Time Wasters!

So the Irish league played a game against an English league eleven on Tuesday night at Mourneview Park Lurgan? Well that’s what it said on Teletext and Teletext never lies, does it? This so called English eleven bears very little resemblance to any English eleven which we have played before. Not only was it not a Premier league eleven, it wasn’t even a Championship eleven (old 2^nd division), nor was it a current 1^st division (old 3^rd division), nor a current 2^nd division (old 4^th division). In fact it was a representative side from what used to be called non-league football, but is now referred to as the football conference. In my opinion you can dress things up as you wish, change their names, but at the end of the day as the old saying goes, ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’. Put in layman’s terms this simply means, no matter what way you package it, dross is still dross. Irish league manager, David (the fat controller) Jeffrey, said it was a good victory for our lads. Who does he think he’s kidding, we all know it was a foregone conclusion from the start? If an Irish league team, made up almost exclusively from Linfield and Glentoran players, most of whom are full-timers, can’t beat the equivalent of our own 1^st division, then Irish football is in a real bad way. If the English weren’t prepared to send a team representing their current 1^st and 2^nd divisions, surely we should’ve turned to our Scottish friends and asked them to send a team from their 1^st division. With the apathy of Irish league fans reaching critical level, the last thing fans need is to be duped into attending representative games, which are at best sub-standard and at worst a take-on. The fat controller did his best to convince us that this was an English under-21 side, but I’d hazard a guess that very few of these players will ever don a full England jersey, at any level. It was interesting to see also that Jeffrey selected current top scorer Gary Hamilton and his own Peter Thompson. Why pick two players who are as alike as two peas in a pod? Both are poachers, surely he needed someone like Smart of Portadown or Parkhorse, to play alongside either of these two strikers. Yes these are the best two strikers in the league, but they feed off a different type of player than themselves. But then again it was only a ‘paper exercise’ after all. Please try in future to give us something worth looking at, otherwise you’d best just forget about it!