Well I Wonder

Scotch John has delved greedily into the transfer market and licked up Stefan Oakes from Notts County. He’ll have to be decent otherwise he’ll be permanently known as the “cuntwhohandballedatFilbertStreetthecunt”. Obviously Honest John started banging one out when Oakes let fly from range™ in the home defeat to the Moody Magpies earlier in the season.

It is breathtaking, however, to see how many times so-called mangers just buy anyone who has a decent game against the side they manage. Oakes sealed that deal when he scored at Adams Park earlier in the season. I can categorically state that without that goal he would not be a Wycombe player.

Remember Manchester United signing Karel Poborsky after Euro 96. “We’ve had our eye on him for some time” the PLC idiots drooled. Course they had. Bollocks. Remember Wycombe buying Glyn Creaser after he laid out Oxon’s Mark West. Some things never change.

Now Oakes is being touted as a midfield general, a playmaker, a dream-catcher. Yet he can’t run the team by himself. Friendly John has been crowing about 4-3-3, but that means fuck all in this league. Oakes didn’t inspire County to a decent finish and it will take more than some chubby ex-Premiership fella pinging long balls and having generic pot shots to get Wycombe into the play-off zone next season.

Work to be done Upbeat John, work to be done.

For the love of God, leave now

Media pundit and all-round washed-up footballer Steve Claridge was bleating in the press again this weekend that Wycombe's contract offer is abysmal.

"I've consulted minimum-wage legislation and to my surprise the first offer I've been given is actually legal. But if I take it, after driving in to training three times a week I would only just break even," the gambling addict droned to the Sunday People. This is a man who boasts in his autobiography that he regularly lost five figure sums on various reeling, decrepit nags around the country. Perhaps Scotch John would have offered him a more lucrative deal if he had managed to score just a single goal in the last 12 (twelve) games of the season.

Claridge was a strange signing and one that did not pay off at all. He was on big appearance money at Wycombe, and his total of four goals in 19 games is an indictment of the chummy "my mates" management style of Grinner Gorman. Claridge lumbered round the pitch like a man of 67, which is what he is, of course. Rolling your socks down and puffing out your cheeks might be good advice for a up and coming prostitute but it does fuck all in League Two.

Go now Claridge, go to your media friends and your gambling pals. Rake in the money on the after-dinner circuit but do not force us to watch another minute of your stinking, wretched play. You got paid to do something you never really managed. Now there's the door, please use it.

You're The One For Me Fatty

Vaguely encouraging news from the Meat Clinic this week as Pakky Jones, the Chinnor barber, decided not to press charges on a consignment of ducks' eyes that he ate at Alf the Chum's wedding (to a Nigerian oil rigger). As you know, one of "them eyes" was loose and he briefly caught AIDS, but the doctor has said it is temporary or inoperable and we at the Clinic are safe from legal action for another week.

Vaguely encouraging news from Wycombe too, as Honest Scotch John actually signs a player under the age of 47. I've never seen Charlie Griffin play but if the reports of him as deceptively quick, burly and capable of scoring in the Conference are to believed then surely he is the reincarnation of Keith Scott.

Now who was the manager who took Scotty into the Premiership again?

Matt Bloomfield and Mike Williamson have gunked one onto the dotted line too, two years apiece and both of them have decent spell. Aye, Christmas and Easter. Still, they are decent monkeys each and another indication of Timber Tone's roving eye when it comes to talent. The current vogue at the club to maintain Adams is a lunatic is surprising when he shaped the current team but there you go. Tyson and Bloomfield or Claridge and Lee?

There's no need to answer, I can see the egg dribbling down your face.

Best meat for this weekend: Cup Final Chump Chop

Outpost Of Tyranny

There are a tiny minority of Wycombe fans who will be glad to see Carlisle back on the agenda for 2005-06, but most will be sickened. Neanderthals occupy the ragged heathen rock in that northern outpost and the knuckle-dragging apes will no doubt be straining to get back onto the pitch when they travel to Adams Park next season.

Veterans of the trips in 1993-94 will not forget the climate of shame that blights the Cumbrian air, this is one town that has serious issues.

Carlisle’s footballing son is Steve Harkness, a player who somehow made it to Liverpool during his career, though he is remembered by a dwindling band. He is most notable for statutory racism throughout his career. He is a vile man but no doubt a folk hero in the inbred, disillusioned sheep-sheds of the county.

He is a figurehead for the town, the region and everything it stands for. We can only prepare ourselves for the hideous scenes that await.

Smack My Twitch Up

How satisfying it was to see jowl-faced failure Harry Ratknapp take his Southampton team into the lower leagues after arrogantly predicting he would keep them up.

The media infatuation with Ratknapp is sickening in the highest; he has never won a trophy, he has never actually achieved anything and his reputation seems to be based on a youth policy at West Ham that he had nothing to do with. Ratknapp stitched up his "mate" Billy Bonds when he got the job at Upton Park, he stitched up tactical nonce Rix when he moved to Portsmouth, yet when he is on the end of some boardroom manoeuvring he squeals like a pig to his friends in the gutter press.

