cats on Sunday, tearing them a collective new arsehole and battering them with a ferocity that would have made Harry Ramsden proud. With Wayne Rooney conducting the orchestra and Ashley Young playing lead trombone, they decimated Arsenal going in at half time with a very pretty 3-1 lead. Arsene must have attempted a rousing half time speech because his team came back out with the collective determination of a mildly disabled centipede. By the final whistle the scoreboard proudly announced an 8-2 victory and the Lizardman slunk back into the away changing rooms to scowl at his charges and reflect on better times. As Arsenal prepare for their worst season since 94/95 when they finished 12th, it might now be the right time to look back over Arsene Wenger’s career and see just how good he really is;

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SLEEPING BAG ADORNED LIZARDMAN

Arsene was found in 1949, scuttling around the vegetable patch of a kindly French couple, not far from the city of Strasbourg which is exciting because that is where the Kronenbourg brewery is. The Wengers took Arsene in and fed and watered him religiously, nursing him back to health. Mr Wenger worked at the nearby nuclear plant in Fessenhiem and one day while licking a spent uranium rod he had a plan. If he could sneak back one of the fuel rods he might be able to make their adopted lizard into a fusion of lizard and boy. The experiment worked, Arsene began to grow arms and legs and was developing well, it just seemed to be his eyesight that wasn’t getting better. He did manage to obtain a degree in electrical engineering and economics and Mr Wenger had got the lad a career mapped out for him, he was going to send the boy to change light bulbs for elderly neighbours and charge them a small but well calculated premium. Arsene didn’t see that as being a feasible plan and instead became a footballer, sadly he was shit and eventually RC Strasbourg told him they could no longer pay for his services, so in 1984 Arsene decided he would become a “head coach” and managed to persuade a local lady Nancy-Lorraine that he could manage her team AS. Arsene was rubbish though as the rough and tough players refused to listen to his spouting’s about electrical engineering and they revolted. The dysfunctional dressing room led to relegation. Arsene wasn’t sacked though; he agreed to join the family business and spent the next few weeks’ right in the thick of the contract light bulb changing world. Strangely he then got a call from Monaco, they had struggled to gain any European success and the club chairman Monsieur Le Pamplemousse had told the board they might as well sign an “insane wanker”. The club secretary Jacques Lebody Jacques Jacques Le Body was notoriously hard of hearing and despite his surprise that they wanted to sign this Arsene Wenger he got the contracts drawn up and the Lizardman was back in the game.

Arsene had instant success and won the French league in his first year, to put that achievement in context I won the Conference with Bromsgrove Rovers in my first season on Championship Manger, so it really isn’t all that. After three seasons of success, despite signing such luminaries as lazy amputee botherer Glen Hoddle and the perpetually bedecked Jürgen Klinnsamn, the Bavarian giants Bayern Munich approached Monaco for their manger. Monsieur Le Pamplemousse had once got food poisoning from an out of date black forest gateau so there was no way  he would sanction such a move and eventually Bayern appointed David Hasselhoff. Arsene was sacked shortly afterwards, demonstrating the sheer anger that Pamplemousse had towards the Germans. Next stop was Japan, Arsene had been spotted by Japanese border control and they tried to release him back into the wild. It took the chairman of Grampus Nagoya 8 hours to negotiate his release; he even had to take actual Komodo dragons into Wenger’s cell to prove that he wasn’t one. Of course, Arsene did quite well in Japan, after all the whole J. League was absolute shite. He won the Emperor’s Cup, awarded to the team that could eat the most Ferrero Rocher and then finished runners-up in the J. League. He won the Manager of the Year award and was asked by David Dein to come and manage Arsenal.

