Managed to fix my computer. Had to replace the 48.4H503.011 power button board with one I purchased on an electronic auction site. The results are satisfactory, as you can all see.

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Opposition summary: Arsenal are the best team in the Premiership League that sound like a butt.

Prediction: Martial to be the new Henry by doing old Henry stuff that the old Henry used to do for the old Henry’s team except that the new Henry is better than the old Henry because he’s newer. Like a new iPhone or a new Land Rover Discovery. I’ve forgotten my point. 0-0 United.

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United’s newest German acquisition met me for coffee and told me that his favourite things are tropical fish, the smell of furniture wax and having a ridiculously long surname:

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  Tom (@tom_mcghee)

I ditched those two suckers for a weekend of haggis and bagpipes. Ruddy love Kent. Oh, and this week’s film review by Tom McGhee (me) is for The Lovely Bones (2009). The bones aren’t that lovely tbh, and that actress girl’s name is ridiculous. That aside, pretty good.

Prediction: 2 goals for Manchester to zero goals for Southampton. 0-0 United. 

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  Brett (@yourhousetonightx)

Of all the games that Vangle’s boys have faced, not only this season, but the season before that, and in fact it’s fair to say since before they were Vangle’s boys, going back as far as possible in the history books, to biblical times down the local park – martyrs for goalposts – this game is by far and without doubt the most recent.

I can’t wait to get to work and miss another game that Roondog starts.

Prediction: Danny with his customer satisfaction guarantee. Vangle to call on his familiar to do his bidding. I dunno. Just sounded edgy and mysterious. Like me, laydeez. If you’re reading this, the B-Dog is out with his dogz tonight, if you wanna hook up. It’ll probably just be me actually. And maybe an old couple. It’s not my mum and dad. Please hook up with me. I’m usually more funny than this irl. I can change. 0-0 United.

Ben (Benglorious):

By now, you should have experienced enough fallout from the Fulham travesty to be screaming for Moyes’ head to be removed, covered in tar and placed next to that unlucky Stark fellow’s bonce on the ramparts of King’s Landing.  A bit of sword-breathing, topless dragons and incestuous dwarf-action would serve as a very welcome distraction from the Afternoon of a Gazilbillion Ineffectual Crosses we all witnessed on Sunday, but who can afford a train ticket to Liverpool in this economy?

After the aforementioned debacle (always good to crowbar that word in whenever possible), a trip to Highbury would normally fill most fans with trepidation.  Luckily, that Art Deco colosseum is now a dog park.  Or a golf course.  Or a quarry.  I don’t know, it’s not like I’ve got all the information in the world at my fingertips, is it?  My point is that we have to go to the Emirates.  Which is thousands of miles away and you can’t even get a drink once you’re there.  That wasn’t actually my point.  My real point is that Arsenal appear to be the only team in the Premiership that still fear our broken band of misfits this season, and they’re also coming off the back of an absolute spanking at the hands of the most successful team that has an L4 postcode.

This means that we can probably take advantage of their shellshock with some solid wing-play and plenty of crossing to beat their shorter-than-average centre-halves.  Failing that, we could try playing the ball on the floor, maybe even getting the triumvirate (another great word carelessly shoehorned in) of Rooney, Mata and RVP linking up for some liquid football.  Like my commanding officer in ‘Nam used to say: “Liquid football equals goals, lads,”  before he lost both arms and both legs hunting buffalo in Hoi An back in ’71.  I don’t know why he stopped saying it after his mishap, he could still speak perfectly normally, but something had inexplicably driven him into a state of depression which led to our eventual mutiny two days later.  The rest is history.  Not history that you’ll read anywhere, so it’s probably for the best if you don’t try and look it up.

The other, and far more likely option, is that Arsenal will be looking for some sort of Chuck Norris-style revenge after their drubbing, and, luckily for them, it just so happens that it’s their old rivals from up the [look up name of London-Manchester motorway in road atlas] who are next on “the most unfair fixture list in the history of football”- D. Moyes, 2013/4.

Prediction:  Hopefully Moyes has finally woken up to the fact that nothing is working on the wings, so will change tack.  We all know he won’t, so I’m going for a cracking goal-fest of 3-2 to Arsenal, with goals from Thierry Henry, Charlie Nicholas and Kim Kardashian.  United’s will be two Rafael headers off crosses from Phil Jones, and all the players will shake hands at the end and go off to enjoy various jellies and ice cream.

I realise that’s all a bit doom and gloom so I’d like to finish with a Smiths song that I’ve changed the lyrics to.

About the author:  I seen some things, man.

