Been Busy?

It is with regret that I announce that the contract of Stephen Staunton as 'latest post' on Tom's Sporting Almanac has been terminated by mutual consent. TSA will now appoint a committee to recommend where to find funny photos of Terry Venables to put up instead, preferably one of him wearing a sombrero in the Eighties.

It's a been a while, I give you that. Not that there has been anything much happening in sport to write about since October 16th. Just yer international managerial escapades, the denouement of a Rugby World Cup, the first ever general player strike in Gaelic games history, the familar clank of Brit-failure that brought the Formula One season to an end, a football season that has ratcheted up the usual manager-disembowelling count and much more.

So yes, not writing about sport over the last six weeks or so is a bit like Santa going off somewhere nice and warm in late November, then ambling back into the elves' workshop mid-January and idly querying of the little toysmiths "been busy?" (An analogy which works only if Santa is indeed involved in the toymaking process, not if his only job is, as such, dispatch. In which case it's no skin off the elves' noses what he does, it just means "there's a big pile of bloody toys lying out the back waiting to be delivered, you great fat, brandy-quaffing, christmas cake-munching oaf!")

Unlike this indolent Santa, TSA has been exceptionally busy of late, seeing as how I've started a new job and that. Having gotten through that opening six week period of a job wherein one suppressess those natural characteristics so unappealing to new employers - negligible personal hygiene, workplace narcolepsy, tendency to attempt seduction of boss's wife/daughter/mother -
I feel I can now relax and renew the idle, yet exquisitely-gentrified lifestyle of the blogger.

So where were we? Ah, the old San Siro once again. As part of my sabbatical, a trip to the Celtic v Shaktar Donetsk match last Wednesday was squeezed in, to witness yet another eye-rubbingly unlikely Champions League win for Celtic at Parkhead.

Two last minute winners and a deflection have given Celtic the nine points from which they hope this evening to springboard to the knockout stages this evening, and a bit more of that sort of fortune will be needed.

The hopes of Celtic fans - the bluster about "going there to win" to win aside - have strayed this past week to Messrs Strachan and Ancelotti being fellow members of some sort of managers' freemason group, through which a particular prematch handshake will signify the ensuing of the most gentlemanly, inoffensive, tedious scoreless draw imaginable.

However, even were Celtic to arrange a scurrilous carve-up, you can be sure some hapless calamity will befall one of their defenders early in tonight's game, and a probably-terminal goal conceded.

No, Celtic will get no favours this evening, unless they navigate themselves to the closing twenty minutes on level terms, in which case an informal armistice may materialise.

Although, even then, Inzaghi will probably scuff one in off his kneecap. The little shit.