Don’t Ask Any More Stupid Questions


Last month we discussed why one should spend money one has not got on things one does not need. I say “we discussed” when meaning I rambled on like a drunken old goat while you waited patiently for some swearing about sunderland and we were all left feeling slightly poorer for the experience.
Already this month I wonder what kind of tit uses the word “one” three times when opening a sentence and hope to God I’m being ironic. These days it is increasingly difficult for one to tell. (For those of you not watching on the red button I am pouting and opening my palm out over my shoulder like Oscar Wilde would if he were ever asked to drive a logging truck though Alaska – it’s not a good look so please can we all agree on ironic?)

This month’s stupid question was going to be: “Which player should Newcastle United have cashed in on sooner? Not rubbish players, but the briefly over-priced players who we kept until they were worth less?” It was a question in direct response to the colossal amount of cash we got for Andy Carroll, who lumbered around wondering when the crosses were going to start coming in when playing for Liverpool at sunderlandthe other week. I’m still pathetically trying to convince myself that he will be injured, jailed, riddled with the clap or shinning clear chances askew until his value plummets, thus proving that we did the right thing in flogging the lad.
And thanks to him scoring for England having very little success in doing so.
The only real example I could come up with was Kieron Dyer, who after one of his all too rare purple patches was reportedly interesting Chelsea and Leeds United with figures like £20 million being bandied about. A player we chose to hold onto and a decision that I applauded at the time, a player who, now 32 years old, has returned to Ipswich Town with most of his potential lying dead in a darkened basement somewhere. This idea was going to need very big print to fill the page, as well as a two pictures and a couple of sudukos.
So instead, in direct response to a recent treacherous and dangerous expedition into my own loft, I ask; what is the point of having something and not using it?
Like what is the point of having a great big goalkeeper who is exceptional on dealing with crosses like Tim Krul on the wage bill then playing teeny tiny Steve Harper at f***ing Stoke? Now we have got to live with that bullshit spouting Welsh reptile Tony Pulis having taken 6 points off us this season for no other reason than we have been too bloody stupid to stop him. And don’t talk to me about the benefit of hindsight because the relative size and differing abilities of our first choice goalkeepers wasn’t some impossible conundrum yet to be solved a fortnight ago. It was obvious – and consequently not a great big tick next to Mr Pardew’s name thank you very much.
My loft was full of stuff that I presumably thought I might want or need at some point in the future. Perhaps I expected to get some kind of debilitating illness that would mean I would have the time or inclination to watch Red Dwarf or The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer in their entirety, read the collective works of PJ O’Rourke or start wearing The Ramones sweatshirt I bought outside the Poly in 1994. Again.
Some years ago I got a Video to DVD recorder and began the task of painstakingly copying the videos that I never watched onto DVDs that I have also never watched. Fortunately the DVD part broke, possibly due to the futility of the entire operation, and the contraption was tossed into the loft the same day a miserable Teessider came round to wire up my Sky HD + box all wrong. (two months after flicking between normal TV and the HD version to see if we could find the slightest difference, except for a short time delay, a different man came round, not from Sky, and wired it up properly).

Black and white, season highlights

Exactly How Bored Are You? - I can help


Also up in my loft were 58 Newcastle United videos. Official ones and “classic” games that I thought too good to tape over. I actually bought club videos of entire games as well; the earliest is a home game against Nottingham Forest from December 1986, closely followed by a cracking game against Norwich (featuring one Mr. S Bruce) from April 87. sunderland from March 92 is in there somewhere along with a game at Norwich from January 94 that Keegan claimed was our best ever performance under him. The £10.99 price label is still on it and I think I watched it once and if memory serves (and it regularly doesn’t) featured only three fouls and five throw-ins in the 90 minutes such was the fluency of both teams passing. A lot of the tapes are season compilations scarred by the hideous vanity of Roger Tames adding his own painfully delivered and obviously rehearsed commentary. He’s been getting away with this deliberate vandalism for nearly twenty years by the way.
Anyway as a social experiment I am putting the lot, and a video player to play them on, on ebay. My belief is that not one single person is interested in buying them – even with the promise that my driver will deliver them for free to the door of the lucky buyer providing they live within twenty miles of Newcastle City centre. And will give half the money to Comic Relief.
Please bear this in mind before purchasing the DVD of our recent game against Arsenal – unless you are very ill or very bored, twenty years from now you will wonder why the hell you bothered.

Go to ebay and enter Newcastle United videos 1986 to 2003 (58 in total) – 270725757151 and the auction begins at 9 am on Monday April 4th.


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