Frank Keating

Sledge betting

London on Saturday stages a precise convergence of the sporting seasons.

London on Saturday stages a precise convergence of the sporting seasons. At the Oval England’s cricketers play the decider of their compelling and all too short Test series against India, and upriver at Twickenham England’s rugby men have a penultimate dress-rehearsal for their imminent World Cup defence in just a month. But it is the restart of Premiership football and its overflowing baggage of baloney, avarice and artful dodging which will be given pole position by its enamoured obsessives in broadcasting and the public prints. Take a deep breath, it’s a long, long way from August till May. It is curtain-up in the capital at Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge and — to my mind the most implausibly intriguing Act 1 Scene 1 of the new season — at Upton Park where West Ham (as they used to say) entertain Sven Goran Eriksson’s Thai-owned Manchester City. 

I fancy Arsenal could well profit without its preening French monarch Henry who, after threatening annually, has finally cashed in his pension chips at Barcelona. Last winter, Arsenal’s sulky talisman had such a petulantly regal strut about him that the highly promising young runners around him were forever on too awestruck and fretful tiptoe. Chelsea make their debut today without their new £135,000-a-week man, Terry, an appealing enough bulldog of a centre-half all right, and one who employs, obviously, an even more appealing rottweiler of an agent. Down in old dockland, West Ham are thankful enough to be in the Premiership at all — last season’s dodgy dealings should have had them whistled down a division at a stroke — but their patch is a humorously apt enough stage for the return to London of the dreaded, suited Swede, that almost surreal figure, the sexpot Sven.

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