“The Arsenal” as they are sometimes called in a manner as confusing as “The Ukraine”, were crap at the time and had finished 5th the season prior. Their squad contained such mercurial talent as Glenn Helder, Ian Selley and Paul Dickov, and so Arsene set to work. As we now know, Arsene is not allowed to be in charge of the purse strings at “The Arsenal” or he would fritter away their transfer budget on 14-year-old Seychelle Islanders, slightly built but with magic in their boots that sadly only lasts until March, and so when he was asked to get a midfield enforcer he had no idea where to look. Arsene was sat in his bedsit looking at the clothes airer when he had a magical idea. He got out the spent Uranium fuel rod his father had given him and rubbed it on the clothes horse. He closed his slits and wished for a Senegalese Midfield brute and when he opened them his airer was transformed into a 6 foot 4 inch man. He named him Patrick the Airer and took him down to Highbury. Patrick helped his new club to a lofty 3rd in the Premier league. In the summer, Patrick the Airer asked for a friend in midfield, someone similarly attributed and again Arsene was stumped. Slumped on the floor of his bedsit he thought long and hard, pausing only to read the instruction book for his new portable black and white television. With a twinkling of his slits he happened upon another idea, rubbing the uranium rod on the instruction book for his telly he wished for a ponytailed Frenchman to hold hands with Patrick the Airer. Upon opening his slits he feasted his eyes on the transformed tiny instruction booklet, A Manual Petit was born. With these two nasty sods “The Arsenal” managed to accrue a League and Cup Double, although many would say the only reason for this was the jiggery pokery Arsene performed with his spent fuel rod.

The following season Arsene’s team were struggling for any kind of creativity from the flanks and once again Arsene got his fuel rod out. This time he wished for a dreamy Swedish twinkle toes with a fiery edge. He rubbed his Uranium on an old cotton reel, and a magpie’s internal organs and lo and behold Thready Lungbird was unleashed. Arsene had reckoned without United’s dream team in attack though and that season Cole and Yorke smiling, spit roasting and scoring for fun drove them to an unprecedented Treble. Arsene was distraught. He vowed to do something dramatic.

Over the course of the next two years Arsene made some terrible errors, creating filthy offcuts with his now fading fuel rod, players such as Igor Stepanovs, Oleg Luzhny and Jeremie Aliadiadiadiadiadiadiere were all created and then quickly melted down to make spare parts for sewage plants. He did manage to cobble together Terry Henry, a fusion of two of his former creations Terry Fish Fingers and Henry contraceptive pill. But finally in the summer of 2001 Arsene actually bought a player, well he actually managed to persuade Sol Campbell to leave White Hart Lane for “The Arsenal” on a free transfer. To seal the deal Arsene had to provide 4 academy players a year for Sol to sacrifice and eat, here was the birth of the Arsenal “youth project”. In years to come it would throw out literally hundreds of players a year, all of which were either “provided” to Sol or set to work in Arsene’s den, desperately trying to create a new enriched uranium “player wand”. Sol did help Arsenal clinch another double in the 2001-02 season but it was really by default as that year no-one else could be arsed, the hot spring weather leading to a lot of sunbathing and orienteering at other clubs.

United wrestled the title back in 2002-03 as Arsene’s magic continued to ebb away, he only managed to grow players of the calibre of Pascal Cygan and Rami Shabaan and it became clear to him that planting the faeces of two players in a pot was not the way to develop future talent. Then in the summer of 2003 one of the young squad players Gaylord Clichy accidentally created a cloak of invisibility when an attempt at producing cherry flavoured sex lube went horribly wrong. Arsene immediately commissioned him to make 17 more and the team donned them on the opening day of the season. Of course the opposition couldn’t see “The Arsenal” players and so they were unstoppable. They finished the season undefeated and in the final press conference of the year a jubilant Clichy blurted out the reason. The press instantly labelled them “The Invisibles” and once the FA investigated the cloaks were taken away. “The Arsenal” were powerless and to make matters worse the FA ordered Arsene’s den be closed down, he now had nowhere to try and grow or create new players. Pressured by the board, who wanted to move into a new stadium to escape the awful stench of the closed down den and all its contents that were slowly rotting, Arsene was forced to rethink his strategy. He adopted a policy of selling players and then re-investing 10% into Malawian orphans. Surely over time with the first class coaching of Boro Primark (who was spending every spare minute setting up his discount clothing retail empire) these young lads would eventually bear fruit.

