The Top Ten Best Football Club Pies.

1, Huddersfield Town, The Galpharm Stadium. Hollands meat and potato pie. Ok so in a previous post I said that Pukka Pies were the best pies in the world and they are, however Hollands run a close second and being a town fan pushes them over the top. Another plus is they serve John Smiths Beer.

2, Rotherham United, Millmoor. Pukka Pies meat and potato pie. I have already sung this companies praises so no need to say any more. Rotherham has the advantage of a better stadium atmosphere over Notts County.

3, Notts County, Meadow Lane. Pukka Pies meat and potato pie.

4, Sheffield Wednesday, Hillsbough. Chicken Tekka Mesala pie. Avoid if hung over, although having said that you probably would them if you were sober.

5, West Brom, The Hawthorns. Chicken Tekka Mesala pie. Let this be a lesson to the toffs of West Brom the high cost of your pies cost you forth place.

6, Ossett Town, Prospect Road. Pork pie and pea. I know it’s non-league and thing operate on a different level but how cool is being able to get pie and peas at the match. Also if I ever do a list of best Beer at the football Ossett Town would be a strong contender with Sam Smiths served in glass pint jars.

7, Barnsley, Oakwell. Cheese and Onion pasty. The only redeeming feature of my one and only trip to Oakwell, you could have believe the pasty came from your local bakery. Town played a striker in defence and lost 4-0. To add insult to injury there was no roof on what was laughingly referred to as the toilets. Call me a snob but I don’t class a downward slope towards a gutter as a toilet.

8, Burnley, Turfmoor. Cornish pasty. Sort of Gregg’s standard.

9, Wigan, JJB Stadium. Cornish pasty. Probably would have featured higher up the list had not a devious Lancastrian pizza shop owner refused to give me directions to the ground until I bought a deep pan pepperoni an hour before kick off. Directions that turned out to be wrong!

10, Birmingham City, St. Andrews. Miscellaneous meat and potato pie of an okay standard. Although we must remember that “meat” can mean anything lets face it I am sure there are many pie shops not to mention Indian restaurants were you would suspect “meat” meant Dog.

Best of the rest.

Halifax Town, The Shay. Candy Floss. There are several reasons I shouldn’t have mentioned Halifax Town, Candy Floss isn’t a pie would be the most obvious, but being able to buy Candy Floss at the football is the sort of crazy gimmick that makes you warm to the Shay men. They are local rivals so I should hate them as much as I hate Bradford City but somehow I can’t. Halifax have an endearing quality they’re the team who arrive in Huddersfield for an LDV Trophy match and announce that they have forgotten their kit. Even though Halifax is less than 10 miles away they still gamely delved into the Huddersfield Town got box and played in our old away kit.

Worst of the rest (it’s a photo finish).

Narrowly avoiding last place:

Wakefield and Emely, Bell Vue. Cheese Burger? There is no way of dressing this up Bell Vue is a dump although a Wakefield super stadium has been talked about for years it hasn’t happened leaving the cities football and rugby clubs sharing what is on three sides a hole. The forth, the goal end away from the city centre, is inexplicably an entire stand of executive boxes. I am sure that in that stand the fans are well catered for on the food front but the rest of the ground is severed by one dodgy burger/salmonella van. I don’t know which queue is longest to get the burger or for the toilet afterwards.

Dead last:

Leeds United, Elland road. Ginster’s Cornish pasty. How can you do wrong you take the pasty out of the packet and put it in the microwave. They found a way. It just adds insult to injury if your sat in the family stand, as you approach you see the huge McDonalds logo on the side of the stadium but is there a McDonalds inside, is there hell!

I saw some vitamin pills the other day.

The vitamin “E” pills boasted that each pill contained 100 % RDA (recommended daily allowance) which means that if you take one pill you should not have any more vitamin “E” for 24 hours.

That’s bad enough but the vitamin “C” pills state that each pill contains 833 % RDA. So if you take one that means no more vitamin “C” for over a week!

Is too much vitamin “C” bad for you, with 833 % RDA floating around your system are you in danger of keeling over if someone in Keighley peels an orange?

I had originally planned to do a post about how ironic it was that the bargain bin at Argos is full of unwanted “Randy Orton” “WWE” Wrestling figures for £1, while ASDA are selling “Koko B. Ware”, “King Kong Bundy”, and “The Iron Sheik” figures for £8.

For anyone who doesn’t know “Koko B. Ware”, “King Kong Bundy” and “The Iron Sheik” were at the height of their careers in the old “WWWF” A.K.A. “WWF” (now known as the WWE”) in the seventies and eighties. I have not seen the wrestling for at least 4 years but I can’t remember any one called “Randy Orton” so I am guessing he must be relatively new.

