the North Vs the South This was written by some smoggie on football 365 and is a pretty good rant if you can be bothered to read it all. So it's The North 1 London 0 Or in Premiership terms it's The North 9 London 2. Beautiful. The best teams in the history of football have been Northern. The top league has been won over 75 times by Northern sides and less than 15 times by London clubs, despite the fact that even now London has six sides in the Premier League and a population greater than all the industrial cities of the North rolled into one. The best managers are Northern and always have been. Okay, we'll give you Sir Alf but against that there's Cloughie, Shankly, Paisley, Greenwood, Revie, Fagan, Stein, Dalglish, Bill Nicholson. The last English manager to win the top league? Yup, Mr Northern himself, the much-maligned and now admittedly mad: Wilko. Even today the best British managers are Fergie, Moyes, Strachan, Bobby Robson, Souey, McClaren. Look at the London managers - Hoddle, Venables, Roeder. Curbishley is the honourable exception at Charlton. Oh dear. I won't rub it in any more. You see, there's a fact that everyone in this country knows is true but some can't admit to. I'm talking about the absolute and incontrovertible truth that the North is better than the South. By the South I'm not talking about Ipswich or Torquay. That's the scary but great Eastern and Western Badlands, I'm talking about London and the Home Counties. The North, of course, is anywhere from Sheffield upwards - though to North-Eastern lads like me, Sheffield is the deep South. We have more fun, we laugh more, we drink more, we eat more pies, we take more drugs, we have more sex, we have more disposable income and our women have bigger tits. All these things have been proved recently by various surveys. Yes we die younger, but who wants to have an extra five years of worrying about house prices and the cost of driving and parking your Renault Espace? Me and almost everyone I've ever known in the North have always taken it as a self-evident truth that the North rules in everything that matters. And it's no use writing to tell me how great it is in Bromley, Marlow, Isleworth, Dulwich Village, St Albans or especially bleedin' Camden. I've been to all these places and they're all full of people who my Granddad, a Castleford-born miner, would call "all fur coat and no knickers" and totally - what a proctologist would undoubtedly diagnose as - "up their own holes". We're always being told either directly or implicitly that London is the cosmopolitan, cultural capital of the country. It's where 'it' whatever'it' is, all happens. But funnily enough, when I go down there, all I see is thousands of sour, miserable people who won't look you in the eye on the street in case you're a loony and want to stab them. Talk to a stranger in a pub and they look at you like you're insane or a prostitute, especially if you don't want to talk about house prices. They're obsessed with maisonettes and mortgages down there. These people seem to think talking about finance makes a good night out. I see people paying silly amounts of money for beer (it's £1.54 here guys, not £3-plus), I meet people who have paid £175,000 for a glorified dog kennel on a stick but who insist on calling it a 'bijou studio apartment'. I've met people who genuinely think a house full of swearing cocky Northerners will lower the local house prices! An air of barely-suppressed tension pervades the place and almost everyone seems very worried about almost everything. Even more oddly, considering I am a remarkably ugly man, I've never visited London without someone soliciting me for sex in the street. "I suck your cock for you," one Greek bloke shouted desperately at me last time I was down there. That never happens in Middlesbrough - even if sometimes we wish it would. If you want to be radical, individual, fashionable and glamorous the north is the place to be. Arsene Wenger's "we're still the best team" garbage - that's a typical Capital-centric vision. Okay, you can't quite accept that your team is a bunch of sulky whiney bottlers, but get yer head out yer ass man. I'll be honest, back in the autumn I couldn't see a way that Arsenal wouldn't win the league. They did play the best football. But stupidly, I forgot that football, like rock 'n' roll, isn't about who's got the most skill or technique. It's about guts, commitment, belief, passion and a grindcore work ethic. This year Man United were Metallica while Arsenal were Busted. Success is based on 75% attitude and 25% technique. Arsenal's ballet-dancing style of football this season was full of the latter and devoid of the former and the truth is they've been utterly steamrollered by the Northern glamour boys - ugly footballers like Scholes, Butt and Van Nistelrooy who just kept up the pressure until the Londoners broke. Players who cared more and tried harder. The core of Manchester United's team is from the British Isles and if you think this doesn't matter, does anyone really think Gilberto Silva really cared very much if Arsenal won the title this year? I think Ray Parlour did. I saw him run his nuts off but he's a rare Brit in the Arsenal set-up isn't he? Happily, Wenger's mission to destroy British football has blown up in his face, especially with the sale of Matthew Upson, which was a dumb, not to say financially-wasteful decision. So the North rules again and I for one will be celebrating by putting a flat cap on my whippet, growing an enormous leek, eating the chips off my shoulder along with some mushy peas and coal and laughing loud and hard all summer.
Southerners think football is a common sport though. Rugby too. They play cricket. (coz its obviously more fun!:spangled: ) I think they're just soft. They're more scared of being kicked than Italians!