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Tom (@Tom_McGhee):

With Arsenal’s inexorable decline now in full swing and United’s march on a 21st title a mere formality, there’s never been a better time to play the true blue gunner gooners. Indeed, coming off the back of such a crushing defeat, the fact that Arsene is still in a job – 81 crosses!? – whilst our David simply goes from strength to strength, can only make the coming fixture seem like a stroll in the park for United. So much so, it’s hardly worth discussing further; even their Gollum lookalike has nowt on our Dave (Moyes lends Smeagol a certain gravitas –  Ozil just has big eyes).

So what to expect? With Wenger desperately clinging to the vain hope of 4th place and the Champions being in such devastating form – and they said our midfield wasnt up to it! – I expect a high tempo passing game, with players in their correct positions and scoring chance after chance in a dazzling display of creativity and adventure; Arsenal will probably just stick to playing hoofball  – and I do feel bad flogging a dead horse –  trying cross after inaccurate cross in the misguided hope that at some point Van Per…Giroud can maybe get a lucky touch to somehow score. And whilst it seems slightly unkind to mock the afflicted, with our back four, in the form they’re in, I just can’t see that as anything other than completely naive.

Prediction: This being the case, it’s very hard to see past a routine victory for a United team who’ve broken records wherever they’ve played this season, and I can only predict a 16-0 rout  (Wayne scoring the first 8 and dedicating them to the fans he’s always loved) and Arsene collecting his P45.

Disclaimer: please excuse any poor grammar etc – I was pelted with rocks earlier this week (We had a powercut and I produced a torch…. the villagers did not like it) and received quite a serious blunt trauma to the head. No side effects so far.

Brett:

With our proclivity to lose hope, I’m only listing positives…

*press play before reading on*

Okay, you can start reading the list when the vocal comes in. Wait. Okay, here it comes … no, wait, it’s coming up now… no, wait. Here it is … no. Okay, here it comes … no, wait, it’s coming up now… no, wait. Here it is … no. Okay, here it comes … no, wait, it’s coming up now… no, wait. Here it is … no. After this loop … no. Dum-dum-dum, oh yeah, I remember now, here it comes… no. After this loop … no. Dum-dum-dum, oh yeah, it’s a good loop this … Aaaand now, here it comes… no. Okay, just wait for the vocal and then proceed to the list…

1. Dying inside is not real dying.

As for Arsenal…

When they were buying Ozil I was in Madrid and the fans on the telly phone-ins were very happy to see him go because they thought he was a right ‘perezoso tal y por lo’. When I came back from Madrid I shared this information in the interests of making myself appear knowledgeable. I remind you of this now, not because I want to be able to tell you ‘I told you so’ when it all goes wrong, but because … oh no, wait, that is why I’m doing it.

Prediction: 1-2. Danny with his customary two, both cross-cum-shots. Not like that.

I was asked a couple of years back which other player Danny reminded me of the most and, without pausing for breath, I replied: “Henry” because he did … a little bit. It was met with such unexpectedly high levels of derision that, to save face; to pretend I wasn’t wounded – and that in fact I felt I should be the one laughing at them, not the other way around; that they were the ones who’d gotten it so catastrophically wrong – I had no choice: no choice but to forego my usual equanimity.  From that point onwards, where Danny was concerned, I went dark; darker even than that: fluorescent dark, I’m talking real messed up. I trained myself to make reference to Danny’s similarities with Henry whenever there was the slightest hint of one, and especially where there wasn’t; the obscurer the better. I was the saline drip (Oi! Who said without the saline?!) of the Welbeck Trust, slowly administering the comparison into their bloodstream. The problem was, these other people were armed with antibodies and things; things like facts and evidence and strong opinions and relatively well articulated arguments, not to mention bitterness, bad manners and I’m pretty sure I saw all of them steal from the ‘dogs for the blind’ box at the bar – and so you see, being as I am, oil to their water – armed with only love and hope – I had no choice.

If anyone so much as owned, let alone raised, an eyebrow when Danny was unfortunate enough to have mistimed an attempt on goal on account of all that overt dynamicness (“scuffed a pea-roller harmlessly wide from eight yards”), they’d have me coming at ‘em like a distressed seagull (only with a beard and therefore more handsome): “YOU REALLY THINK HENRY SCORED EVERY TIME HE TOOK  A SHOT?! WELL DO YOU?! ANSWER ME?!” I’d say, but cleverer than that and with some longer words in it, I don’t remember which ones, it’s not important. Friends. Family. Children. Pets. Inanimate objects. Objects. Lists of objects. No-one or nothing was gonna have a bad word to say about Danny with Henry getting away with it. All the time I was crossing my fingers under the table – hoping that I just had to wait it out.

