16 July 2007

The second annual end-of-season awards

Yes, Footie Girl and I are doing it again. Yes, we realize that the Premiership is already pretty much back in season, with friendlies and summer tours and meaningless cup competitions. But like everyone always says, the season's not over till Argentina choke in a major way, so here we are. Some of the categories have changed since the last time -- different season and all that. Anyway. With apologies for the delay, here are the Second Annual Footie Girl and You'll Never Blog Alone End-of-Season Awards!

Chav of the Year: Steven Gerrard. While his wedding wasn't quite as gloriously tacky as we'd all been hoping for, the best man's toast tipped the scales all the way over to chav. It takes a lot to have a tackier wedding than John Terry (Lionel Richie, that's all I'm saying), but Steven managed. Good job, kid.

Runner-up: Rio Ferdinand. For the Myspace page alone.


Most Valuable Spaniard: Pepe Reina. He had a good season overall, really, but basically, this award comes down to one thing: penalties. I've never really seen an alleged "penalty specialist" who lived up to the hype like Pepe does. I don't have a lot to say here, since the video really speaks for itself. Basically, though, our keeper's a total fucking stud, and maybe the best buy Rafa's made.
Runner-up: Cesc Fabregas. Scored basically no goals, but really grew into his central midfield role, and grew up enough (apparently) to be Arsenal's new vice-captain. Stop throwing pizza and see where it gets you, kids?


Most Emo Player: We've got a tie! This one goes to both Jose Antonio Reyes and Julio Baptista. Either Arsenal is really awful, or Reyes and Baptista both need to get a sunlamp or two and just deal with it. It's not like Real Madrid was the happiest place on earth, either.
Runner-up: Andriy Shevchenko. Left Milan in the summer, and pretty much immediately started batting his eyes at them again. Now he might go back, he might not, but ugh. We're over it.


Clusterfuck of the Year: England. Runaway winners in this category, especially after Real inconveniently ended up winning La Liga. For the analysis here, I'm just going to quote Footie Girl: "For the entire World Cup fiasco, the endless process of replacing Sven that ended up with ... Steve McClaren (woo), dropping Becks and then bringing him back, the ongoing attempts to shoehorn Steven and Lameass into the same midfield, the failed experiment with 3-5-2, etc., etc." Add in the incredibly lackluster, and likely doomed, Euro qualification campaign, and you've got a big old mess, and one that's not going to get better anytime soon.
Runner-up: Chelsea. There are so many links I could dig up here, but I'll just go for this one.


Gayest Team: Italy. The Internets are being remarkably uncooperative with photographic evidence right now, but come on. Gattuso was pretty much naked before they even laid hands on the trophy, and apparently the Italian way to congratulate your keeper for winning a penalty shootout is to straddle his crotch. Not that we're against either of those things.
Runner-up: Arsenal. Still and forever.


Best Fight: Craig Bellamy, John Arne Riise, karaoke and golf clubs. Everyone's heard about this one by now, but it's still awesome. The facts alone are probably enough for this to win, but the part where these two idiots -- and I say that with love -- went on to score in the Barcelona game? Seals the deal. I don't want to say it was ironic, but it was at least Alanis Morrissette ironic.
Runner-up: Inter/Valencia. Like, play with that much energy and one of y'all would probably have scored.


Douchebag of the Year: Mike Newell. Knowing that you're a sexist doesn't make it any less douchey, sunshine. (Yes, I did just call Mike Newell "sunshine." He's lucky that's all I'm calling him.) We would also like to take this opportunity to point out that Rachel Yankey wins. Unlike Mr. Newell or his team.
Runner-up: Jose Mourinho. No new links, but basically he gets this for everything he's ever said at a press conference ever. Also getting arrested over a dog.


Special Achievement Award: Daniel Agger. We'd like to be all high-minded here and say that this is for his goal against West Ham. Or even for his goal against Chelsea, which was less pretty but more important. But we have to be honest. Those helped, but this is really because somewhere along the line, Dan got hot. If this makes us shallow, we can live with that.

That's all for this season's awards! Hopefully next year they'll be done before preseason.

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