da stake casino： Having missed the apparently engaging first leg of this crucial Champions League qualifier I settled down with a beer and re-heated box of dominoes chicken wings and prepared myself for the important business of watching my first European encounter of the new season. This wasn’t factually true, as I’d watched Liverpool vs. Tranpzonsipspor (or something) the previous week, but considering it was both a) dire, and b) the Europa League, I’d decided that it didn’t really count in any significant sense and had thus struck it from my memory like an ill advised drunken liaison and was pretending it hadn’t actually happened.
da aviator aposta： On paper this clash didn’t fill me with much overt enthusiasm, being as it was essentially a Europa League play off match designed to weed out the chaff from the wheat and ensure the Champions League’s most crucial and revered contributors – their sponsors – didn’t have to watch too many unglamorous games and their second most important contributors – the big boys – didn’t have to take too many energy sapping midweek trips to dilapidated god forsaken areas of the globe only to play out the equivalent of a training game against a bunch of Norwegian semi-professionals or Celtic.
Unfortunately for one of Barca, Inter, Bayern, Milan and Lyon, they will have to take the ominous trip to the dilapidated god forsaken Tottenham High Road, but on this evidence, at least it’ll be entertaining.
The teams came out to a flurry of white flags, which made it a shame Spurs weren’t playing a German team, wherein I could’ve make a joke about it being like entering France in 1940, but unfortunately Young Boys were Swiss, the perennially neutral land of cheese and knives, so instead I had to satisfy myself with making that joke by lamenting the fact I couldn’t make that joke.
Having not seen the first leg, the wonderfully endless pun possibilities presented by the moniker of the erstwhile Young Boys had sadly passed me by, meaning that any clever innuendos I could conjure up whilst watching would almost certainly have already been done.
Regardless of this, the Young Boys exposed themselves within four minutes as Peter Crouch ambled onto a looping far post cross like he’d just stepped onto the pitch from the touchline and nodded the Lilywhites ahead on the away goals rule for the first time in the tie. Essentially, the game looked over from then on, but it was still an entertaining enough spectacle, proving once again my theory that games played in the rain at night are automatically better than any other games just by virtue of sheer aesthetics.
Assou-Ekotto managed to knock a ‘Boy’ called Jamal out with a volley before Jermain Defoe – who seemed to have cut his own hair in a hall of mirrors – caught the ball in mid-air and slotted one neatly off the near post. For the rest of the half everyone ran around being very wet and I was left to reflect on whose hair looked the most rubbish in the rain. By the time I’d decided it was Crouch, the second half was up and running, thanks to my patented tradition of always pausing the game at the start for 15 minutes on Sky + so I can go straight into the second half without having to suffer the horrors of Gareth Southgate and/or Andy Townsend.
Perhaps aware that they were Tottenham, and that no Tottenham team should ever be too far away from the possibility of ballsing it all up at any moment, the Young Boys started to come back into it early on. Someone who seemed to be called ‘Welcome’ in French (which I suppose is infinitely better than ‘Small’, or ‘The Beef’) tested sub Carlo Cudicini after about 5 minutes of the re-start and really should’ve done better.
After ‘Arry had artfully avoided admitting he hadn’t a clue who any of his opponents were by telling us that his lads needed to be wary of “their wide players”, it transpired that Tottenham’s wide players were the real danger men as Aaron Lennon quick stepped his way around several large bumble-bees and Gareth Bale continued to look brilliant at everything.
Crouch managed to miss from a yard out by being too gangly for his own good before he finally nodded another in from a corner prompting Peter Drury on iTV to shout, “Spurs are coming!”..Something that was possibly a bit inappropriate since they’d been penetrating Young Boys all night (I am so, so sorry.)
There was just enough time left for a bee to get sent off, Crouch to grab his hat-trick from the spot, miss another great chance and Jim Beglin to make up the word “Determinigation” which was clearly a sterling effort to fill the still vacant but sadly racist shoes of Big Ron Atkinson, long since departed from iTV and taking his collection of made up words and phrases with him.
“The Young Boys are wasted,” belted Drury as Spurs passed out the final few minutes, leaving us all to ponder why on earth the 5th officials behind the goal line had suddenly been given sticks. Perhaps they’ll wave them furiously about in the off chance someone scores a contested goal in a scramble? Perhaps FIFA felt flags might distract the players in the way Petr Cech’s kit is apparently designed to draw the eye line, but felt they should at least give them something linesmany to wave about? Who knows? Either way the 6-3 aggregate score line bodes well for us football junkies as Spurs’ consistent inability to play tight, boring football and tendency to quite possibly self implode at any minute means whomever they draw today, it’s going to be a roller coaster fun time for all watching.
Well in ‘Arry.
Click on image below to see the gallery of Mario Balotelli’s stunning girlfriend