http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010 ... -tottenham
Something Bad Will Surely Follow
* Scott Murray
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 May 2010 15.46 BST
Typical! Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images
TYPICAL BEHAVIOUR
As anyone who has devoted more than 0.0000000000000432 milliseconds of their lives to football can tell you, Manchester-based soccer outfit Typical City FC have been a complete shower for the best part of 90 years now. In 1925-26, they were relegated from the First Division despite having scored 89 goals, the highest total of any demoted team in history. They'd have avoided the drop had they not missed a penalty in their last match. The year after, it looked like they'd bounce straight back up, especially after they won 8-0 on the final day of the season. Sadly, Portsmouth won 5-1 that day too, pipping them on goal average by 0.0041 goals.
Typical City eventually did win promotion, and 10 years later won the league. Yay! Sadly, the following season saw them become England's first – and still to this day last – reigning champions to suffer relegation. It hardly needs pointing out that they'd scored more goals than anyone else in the division.
Typical City's next title, which came in 1968, had the edge taken off it a fortnight later when quiet neighbours United won the European Cup. City hoped to match their feat the following season, but crashed out of Europe at the first hurdle in humiliating fashion to Fenerbahçe. The next eight years brought an FA Cup, a Cup Winners' Cup and a League Cup, but between Dennis Tueart's famous 1976 scissor kick, and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan's arrival in 2008, Typical City only scored 17 goals in all competitions, at the rate of 0.53125 goals per season. Oh alright, we admit that's not right. We've rounded up the average just to make them look a bit better.
Anyway, thanks to Sheikh Mansour's big dangling coin purse, things have been very different for Typical City in recent times. They have done lots of deals. They have done lots of goals. And tonight they have a great chance to make a grab for fourth place in the Premier League and close in on a place in Big Cup, in their not-quite-win-or-bust game against Spurs.
Of course, even if Typical City thrash Spurs 11-0 tonight, something bad will surely follow. They will lose their final game at West Ham on Sunday, handing Spurs a lifeline. They will lose their qualifying match for Big Cup and drop down into Big Vase, rendering the whole effort worthless. Or they will qualify for Big Cup and sign Fernando Torres for £80m, only to find the Spaniard has gone lame, that meanwhile David Ngog has inexplicably turned into the next Lionel Messi, and their new manager José Mourinho has been winging it all along, the Portuguese exposed as nothing more than the poor man's Brian Horton.
This is all baseless conjecture, though back in the real world Typical City are already turning wine into Special Water. The run-up to tonight's match has been clouded by a legal row, 'Arry Redknapp claiming Typical City last year threatened to artificially inflate the price of Wilson Palacios by bidding for the then-Wigan player, unless Spurs stood back to allow them a free run at buying Craig Bellamy from West Ham. Typical City are now thinking about hitting back with a lawsuit, a tactic with more than a whiff of the strong arm about it, and one which would finally see a once-popular club take over from Chelsea as the nation's No1 nouveau-riche pariahs – some feat as they've yet to win, or even look like winning, a single brass bean. Typical Typical City!
