It’s the Christmas programme! The fixture pileup! The season’s halfway point! Teams that are bottom of the league at this stage never stay up, you know. Except that year when Bryan Robson’s West Brom stayed up by being marginally less rubbish than those below them. And all those times it must have happened in the pre-Sky era, of course, but they don’t count for some reason. Here’s Sport.co.uk’s Top Ten: Christmas Football Things…
1. Loads of games – Of course, how much you enjoy the proliferation of fixtures may depend entirely on who you support. Nevertheless, just enjoy the notion that it could all be put right in a couple of days’ time.
2. Heaps of snow on the side of the pitch – Invariably occupied by awestruck ballboys. And that orange ball used to be quite something.
3. Dispute over Santa’s footballing allegiance via the medium of merchandise/banners – Scan the Boxing day results and draw your own conclusions.
4. Sky Sports’ Snowmen – The Murdoch media is trying to join Coca Cola – and Hellman’s Mayonnaise now, it seems – in associating itself with Christmas with a series of ‘iconic’ adverts, in this case some snowmen playing football set to a festive jingle. Sadly, it’s working, although that Richard Keys snowman is pretty terrifying. Try using its visage to discipline errant children.
5. Gloves – What used to be the preserve of (Daily Mail reader voice) “them bleedin’ foreigners” (/Daily Mail reader voice) has now been embraced by Britain’s chilly-handed elite.
6. Managers’ red noses – They glow and fade in accordance with stress levels, you know.
7. The unfailingly jovial reporting of abandoned lower league matches – Because nobody cares about Shrewsbury and Exeter, do they? It’s not as if anyone took the trouble to travel all the way there just to find out from a grinning Sky Sports news reader that it was all in vain. But at least it makes Jeff Stelling’s job a little easier.
8. Watching overpaid idiots having to work on Boxing Day while you don’t have to – Makes you feel all warm inside, doesn’t it? Although their millions of pounds and long summer breaks sort of level things up a bit…
9. Pundits advocating the introduction of a winter break – …which seems to dissipate by the year. Until, of course, an England player gets injured. Just you try and stem the tide of “told you so” then.
10. Different sets of fans’ different approach to winter dress – Go to, say, Goodison Park and you will witness Everton fans competing to see who can wear the most layers. But go even further up north, to, say, Newcastle or Sunderland, and you’d be only a few thousand pairs of jeans away from a nudist colony. Nutters.