NEXT Wednesday marks the eighth full calendar year of the Kenna League.
As Christmas turns from work parties to family meals to the creeping burn of stomach acid, it’s time to look back on the last 12 months in the Kenna – the world’s leading London-pub based fantasy football competition.
It’s also time to reveal the top five most popular posts of 2013 on the Kenna site.
“It’s been a roller coaster year,” cliched the chairman, too full of his future mother-in-law’s cabbage surprise to care any more.
The year in a nutshell
Sporting Lesbian brought in the New Year with a 36-point lead over defending champions FC Testiculadew, and maintained a healthy buffer until lifting the league title on debut five months later.
The Woking manager faced serious questions from authorities at the February transfer window, held in the upstairs bar of The Two Chairmen in Trafalgar Square. The league leadership is still adamant that after a trip to the casino following the window, he did not fall asleep on the night bus and wake up miles from Kenna HQ in Enfield.
In April, some managers were seen on the banks of the River Thames lamenting their failure to capture league form on the first of three Kenna-organised London pub crawls in 2013. As Sporting took the league a month later, the Spartak Mogadishu manager celebrated his team’s first ever Kenna silverware when his side walloped Just Put Carles 7-1 in the Canesten Combi Cup final.
May’s end of season awards bash at the Pakenham Arms in Bloomsbury was the prelude of an international tournament free summer when the chairman had nothing better to do than bother a top European football ground in Lisbon and announce himself as statistically the best manager ever to compete in the Kenna.
In August, 23 managers convened for a record-breaking auction event at The Roebuck in Borough that saw a clutch of them hitting Club Duvet way past dawn to found The 7.08 Club.
While February’s transfer window enjoyed record attendance, October’s was a reminder of the disappointing turnouts of the late noughties. Just eight were seated around the table in the upstairs room of The Three Stags in Lambeth, and it led to calls for a managerial cull and unsavoury reprisals.
Soon after the October window closed and the heavy cogs of the Canesten Combi Cup group stage ground into action, early-season pretenders Headless Chickens lost their place at the top of the table to perennial underachiever the Piedmonte manager.
There was still time for two more pub crawls – one at the start of November, and one at the end – before the PSV Mornington manager became the first ever Kenna manager to get the sack by Christmas when the club’s board lost patience with the poorest start to a season ever recorded.
Much to universal astonishment, AVB joined the Kenna just before Christmas.
The Kenna blog’s top five posts in 2013 (that weren’t about pub crawls)
- Lezzers lose libido late on – It’s highly likely that not everyone looking for this page expected to find details of Sporting Lesbian’s wobble towards the end of the 2012/13 season.
- In too deep – The Woking manager’s brutal murder of an attractive Sky Sports News anchor to the music of Genesis was a firm favourite all around.
- A Tale of Two Cissés – Kenna revisit of the Charles Dickens classic to compare the fates of Papiss and Djibrial after joining the league in February.
- No Sporting chance – Difficult to see why news of an administrative debacle over which team really progressed from a cup semi final was so popular, unless the accompanying photo is taken into account.
- What a bunch of can’ts – The chairman’s failed attempt at skiing captured on camera was an instant hit.
