BBC exile still accepted by lovers of lentils, sandals and beards

In case you didn’t know, popular sex addict and keen West Ham supporter Russell brand likes to show his command of unnecessarily big words in a weekly Guardian sport column. According to our mole at Guardian HQ, he will be scribbling his thoughts in tomorrow’s edition of the paper - whether he talks about his conquests or poorly-thought out gag that was blown hideously out of proportion remains to be seen.

(An unfortunate victim of the whole ManuelGate scandal is Brand’s Radio 2 co-host Matt Morgan: he was away on holiday when the incident occurred, and returned to find his stable source of income no longer existed.)

Thanks for your concern Spain, but England’s most gifted player could probably do without the ghoulish speculation just at the moment.

As reported in last week’s Guardian, players with more than five seasons of Italian football in the 1980s and 1990s have reason to worry after fifty-one professional and amateur sportsmen died of Lou Gehrig’s disease - that’s six times more than the non-sporting national average. And now the Spanish press at Sport have taken the report and gone in search of fresh victims.

The disease is named after the great New York Yankees player, Lou Gehrig, who died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941. As conditions go, it’s horrible, causing a swift onset of paralysis, weakening of the muscles and slurring of the speech, while the mind stays perfectly tuned in. It’s fatal.

Crafty British broadsheet identifies the vandal in the Chelsea line up who ruined all their dreams

The young men at the Guardian’s daily football email The Fiver, though over-educated and known to get through eight pints of sarcasm of an evening, have put their weakness for detective drama to good use for once. They have cleverly deconstructed Chelsea’s season and in a piece of deduction worthy of the great Christie - that’s the crone Agatha, not the seventies pop group responsible for Yellow River - to reveal the malign spirit putrefying the core of CFC. If you wish the identity of the villain to be revealed, read on.

(If you wish to subscribe to The Fiver, or read today’s The Fiver in its entirety go here.)

“As Avram Grant drags his surly also-rans up to Goodison Park for tonight’s tryst with Everton - a match that’s been rendered as meaningless as zgfhzxkagkatyg by Chelsea’s flower show against Wigan on Monday - there’s one key question the Fiver feels compelled to answer: who is Chelsea’s weakest link? Before considering the evidence, we can, of course, rule out two unlikely

As the Newcastle monster devours the last morsels of its Big Sam meal, an unqualified local awaits his turn…

Were there such a thing as a map of national fiasco, Newcastle would be the biggest dot in the country. But if you think that hard-earned reputation will fade when Sam Allardyce’s rage-filled pantomime rolls out of town, as it surely must soon, think again.

An even greater calamity is set to take over at the North East’s Regional Theatre of Unintentional Comedy in the form of the Alan Shearer show, a short play in which a large group of beer-bellied proles grow increasingly bitter as they realize the man they believed was a messiah turns out to be beyond useless.

Richard Williams, writing in the Guardian last week, claimed Shearer was too grand to consider serving an apprenticeship before taking over at Newcastle, or even England.

Yet for all Shearer’s popularity - and gigantic sense of self-worth - Mike Ashley need only glance at Match of the Day each week to gain a sense that his reading of the game is unlikely to trouble the greater tactical brains of the Premier League. In fact, Shearer manages to pull off the improbable feat of saying nothing yet still managing to contradict himself.

His most recent display of insubstantial punditry came last Saturday, December 29. The “highlights” are as follows…