It’s tea time & i’m ‘avin hoops

Andy Gray has been the head Sky Sports premier league football pundit since the beginning of time it seems and it is time for him to move over and be replaced by a new breed of pundit who actually thinks before they speak.

I am sick of having to listen to Gray moan about everything to do with football APART from the over paid cheating children who play it.

My point was proved a few Sundays ago: Man United v Liverpool, Javier Mascherano gets booked for a bad tackle and proceeds to quite obviously swear at the ref. This abuse of the ref continued throughout the first half before he eventually ran 20 yards towards the ref to ‘discuss’ the booking of one of his team mates and was quite rightly sent off.

Cue Andy Gray’s standard defence of the player. “What did he do that deserved a sending off”, “The ref has ruined the game”….. blah blah blah.

Everyone is bored of listening to you Andy. Time to retire.

As i have mentioned before, i am a supporter of Queens Park Rangers Football Club and have been for over 20 years. Now for those of you who don’t know QPR, it is a team that has always had it’s ups and downs. 15 years ago we finished the season as top London club (yes that’s right, above Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs) yet following relegation from the premier league we have gone into administration, our chairman has been held at gun point and our whole team has got into a fight with the China U21 team during a ‘friendly’ at our training ground.

Following a disasterous start to our season and the sad news that Ray Jones (a future star striker) had died in a car accident it seemed that things could not get worse. We were wrong, it soon became public knowledge that if the club didn’t find a buyer before the end of August we would go into administration for a second time….. Then all of a sudden things changed.

We are currently placed at the bottom of the second tier of English football which would usually mean there would be a number of people wondering around West London on a Saturday afternoon wearing blue and white hoops looking depressed, yet this is not the case.

The fact is that our chairman, Gianni Paladini (love him or hate him) did managed to secure investment before the deadline and not just any investment but investment from Flavio Briatore (Formula 1 boss with estemated worth of 500 million) and Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1 chief with estimated worth of 2 billion).

All of a sudden, a team that has always had to sell it’s best players to make ends meet and could have quite easily gone out of business has rich owners and is being linked with the purchase of all sorts of new players and yet there may be another chapter in the transformation of my club as we are now being linked with another multi billionairre who makes Flav and Bertie’s fortunes seem small.

Lakshmi Mittal has a reported fortune of 26 billion and could turn QPR into the richest club in the world……

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2007/12/20/sfnqpr120.xml

This is great news BUT i have my reservations. While i am forever grateful that the club i love is finally financially secure i don’t want it to turn into Chelsea who i always think of as a team who has the ‘money cheat’ turned on. I would love it to turn into a club that develops it’s youth into top notch players.

Anyway, that is all a way down the line as we still have to get out of the sh*t this season but don’t be surprised if in 10 years you see QPR challenging the big boys in the premier league while supporters of some other unfortunate clubs are watching their teams go out of business. 

Am i the only person who thinks that if a sportsperson fails to turn up for a drugs test (without just cause) the authorities should treat them as if they have failed the test?

OK i do realise it’s not always as black and white as that but surely if you are a sportsperson, attending a drug test should be as important as playing the football match or running the race.

As a QPR fan i have got used to watching some pretty terrible players wearing the hoops of my team and i may even moan about them to the person sitting next to me but am still trying to understand why some of the crowd feel it right to boo them.

It’s rediculous. Surely even stupid people can work out that by booing members of your own team you are only going to make them play worse……. Obviously not.

It has become apparent that there is only one thing that the British are world champions at and that is art of booing. This was proved recently at the Lloyd Mayweather, Ricky Hatton fight in Las Vegas where the American national anthem was booed by a large percentage of the brits in the crowd.

I am sure that there were a number of people in the crowd who didn’t boo and were as embarrassed as i was at the actions of their fellow ‘Brits’ and would like to think that those who did boo felt embarrassed the next day once the lager had worn off but i very much doubt it.