Good morning. Here is your briefing. Let’s start with some good reads
If you’re still trying to make sense of what happened to Manchester United at the weekend, Barney Ronay’s piece in the Guardian is very good and contains a reference to Colonel Kurtz.
And while Ronay invokes Kurtz, Dion Fanning goes with a well placed Winnie the Pooh reference for his equally excellent piece on United’s decline.
Ahead of Claudio Ranieri’s clash with former club Chelsea, Simon Hart of the Independent looks back fondly on his time in West London.
Meanwhile, if you do happen to see Ranieri’s goalkeeper, Kasper Schmeichel, don’t go over and say that he’ll never be as good as his dad. Not that you would. You’re lovely. Anyway, he chats with Oliver Holt here.
ON YOUR TELLY THIS WEEK (Assuming that you live in the UK)
This week is like a big bag full of Revels. The first thing you pull out will be a lovely, succulent Leicester – Chelsea clash, but by Friday night you’ll be half-heartedly chewing through Nice – Montpellier and trying to convince yourself that you like it. Ah, but there’s everything in here. League games, cup games…erm…cup replays. Let’s get cracking.
Pick of the bunch tonight is, of course, Jose Mourinho’s showdown with the ghost of Chelsea past, Claudio Ranieri. Mourinho has been very mean about Ranieri in the past (he’s far nicer to him now), but it’s the Italian who sits a whopping 17 points clear as the half way stage approaches. Leicester’s run can’t go on much longer, can it? Watch that on Sky Sport 1 or alternatively, you can catch Blackburn Rovers vs Nottingham Forest on Sky Sports 2 or Lazio vs Sampdoria on BT Sport Europe.
British television’s infatuation with anything even remotely connected to Manchester United continues on Tuesday as BT Sport 2 brings you the FA Cup replay between Hartlepool andf Salford City. If that doesn’t lure you in, then perhaps Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink’s second game in charge of Queens Park Rangers, against leaders Brighton and live on Sky Sports 1, might suit you better? No? Okay, what about Bayern Munich vs Darmstadt in the DFB Pokal on BT Sport Europe? Rennes vs Toulouse on BT Sport 1? Uniao da Madeira vs Benfica on BT Sport ESPN? Still no? Well, I can’t help you then, mate.
If you can get off work early on Wednesday, you can watch Bordeaux vs Monaco on BT Sport Europe at 4pm. Or you can just go to the pub. There’s more to come in the evening too with Augsburg vs Borussia Dortmund in that DFB Pokal on BT Sport Europe. There’s Hull City vs Reading in the Championship on Sky Sports 1. There’s Whitehawk vs Dagenham & Redbridge on BT Sport 2. And if that’s not enough for you, how about PSG vs St Etienne on BT Sport 1?
Quiet night on Thursday. Just the small matter of one of the most successful sides of the 1950s against one of the most successful sides of the 1960s, both ravaged in different ways by the vagaries of modern football, now reduced to a grim knife fight for mid table mediocrity in the second flight. Wolverhampton Wanderers against Leeds United is on Sky Sports 1.
It’s Black Eye Friday, but you don’t have to be a part of all that. You can slip off home early and leave the part-time drinkers to their traditional night of festive felonies; vomiting sugary cocktails into litter bins; exchanging wayward punches in the kebab shop, falling into the arms of a stranger and stumbling home, amateurishly thudding against each other in sheets you haven’t seen reason to clean in weeks, just trying to feel for one moment, just one moment, as if you’re not hopelessly alone in a city that holds you in utter contempt. Nah, you can watch Schalke vs Hoffenhiem on BT Sport 2 or Nice vs Montpellier on BT Sport ESPN. You could even watch Birmingham vs Cardiff on Sky Sports 1. And what about Braintree Town vs Wrexham on BT Sport 1, eh? What? Yeah, I’ll see you at the bar at six.
Full TV listings can be found over here on the Live Football on TV page.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Okay, let’s be honest with each other. Last week was pretty busy. I’m moving house, you see. And it’s Christmas. And there was a lot of football to watch. The only reading I did was on my phone in bed, which isn’t very clever because the backlight is supposed to keep your brain fizzing and whirring at exactly the time when it should be winding down. But I really like reading on my phone. I find that it helps me drop off. Anyway, on the first couple of nights I wrapped up Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which isn’t about football, but is a vast, highly ambitious and quite wonderful epic that is challenging enough to read, let alone write. Imagine writing that. Mitchell must have a brain the size of Devon to have held all the plotlines together. Anyway, when that was finished, I still didn’t fancy anything about football. I grabbed Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment, which I haven’t read in years. It’s one of those glorious Pratchett books that was written between 1997 and 2007, the period when he became more than just a great fantasy writer and became simply a great writer. If you’ve never read Pratchett, I’d always put Guards, Guards forward as a gateway book and then tell you to read the whole lot from the start. I miss him far more than I should.
FROM OUR VAULT
Our plans for 2016 are slowly taking form. Another couple of lunches at the Tapping the Admiral should finish the job. One feature that we’ll certainly be keeping is Vox in the Box. In fact, we’ll have one every Friday. And here’s one of the best from 2015. It’s former News of the World sports editor Paul McCarthy.
BEST NON-FOOTBALL THING
This camel laughs like Peter Griffin. And if you like that, here is the internet’s top ten of animals making human noises. And we said that we’d never go downmarket in search of hits.
If you’d like to recommend something for next Monday’s briefing, get in touch by emailing [email protected]