It will be no surprise if he quits his job now, leaving another club in turmoil and increasing the number of people who can see how relentlessly he urinates on the morals of professional football.

English Landscape Tradition

The horror unfolding at Manchester United in the last few days has no doubt cheered some of the more clueless post-Euro '96 era supporters that blight the national game. Their plastic loathing of Manchester United runs contrary to the truth, which is that a vast majority of that club's fans are local people from Manchester who thanks to the weakness of the business system now face a future with their club in pieces.

If you feel any sympathy for the plight of Wrexham then the same emotions should be present for the greedy meddlings of Malcolm Glazer. Both scenarios have arisen because soulless capitalists have seen opportunities to sift more cash from the fans into their back pockets. This is what happens when something as cultural as football sells its soul to the money men.

Who are all the people constantly telling fans that revenue streams and advertising are so important? Ah, what a surprise: it's the very same people who stand to benefit from the extra cash. Do the supporters get anything extra? No, just a seat for £25 when it used to be £7 to stand. Perhaps the implosion of Manchester United will finally shake football out if its dreary dance with money but I fear not. The moneymen see profit in everything - they are the people at IBM who sold computers to the Nazis to keep track of the holocaust, they are the people who buy water companies in South America and cut off the supply to anyone who cannot afford the vastly increased prices.

This is a global virus and it won't stop until there is nothing left to feast on. And even then they'll auction off the bones.

Favours In The Beetroot Fields

To no-one's great surprise, the festering cultural vermin known as London Wasps have announced that they will be playing in High Wycombe (clue: it's not in London) for an indefinite period, perhaps 20 years.

How many more innocent Sands children will have been run down by gurning Thatcherite rugby fans in charge of 4x4s in 20 years? Well hopefully the world's oil supply (drained daily by Wasps supporters using their all-terrain vehicles to go upstairs to clean their teeth) will have run out by then and there will be keening death mobs waiting at every corner, ready to stone to death anyone wearing a wax jacket.

That is a dream, the reality is more horrific.

Wasps Chief Executive David Davies changes his mind more often than the Meat Clinic changes tripe trays and from a sneering position last week he is now planning a long term association between the two "sports clubs". Idiocy abounds here.

Wasps bleat on like condemned sheep that Adams Park needs to be expanded as part of their plan to conquer Europe (yes all two of the countries that play the 'game'), yet for their MASSIVE play-off game last weekend against Sale Sharks they achieved an attendance of just 5,824.

Compare this with Wycombe's gate against Northampton in March when the Chairboys hauled in a resectable crowd of 7,417. This was an evening kick-off, not to mention a match in the bottom division yet it is London Wasps who meddle and plan expansion and roadbuilding projects like a inbred Hausmann. They simply cannot accept the fact that their sport is having a short-lived upturn thanks to the tedious exploits in Australia in 2003, but they must.

More importantly, if WWFC get dragged into helping with the costs of any stadium expansion it will be the biggest mistake since they installed CCTV in the West Wycombe caves. There is no need for it and it will drag Wasps into their deserved grave. Rugby has an international following as it is a good day out for Hugh and Jeremy from the merchant bank, but there is simply no culture of following your club up and down the country through thick and thin, and it is this fact that will condemn the 'game' in the long-term. If a hockey team had asked to share and subsequently expand Wycombe's ground after the 1988 Olympics, where would we be now? The current situation is no different.

The Wycombe board must bat away the arrogance of Wasps and secure the long-term stability of the football club. Apologists will jerk around and yelp about the 300k that Wasps bring to the coffers, but now they have got their feet under the table and will be asking for facility upgrades, helicopter pads and drug-testing avoidance schemes.

It was only supposed to be temporary but now it stretches into the distance like the western front. It'll all be over by Christmas, they said, but they were wrong.

Contractually Unfirm

Scotch John's first batch of steamy contracts have come sliding off the Adams Park presses. Flymo Frank and The Key are the first two players to have gripped the club pen and dribbled some ink onto the dotted line.

Talia seems to have rescued his career from nowhere. This time last year he was working naked on a farm and using a scythe to trim his pubic hair. A year later and he has added some Australian charm (sic) into the Wycombe defence, and now he has his reward. His howler against Bury will take some forgetting but everyone makes mistakes and he deserves a chance to have a relaxing summer drinking Bloody Marys in the back garden.

Philo deserves a chance as this season was shattered like a toblerone in pre-season. The ignimony of being Tony Adams' favourite son led poor Mark to cave in his femur with a rock. Nonetheless, he's recovered now and the Meat Clinic are promising to give him a meat-based meat pie for every goal he scores in 2005-06.

There is trouble ahead on the contract front, though, and it concerns Happy John's love of wily experience, namely Steve Claridge.

If the old man of Channel Five gets a new contract then it is surely a sickening indictment of the Gorman regime. His knees are buckled and his hope is gone. Time to put him to sleep or let him end his days in a grassy paddock, with insects feasting on his shank. He's aimiable enough and puts ridiculous bets on horses so is automatically a hero to the "working man", but the truth is he cannot run anymore. He is Trevor Aylott with a TV deal and a metal shin. Thanks for the memories but I can't remember what you did.

The goalnets at Rochdale are still laughing.