If you thought Early Doors was going to take the easy route
of celebrating Oscars night by giving out its own awards... well, you were
right.
So without further ado, let's
don our tuxedos, physically restrain Billy Crystal from taking to the stage and
hand out those little gold men!
Best Actor - Steven Taylor, for his stunning penalty-winning
dive against Sunderland, and for multiple
instances of committing a blatant handball then acting like he has been shot in
the chest.
Best Supporting Actor - Didier Drogba, for his season-long sulk, poignantly depicting the hell of getting paid millions of pounds a year to play up front for Chelsea.
Best Supporting Actress - Tzofit Grant, aka Mrs Avram, who
told Roman Abramovich that sacking her hubby from Chelsea was "a major mistake, as a friend, as a human being and
as an owner".
Best Foreign Language Film - Joe Kinnear's conversation with the gentlemen of the press,
conducted almost entirely in f***ing French.
Best Film Editing - Arsene Wenger, for erasing any
recollection of the incidents that have led to 76 red cards during his tenure at
Arsenal.
Best Animation - Martin O'Neill's touchline antics.
Best Costume Design - Petr Cech, for the timeless
combination of scrum cap and luminous orange shirt that makes him look as
though he should be cleaning up after a fire at some nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union.
Best Sound Mixing - Cristiano Ronaldo, for managing to 'hear' a
whistle in the derby against Manchester
City and getting sent off
after catching the ball.
Best Cinematography -
Ever Banega, whose webcam footage of himself somehow ended up on the internet
in a video with the self-explanatory title: 'Ever Banega, always big'.
Best Musical Score - John Terry, who hogged the karaoke
machine at Chelsea's Christmas party, belting out Luther Vandross
numbers including Never Too Much, before butchering songs by Notorious BIG and
Soulja Boy.
- - -
Maybe it was just the Calpol Junior talking, but when Early
Doors turned on Final Score on Saturday, it was sure it saw the following
result: Weymouth
0-9 Rushden and Diamonds.
The classified check confirmed that ED was not hallucinating
as the cartoon Swedish giraffe in a bowler hat repeated the scoreline.
ED later discovered that Weymouth were forced to play their youth team
after the first-team squad walked out in protest at not being paid.
The South
Coast side were even
given a standing ovation after a string of saves from goalkeeper Joe Prodomo
kept the scoreline in single figures.
Some other football mismatches:
Manchester United 9-0 Ipswich Town
The most one-sided result since the First Division became
the Premier League came in 1995 and featured five goals from Andy Cole. Shame
he didn't save one for the last day
of the season, as he missed hatful of sitters at West Ham and Blackburn
won the league. At the end of the Ipswich
game, the Old Trafford crowd started chanting 'We
want 10', while the visiting fans
hit back with 'We want one'.
Arbroath 36-0 Bon Accord
In 1885, an era when football was meant to be a gentlemanly,
sporting game, Arbroath saw fit to rub Bon Accord's
noses in it to the tune of 36-nil in a Scottish Cup first round tie. The
visitors, it turned out, were actually a cricket team that had been invited to
play by mistake, and 18-year-old John Petrie helped himself to 13 goals. On the
same day, Dundee Harp beat Aberdeen Rovers 35-0. Despite this, Scottish
football has never been more credible than in the late 19th century.
San Marino
versus anyone
European football's
whipping boys par excellence have only ever won one match, a friendly against Liechtenstein
in 2005. Apart from that, and their nine-second goal against England in 1993, it has been 19
years of pure misery for the Most Serene Republic. Despite this, managers still
claim with a straight face that there are no easy games in international
football.
The FA and Football League 0 (brain cells), Luton Town
-30
It's not often ED
gets behind a club whose emblem is a hat, but when the league added a 20-point
penalty to the 10 already imposed by the FA for financial irregularity, it was
clear that Luton's
2008/09 season would be a bigger waste of time than Caddyshack II. To their
credit, they have got out of negative numbers but are still 18 points from
safety.
- - -
QUOTE OF THE DAY: 'It's not me, it's
you', Harry Redknapp continues to
tell Spurs: "I just think it's
a case of dealing with set-plays better. There's
no reason we shouldn't do. You start
to think 'can we deal with it?' It's
the worst it can be. But the more you talk about it... It is something we have
to deal with. We are not a big team. If you look against Shakhtar, only Michael
Dawson is a real header of a ball. After that, Pascal Chimbonda can spring, Tom
Huddlestone is okay but we are not a big side. If you had Jonathan Woodgate or
Ledley King in the side (it is different). We haven't
got that many that strong in the air when they are not playing."
FOREIGN VIEW: Bild reckons Juergen Klinsmann is living on borrowed time at
Bayern Munich, after a run three defeats in four saw them slip to fourth in the
Bundesliga.
COMING UP: Hull
take on Tottenham in a match that both sides would rather not think of as a
relegation six-pointer. However, it is. Kick-off is at 20:00 UK time.