RED-HOT CHAT
During Euro 2016 a pub in Dublin offered free pints to women whenever the better-favoured team scored, and pints to the men when an underdog managed to hit the net. Iceland’s success presumably went some way towards ensuring both $exes ended up stumbling around with equal measures of decrepitude – but just imagine the chaos if Mohamed Salah had been Icelandic!
In the kind of seamless segue The Fiver learned before getting slung out of writing school, we follow this with news that Salah is currently doling out inadvertent treats of his own. It might not have escaped your attention that he is having a rather prolific time of things at Anfield, reducing defenders to tragically-sprawled pieces of Renaissance art in one move and looking dangerously close to being the new incarnation of late-2000s Him in the next. They’re all talking about it back home in Egypt and tongues have even more reason to wag because, in the latest example of a cuddly football-related gimmick to be employed by a tech company, a leading mobile phone network is scattering freebies around every time he hits the net.
Those in Egypt who sign up to a bundle named after their great hope will, between now and the end of the season, get 11 free minutes’ chatter every time he does what he always does. If anyone needed persuading, he has starred in an ad that paints a rounded picture of his life on Merseyside: trips to the playground, trips to the chippy, games of pool, games with the kids, haphazard pauses for thought on street corners. An everyman and, in Egypt, everyone’s main man.
We’re going to assume his next opportunity to cause ringtone-related embarrassment will arise on Friday, when he comes up against Portugal. He would have bankrupted a few phone companies if a similar offer had applied in His pomp; both players are absolutely critical to any hope of World Cup success for their countries and if Salah is causing marketing bods to high-five by full-time then perhaps he’ll have offered some sort of clue that Egypt aren’t to be trifled with when this summer’s tournament comes around. He’ll also have auditioned pretty nicely for the world record move to Madrid/Barça/PSG/delete as appropriate, being banded about, that will bore everyone witless until it, almost inevitably, comes to pass.
High stakes for everyone then, whether or not you’re pacing through Cairo’s streets on the hands-free while watching your minutes drain helplessly away as Salah takes an age to place the ball for a penalty. Not that there’s much danger of your conversation being curtailed: he’ll score it, after all.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“When we don’t have the ball, what should we do? Defend high up the pitch and quickly. Why? To [effing] stifle the opponent by closing the spaces. The less space we give our opponents, the less chance they have to reach our goal. What’s football? It’s space-time” – Xavi gets cosmic.
C64 USER OF THE DAY
“At 13, I went to Real Madrid and started taking notes. I was giving marks to my team-mates after every game, writing down the top scorers. I still have those notebooks at home somewhere. I have all the training sessions of my players. I have my old computers, the Commodore 64 I used to work on. I used MS-DOS, then Basic, but I also learnt you have to be careful with computers. They give you too much information” – Rafa Benítez, ladies and gentlemen, quite possibly the only person in history to use a C64 for actual work and not just epic sessions of Jet Set W1lly and Pitstop II.
RECOMMENDED LOOKING
David Squires on the FA Cup and football heritage. Oh it’s good.
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FIVER LETTERS
“Blimey – if you’re struggling for letters already, I dread to think how bad it’s going to be once international week actually starts” – Jim Hearson.
“If Barnet’s Tony Kleanthous (yesterday’s Fiver) was from Yorkshire, then his name would be an accurate description of how he likes to run his club” – Dave Form.
“As an Edgware native, I take exception to some of the ‘facts’ in your missive about Barnet. They play in neighbouring Canons Park, where the only glistening vistas one might stare out over is the sight of numerous youths exchanging cash for illicit substances under the cover of a willow tree in the local park” – Ben Fox.
“Upon seeing the photo of the tumbleweed lazily rolling across the road in Friday’s Fiver, I thought for sure the prizeless letter o’the day award would go to ‘Rollover’. But you gave it to ‘A Tumbleweed’! I was just about to complain about this most undeserved LOTD award in Fiver history, when I read yesterday’s winner, which was arguably even less deserved. One more bizarre gong and I’m afraid Fiver letters will find itself in a full-blown crisis. I can’t tell if you’ve been hacked, had too much sake or become even lazier than before” – Peter Oh.
Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet The Fiver. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is … Dave Form.
THE RECAP
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RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Join Max and co for the latest Football Weekly podcast.
BITS AND BOBS
Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold has been given the rare and exciting opportunity to see Gareth Southgate coaching in the flesh after being called up to train with England before Friday’s 0-0 draw with the Netherlands.
Stevenage have wedged former player Dino Maamria into their vacant managerial hot seat. “We had a lot of applications for the job but we needed to bring Dino back home,” trilled chief suit Phil Wallace.
Didier Deschamps reckons Paul Pogba has every right to feel fresh and funky after being made to study Scott McTominay from the Manchester United sidelines. “This is a situation that he must not appreciate because of everything he would have been able to offer,” hee-hawed the France boss. “He cannot be happy with what he is going through with his club.”
N’Golo Kanté has taken a glass of cold water and half-heartedly poured it over rumours linking him with a move to Ligue 1 champions Qatar FC. “I am at home. It is my club. I am a Chelsea player,” he helpfully confirmed.
And Newcastle have been charged by the FA for breaching kit regulations by fielding a team of whippersnappers in shirts bearing the logo of whatever betting company is sponsoring them at the moment.
STILL WANT MORE?
Palace and Portsmouth legend Vince Hilaire talks about the racism he had to endure in the 70s and 80s, and plenty more besides, with Dominic Fifield.
Barney Ronay’s a bigger man than The Fiver, which is why he is happy to admit being wrong about Mo Salah, Liverpool’s gerbil superhero.
Barry Glendenning meets Charlie Fogarty MBE, the footballer forced to rebuild his life from scratch after a car accident aged 15.
Rob Smyth relives the infamous West Germany-Austria lash-up at España 82 in the latest of our reheated World Cup stunning moments series.
Suzanne Wrack runs the rule over the Women’s Big Cup quarter-finals and says: lump on Lyon.
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