The Driftaway Fantasy Football League
Founder - Lewis Trahar; Secretary - Dave Trahar; Honorary President - John Charles R.I.P.; Honorary Chairman - Baldy Pevsner O.G.
This
is the Home Page of the Driftaway Football League.
Use the links below to navigate to the page you're interested in and
have a good old nose around in all the other managers' business - you
know you want to. Or try the links at the bottom left, which will take
you to various sites holding info on players, teams, injuries,
suspensions and all that other important stuff.
You, of course, will do better than these cheerful chappies. You will
home in on the new superduperstars before the ink on their contracts is
dry. Your defence will keep out more strikers than Arthur Scargill, and
your attack will score more than Don Juan, Lothario, and Little Billy
Kershaw combined. You will be unstoppable - the behemoth; the Kraken;
the Juggernaut. And on that day my friend, Satan will be skating to
work.
Marcos Alonso starts to celebrate his rocket powered goal against the
Toon, and his 9 point Player of the Week total, by belting out the
Spanish National Anthem, until he remembers it doesn't have any words.
Still, it's a nice tune.
At Leicester, a potential 2nd goal for Burnley was chalked off after the
VAR decided that Chris Wood's accidental ankle tap on Jonny Evans was a
foul (Evans would never have reached the ball anyway, but this is not
relevant to the foul/no foul judgement.) At Man Utd, Lindelof
kicked Origi's leg from behind, nowhere near the ball, but Son of Ron
didn't see it, much as Jon Moss didn't see the Wood/Evans incident.
MU collected the ball, raced down the pitch and scored. After
extensive VAR action, the goal was allowed to stand; that is, Lindelof
was not penalised for doing exactly the same thing as Wood, who was.
The only significant difference between the two events was that
Lindelof's action was deliberate, where Wood's was not. At
Wolves, Raul Jimenez used his upper arm to control the movement of the
ball before burying it past Angus Gunn, and was not too surprised to
have it ruled out by the VAR for handball. At Spurs, Dele
Alli used exactly the same tactic to control the ball before netting
against Watford, but the VAR allowed the goal to stand, once he'd worked
out which button to press. In the same match, Vertonghen clearly
and obviously slid into Deulofeu from behind, hooked his legs and sent
him flying. The VAR reviewed this as well, but declined to award a
penalty. John Brooks - mark that name - was the VAR, and if he'd
been alive in 1986 he would have waved play on after Maradona's Hand of
God. This whole business with VARs is now, as Lewis would say,
completely beyond the pale. You'd think that having the officials
able to see what happened, with slow motion and multiple angles, would
improve their decision making. But in a typically English fashion,
they've decided to assert their authority by denying the referee sight
of the video recordings (the FA have instructed refs not to use the
expensive pitch-side monitors) and leaving the decision making to barely
qualified yes-men (Brooks has never refereed a Premier League game, and
is not a Select Group 1 referee) who
are well aware that their own decisions may shortly be reviewed by the
same guys they are themselves reviewing. The game deserves better
than this.
Much
outrage in Her Majesty's Press over the racist chanting by Bulgarian
'fans' and much credit to the England players for their reactions.
The credit was fully deserved - I doubt anyone would have blamed the
players if they'd decided to walk off - but I can't help feeling the
outrage is a bit artificial. In December last year, English 'fans'
at Chelsea were recorded hurling racist abuse and acting aggressively
and threateningly toward Raheem Sterling. The Crown Prosecution
Service decided no charges should be brought, though Chelsea's own
investigation ended with a life ban for one arsehole and shorter bans
for five others. A week later, Mr Averof Panteli, a Spurs
supporter, threw a banana skin onto the pitch after Aubameyang scored
against his team. Although arrested for a racially aggravated
public order offence, he was not charged with that, just with throwing a
missile. He pleaded guilty and was given a four year football
banning order and fined £500. An Arsenal fan, who admitted
throwing an empty plastic bottle at Spurs players during the same match,
was fined £650. It'll be interesting to see what, if any, charges
are laid against the two Somerset men allegedly responsible for the
racist abuse incident that saw Haringey Borough and Yeovil walk off the
pitch on Saturday.
