Wright on the Money: Who the fuck is Lucas?

Wright on the Money is a sporadic look at the former England and Arsenal striker’s forays into the world of the written word.

Today, Wrighty previews Liverpool vs Manchester United (kind of), sets out his plan to improve Liverpool’s season and then goes mental.

Original article in bold, my comments in normalz.

LIVERPOOL’S season could blow up right in front of their faces this week – and I am not referring to that blooming red beachball.

Blooming heck! Putting aside for one moment whether or not Wrighty has used three superfluous words with ‘front of their’ when ‘blow up in their faces’ would seem to be the more common usage of the phrase, this metaphor (or joke, or…whatever) doesn’t work:

1)The beach ball didn’t work as a kind of grenade that was thrown on to the pitch and then detonated, destroying their defence and allowing Darren Bent’s shot to tamely roll over the line amidst the scenes of devastation and destruction.

2)The only other perceivable meaning is that the Liverpool players will use ‘their faces’ (or mouths) to blow up another beach ball and, presumably, stealthily roll it onto the pitch when they are attacking, thus hoping to neutralise the flow of karma and claim their own freak goal. I don’t think this is very tactically sound or, indeed, likely.

Just saying, it’s not the blooming strongest opening paragraph.

All jokes aside now.

Ok, sorry.

The loss at Sunderland, not helped by an inflatable, has left boss Rafa Benitez staring at a defining point in the season – and it’s still only October.

Agreed, although in the sense that a game against Manchester United will always be a somewhat defining point of Liverpool’s season, whether or not a beach ball affected their result the week before and whether or not Wrighty can believe it’s still only blooming October!

…

Ask Liverpool fans – and I have and I know quite a few of them – and they will tell you the Premier League is the trophy they want above all others.

Great to see some good old fashioned research went into this piece, if you need to back up your point get on the phone and use your face to ask some questions:

“Hello?”

“Hello, Mark Lawrenson? It’s Ian Wright. Oi Oiiiiiiiiii!”

“urgh nurgh, what do you want?”

“You’re a Liverpool fan, right?”

“Not really, no”

“Great! So, as a Liverpool fan, do you want to win the Champions League?”

“But…I just said…urgh…not really, no. It interferes with Coronation Street”

“Just as I suspected! Bye!”

“Never call this number again”

Then it gets really good.

…

At Anfield you have Glen Johnson and Jamie Carragher – two fine English defenders.

But then you have Lucas and Fabio Aurelio – to be honest I don’t really know who these players are.

There’s the money shot, right there! The upshot of this article is that Liverpool should not bother with the Champions League and try and win the Premiership and to back up this superb piece of strategic thinking we get this.

Just read that again

to be honest I don’t really know who these players are.

yep, it definitely says that. There’s no hidden meaning or joke there I’m not getting.

So, the formula for…errm…winning the Premiership is:

1)Forget about Europe! Not gonna happen! You can’t be competitive in Europe and win the league, no way!

2)Pack defence with ‘fine’ English players such as Glen Johnson and Jamie Carragher.

3)Sign players Ian Wright has heard of and not bloody foreigners!

Players Ian Wright has heard of:

Ian Wright

Shaun Wright-Phillips

Bradley Wright-Phillips

Theo Walcott

Paul Merson

Thierry Henry (foreign)

Jamie Carragher

Glen Johnson

Roon Wayney or something

There you go, I think if we look at the teams who have won the Premiership in recent years, and the two teams who look most likely to win it this year, we can all agree that they’ve basically followed this formula. It’s not blooming hard!

This is before we get to the fact that Ian Wright is a football pundit who, I assume, gets paid and it’s perfectly reasonable, therefore, to expect that he might have heard of Fabio Aurelio and Lucas. I mean, when you think about it, the fact that he claims to not really know who these players are is actually pretty fucking astounding. It’s not like I said ‘hey, Ian Wright, who plays left back for Chester City’ and he was like ‘sorry, I’m not really sure on that one’ it is, when you think about it, kind of akin to writing a shit plan to win the Premiership that is just so patently incorrect and then putting in the middle of the article ‘by the way I don’t really know who any of these people I’m writing about are, please disregard this’, it’s actually not that much different from just writing that! And! LUCAS ISN’T EVEN A FUCKING DEFENDER!

Wrighty then, inexplicably, went on to talk about how the FA are responsible for Theo Walcott’s injury but my head exploded trying to work out what on earth that had to do with what he’d previously written in the article.