Episode 40
Life begins at forty. Instead of buying a Harley-Davidson and entering a talent show to prove we’re not past it, we’re looking back at a last weekend’s decisive victories in the Premier League. Both Manchester clubs sealed crucial victories and it’s shaping up to be a two horse race. But is it that simple? The Daily Telegraph’s Mark Ogden joins Podcast host Ciaran O’Raghallaigh to discuss everything from Mad Mario’s stamp to Man Utd’s Continue reading
Ballcrack may sound like a rather painful sporting injury but the only damage being done is to the egos of our favourite over-paid footy stars. Join Motty as he takes a Monthy Python-esque look back at this week’s biggest/funniest football stories.
‘What a great weekend of racing!’
It’s no secret that we say that or variations of that most weekends. There’s a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, we’re very easily impressed (wow, look at that cloud, it kind of looks amorphous and exactly like a cloud) and secondly, Paddy fills us full of Fanta and Hula Hoops in return for writing enthusiastically about it. There is a point to forthrightness and it’s that this weekend is actually a great weekend of racing. Don’t let your creeping cynicism arising out of all the times we’ve described the Charlie Hall Chase as ‘THE RACING EVENT OF THE YEAR!’ dismiss our claims. There’s so much quality racing on offer in fact, we’ll be using short, possibly nonsensical sentences to describe it. So pretty much business as usual really.
It’s unlikely to be adopted formally, but we’re calling Saturday at Cheltenham ‘Harry Redknapp Day’ because of all the trials. As we clamber desperately towards the end of the most depressing month of the year, we can see the shining light of happiness that is the Festival up ahead and Saturday’s action will go a long way to deciding which horses will get the chance to come back in March and which horses can book Paddy’s week off. Grand Crus will certainly be heading to the Festival, but his destination is to be decided.
A resounding win is now pretty much mandatory for Big Buck’s in the Cleeve Hurdle. Anything else will have the racing public wondering if he’s on the wane or just not at the peak of his powers. It’s going to take an off day or a lot of bad luck for the superstar to be dethroned and you get the feeling most of the opposition would count ‘getting a decent look at his arse as they cross the finish line’ as a successful outing. Mourad is the horse considered most likely to be best of the rest, but unless you’ve perfected time travel and has already been to Cheltenham this Saturday, there’s no logical reason to think the champion will fail to oblige against opponents he has generally beaten soundly on more than one occasion in the past.
There’s some high class racing in Doncaster too, the highlight being the Sky Bet Chase. Hold On Julio is the favourite and he’s a fascinating horse – ‘fascinating’ in the mainly positive way, but with a splash of cautious doubt. A couple of runs a few years back suggested he didn’t have the stamina for a walk around the parade ring, but after a long time away from the track, he has made a triumphant return and shown he’s a horse of real ability. He gave Neptune Collonges a good beating the last time out and further improvement is expected. There’s a lot of tried and tested old hands capable of upsetting the favourite, but Shakalakaboomboom is seen as the big danger. Not too dissimilar to the favourite, he’s another horse who has also got it together in recent times after a few performances which made you wonder if he really had the knack of this racing lark and it looks like being a cracking race.
On the more Leopardstown hosts a couple of days worth of quality racing. On Saturday Ted Walsh will put telling everyone else in the world of racing what they’re doing wrong on hold for a while in favour of saddling up Seabass for a wide open Leopardstown Handicap Chase. His charge is looking to make it 5 or 6 wins on the bounce – depending on whether or not you want to include a point to point victory in that run. Saturday’s action is mainly a tasty little appetiser for Sunday at Leopardstown. The Irish contingent aiming for the Arkle at Cheltenham is small and largely unfancied, but they could force their way into the reckoning with a good showing in the Irish Arkle. If either Blackstairmountain and Flemenstar were to win in style, they’d almost instantly command attention for the Cheltenham assignment and it would be a similar story if the English raider, Notus De La Tour were to signal his ability.
The reigning Champion Hurdler is pencilled in to make his belated seasonal appearance in a high class Irish Champion Hurdle later in the day, but given is track record when it comes to picking up knocks, we’ll believe it when we see it. If he arrives in full health, Hurricane Fly should be more than capable of defending his title before heading for the Festival, but the 9 pounds and couple of prep runs he’s conceding to Unaccompanied might just be enough for people to side with Dermot Weld’s exciting young’un. Likewise, Thousand Stars has seen too much of Hurricane Fly’s backside to be considered a better horse, but if the champ runs below par and he’s on form, he’s got enough quality to cause a shock.
It promises to be a quality weekend of racing and that’s not just the Hula Hoops and Fanta talking.
Related links
- Argento Chase
- Cleeve Hurdle
- Sky Bet Chase
- Irish Champion Hurdle
- Irish Arkle
- Leopardstown Handicap Chase
As a Liverpool fan I obviously believe it was a bang on, no doubts whatsoever, couldn’t be any other way, penalty! Anyone who claims differently is either a moron or hates football.
