Virtual Methodist

Being a sports fan is an up and down business… more down than up if you’re an Arsenal fan at the moment… but I won’t rub salt into the gaping wound there… It's even more complicated if you participate in the myriad "fantasy" competitions out there, where you can end up wanting your team to win but not by too much, incase any of your fantasy players incur too many points against them. I'm currently registered with 6 different fantasy leagues - four football (that is real football for all you American readers out there... you know, the sort played with your feet!) and 2 World Cup Rugby ones. However, things have been so busy lately I haven't had time to look next nor near them, except to register the fact that I was effectively bottom in all of them. However, until Sunday it was a good weekend, for me… Ulster won convincingly against Cardiff in the rain on Friday night… Then Saturday morning Ireland put all their fans through the wringer as they won a close encou...

For me, this week has been dominated by 2 news stories emanating from 2 states with similar, but not identical flags… Being a Liverpool fan, much of my week was marked by the ups and downs of the attempts to oust former owners Hicks and Gillett and sell the club to the Boston Redsox owner John Henry and his NESV consortium... I know that exchanging one American owner for another may seem like a frying-pan/fire situation, but I'm also a Redsox fan and I like what they did there, and anyway, nothing could be worse than the gruesome twosome. However, to wake up on Thursday morning hearing that Tom Hicks had taken out an injunction in a Texas court against the sale of the club, raised in me an unbelievable antipathy to the so-called Lone Star State… Thankfully by the end of the next day the injunction had been lifted and the deal with NESV was done , but it was not a good way to start the day… It stood in huge contrast to how the previous day began, with much celebratory waving of a si...