Of rugby, soccer and editors in therapy

My first break in journalism was given to me by Rob Hardie, one of the editors of the Derby Evening Telegraph (DET) in England. The newspaper covers the city of Derby and surrounds and is at the forefront of anything to do with Derby County Football Club (The team that won two league titles under Brian Clough and Dave Mackay — but you knew that).

When the editors decided to launch Sports Leader, they figured, that seeing as my background was heavily grounded in sport, how much damage could I do? By the end of June they’ll find out and you’ll get the chance to meet them at their local church. I find my editors tend to become highly religious after about a month of my postings. It’s not so much a question of finding God, but rather ducking calls — hopefully no more than that, what with gun licences so hard to come by — from irate fans.

Mind you it never did Rob Hardie and Darren at the DET any harm. Just keep taking the tablets guys…

Anyhow! Seeing as I have been roped in, I thought I would do the same thing that I did for Derby County but on a wider scale. Each posting will look at the latest news coming out of the Premiership and the Championship

Yes, I will be slaughtering Manchester United on almostl every single posting. That aside I hope to keep you up to date with the stories doing the rounds in English Football.

In addition I will do a rugby round-up heavily slanted in favour of those magnificent Blue Bulls that I have loved and adored my whole life … with the odd scrap of information about the rest of the no-hopers.

A couple of items :

I write columns with Jake White in his newly launched blog which you can find here.

In addition Will Carling has started a lovely message board type thingy called Rucku.

Will really is a wonderful guy who sends out tons of funny stuff. The site is filling up with fans from around the world but seems to overloaded with those fecking Welshmen! Lets hope they don’t win the Six Nations in a hurry again. They’ve been telling us how they’re going to slaughter the Bokke next month.

They were a bit concerned about the xenophobia but I reassured them that we’d be putting the whole squad into a witness protection program. The only thing we were concerned about was whether they’d be able to play properly while wearing those fake Groucho Marx combination glasses and moustache masks and full length raincoats with the collars turned up.

Then I waffled something about if you’ve got your health who cares about the results…or something like that.

I hope you lot are going to enjoy this. If you don’t have a sense of humour don’t bother dropping in. This one is going to be a virtual pub (Gary Archer) with poses left at the door.