Badges done. Time to change the football

"Fucking yeeeeeessssss!"

Last week we said we were off to get our badges from UEFA. We’ve got them now. And what an experience it was. For one, we now can’t move for cones and bibs at Spongers Towers. You can't even get in the bogs without doing those daft jumps over those daft bars, and that's not solely down to the fact that 'the bogs' double up as 'the cupboard'.

When is the FA Cup not the FA Cup?

Apparently much more important than you'd previously thought 

It’s been much maligned over the course of the past few years as an inferior relation to the other, more popular, more rewarding versions on which it’s modelled, and for once we’re not talking about our Tinder accounts. 2016’s never-ending festival of football hoves into view this week with the League Cup semi-finals, which see Liverpool travel to Stoke and Manchester City to Everton.

Web Of Deceit

"Am I allowed to go back to Liverpool now?"

Spurs season ticket holder Hugh Lindley makes his debut for Magic Spongers

Official football club websites fascinate me. Getting the ‘official line’ on any controversial story is usually as fascinatingly false as the seemingly implausible scandals pedalled in newspapers are true. On club websites, journalists are routinely derided as liars, stirrers and heathens – before their stories invariably turn out to be true.

A Few Good (Football) Men

"I BET my stock can fall further than yours in three years"

So the Premier League is getting a winter break after all. Well, almost. While the snow goes about clearing the traditional and ludicrously busy Christmas fixture list quicker than we can clear a table at an awards ceremony, a couple of the weekend’s top-flight matches were at least salvaged. Unfortunately, they were both rubbish, which only served to suggest that if there is to be a seasonal break on these shores, it shouldn’t necessarily be from furiously practising football.