If in doubt, look tough

Whenever a new generation comes through, it’s the job of the older generation to toughen them up, show them how to be men. This generally involves standing nonchalantly chatting with your feet as far apart as you can get them, or doing that back and forth drying motion with a towel between your legs after a swim. As far as we can tell, Fabregas has definitely done one of those things (pictured).

Everton star helps fuel the ’stupid footballers’ stereotype

Phil Neville may be a pretty decent footballer - in fact he’s the second best current player in his entire family - but there’s one game he can’t quite get the hang of.

Spartacus, Zaki

As any decent salesman will tell you, that Zaki is a gorgeous, beautiful bit of business. Just lovely. Well done Stevie Brucie. Tremendous, bulldozing player. Absolutely fantastic.

Looks a bit like Spartacus though, what with that silly hole in his chin.

The Tigers top local supporter base list

In what might rate as the the least shocking poll ever conducted, the folks at Top Up TV have discovered that Manchester Utd have the lowest level of local support, with just one on five of their fans coming from Manchester.

While the majority of Red Devils in this country would get a nosebleed if they travelled further north than the Watford Gap, it appears that the club with the strongest local following are the Arsenal-bashers from Hull, with 88 per cent of fans coming from the region.

Here’s the survey results in full, where you’ll notice the big four languishing at the bottom of the table, or the ‘Spurs end’ as it is commonly known:

Hull City 88%
Stoke City 85%
Wigan Athletic 80%
Newcastle United 77%
Middlesbrough 76%
Aston Villa 73%
Fulham 73%
Sunderland 67%
West Bromwich Albion 67%
West Ham United 66%

How to stop your team from scoring goals

Rival fans may have laughed at the fact that Tottenham finished eleventh last season after talking up their top-four credentials but one area where you couldn’t fault them was their knack of scoring goals. Their 66-goal haul was the fifth best in the league last season and even better than Chelsea’s. But Juande Ramos and Gus Poyet clearly weren’t happy with this free-scoring nature and set about enforcing a five-point plan to change things:

1. Get rid of Jermain Defoe
Juande logic: He might have scored 64 goals for the club from starting 110 games, but who needs Jermain Defoe when you’ve got Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov? By selling him to another club with European aspirations, Portsmouth, there’s no way it’ll come back and bite us. If anything, he’ll help drag them down to our level.
The reality: Defoe has scored thirteen goals in eighteen league starts for his new club and scored against Tottenham this weekend.

2. You don’t win anything with left-wingers
Juande logic: We may already have Jamie O’Hara, Didier Zokora, Tom Huddlestone, Jermaine Jenas and Aaron Lennon here already but what we really need is more midfielders who prefer playing in the centre or on the right. Bring in Luka Modric, David Bentley and Giovani dos Santos, it’ll be fun trying to figure out where to play them all. Who cares if Bentley got into the England squad for his performances on the right, let’s sling him on the left or behind the strikers. Luka Modric is known as the exciting, attacking impetus of the Croatia team but there’s no harm playing him as a holding player. Maybe I could throw him on the left too!
The reality: Spurs ended up starting Gilberto, who hasn’t looked too convincing in his preferred position of left-back, as an attacking left-winger against Portsmouth.

3. Sell one of the best strike forces in the Premier League
Juande logic: Robbie and Dimitar scored 46 goals between them last season for our bottom-half side, and the fans voted Robbie as player of the season but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to cope without them. They both say they want

Also appearing on a computer near you…

If you haven’t seen it yet, Paul Whitehouse’s football manager is not to be missed

WAG Gemma Atkinson’s 2009 Calendar
[Double Viking]

Video: Fernando Alonso’s drink problem
[Grid Crasher]

Brazilian footballer Thiago da Silva probably shouldn’t have split up with his girlfriend
[The Beautiful Game]

Is Andy Murray a West Ham fan?
[Polite Applause]

Qatar are building the world’s first underground football stadium
[With Leather]

Berbs says he will maybe have a crack at scoring some goals soon
[Football365]

… check out some of these German beauties

While Chris Waddle used to cultivate a mullet that any NASCAR enthusiast would be proud of, German footballers of the eighties really cornered the market on awesome hairstyles and  handlebar ‘face art’.

Visit our friends at Bild to see even more incredibly stylish barnets.

Yet another model who has experienced a Ronaldo steamrollering

This week, we were reminded of the existence of Cristiano Ronaldo’s summer project, and it just so happens that another of his loose-moraled partners has recently been talking to the media.

Niki Ghazian, a young model with whom the Portuguese man-o’-sex done it during his trip to Los Angeles, has shared some rather frank information with a popular men’s magazine. Apparently, the man who was too vain to remove his sunglasses during coitus also kept his his leg cast on:

“Yes, he was wearing his boot, but that story sounded like he was banging me on crutches. He had his cast on the whole time - not just when we were having sex.”