ARSENAL
BT Sport have done well with “the football” since securing the rights to a share of the Premier League, but their hard work is at risk of unravelling with the appointment of Michael Owen as a co-commentator.

The guy’s monotone voice, burping out clichés with as much verve as a five-year-old narrator trying to remember his lines in a school play, is an anaesthetic dullifying even the most exciting of matches.

It deadened the excitement of Spurs vs Chelsea at the weekend, for example.

Mothers and fathers of the world, I'll share this tip now: 1. Take your tantruming recent borns. 2. Place in moses basket. And 3. Turn on Michael Owen commentating.

That should give you 20 minutes of peace at least, the nipper won’t stand a chance against the Owenator’s one-key voice.

It’s not as if I myself reveal these irritations from a position of strength. I’ve a cockneyish slur, a mess of mumbles and missing vowels. On the phone, I sound like a teenager.

But even so, I wouldn’t swap for Owen’s whirring white noise and it seems almost cruel to ask him to commentate in this way.

Maybe it would be okay if he was as incisive as that goal he scored against Argentina, that one time. But on Saturday he wrote a national newspaper column insisting Arsenal were not top-four quality.

Maybe he’ll be proved right, but what a rascal to write that now, during a purple patch when the club is spreading so much obvious joy.

The second Gunners goal against Swansea, so Barcelonaesque, should have made him regret his mean words.

I hope the final standings in May do the same.
RICHARD OSLEY

TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR
GRAN always says that if you can’t beat a club like Chelsea at home, at least take a point and leave them fuming.

Which we did on Saturday because Juan Mata changed the game in the second half and Fur Coat and No Knickers FC would have won had Fernando ‘Ellen Ripley’ Torres not been so cruelly sent off. Apparently.

Actually, I’ll give you Juan Mata. Which is generous seeing how rubbish he is. D’oh.

Think of the matches your lot could have won if Mr Look At Me had woken up a few weeks earlier to the fact that Mata is the best player you’ve got.

Even Rafa the Red worked that one out.

Fact. 

What I won’t give you is the fact that El Nino (that’s Spanish for The Big Daft Kid) was cruelly sent off. That’s because he shouldn’t have been on the pitch at all following his Face-Off stunt on Jan Vertonghen.

But that’s only my opinion and clearly not one shared by the wonks who run the game.

Nope, we’re told that the incident was half spotted as a “coming together” by some Small Wonk with a Flag employed to keep an eye on this sort of thing and therefore un-punishable by the many Great Wonks with Expense Accounts appointed to do the same.

Call me pretentious, but I thought Coming Together was what Lennon and McCartney did on their Abbey Road LP in 1969, a month or so before The Beatles, erm, split up.

It is certainly not the thing Torres did to our Jan, and if you ask me, there’s no room for it in the game.

Now pulling down your opponents shorts as they’re through on goal is a different matter entirely.

Fuming? Ah, I guess we all are

sometimes …
CATHERINE ETOE