Off The Bar: Chelsea-Mayweather Twins, Indiana Newcastle

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  • Indiana Newcastle and the two boring champions feature this week.

    In the cash-rich world of modern football, there is plenty of room for ridicule; Sport360 has it for you in abundance every Monday. This week, Off The Bar takes in the brilliantly boring Chelsea – Floyd Mayweather mix and interprets the similarities between Newcastle United and Indiana Jones.

    Time To Mix Things Up

    Congratulations Chelsea! They have secured yet another Premier League title! If you feel dangerously resentful at those exclamation marks we can understand. If you feel a little bit emptier than a Newcastle trophy cabinet about it all, you won’t be alone. You would have felt the same if you watched the Floyd Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. Indeed, there is something heart-breakingly brilliant about both Chelsea and Mayweather, both so untouchable that it feels infuriatingly unfair to see them prosper.

    In terms of their attributes – stubborn, patient, watchful and intermittently explosive – the two parties feel like an echo of one another, different yet somehow identical, like Arnold Swarzeneggar and Danny Danny DeVito in Twins.

    A neat and obvious way to freshen up two competitions that have had rather anti-climatic endings this weekend – is to make the boxer and Chelsea swap roles next season, make them break out of their comfort zones. The thought of seeing the five-division world champion line up against West Brom on the opening day of the season, whilst the entire Chelsea squad square bob and weave in unison around Amir Khan, is a remarkable thought. Somehow Terry will still contrive to score a scrappy late winner against Khan from a set-piece though, we just know it, not even a completely different set of rules can stop such a thing.

    Newcastle Must Rediscover Their Inner Indie

    Occasionally we like to participate in a little relegation rubber-necking, which invariably means listening to apoplectic Newcastle fans vent their spleen, pancreas and bladder on fan call-in shows. One Magpies fan – in pieces after witnessing the team’s 8th league defeat in a row – shrieked that the ‘heart had been ripped out of his club’ by controversial owner Mike Ashley. The striking imagery rung a bell for us and delivered an intriguing conclusion – Newcastle’s fall from grace is almost exactly the same as the heart-detachment scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

    Indie is of course the mid-90s Newcastle we all know and love – reckless, adventurous, easy-on the eye and idiotically brave in battle.  And yet in the aforementioned scene, those powers have deserted him, he embodies today’s Newcastle  — poisoned, confused, his hands tied and at imminent risk of having his heart fully detached by a highly distasteful power-hungry chief. That’s all before being lowered into a pit of inescapable magma bubbling doom – aka The Championship.  Here’s hoping Newcastle will one day awaken their inner-Indie and fight their way out of the Sports Direct Temple of Doom.

    Attack of The Colback Clones

    Committed Colback

    As for John Carver, we can all agree that this chap couldn’t be more disorientated and out of his depth unless he was a chimp at the controls of a nuclear submarine.  The entirety of the squad isn’t much better. Perhaps the exception is Jack Colback who has battled hard to try and drag his team to the heady heights of mediocrity in recent weeks. Indeed Carver said he would love ‘a team of Colbacks’ right now, which is perhaps the finest ethical judgment for cloning humans that society has ever heard. Yet at this rate a team of any kind of mammal would be a marked improvement – Zebras would do nicely for you know who, a chance to save money on kit.

    Vote Sherwood

    Christian Benteke scored twice again at the weekend in Aston Villa’s 3-2 win over Everton. Just like his defibrillation of Emmanuel Adebayor at Tottenham, Tim Sherwood has brought another hugely gifted forward back to life. When it comes to rebooting damaged goods, Sherwood certainly has a way of teasing out a turnaround more inconceivable than a Neil Ruddock Cruyff turn.

    With that in mind it becomes increasingly apparent that we have all missed a trick by not getting Sherwood’s name on the ballot paper for this week’s UK election. We cant help but feel Tim could ‘do a job’ with the faltering economy, massaging it’s ego and encouraging it to brush off the pressures of inflation and high interest rates and just go out there and express itself out on the stock market. The campaign for 2020 starts here.

    Crocked Carrick Cripples United

    Manchester United have now lost three games in a row, including the 1-0 loss at home to West Brom at the weekend, and the common denominator in all of those defeats screams loud and clear — an injured Michael Carrick was injured for all of them. 

    Jump on to a comments board or Manchester United forum and you cannot move for this fact. All hope for United and life in general seems intrinsically linked to the health of the poor man’s Pirlo. We’ve now read the ‘we can’t do anything until Carrick returns’ sentiment so often that even Off The Bar is fearful that simple day-to-day tasks may be insurmountable until Carrick is fit again. The mere thought of trying to get dressed or eat toast seems quite frankly inconceivable until the midfielder rejoins the team. 

    Get well soon please Michael, we haven’t left our bedroom for three weeks now.

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