The Emirates became the new home of “The Arsenal” in July 2006 and the board confident of more success decided to pay a local graffiti artist to pray can their achievements all over the stadium, a move that would come back to haunt them in the summer of 2011. Desperate to add something to the “art” they added “Emirates Cup Runners-up 2011”. With all these new fans to impress Arsene decided he would further meddle with his tactics. He planned to go back to the muscle of 2001-02 and invited Emmanuel Adebaywhore, William Malice and Julio “The Beast” Baptiste to join his growing band of willowy ball wizards. Stupidly Arsene had offered the new recruits the same deal as Sol Campbell, but it was unsustainable as the Academy boys now had to play in the team and it wasn’t long before the camp grew discontent. Around February the source of academy boys ran dry and although Arsene persuaded Vic Akers to supply girls with closely cropped hair it wasn’t enough. The team faded from their tittle challenge and the damage was done.

The pattern repeated itself again the next season, with Bacary Sagna the newly recruited player, although he was capable of storing food in his hair he couldn’t stockpile enough and as winter turned to spring the river ran dry. In 2009, Arsene thought he had cracked it, he bought Andrei Arse-shaving from somewhere in the old Soviet Union. Arsene had done his homework and knew all about the nuclear disaster in Pripyat, Chernobyl and part of the transfer fee was a down payment on 4 uranium enriched fuel rods from the damaged reactor. Arse-shaving arrived and promised to have the rods sent as soon as possible but the cheeky Russian was bluffing. There were no rods as the reactor had been enveloped in 10 inch thick concrete, Arsene knew he had been fooled. This was the beginning of the end for the Lizardman, no trophies with which to entice the footballing magpies of the world and a pay structure that worked out slightly less enticing than double shifts at McDonalds. He resolved to knit together a team of curiously handsome young boys and eek towards retirement watching them play beautiful but ultimately fruitless football.

Sadly in the summer of 2011 his plans were sent awry. The Catalan pin up Cesc Fibreglass was the first to be wrestled away, back to his homeland and within 14 minutes of disembarking the plan he donned a winners medal, something the Lizardman could never give him. Another dagger into the heard of the Lizardman. Just weeks later the peg whittling gypsy boy that Arsene had caught stealing from his clothes line also flew the coop. $amir Na$ri had struggled by on the 2 euros a week he made whittling pegs and selling lucky heathers in the south of France until Arsene adopted him. He slapped the ageing Lizardman firmly in the gills by flouncing off to Manchester City in the latest instalment of their feeder agreement. Arsene started the new season filled with trepidation, his midfield decimated by the fire sale and his new golden boy Spack Wilshere injured after an episode of horseplay at cub scouts left him with a “baddie” on his knee. The final nail in the Lizard man’s coffin came at the hands of hid old adversary, Lord Alex of Football. Lord Alex had assembled a new team with pace and stealth and they tore “The Arsenal” apart beating them 8-2. As Arsene left the pitch you could see in his slits that the passion had gone and the search had begun. Arsene has decided it is time to look for his successor and the scouting network is currently looking under large stones and in air conditioning units right across Latin Europe.

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4 Comments

  1. Chicharito1488

    And again a piece of sheer creativity, random and thought by Maestro of seagulls, seahorses and geese Mr Alan Young who is unfortunately not decent in Fantasy Football as some German showed him how to pull the strings of virtual puppets the right way 😉

  2. Gavier Byrnandez

    Dear John,

    Yet another fantastic article. Keep it up. I need good stuff to read.

    Yours truly,
    Squiddy.

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