While surfing the web looking for info for this post I found out that some of the old wrestlers have had quite interesting, if not to say mercurial, lives. I never really thought that much of “The Iron Sheik” as a wrestler but I was fascinated by some of the events in his life.

The Iron Sheik was actually born, in 1943, in Iran (although anyone who followed the WWF during the first Gulf War would be forgiven for assuming that he was from Iraq). He served in the Iranian Army for two years and won the 1968 Olympic gold medal for his country in Greco-Roman Wrestling. Forget Ali, Lewis, Henry, or Angle the Sheik was the first Gold medal winning Olympian to turn “professional”.

The highlight of his “professional” career was obviously defeating Bob Backlund for the WWF Heavyweight Title at Madison Square Garden, New York, in 1983. He was World Champion until January 1984 when in one of the most famous matches of all time he was defeated by a young wrestler called Hulk Hogan (the rest is history). Apparently, AWA promoter Verne Gagne offered Sheik $100,000 to break Hogans leg during the match. The Iron Sheik resisted the temptation and informed Hogan & Vince McMahon. The AWA went bust unable to compete with McMahon’s new style of “sports entertainment”, embodied by grapplers such as Hulk Hogan.

May 26, 1987: The Iron Sheik and Jim Duggan were arrested by New Jersey State Police. Duggan was charged with possession of marijuana and drinking alcohol while driving. Sheik was charged with possession of marijuana and cocaine. Duggan received a conditional discharge and Sheik received one year probation. What was so shocking about this was that they were feuding at the time, and the incident exposed the business, The Iron Sheik left the WWF soon after this incident.

In January 2002 America was living in the shadow of September 11^th, The Sheik was detained entering the States from Canada at the airport in Rochester because they believed he may have been a terrorist. They even made him remove his shoes

May 5, 2003: Iron Sheik's daughter, Marissa Jeanne Vaziri age 27, was found strangled to death, in her apartment. Marissa's live-in boyfriend, Charles Warren Reynolds, 38, confessed to the crime and was charged with murder.

The reports of what the Sheik is doing now seem mixed certainly up till a couple of years ago he was appearing for any number of the independent wrestling outfits, drawing crowds as low as 200 people, anywhere between 200 and 400 times per year. For a while he refused to wrestle anyone who had not been in the WWF or WCW because they were not stars, but in the end I think the financial realities hit him. In his own words “The only thing I did all my life — wrestling. I cannot eat my gold medal. I have to make a living”.

The Sheik was an Olympic hero and one of a very few foreigners who managed to make a career in an American dominated industry. Some wrestler like Hulk Hogan, or Rick Flair, have managed to transform success in the ring in the eighties into financial security in later life. Unfortunately this has not seemed to be the case for the 63 year old Sheik who is still trying to earn a living from the “sport”. Randy Orton, whoever he is, probably has a long career ahead of him and is probably earning money that most of us can only dream about, it wont affect him if his merchandise is popular in the Bradford branch of Argos or not. On refection I hope the Iron Sheik is getting a cut of his £8 per figure, and I hope that “Koko B. Ware” and “King Kong Bundy” have faired better although I do get the feeling that they have not.

Anyway happy thoughts here is a picture of the moment that the Sheik became “WWF” Champion. You can literally see the Towel being thrown in as Bob Backlunds manager calls it a day.

It’s 50 years ago this week since James Dean killed himself in a road traffic accident. It’s also fifty 50 years ago this week that ITV first broadcast. Coincidence? I think not!

It’s hard enough trying to get your head round the idea that McDonalds are now serving “healthy” food. But in the wake of the film “Super size me” they do seem to have made a big effort to provide a more varied menu including Salads, sandwiches, and porridge.

Actually going on a tangent for a minute I can not believe that people gave “super size me” the time of day. Firstly it work on the ground breaking concept that “fast food is bad for you”, really is that a fact! We all Know that fast food is bad for us, tasty, but bad for us. Secondly the man ate every meal until in was physically sick for a month, and then he got a doctor to tell him that this was, wait for it, “damaging his health”. I found that really unfair do honestly think the film would have received the same c overage he had been trying this tactic at Michelin star restaurants, although having said that just the thought of snail porridge has me feeling a bit queasy.

Anyway dispute the unfair conclusions reached by “Super size me” McDonalds have bravely pushed ahead with the new healthy marketing strategy. The only problem is that the staff that work for the wages that McDonalds pay are often the sort of people who think “This job may pay barely above minimum wage but I get as many free Big Macs as I can eat”. in sort they are on the large size and in its self there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that McDonalds now has its staff wearing T-Shirts advertising salads on the front and “Sprite Z” on the back, the irony seems to be lost on the management that the staff are wearing XXXL T-Shirts.

