Friday, June 02, 2006

God I hate Simon Barnes

Simon Barnes is chief sports writer for The Times. He has an emotive, honey drip style of sentiment and sick making pastiche that makes me want to tear the paper to shreds most mornings.

Problem is though, on occasion he writes pieces that feel like they’ve been spinning round my head for a couple of weeks, before suddenly being laid out in front of my eyes. So completely spot on, that you spend the entire article nodding sagely and emitting small ‘uhu’ type noises. He wrote a front page piece on July 7th last year - the day after we won the Olympics - which had my heart in my mouth with excitement.

This morning’s offering was just such an occasion.

I’ve been quietly thinking, but hardly daring to breathe it that I think Beckham’s gonna be ‘the man’ in Germany. There has been so little attention focussed on this one time national obsession that he’s shed the shackles entirely. Away from prying English eyes, he’s arguably been Madrid’s best player for the past 2 seasons, all be it in a side of faded glory, but nonetheless IT'S REAL MADRID. Then on Tuesday he produced his best performance in an England shirt for years. It’s something that Barnes summed up perfectly.


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Great. You've bleedin' jinxed him now.

Crispin Heath said...

No I haven't. I didn't say anything. I purposely didn't. Barnes said it first. Nothing to do with me guv.

David with my record do you think I dare make any predictions. I posted about Hoggard and he's bowled like a novice this morning, I should really just butt out.

Anonymous said...

Lol. In fairness the ri Lankans have batted well (and the poor decisions from Hair evened out. Sanga was out caught behind but Hair missed it but then gave an equally atrocious decision later). Will be a very interesting test if Murali gets enough runs to bowl at.

Crispin Heath said...

I have to admit I've only been reading Cricinfo, but his first spell seemed all over the place, with liberally sprinkled no balls most unhoggsterlike

Span Ows said...

WTF! Shut up about the Cricket you two - this is about DB - I really hope you are right NO, NO!!! I mean that I really hope Barnes is right...DB has certainly played well for RM - he's a bit of a favourite with the 'merengues' that I kind of like the feeling of...wierd

Lucy said...

Simon Barnes acknowledges Henman is a fine Tennis player!
I like him ;)

Crispin Heath said...

Problem with Henman was he was always too nice. I hink that's why he never got the respect he deserved for being a very high quality player for 5 or 6 years. It may also have been why he never won a major though.

The failure stuff always always drove me crackers. At wimbledon he consistently outperformed his ranking yet everyone said he was a loser. I guess he's an easy target. If he'd been stuart Pearce no one would have got on his back like they did.

Anonymous said...

a bit late to say, but mostly i hate Simon Barnes too. His ultra feminism and right on opinions, and describing Bradley Wiggins winning the tour de france as an amuse bouche before the olympics had been feeling almost physical pain.