Rio Ferdinand is a great player, so he's had to do some pretty retardedly stupid things to win my Premiership Twat of the Year award. He's come in ahead of of such chimps as Lee Bowyer and Craig Bellend who are every bit as ugly, just as prone to stupid behaviour plus they're not even that good. Rio's catalogue of repeated stupidity, which demonstrates his especially stubborn lack of capacity to learn from his mistakes, coupled with his inflated wage demands mean that he scoops my top award for this season.
A closely fought contest, with Ferdinand's ill-advised corn-braids, which looked bad until you realise it's not that bad a haircut, it's just his face that's the problem. Also staking a strong claim was Darren Huckerby, with his laughably shit hair "style" in which he bleached some of it with dettol, dipped his comb in lard, and tried to fashion it into some sort of spikey arrangement. Craig Bellamy's tragic effort at a longer style was tantamount to treason, while Cisse's recent efforts can only be described as "astonishingly bad".
However, the man to top them all, is as ever, Alan Smith. Alan Smith is the very end of the line in a long game of "Chinese Whispers" in haircuts, that starts more than two seasons earlier with David Beckham. Just as in the famous game of message mutation, the haircut transforms itself in a small way from one hop to the next, so that it when it eventually arrives at the end of the long chain, it presents a ridiculous, yet nevertheless hilarious mess which is unrecognisable from its original form.
The chain, in which each new round follows the previous one by approximately three months, goes roughly thus:
Who can forget Chelsea's lack of grace in defeat after they failed to buy the Champions league, taking the edge off their championship "win" and meaning they could only celebrate the historic "double" of League and tin-pot reserve cup. This was part of a special "Buy one, get one free" promotion by the FA, which sounded very good value. In reality, as is usual with these promotions, you pay for the main item and the "free" element is invariably of very little real value.
Liverpool's incredible European cup win demonstrated that UEFA might as well let all top division teams into the competition, since the fifth best team in a really rubbish premiership can win it. It also showed the Italians that they're not as good as they like to think, *AND* if English teams had been in Europe in the late eighties, they wouldn't have won the titles that they did.
West Brom stayed up, after one of the most closely contested relegation battles for years. The problem with this is that for a short while people are going to think that Bryan Robson is not a shit manager. If I was the FA I would have been more like the wise King Solomon and just relegated all four of them, telling them to fuck off and not think of coming back until they're not shit. In exchange we get Sunderland, Wigan and West Ham. Oooooooh, excite-MENT!
My other awards this year include: