The Layman

A selection of the best 11 players from the past 12 months.

There always was something of inevitability to the outcome of the game at Ewood Park on Monday night. After all, it was the kind of match that Manchester United have made their trademark down the years.

Globalisation has impacted upon football in a variety of ways from the fall of in importance, and perhaps decline in quality, in international football to the countless YouTube videos showing the best, and only the best, bits of footage of your new Brazilian signing.

Familiarity with a dangerous situation helps to breed a certain amount of confidence in dealing with aforementioned situation, a confidence that can border on the complacent.

The relentless nature of modern day football means the game is one in which déjà vu is a regular occurrence; you sit in the same seat every fortnight, with the same people around you, watching broadly the same XI players against largely the same teams as the year before, singing the same songs.

There are some changes that the Layman likes; the tweaking of the back pass law in the early 1990s, the casting of Guy Pearce rather than Brad Pitt in Memento and the ageing process with regard to Jennifer Aniston.

There is something rather peculiar going on up in Newcastle currently and we’re not talking about THAT stadium name change or the lack of shirt-wearing in the crowd (that’s always peculiar.

The idiom goes that “prevention is better than cure” but what the saying doesn’t consider is the unfortunate factors that characterise the clamour to spread the gospel of prevention. That’s one of the reasons “every cloud has a silver lining” was promoted from mere sentence to fully fledged clichéd idiom.