Sleepy Head

Weekends. What's with weekends? I wasn't last weekend yet still I failed to get my posts off. Considering how little sleep I also managed to get I really don't know where all the time went. So now it's Wednesday and I have the weekend to catch up with - the lack of sleep - this is the first time I've been in position. Next weekend I'm going to implement some sort of time management programme to enable me to post properly.

So it seems a bit pointless catching up with the papers from the weekend in any meaningful way. Disappointing draw with Middlesbrough, none of the reports had too much to say (or it's now too long ago for the anger to still be fresh with me). The only story I'm going to link to is this from Saturday's Guardian, notable for Sir Alex's comments on that Portsmouth game (again):

Ferguson also revealed that he intended to fight his Football Association charge of improper conduct for comments he made about the referee Martin Atkinson following United's FA Cup defeat to Portsmouth. "I will contest it," said Ferguson, who intends to highlight Atkinson's mistakes to justify describing him as a "disgrace". When he was asked why he felt he could get away with it, Ferguson replied incredulously, "Were you at the game?"

Brilliant.

To the Champions League previews. Not much of interest around (unless I'm still too tired to pay enough attention while I'm speed reading through these thing - I intend to really catch up with sleep today). This from The Guardian has Sir ALex's comments from the prematch press conference:

"Let's be sensible," he said. "We've got one foot in the semi-final. The best way to get both feet in is to approach the game in a proper fashion. We can't look upon the performance in Rome as a pass into the semi-final. In a situation like this we have leeway, but we've never taken anything for granted and we're not going to either. We are looking upon this match as the most important of the season for us."

And there's this by Henry Winter in The Telegraph, on the importance of Rooney:

Rooney's display in Rome had Italian sports papers raving about this "world-class" England centre-forward, eulogising over his ceaseless running, intelligent use of possession and selfless application of Ferguson's game-plan, which demanded he start on the left. When unleashed through the middle in the second half, Rooney scored. His versatility makes him so valuable for Ferguson. The striker's prowess in Rome was the sort of mature performance that forwards give in their latter days, not those with their best years to come. "He sacrificed his own normal position in the team to work for the team, and that for me is a great demonstration of a great player," said Ferguson, speaking at Old Trafford yesterday. "He is prepared to do that. Sacrifice is an important act in every good team."

And that'll do it.

The worst bit of bias I saw all weekend was on Monday when I was in the pub and they had Sky Sports News on the TV with the sound down and the subtitles on. I don't know how many people have seen these subtitles, they must be done on some sort of voice recognition thing I think, and frankly they are awful, they make hardly any sense most of the time, such is the amount of words that come up wrong. So the report was on Rio Ferdinand's injury and the scan showing no break, on the screen came the words "... shame it wasn't broken". Compared to the usual mistakes this makes some sense, therefore I can only conclude that was some INTENTIONAL bias.