Published: 28 November, 2013

ARSENAL by Richard Osley

A LITTLE moment of contemplation for you all, courtesy of a little experiment cooked up by The Crow.

See it as a public service. All you have to do is read the following in full, out loud if you’re feeling perky, in your head if you’re on the bus, definitely in your head if you’re André Villas-Boas – that growling is hurting our ears, have a Strepsil, son.

Here goes.

Start reading…

One. Mississippi. Two. Mississippi. Three. Mississippi. Four. Mississippi. Five. Mississippi. Six. Mississippi. Seven. Mississippi. Eight. Mississippi. Nine. Mississippi. Ten. Mississippi. Eleven. Mississippi. Twelve. Mississippi. Thirteen. Mississippi.

Did you do it?

Don’t go thinking I copied and pasted those Mississippis, by the way, I typed out every last “s” out. For you.

Just so you could read it all in full and understand just how quickly 13 seconds pass. Zip, there goes another 13 seconds trying to explain it to you.

And yet there were Tottenham on Sunday, the new mighty Tottenham ready to beat the world, Garth Crooks’s Beatles, the £100million men.

Thirteen seconds into their match against Manchester City and they were already 1-0 behind. Of course, Manchester City are fearsome opponents, but 13 seconds?

That is officially gilding the lily even by Spurs’ gold standard prowess at deflating their own fans’ oversold expectations.

Desperate to deflect attention from the fact that it had taken only 13 seconds to score against them, they did the decent thing and masked that mini-embarrassment by contriving to let in five more.

Six-nil.

That’s a thumping!

SPURS by Catherine Etoe

SOME people take this column far too literally.

Take Spurs.

Boys, boys, boys, when I said that we could have a relaxing Sunday because Manuel Pellegrini had ruled Tottenham out of the title race I was being sarcastic.

I didn’t mean you should play like you were having a kick-about with strangers on the beach wearing flip flops and thongs for cripes sakes.

Call me next time you can’t tell whether I’m joking or not.

Funnily enough I often find that phoning a friend can help at a time like this.

So, feeling humiliated, ashamed (and whatever else it was we were told Spurs, ergo the fans, ought to be after Sunday), I rang someone who has been through even worse – Gran’s childhood sweetheart Fred.

Fred knows how to face his colleagues after humiliating defeats in Manchester, I thought. He knows how to wear his scarf with pride in the supermarket despite losing by a six-goal margin.

That’s because he’s a Gooner and he was there when Arsenal were battered 8-2 by Manchester United. Sadly, the line to south London was so bad I could barely hear the man himself.

I could hear his parrot cackling in the background though. “We’ll always have the Bernabeu,” he crowed. “Lasagne, woahho.”

“Toptastic Arsenaaaaal”.

On and on the feathery rat shrieked until I had to put the phone down and shrug.

OK you smug lot, so we lost. Heavily.

It happens. It might even happen again. But that’s the thing about football, you do get a chance to put things right.

So get a grip AVB, sort the wheat from the chaff, settle on your best XI and give us our Spurs back.

While you still can.