Gone to Iceland

I WAS in a café in central Reykjavik yesterday lunchtime when I saw a woman I had bumped into the previous evening at an Icelandic Premier League match between Fram Reykjavik and FH Hafnarfjordur.

It’s difficult to have a conversation with anyone from Iceland these days without discussing the economy, so that’s where we ended up going. “When you go back to England,” she said, “you can tell people that Alistair Darling is a fucking asshole.”

The making of Rajko Purovic

A FEW days ago, I wrote on here about Rajko Purovic, the Serbian teenager linked with a move to Middlesbrough by the Teesside Evening Gazette, the Daily Mirror, the Press Association, Sky Sports News and Setanta Sports News – despite not existing.

Well, I’ve now made contact with the chap who created him, to find out how and why he did it.

Watch the football! Watch it! It’s going to move! (But probably not on Setanta)

ONE of Mitchell and Webb’s finer non-Peep Show efforts is a sketch parodying the hyperbole of Sky Sports’ Premier League trailers. (You know the sort of thing: This is Armageddon, only slightly more important. AND IT’S LIVE!)

Bugduv, the sequel

FOR one fictional teenager to be swept up in the transfer speculation maelstrom could be considered unfortunate. For a second to follow is just careless. First there was Masal Bugduv. Now we have Rajko Purovic. Or rather, we don’t, because neither of them exist.

Jumpers for goalposts? Meat pies? Uncle Joe’s mint balls? Rugby league? Marvellous!

OH dear. Poor Wigan Athletic. They wait ages to get Roberto Martinez in as their new manager, and then promptly forget his name.

SuBo for the Bernabeu!

REAL Madrid are set to cause yet another transfer sensation after putting in a world-record £100million bid for Susan Boyle.

Enjoy Leicester, Ricky

A FRIEND of mine is convinced (and has tried to convince me) that the World Twenty20 is a lottery. And I will admit that there are a couple of similarities: 1) I have never bought a ticket for either of them; 2) In both cases, Paul Collingwood’s chances of claiming the jackpot is roughly one in 14 million. (Just watch: he’ll go and win both now.)

You are such an inbetweener

IT’S a remarkable book is Frank Skinner’s 2001 autobiography: what with the eye-watering personal revelations, the account of his alcoholism, the skew-whiff views on relationships, and the very funny tale of the Smethwick Telephone newspaper’s report on a woman from Rowley Regis who claimed to have encountered aliens.

Trouble Dutch

THE opening ceremony was cancelled, Kevin Pietersen pulled out with an injury and England managed to lose to the Netherlands. Apart from that, the ECB will be thrilled with the first day of the World Twenty20.