Removing my red tinted fan specs and suddenly the incident becomes somewhat less conclusive. I personally believe that if a player goes in to a tackle with his hands in the air then he’s taking a risk. If the ball is blocked by the raised hands then yes it’s a free. However, this was a sliding challenge where the player got a foot to the ball which was then accidentally played on to his own hand. It was a harsh decision and one which I would have me screaming blue murder were my team on the wrong side of it. They weren’t and I’m going to Wembley at the end of February so tough titties City. You’re just going to have to settle for the Premier League instead.
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The team at Paddy Power
Robin Van Persie claims he was merely exclaiming his surprise when his manager made the mental decision to take off the excellent Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and replace him with a flash-in-the-pan that has now become an annoying stain at the bottom of the pan, Andrei Arshavin, instead of hauling off Theo “please don’t steal my pocket-money because mummy will be terribly cross” Walcott.
Well the ever funny an surreal guys at fitbathatba.com have discovered the truth and reveal it to the world through the beauty of song.
There are so many new Messis floating around, it’s a wonder why we hang on to the old one. I mean he’s good and all but he’s lost that new Messi smell and the extended warranty has expired and one of the kids spilt milk on him but you didn’t notice until it started to go off and you never really get that smell out.
Thankfully the newest of new Messis has arrived on the stage that is the African Cup of Nations. Watch as 21-year old Youssef Msakni scores for Tunisia against Morocco on Monday looking mildly like Messi, if you squint and hold a picture of Messi in front of your face. It’s a good goal though.
Whose Career Is It Anyway? is back!
No, not by popular demand – not by any demand in fact – but it’s back nonetheless.
‘It’s been a while’ is pretty much the flimsy justification for giving it it’s first run-out of the new year even if the sight of it springing from the bench garners the same enthusiastic welcome as Andrey Arshavin coming on for Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain got from Robin van Persie.
What I’m asking of you is the same as always, but for newcomers, novices or people who have irreparably damaged their hippocampus I’ll go over the task at hand. Each of the flags planted in the map below corresponds to a club this man or woman has played for in the course of his or her senior professional career, you need to tell me who the person is. And by the way, the flags represent all the clubs – not just a little snapshot of the career in question. So, before you hit the online encyclopaedias and search engines of the world, here’s the map:
Because the information I’m after is sensitive, you need to email your answer to competitions@paddypower.com with the subject line ‘Football Nerds Get All The Girls’. If you are a girl, I’ll permit you to change it to ‘boys’ and changes related to your own personal sexual orientation will also be tolerated. Or else don’t bother, it doesn’t make any difference. DO NOT PUT YOUR ANSWER IN THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW – it won’t count for the competition and it might give a rival a clue. Feel free to use it for deceit and other stuff, but no answers please. You’re allowed more than one guess, but anyone who adopts a carpet bombing strategy of naming pretty much every footballer ever will be ignored.
The prize starts off as a Free £/€50 Bet, but I’m hoping it will get substantially inflated. For every retweet of this tweet or share on Facebook, google+ or LinkedIn, I’ll add one euro/pound to the prize. Last week’s competition got a huge boost from being pimped around the internet and you should try and maintain those standards this week, because you could well be the person winning the prize. If we get more than one correct answer – as often/always happens – the winner will be drawn at random from my quiz-concluding hat of mystery.
Get your answers in before 10am on Tuesday January 31st and I’ll pick a winner soon after I finish my daily cyberstalking. If you’ve any questions or ponderings, use the comments section or give me a holler on twitter where I’m called @PaddyPowerAidan. Best of luck.
Conditions
- Customers must be over the age of 18, have a valid paddypower.com account and be old enough to remember when Madonna looked kind of like a woman.
- Maximum size of the free bet will be €/£150.
- Paddy Power decision is final and moaning will be ridiculed.
Well done to everyone who entered to last week’s blog competition. Going through the answers gave me a good laugh and on a day when I learned that Harry Redknapp has a bank account in the name of his dog, that’s really saying something. With Spurs’ title challenge looking about as sound as Harry’s bookkeeping, it was a headline that offered a lot in terms of humour and even more in terms of libel damages.
It was a very tough decision, but after much debate and name-calling, our panel of comedy experts decided that the winner that only one person is going to be happy with and everyone else will give out about is:
That means the winner of the competition is Robb Falls and thanks to all your shameless pimping, the prize got bulked up to the maximum of a £150 Free Bet. Congratulations Robb.
We’ll have more competition fun in the not too distant future.
FC Metalist full-back Cristian Villagra pings one in from 70 yard against Dinamo Moscow in Monday’s friendly and he meant it too. Not just did he intend to shoot but the lack of wind assistance, poor goalkeeping positioning and the many other factors which are usually the real heroes of these moments makes this one worthy of mention. Being a friendly takes the edge off but it’s still pretty amaze-balls…or whatever the hell it was I heard some floppy-fringed teenager say.
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