Loving Danny is easy, ‘cus he’s beautiful. I love Danny to bits. Loads of United fans do. Some don’t, but that’s something they’ll grow out of, so long as they can outrun the released hounds. It’s a no-brainer. He’s stockpiling boxes for us to tick as we speak. However, it’s not traitorous to note that his finishing has lacked the consistency we’d all perhaps wished he’d have by now and that when in full slalom, the ball occasionally intertwines itself betwixt his feet more by happy accident than design. When you’ve fallen in love with someone though, these little things are nothing more than adorable idiosyncrasies: “It’s no biggy Danny, we still love yer,” we whisper into our cups of tea.  Besides, we’ve all seen enough of Danny’s finishing, when it is more instinctive, or of confident mind, and enough penetrating runs with the ball absolutely in control, to recognise these as mere wrinkles that he’ll iron out over time, rather than something terminal.

Those people I used to hang out with have since moved on to sit at a different table in the pub, and so with Danny in the ascendancy, and receiving praise from all corners this summer, I thought I’d reiterate my feelings regarding the Henry comparison on Twitter, to see if I could recruit some digital allies. The abuse was swift, stealth like; amongst it a couple of death threats (hastily retracted) and some jip from United fans: “#Idiotz lik u giv us a bad gnome…”, etc. My tweet went something like this (actually, this is it verbatim): “Danny is better than Henry was when he first moved to Arsenal. Henry moved to Arsenal when he was 22 years old.”  The implication being, that, in my opinion (already implied in being posted from my Twitter account), Danny is better than Henry was – and this is the key part – when Henry FIRST moved to Arsenal. Also implicit in the comparison, is that the two players’ ages are the same, at the point of their respective careers being referred to: Danny now, Henry then.  So it’s not entirely impossible for me to stretch my imagination and picture Danny getting somewhere close to achieving the amazing things that Henry has. It was a compliment to Henry. Of course, we don’t see tweets as they are, but as we are.

Inevitably I was also inundated with more of those ‘things’ – all up in my chops again. The things like facts and that. So, I thought I’d try some of that there research myself; yuck. And yet. And yet…

Y’know, it turns out, Henry scored just three goals in sixteen games for Juventus, the season before he joined Arsenal, after being asked to play ‘out of position’ as a winger (sounds familiar). Combining this with his scoring record for Monaco – and therefore encompassing his professional career to that point – his goals tally was just above one in every five games. So, if we then cross-reference this with Danny’s goal tally up to this point (not including the two against Swansea) it’s … oh … wait … just above one in five. There’s more … the internet stores this stuff – who knew?! Just before moving to Arsenal, Henry had broken into the French national side and, on his first appearance at a major tournament, finished as their top scorer. Danny happened to make the ‘step up’ to international level much earlier in his career than Henry, relatively speaking, and … oh … wait … also became his national side’s top scorer in his first major tournament. Hey, that wasn’t so bad.

With regards to Henry: I wasn’t that convinced by him at first, and I know that Arsenal fans I was friends with at the time (reluctantly and probably under duress and certainly never in public places), felt the same. He was seen as something of a ‘poor man’s’ replacement for he-of-the-upside-down-smile, who was Real bound having burned Wenger’s cookies once too often. He proved me, and a lot of other people, wrong. That first season he went on to score 26 goals, no mean feat; especially in light of the fact that he initially took time to settle. The rest is Premier League history. I think, scooched in next to Eric, Scholesy and Giggsy, Henry rightly takes his seat in the pantheon of Premier League stars.  I would have absolutely loved him at United. The point being though (it’s in here somewhere), that a career viewed retrospectively, with the benefit of hindsight, does not my comparison quash.

Course, it’s not that I really think Danny is the new Henry: Henry is Henry, Danny is Danny. When I first made the comparison, it was to do with something about the way they both collected the ball – with a similar physicality – and shifted it on; something about the positions they took up; something about the runs they made; something about the types of shots they shape for. But more, it was something about wanting Danny to realise his potential and become one of the best players the Premier League has ever seen, and that is what it’s always been about.

I’ve put a bet on Danny winning Player of the Year, not because I necessarily think he will – though I do necessarily think he will – but because he makes me feel giddy; he gives me hope. As I’ve written before, hope is seen by some as a negative, as delusional, but I see hope as a catalyst, a stimulant, that inspires to better things, and so, I really hope that in fourteen years time we’re talking about Danny Welbeck in the same breath as Thierry Henry.