From The Centrifuge

It’s all a little bit exciting, if you’re me, which I am, to have revived something so Hanoverian as a literary feud! Such a back and forth brings to mind the savaging of John Rae by Charles Dickens post Franklin expedition (including the publication of Rae’s rejoinder in Household Words ), or the attacks by William Hazlitt on, well everyone. I only wish I had the intellectual vigour of a Hazlitt or indeed any of the great correspondents of the past, to be able to maintain a contiguous train of thought for longer than a lunch time, and to not to be interrupted and thus de-railed by something so mundane as a game of football. Still, to be galvanised at all in this age of short attention spans and antipathy to anything other than apathy is a miracle, and it is to football that, my wife’s scorn notwithstanding, I can give credit on this occasion. Swipe I set myself up for a pretty meaty swipe in retaliation for my retaliation previously . I sort-of lost the plot a little bit in places,

You know, I almost did a very stupid thing, and copied all of my most interesting tweets from Twitter into a blog post. I didn't. Not because it was a senselessly narcissistic thing to do, but rather it would show up what a completely dull twit I am. Outward gaze, latent writer, outward gaze...

I feel the need to raise the ugly spectre of my footballing allegiance this sunny Tuesday morning in response to some not unfounded criticism from an  understandably long-suffering Jack , now into the fourth (or fifth?) day of waiting for the delivery of a little Jack, and also a Swansea City fan of some years. I say not unfounded but playing to an anti “Plastic Scouser”* crowd is just going for cheap laughs if you ask me. So, a rebuttal it is. In no particular order, let’s start with punditry. Like all those in the harsh media spot light, the best football pundits are the ones who are unequivocal about their opinions. It doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong, as long as they invite comment and argument, otherwise what would be the point? An expert opinion is useful if one has to make a decision on something, but when the decision is out of your hands in the first place, the only use it serves is to make a prediction that can be debated endlessly for fun or to infuriate.