LAST WEEK wasn't the best of English or Scottish football but it was a vintage one for Johnny Giles, Eamon Dunphy and Bill O'Herlihy who surveyed the wreckage of the cross-channel clubs' European ambitions on Wednesday night. After watching Manchester United's 1-0 thrashing in Turin, Dunphy declared that the English game was like "It's a Knockout' compared to the European model and was "infused with stupidity".
O'Herlihy asked Dunphy and Giles: "What made the difference tonight? What made a Premiership team that won the double be so convincingly outclassed - what was the distinctively different thing tonight?" "Juventus had the better players, Bill," replied Johnny `tell it like it is' Giles.
Not the best of weeks either for Arsenal . . . but then is any week good for the Gunners these days? First they lost at home to Borussia Moenchengladbach in the UEFA Cup, then Stewart Houston left the tea-lady in charge of the first team while the new manager tries to get out of Japan and finally, to cap it all, club captain Tony Adams admitted he was an alcoholic.
Sky News took a strong interest in Adams' plight and went so far as sending their intrepid reporter to the player's local pub, The Chequers in Hornchurch, to interview the landlady. Instead of hearing her complain that the takings would take a plunge now that Adams was on the wagon the owner wished him all the best and hoped he would return soon to his career as a professional offside-appealer which clearly wasn't what the reporter wanted to hear at all.
Meanwhile Adams' former manager George Graham, was in the news at the beginning of the wee after his appointment as Leeds boss. On Saturday BBC's Football Focus replayed an interview with Graham, in his back garden, from last May when he spoke of his desire to get back in to the game.
"I'm ready to return to management even though I love my garden - it brings out my creative instincts," he said while slightly obscuring a view of five geraniums in a neat line (all with one petal sticking up in the air) and a lanky tulip on its own at the other end of the lawn.
One of his former geraniums, David O'Leary, spent the week denying that Graham had been in touch with him about the assistant manager's job at Elland Road, but stopped just short of holding up a placard displaying his home phone number.
O'Leary appeared on Sky Sports Centre on Thursday and Friday evening and Football Focus and Match of the Day on Saturday, extolling the virtues of Graham's managerial skills while pointing out that the assistant's post at Elland Road would be a great learning to process for him. He also wished Stewart Houston, regarded as his main rival for the job of Graham's deputy, success at QPR even though he hadn't actually been given the job yet. Subtle or what?
If Wimbledon FC pack up all, their possessions and head for Dublin in the near future, club captain Vinnie Jones may have trouble running his smallholding in Hertfordshire. Sky Sports Centre showed us the agricultural side of our Vinnie on Friday and over a shot of a pigs attempting to bite the ear of a sheep, the midfield maestro told us how easily he was adapting to The Good Life.
"I've had a go at it and I'm doing, well. I'm rearing the animals and,, you know, mating them all properly the pigs ain't mating the sheep yet so I think I'm doing quite well," said Vinnie as one of his shigs walked by.
In his preview for Wimbledon's match against West Ham on Saturday our Vinnie went about explaining why the Hammers weren't having such a great start to the season, despite some big signings during the summer.
"West Ham's supposed to be the Academy of Football but they've got all these foreign players in. I don't know what the atmosphere must be like down there - if they can't speak English or anything how can you have the crack with them. My experience is they're a bit miserable, the old foreigners," said the Premiership's very own Eurosceptic.
And `miserable' is the only word, to describe Bruno Brooks these days. The former BBC Radio 1 DJ and Top of the Pops host is the presenter of Sky Sports' angling programme, Tight Lines, and is showing about as much enthusiasm for the sport as your average salmon.
During the phone-in on last week's edition, when struggling anglers got the chance to ask the experts for advice, David from St Andrews wanted to know how he could fish blood worm on a weedy bottom.
Keith, the expert on weedy bottoms, smiled knowingly and told David all he had to do was glue foam to some metal, stick it on his line, chuck it in and hey presto, all the silly blood worm leave the safe haven of the weedy bottom and head straight for the bait. "Wow," said Bruno, "that's fantastic." And with that the former pop-picker collapsed in to a coma.
Mark Lawrenson is much more at home with his subject on the channel's Sports Saturday programme but looked less than comfortable with the new arrangements made for the footie experts to view the afternoon's games. Last season Lawro and George Best, or whoever was on duty on a given Saturday, were simply packed into a back room to watch a couple of matches live and then returned at full time to give their verdicts on the action.
But not this season - no, Sky have invested in what looks remarkably like an Air Traffic Control centre in the corner of the studio where they now lodge three of their experts, complete with headphones, who watch the matches on monitors and howl loudly any time something happens.
Lawro clearly had enough of looking silly every week so offered Frank McClintock his seat on Saturday. Frank was having a fine time until, while giving an update on the match at Goodison Park, he took his eyes off the screen and missed a Middlesbrough goal. "Eh, Barmby scored there, I think . . . or it could have been Juninho, maybe," said a struggling McClintock as Lawro grinned at the other side of the studio.