Is it just me or do you ever get the impression that some companies just haven’t thought through their mascot. West Yorkshire seems to be a hot bed of crappy mascots be they home grown or imported the streets of the county are crammed with these bizarre caricatures.

The other day driving through Saltaire (north Bradford) I saw a giant rolled up copy of the “Telegraph and Argus” walking down Keighley Road scaring little children and basically being a menace to traffic. How I wish I’d had my camera.

There are the mascots that have nothing to do with Yorkshire; why is it the Leeds Rhinos, or the Keighley Cougars, and why is Kirklees council highways department represented by a Crocodile. Although I will admit even mascots that make regional sense don’t always work. The mascot of Batley is the Bat for obvious reasons, what is not so obvious is why Kirklees council would spend all that money building a ten meter high statue that had the bats hanging up rather than down (unless of course the crocodile told them to).

One mascot that never fails to disturb me is the “Kandoo Frog” it’s a cartoon frog that wipes its arse (while stood up) in front of little children. The advert is unsettling enough but I can assure you that seeing an eight foot version greeting children, with his poo stained hand shakes, outside ASDA is much worse.

But worst of all is Bradford Cities mascot “City Gent” who as far as I can tell is just a fat man in a hat. I know Bradford are a bit strapped for cash at the moment but you could have got the guy a better costume than that. As I understand it “City Gent” walks round Valley Parade throwing coins at the fans. I think “City Gent” is only a mascot on the weekends, through the week I reckon he is His Excellency the Austrian Ambassador because he looks like he might have eaten one to many Ferrero Rocher, and he seems to enjoy diplomatic immunity. I once saw some town fans get arrested for throwing coins at some Burnley fans, which once again proves it’s not what you know but who.

Anyway Boots were found from somewhere, probably the Liverpool grot box, and Smicer could play. The Czech went on to score a goal in normal time and converted one of the penalties, in the shout out, to give Liverpool the cup.

I do feel sorry for AC Milan they trained hard for weeks and all there player remembered boots, shin pads and shorts but none of there meticulous preparation could help them over come the “hand-me-down” shoe wearing Smicer.

It’s the 12 of September, it’s still summer (even if it doesn’t feel like it any more, and what are ASDA selling in their “seasonal” aisle? Selection Boxes!

I always complain that Christmas is getting earlier each year but most stores have the decency to wait till after Halloween. Actually what is going to happen at Halloween I doubt that they would take down all the Christmas stuff since they have gone to so much trouble putting it out. The two festivals will have to share the same aisle, don’t be surprised if Santa comes “trick or treating” this year, or some pissed up joker with reindeer antlers throwing eggs at your house.

Still it could be worse, one can only assume that with ASDA now being part of the “WAL*MART” family that our American cousins have been seminally blessed with the chance to buy yuletide merchandise in summer. I bet there will be junior school plays over there where the founding fathers leave the religious oppression of Britain to work in Santa’s f***ing grotto in Lapland.

How did they come up with that poster! I can just imagine a couple advertising executives sat round trying to brainstorm meat and potato pies.

Actually before I go any further I just have to say that apparently the term “brainstorm” is no longer deemed to be politically correct as it offends people with brains that …. well whatever their brains do it offends them. Fair enough, the only problem is that we are now supposed to say “mind shower” which sound like the safety instruction on a dodgy former soviet block hairdryer.

Anyway the ad men are sat there:

1^st ad man - “So what do you think of when you thing of pies?”

2^nd ad man - “Fat men”

1^st ad man – “go on”

2^nd ad man – “Cold rainy days at the football”

1^st ad man – “not quite what our client is looking for”

2^nd ad man – “Peas”

As this is my first post I thought it would be a good opportunity to say a few things about myself and set the ethos of my Blog.

Firstly, I will make no excuses for any Huddersfield Town bias. Secondly, I have a habit of taking against the strangest people/things, while many may understand a completely reasonable hatred of “Savage Garden”, I suspect that few people are as obsessed with what a twat Sir Isaac Newton was. Lastly I know that I can’t spell for toffee, not even for a “Werther’s Original” although I have a feeling the nation is trying to repress the memory of that particular ad campaign.

Ethos of the Blog

Okay so I have used words like Ethos and have picked an arsey pseudonym (ten points for the first person who can tell me its significance), but I will endeavour to keep the content of this Blog as low brow as possible. Wherever there is a foible to ridicule this Blog will be there. Whenever there is a needless top-ten list to compile this Blog will be there. However often I can be bothered updating this Blog. If ever there is injustice in the world you better call the “A-Team” because this Blog will be here debating the difference between “hand pulled” and “electric” bitter.