The men who have shouldered the blame this season

On matchday, Premier League football fans need three things to sustain their interest in the beautiful game: an overpriced ticket for a flimsy plastic seat, a weak pint (to be consumed away from the playing surface, Mr Ashley) and a good scapegoat on which to blame the entire team’s shortcomings.

Here’s the top ten players and managers who have been made to bear the brunt of their club’s collective sins in 2008/09 thus far…

Nicklas Bendtner (Arsenal)
The Spoiler’s Arsenal correspondent claims that Bendtner has overtaken Emmanuel Eboue in the Emirates scapegoat stakes, being vilified to such an extent on Saturday that Emmanuel Adebayor received a hero’s reception when he was brought off the bench to offer some firepower.

Jermaine Jenas (Tottenham)
Heurelho Gomes has put in a sturdy challenge in recent weeks but he still has a fair way to go before toppling Jenas, who has been the main subject of clenched fists and growling at White Hart Lane for a few years now.

Florent Malouda (Chelsea)
Apparently being the midfielder who has provided the most assists in the Premier League this season isn’t enough to save you from abuse when you occasionally misplace a pass or have the audacity to have a shot saved.

Luis Boa Morte (West Ham)
Holds the dubious honour of being one of the only players in the world

But the Spaniard fails to convince The Spoiler

David Bentley was axed from Tottenham’s 18-man squad for the 2-0 UEFA Cup loss to Udinese but Juande Ramos denied dropping the winger because he had labelled the club’s season “shocking” and “a bit shit”. Ramos said:

“I just had to choose 18 players from out of 20. I don’t know about his comments.”

The main reason The Spoiler refuses to believe this is because Ramos had included Bentley in his eighteen for every previous game this season and while he was poor against Stoke, he wasn’t much worse than the other midfielders on show that day like Luka Modric and Jermaine Jenas, both of whom made the Udinese squad.

And surely being excluded was a big enough blow to Bentley’s sizable ego without Ramos compounding it by declaring to the media that he considered him one of the two worst players available to him?

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

The model who completed Gabby’s WAG hat-trick

In the realm of Premier League swordsmen, Aston Villa’s Gabriel Agbonlahor takes some beating. According to the News of the World, the Brummie forward has managed to cheat on three separate WAGs, impregnating each of them. The most aesthetically pleasing of the scorned trio is Tia Hithersay, an air hostess and glamour model from Derby.

None of these men are the new Pele…

Everyone makes mistakes. After all, wasn’t it someone at Channel 4 who once thought it a delightful idea to lock a beautiful Indian woman in a room with a mob of angry racists? That didn’t quite work out as hoped. Other bad ideas have included - the quarter pounder WITHOUT cheese, fingerless gloves, blind chainsaw practice, and Davina McCall. All of those, however, pale in comparison to this little lot. Terrible decisions the lot of them.

GK Richard Wright
Looked so good when he was hurling himself around at the back for Ipwswich, but then he went to Arsenal and Everton, and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that he wasn’t a very good goalkeeper. Now, he’s not really wanted at West Ham, but everyone’s too scared to tell him. That’s what happens when you’re tall, people just whisper behind your back.

DL Wayne Bridge
That he’s been at Chelsea since 2003, happy to play second fiddle to the world’s second most irksome figure (behind Mugabe), Ashley Cole, tells you everything you need to know about Wayne Bridge. He doesn’t really want to play football.

DC Jonathan Woodgate
Real Madrid thought him worthy of £13.4 million, then he scored an own goal and got a red card on his debut. If anything, it’s been downhill from there. Made of balsa wood.

And so the football season comes to a dramatic halt, with very dodgy happenings over in Boro - something stinks, and for once it isn’t Jermain Defoe’s finger. Either way, with the top and bottom sorted, the players thought it necessary to go out on the razzle-dazzle. Fashionable Movida was the place to be.

Of course, as expected, Jermain Defoe was his usual slippery self, persuading a cheerful brunette that she should just get in the car and return with him to his dreamy bachelor pad - there, he would no doubt pop on some light Jazz music, spark up a joss-stick, then make some seriously oily love to her until the sun rose, or his alarm clock went off (whichever came first). Lots of that is assumption, but probably happened.

As excellent evening programmes like Location, Location, Location prove beyond any reasonable doubt, moving house is an almighty bummer, and if you didn’t have people working for you - preferably a smug man in a suit, and a horsey woman who you probably ‘would’ - it would be even worse. So much red tape. And what the hell is stamp duty anyway?

Which leads usefully to Jermaine Jenas, he who has been so richly gifted with football skills, and yet is currently in the throws of a massive house move

What are we now? It’s like Tuesday or something, and yet Jermaine Jenas is still out on the town bathing himself in champagne, wearing shiny black shirts, and glancing lustfully at women to celebrate winning the Carling Cup.

Like the rest of the Spurs team, he was at Faces nightclub on Sunday night to watch Ledley King morph into an angry drunk, but even the possibility of a smacked bottom from Juande Ramos couldn’t stop him embarking on night two down at the

Impact of Liverpool’s Spaniard more profound than originally thought

In response to this week’s poll of 2,500 women by that website which bought Ebbsfleet, and which determined that Wayne Rooney is the ugliest player in the world, we asked our users to take a deep breath and explore their feelings about players at the other end of the scale. Results show that Fernando Torres is the player most men would sleep with “if they had to go with a Premier League player.”

Torres was by far and away the winner with 35 per cent of the total vote. One respondent said “He’s more attractive than my last girlfriend,” and another “I’d probably go with him even if I didn’t have to.”

Second place went to Spurs’ Jermain