Groaning: The Kenna HQ doormat struggles under the weight of transfer requests
ROYAL Mail chiefs last night warned of further disruption to services after the Kenna transfer window was blamed for bringing the postal system to the brink of collapse.
Managers notifying the league of their unwanted players by mail ahead of tomorrow’s first transfer window caused an unprecedented surge in correspondence.
As of this morning, Kenna HQ has received 11 letters from managers eager to get their hands on the £10m transfer kitty bonus for getting their requests in by post before today’s deadline. The volume of mail is expected to double today.
The £10m bonus will be added to the remaining funds from managers’ £100m budget from the Kenna pre-season auction. Gathered in the pub tomorrow at 3pm, the managers will bid against each other over unsigned footballers at the transfer auction to fill the gaps in their teams.
The league chairman said: “This is the top, top, top level of football in the world and managers are keen to give themselves the best advantage as they look to freshen up their teams heading into winter. There’s a long way to go to the second, and last, transfer window of the season in February.
“I can confirm that I received a telephone call from the Royal Mail chairman Donald Brydon CBE who begged me to change Kenna rules since additional strain was being put on their services. It seems the volume of under-performing footballers’ names being sent by post was interrupting deliveries of vital, lifesaving equipment.
“I said to him ‘Don, calm down, it’s not like anyone’s lost a kidney. Also, stop using the phone, it’s bad for your business’.
“The call ended well. We’re playing golf next week.”
Photos of managers posting their submissions have flooded social media sites. A prize will be awarded for the best offerings. Here’s a pick of the entries so far:
Going postal: Anders Breivik lookalike the Judean Peoples’ Front manager misuses the cricket-loving company dwarfSeeing red: The Still Don’t Know Yet manager shakes his fist at ‘the ivory tower‘Instant forfeit: The Young Boys manager owes the Kenna committee a round of drinks at tomorrow’s transfer window for using official London 2012 brandingPR opp: The St Reatham FC manager attempts to rebuild his public image after being plagued by unsavoury allegations earlier this yearQueen of football clubs: Her Maj is pressed into service by league leader the Headless Chickens managerPitcher and Piano: The Team Panda Rules OK manager advertises the poor choice of pubs in Berkshire’s county townCock and balls: FC Testiculadew stationery adheres to strict brand guidelinesKnit: The Hairy Fadjeetas managerRide of his life: The Judean Peoples’ Front manager felt it appropriate to include this photo with his transfer request
Don’t matter if you’re black or white. Or eight: Nani could face the door at Team Panda Rules OK for his statuesque performances (photo courtesy of thesparrowman)
THE MICHAEL Jackson statue removed from Craven Cottage last week is being lined up as a like-for-like replacement for Nani ahead of this Saturday’s first Kenna transfer window.
The Portuguese winger has failed to make an impact for Kenna newbies Team Panda Rules OK and the manager is taking no prisoners.
“That shabby tribute to the King of Pop has shown as much movement this season as, well, that shabby tribute to the King of Pop,” complained the Panda manager, as he prepared to table a bid for the statue to owner Mohamed Al-Fayed.
The Egyptian business magnate declined to comment.
This desperation is just the tip of the iceberg in the Kenna as managers prepare for the new format of transfer window on the weekend.
Having bought eleven players each at the pre-season auction, the window is one of only two chances in the campaign for managers to freshen up their teams. A second window is held in early February.
Club’s will release unwanted players by Friday before representatives congregate in the pub to fill their teams at auction.
Aaron Ramsey, Mesut Ozil, Ross Barkley and Morgan Amalfitano are among the unsigned players whose form will see them top manager’s shopping lists.
In the league, Headless Chickens maintained their lead at the top of the table this week with more goals from Yaya Toure and Gylfi Sigurdsson.
Luis Suarez’s two-goal return has lifted This is Sparta…Prague off the bottom of the table.
Rough guide to the transfer window
Notify the league of the players you want to release by Friday to get a bonus.
You will get a £10m bonus for submitting your released players by post to Kenna HQ, or £5m for doing so by any other means of communication.
You start the transfer night with the money you have left from your initial £100m, plus any bonus from getting your transfers in on time.
To begin with, auction lots will be drawn at random from the pot of released players.
Whatever your released player fetches at auction will be added to your funds.
The Titus Bramble ruling applies. Any manager without funds to fill their team spending the minimum of £0.5m on each player will have their most expensive player removed.
If no one buys your released player you can either keep them or let them go on a free. However, if someone buys that player later in the window you will get whatever is paid for them.
Once all the released players have gone to auction, a set number of available players will be auctioned in order of most points scored.
Once the set list is exhausted, managers with gaps in their teams to fill will take it in turns to introduce remaining players to auction.
Each manager has one wildcard that can be played at any time during the transfer window.
The wildcard allows you to release any player in your team at a moment’s notice.
You will not receive a bonus if you do not release any players.
