It hardly seems 90 minutes ago that we were serenading the lads of Barca as they danced around Sir Alex’s leaden-footed bunch of philanderers and litigationists and yet here we are on the verge of another season. I can still taste the Brunello I was quaffing only days ago with my old buddies Dave & Sam in the Tuscany sunshine. (Incidentally, that’s one major drawback for a PM, isn’t it, having to take your holidays during August. I only went along because they prevailed upon me. It was demonically hot out there.)

Dave insisted we talk shop as he says he’s worried about how the national game is going and was seeking my help. I could only concur. Let’s face it, at this rate, in a year or two’s time the Arabs will have well and truly sprung the trap. There will be a European super league, players like the Spud-faced nipper will be paid even more money to get tattooed and abusive, and the average English football fan will be supplanted by squads of Chinese fans flown over to fill the stadia.

After the fourth bottle of Brunello Dave got quite tearful at the prospect of the proletarians losing their pride and joy to a bunch of camel herders and medievalists. I told him I was here to help. So we hatched a plan that began with getting rid of that old crook Slop Bladder and then instigating a football revolution. At this point, Dave sobered up a little. He said that I must guarantee only a football revolution, not any other type. (These old Etonians are a scaredy-bunch when it comes to the working class, as they’ve never met any. And of course, as public school boys, they just can’t hold their drink, so he was a bit all over the place).

Anyway, I solemnly promised a football revolution not a political revolution and we got him back on track. Sobering up in the morning, I realised the enormity of the task ahead but was greatly heartened by the continuing wave of preposterous actions and statements not least from Bladder but also from Rummenigge at Bayern, who’s now shown his cards for the European super league and, I hope, sounded the death knell for all this collective greed that is poisoning the game. But I thought ‘we must react – now’.

As soon as I landed at Heathrow, I was on the blower to Terry Tappin to arrange a meeting of movers and shakers down at the Old Danglers club,so we could launch the vanguard movement and get this thing’a rollin’. Needless to say, things rolled along rather well and we had to schedule another meeting after Buffer Johnson from the FA got wedged under a coffee table while seeking to retrieve the bottle of port.

I will of course keep you all informed as to our progress re. the revolution. But as the new season dawns I must urge all true and honest football fans to prepare themselves for rebellion. The current state of affairs is insupportable and we must act before Scudamore and his chums run off with the goods. So keep mum and I’ll be in touch.

Yours

WR Howe (chairman)

There was a time when Terry Tappin and I used to pack a small bag and head off to the Iberian peninsula to enjoy the largesse of our Spanish football association colleagues and take in one of the marvellously competitive La Liga games.

For years the league fizzed with terrifically entertaining games where results involving the top teams had a frisson of expectation, as any result was possible. Who can forget that sparkling Real Sociedad team marshalled by Xabi Alonso that should have won the league in 2003 or the swashbuckling Deportivo team of Tristan, Valeron, Mauro Silva and Fran that murdered Real Madrid in the Copa del Rey final and even the grinding success of Benitez’s Valencia. Great days. And although Real Madrid and Barca were always around the top, results were never certain.

But now, how times have changed. We received an invitation from the lads in Spain a couple of weeks ago and both Terry and I made feeble excuses to skip the trip. What’s the point? The results are never in doubt. The top two are so superior to all the other teams that the league is almost Scottish in its monotony. Look at this weekend. Real Madrid beat Espanol – the team in sixth place – playing with 10 men for the entire game. Teams turn up at the Bernabeu and the Camp Nou and play with an almost supine reverence.

It’s a classic example of the rich getting richer and richer. It’s well known the top two in Spain snaffle the majority of the TV money and while the Premier League has a slightly fairer system we are undoubtedly moving towards an age when a significant proportion of teams begin the season knowing they are playing for nothing.

It’s a sobering thought that the world’s supreme capitalist nation runs its major sport, the NFL, along egalitarian lines by sharing out the cash and talent equally, as they know full well that lack of competition in the league is a poor product. So the Premiership and La Liga beware. The current age of football is buoyant and monied but those of us slightly longer in the tooth can remember less well-heeled times.

And as for our jaunts to the continent, Terry and I have decided to change tack and eschew the yawn of La Liga for a while in favour of a trip to Bloomfield Road where romance and attacking flare live on…and where you never quite know what’s going to happen.

Toodle-pip

Your Chairman

WR Howe

It pains me to say this but I don’t think we’ve got a scoobies of getting the World Cup not now our friends in the media have blown the cover of some of our esteemed colleagues at FIFA. I was only talking to the FIFA representative from Burkina Faso the other day, over lunch in the Danglers Club. You’d probably be surprised to hear that Burkina Faso has a FIFA representative but not only that, this gent (who I won’t name) is one of the key power brokers in the land of cheese and cuckoo clocks. Somehow he managed to crawl up Ol’ Slop Bladders arse around 1989 and hasn’t come out since. He took great delight in telling myself and Alan Windgust of the FA that Burkina Faso doesn’t even have any proper football pitches. And Slop saw this as a plus and so gave our man a place at the big trough! Well, Al Windgust was deeply shocked at this, poor fellow.

But I digress. Being the reluctant patriotic that I am, I have to confess I answered the call from Biffa Girling and my chums at the FA to try and redeem the situation, which quite frankly is dire. So I started with one of Slop’s pet committee men and moved onto some of the more exalted trough-grazers that haunt the corridors of world football. Like I told Terry Tappin, it’s a dirty job but someone has to do the Brian Clough.

