As has been well documented recently, Nottingham Forest have returned after a record absence of 23 looooong and stressful years. But the universe has set itself to rights, and we're back where we belong.
For many of the younger 'uns, this new home is a novelty, so for the benefit of them, here is a short-ish thingy about the Sky Premier League, the most hyperbolic league in the world.
The Premier League comprises twenty teams, only six of which count.
The "top six" - usually considered to be Man City, Liverpool, Tottenham, Arsenal, Chelsea and Man U - are far superior to the rest because of stuff like merchandising and sympathetic referees.
Most of the other eighteen teams scrap it out amongst themselves in their own competition, often referred to as "Avoiding Relegation".
Matches are played out on television, in front of people who are steamed on Stella and cheesy puffs. No match may start until all Sky's equipment is running properly.
Sky commentators tend to be tendentious gobs*ites, but nowhere near as hysterical as those on TalkSport or Five Live.
Match highlights are shown on BBC's Match of the Day, a programme in which the football is buried under a huge weight of analytical cabbage.
Everything in the Premier League is exaggerated. Goals are brilliant, misses are shocking, saves are world class, tackles are either vigorously good or leg-breakingly bad. Refereeing decisions tend to be spot on or unfathomable. Games are nearly always heart-burstingly exciting.
Next, the 2022/23 Premier League teams.
Arsenal are a well established, successful London club who stole their red shirts from Nottingham Forest in 1886 and never returned them. Their prestige has waned recently, and their fans try to conceal their anxiety by speaking broken and often indecipherable English. Their motto is Victoria Concordat Crescent, which is the name of a nearby tube station.
BrentFord share their name with 1960s 'adult actor' icon Brent Ford. They play at the Brent Ford Community Stadium, which is shared between them and London Irish Rugby Union club, the Desert Eagle Stunt Bikers, an Arthur Askey Tribute Revue, six whelk stalls and various men in dark brown overcoats.
Leeds is everybody's favourite second team in Leeds, the first being Yorkshire Cricket Club. Yorkshire C.C.'s headquarters is at Headingly, where Ben Stokes and Jack Leach broke the Aussies in 2020. Leeds are most famous for never having won the European Cup while believing they have, and their anthem is a tortured version of Paul McCartney's Frog Song.
Fulham are a water-based football club consisting entirely of Aleksandar Mitrovic.
Man U are owned by the American Glazer brothers, who spend their days worrying about how to pay the interest on the £800M+ loans they took out to buy the club. Their latest manager is Erik ten Hag, a Dutchman whose face has only an experimental relationship with his head.
Wolverhampton Wondererrreres are most famous for their chamois "shammy" leather shirts. Originally made from the skin of the short-horned goat-like antelope found in the mountains of Asia Minor, chamois leather is now made from split sheep skin or lamb skin from which the grain (the top split) has been removed and tanned by a process involving oxidation of marine oils in the skin. And that's as interesting as life gets at this famous old club.
S'thmptn are the only vowel-less club in the Premier League. Their manager is called Ralph Hasenhüttl, which means Ralph Rabbitcottage. They are far from being the worst team in the top flight, but not that far. All of this is true.
Leicester City have spent years fishing for hated rivals, but no-one has bitten. Any success they have had has largely escaped the notice of a world disillusioned by jug-eared presenters and the shrinking content of Walkers crisp packets. Their motto, "Foxes Never Quit", has been voted the most stupidly inaccurate motto in natural history.
West Ham famously won the World Cup in 1966, since when their fortunes have been mixed. Recently the F.A. threatened to censure the West Ham fans for singing lewd and provocative songs about "blowing baboons", but the exact source of the chants was impossible to ascertain given the London Stadium is at least two miles wide.
Stressandpie
Newcomers' guide to the Prem...
posted on 9/6/22
This was actually pretty funny
posted on 9/6/22
Excellent post Stress - good to have you back in the Prem.
I'm still chuckling over the West Ham chant comment.
As for Leicester, I think we will have to paraphrase the old Millwall chant along the lines of:
"Nobody hates us, and we don't care".
posted on 10/6/22
It’s a copy and paste.