Anyway, two hours later, after various grubby little notes had passed between myself and Mr Burkina Faso across the table cloth, we agreed a price satisfactory to all, for his vote to go to England and Al and I took off in a cab to the Old Chisellers club to meet up with the king shark himself, the doyen of the brown envelope, the man who has no shame, Jack Warner of the Trinidad & Tobago FA. In the cab I tried to explain to Al Windgust how some jumped up travel agent from a group of Caribbean islands which don’t even have a proper league got to be a kingpin at FIFA. He couldn’t quite grasp that it’s much easier for Slop Bladder to have a coterie of nonentities from insignificant FAs on his committee who are entirely dependent on him for their jollies and so he can wield his evil wand as and when he likes.

Unluckily for us Jack had brought a team of his own hangers own and it took me half an hour and three bottles of Chateauneuf Du Pape to prize him away from his guzzling, sycophants. I’ve met Joke Warner (as he’s known to the cognescenti) many times before and always marvelled at the brass neck of the man. I’ll never forgot the site of him shoveling chicken vol-au-vents into his mouth in industrial proportions at one Champions League shin-dig, so much so that he ran over and took one right off the plate of a Russian delegate who almost fainted with shock.

Needless to say, both he and I knew why we were here, so pretty soon we got down to details on how I was to grease his greasy palms with FA lucre. After we’d danced around his first exhorbitant figure, he without shame, delved into his back pocket and withdrew a short but weighty list of ‘favours’ which could be offset against a smaller cash figure. Not once did he mention the current media brouhaha that’s pointing the figure at him for flogging tons of World Cup tickets. I got the impression he didn’t give a toss. And why should he, Slop will always be there to protect him.

An hour later we clinched the deal, which involved promises of all kinds of shopping trips to Selfridges, John Lewis’s and Fortnum and Mason courtesy of the FA, plus a sizeable wedge, and Al and I departed, exhausted, into the night.

When I got home I had to lie down for half an hour. Being exposed to such concentrated skulduggery is not healthy and I only regained my composure after a stiff G&T and a hot bath. But there you go, such is the burden of patriotism. I was going to say, I doubt, after all that, we will get the World Cup. Jack Warner and his cronies will be stacking up the swag from all the other nations as I write this and goodness only knows how they make their decision but it certainly won’t be on merit. But to be honest, I don’t personally give a stuff. The last World Cup was like watching paint dry. Give me a cold November Saturday down at the Cottage any day of the week. Chin chin….

Yours

W.R. Howe (Chairman)

I can’t say I’ve enjoyed reading the papers this week. While the continuing play of the chipper lads at Blackpool is a joy to behold and Gareth Bale’s performances are truly splendid, we once again are beset by more tedious filth overshadowing the beautiful game. The stench emanating from the North East is really quite overpowering. Even Terry Tappin, a devotee of all things tabloid couldn’t stomach some of the stories cascading across the tabloid media this week. ‘William’, he said to me the other day at the Old Chiseller Club, ‘somethings just put you right off your breakfast.’ For a lad with a fifty inch waistline, this came as quite a shock. Particularly, as Mary his cook makes wonderful porridge.

But I digress. What concerns me most about the recent turn of events is that it seems to be heralding a new age of twisted normality for professional footballers. If it wasn’t enough to have the England squad defiled with the cheating debauchery of Cashley Cole, John Terry and the Cubby Chav we now may have the prospect of them being joined by the sleazily soiled Andy Carroll.

Honestly, at this precise moment i’d almost rather be French. Their players might be a bunch of po-faced, self-centred, self-important, primadonnas but at least you can laugh at them. Our lot make it difficult for the nation to keep it’s collective breakfast down.

Yours, grumpily

W.R Howe (Chairman)

Now, as all you avid dribblers know, I have an unparalleled contacts book when it comes the wacky world of professional football, so it will surprise you that Wayne Rooney’s dramatic/unbelievable/barely credible/conniving/you name it, U turn was an equal shock to me as it was for everyone else.

But I believe there is a reason for this, and that is, that Fergie was in on the game. I believe that the ol’ fella was playing the media and his club just as much as Stretford and Rooney were in propagating the notion that the spudfaced nipper was off to Middle Eastlands. And that’s because, I reckon, the club were stalling on paying the ridiculous monies he was requesting and yet Ferguson was desperate for him to stay because of Man U’s current paucity of talent. It wouldn’t surprise me if Stretford and Ferguson cooked up the whole thing in order to pressurise the club into paying the reported £180,000 a week which Rooney has now been awarded.

Too much of a conspiracy? Well, let me throw another Fergie conspiracy theory your way. David Moyes is believed to be ol’ red wine nose’s favourite to succeed him, so he can step up to a director of football gig and yet work with a fellow Scot and a younger manager he admires. Problem with this plan is Moyes hasn’t won anything but accolades. If he is truly to be considered a Man U manager he has to win something – anything.

So cast your minds back to the FA Cup semi-final 2009 when Everton were playing Man U at Wembley and Fergie picked a B team, when all his big names were fit. Why would he do this? Simple. He’s won many FA Cups, so he was more than happy to pave the way for Moyes to get a shot at the final, if it meant the younger Scot could bag a trophy and thus justify Fergies confidence in him as his successor.

Plausible or mad? You decide. But I know where my money is, especially now I’ve seen Paul Stretford’s greedy gambit.

Toodle-pip

W.R. Howe (Chairman)