Up to your old tricks again stress, take all the credit and not an ounce of grace to say otherwise 🧐
posted on 10/6/22
comment by Igòr; for life, not glory & FECK THE EFL. (U22200)
posted 7 hours, 26 minutes ago
It’s a copy and paste.
Up to your old tricks again stress, take all the credit and not an ounce of grace to say otherwise 🧐
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Don’t get a nose bleed Igor! Big few days coming up 👍🏻
posted on 10/6/22
DJed gone <way>
posted on 10/6/22
Sorry
posted on 11/6/22
comment by Igòr; for life, not glory & FECK THE EFL. (U22200)
posted 14 hours, 55 minutes ago
Sorry
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Thats have a little recap here:
you have NO GROUND
you have NO SQUAD
you have NO OWNER
you have NO HOPE & NO BUDGET
And you have the stupidity to try and troll us?
If you're going out of business please have the curtesy and good manners to do it before the EFL announce the fixtures there's a good chap.
posted on 11/6/22
*Let's*
posted on 12/6/22
Aston Village were formed from a group of interested bystanders in the pretty village of Anston, between Worksop and Sheffield. In 1899 they were tempted by the fleshpots of the Midlands, and changed their name to Aston Village without ever understanding what a fleshpot was. They are currently managed by a nasal implant. Their fans are known as "Villagers" or simply "Idiots".
Totteringham are best known for having robbed Nottingham Forest of the 1991 F.A. Cup when the referee failed to send off Gascoigne in the final after he cynically bust his own knee on a Forest player. Currently their best players are Harry Kane and Sum Hyung Man, who wrote the Art of War. They have a Koch on their crest.
Crystal Palace , known commonly as Palearse, have a long and distinguished history of never winning anything, apart from the London Challenge Cup in which they beat a Holloway Prison Guards XI after a penalty shoot out. Palearse continue to bob around the Premier League as pointlessly as a float in a fished out pond.
Man$ity are based in Disneyland, East Manchester. The stadium can be accessed by a magic tram which holds an infinite number of passengers who are sustained by sweat and carbon dioxide. The stadium itself is merely a giant electronic advertising hoarding. Matches are sponsored by a band of wizards in a land far, far away, and their manager speaks a form of Klingon, but nobody has ever dared tell him so.
AFC B’Muff are a club whose entire business plan is founded on the "yo-yo" principle - get promoted, get relegated, use parachute payments to get promoted... and so on. They are as tiny and annoying as Rishi Sunak, are led by a manager with an inflamed jaw and are based in a stadium which is structurally unsound when required.
Liverpoo long since abandoned the pretence of being an ordinary football club to devote itself to the collective worship of the Klopp, a mythical Prussian giant with glass eyes and tombstone teeth whose look can turn his enemies to stone. That's the Klopp, not his teeth. Fans say they'd walk a million miles for one of his smiles, but they'd never walk alone. My brother-in-law supports the Poo, so I'll leave it there.
Chelsea Dodgers take their name from either a jammy biscuit or their new owner's LA Dodgers baseball franchise or indeed the artful Cockney runt from "Oliver Twist". They are managed by Thomas Tookle, a strange looking fellow with a wandering right ear whose ambition may or may not be to recruit the entire German international team. Tookle, not his ear. They call the German football team the Mannschaft , which means team. Imaginative stuff.
Brighton are a south coast club with ambitions of being mildly interesting. That's it really. Nobody knows much about them. We think they are managed by Harry Potter. Pfft.
Newca$tle are another example of a sleeping giant who, pumped full of oil-based steroids from our friendly wizards in the East, wakes with a noisy snort and starts throwing his weight around in various directions. Can the rampant monster be tamed? Will the angry mob be satisfied? Who can say. Or rather, Howe can say. Or can he?
Everton have no silly nickname because, as they have grown old and weary, all identity has been weathered out of them like an abandoned shed. This is why, when people pointedly avoid discussing a particular subject, that subject is often described as "the Everton in the room".
www.stressandpie.co.uk
posted on 12/6/22
Everything in the Premier League is exaggerated. Goals are brilliant, misses are shocking, saves are world class, tackles are either vigorously good or leg-breakingly bad. Refereeing decisions tend to be spot on or unfathomable. Games are nearly always heart-burstingly exciting.
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This is so true. It’s so OTT and overhyped it’s just lies