Outlook (on 27 September 2013): As both Kenna chairman and competitor, the former Vasco De Beauvoir manager faces an increasingly inescapable conundrum. At the reins of Kenna HQ, the chairman has seen the league swell in popularity and elan with a record 20 managers last season enjoying unprecedented attendance at transfer windows. In charge of Vasco De Beauvoir, the manager has overseen the club’s steady decline since the treble-winning year of 2010, resulting in a slump to relegation for the first time. Indifferent to the Kenna’s overall success, the powers that be at Vasco had enough. Despite bringing them more glory than any other team in the league’s history the manager was handed his P45 in May.
Taking the number 67 bus from De Beauvoir deeper into north London, the chairman has found new employ at Klub Sportowy in West Green, where the streets are literally paved with empty Polish beer cans. The Worcestershire man may be from the pear county, but five weeks into the season his tenure is failing to bear much fruit. Ashley Williams, Nathaniel Clyne and £40m Sergio Aguero may be justifying their expense, but the manager is beset by injury and loss of form.
The Ox made an impressive first 45 minutes to the season, but hasn’t played since. ‘Release’ Bryan Ruiz pulled up right in front of the manager’s nose at Craven Cottage two weeks ago. Andre Schurrle, who averages a goal every three games for club and country, is struggling to make an impact and looks like he will soon share a similar fate to Graham Dorrans and Wes Hoolahan – and lose his place in the starting line up. Mark Hudson captained his side last season but now can’t get a place in the team. Jordi Spence is on loan in the lower divisions. Anders Lindegaard is getting as much time in goal at Old Trafford as Anders Breivik.
So while KS West Green may not be in line for any traditional Kenna silverware, they’re surely an early favourite in the Little Maddy award for least appearances stakes.
‘You’ve won a caravan’: The Kenna transfer window is under threat from a dark and powerful organisation
CHRISTIANITY touches, rightly or wrongly, millions of people around the world.
It’s early orders left a lot to be desired, but as Europe entered the Middle Ages the church provided hope, education and the promise of a life much better than the poverty and injustice of secular existence.
As civilisation marched on organised religion became bloated, corrupt and outmoded. The Enlightenment revealed much of the accepted history taught by the church to be inaccurate.
For example, the Eighteenth Century scholar Edward Gibbon was made to finish his six volume history of Europe – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – in free-thinking Switzerland for daring to use primary sources to write about the calamity that was the early Christian church.
Still men of the cloth – and sometimes women too, but certainly not gay men, or at least openly gay ones – catered to congregations who needed assurance of the basic difference between right and wrong. That was fine while the more pressing affairs of Kenna HQ could, like a happy choirboy, carry on unmolested.
This week the ambiguous relationship between the Kenna and church is in danger of being, like an unhappy choirboy, irreversibly broken.
The chairman is marrying a Catholic, and that Catholic, despite largely enjoying the Kenna’s practical views of religion, wants to get married in a Roman Catholic Church. In Poland.
Turn up and say the vows? Sadly, with this mob – the word is used carefully, meeting the chief priest in the Polish interior was like a scene from The Sopranos – it’s not just a case of chatting about your family values over a pot of tea and getting the bride-to-be to wear a T-shirt to advertise a lack of mystery bruising.
The Roman Catholics Church requires you to attend a structured course of lessons over a number of weeks. And you don’t even get tea.
They also want you to sign a piece of paper declaring you will never stop your children from becoming Catholic.
The icing on the cake, not that you get any of that either, is the reluctance of the priest to impart when the lessons start. The chairman’s better half has been attending mass every week waiting for the Good News.
In the Bernard Samson Cold War spy novel series by Len Deighton, the lead character describes the operations of the KGB as ‘very slow and very cunning’. He could have been talking about the Catholic Church.
The Kenna transfer window was scheduled for next Friday. Friday evening to be precise, a time when the western world finishes work for the week and unwinds ahead of their weekend chores, but not religion.
In His almighty wisdom, channeled through the dog collar of his local henchman, He has hinted, but not confirmed, that this lesson may well take place next Friday.
The transfer window hangs in the balance. This would not have happened if instead of choosing Jim Bowen, the Vatican had considered a more progressive application.
Outlook (on 24 September 2013): Spartak Mogadishu stunned the whole league in May when they lifted their first piece of the silverware, the Canesten Combi Cup. Not writing anything down and drinking heavily, the manager traditionally approached auctions with the gay abandon of an Al-Shabab shopping spree, and his reputation of firebrand was galvanised when he became the first manager to resign in the middle of an auction at the Emmanuel Olisadebe 2012 Euros. Attending last month’s all-dayer for the first time outside of Ramadan appeared to temper the Somali, and he even hooked some worthwhile players.
At the unveiling of the new squad at the club’s Spyglass Hill training facility, the manager admitted he felt slightly hornswoggled at the purchase of Glenn Murray, who’s been on crutches since May and will continue to be for some time. In Robert van Wolfswinkel, Marco van Ginkel and Johnny Heitinga, the manager has three players to feature in the national side for Holland, a country known throughout history for its maritime tradition. Hernandez, Lallana, Kolarov and Jaaskelainen all started the season in strong form.
Despite this Spartak are not managing to gel and slipping down the table with each passing week. In the Kenna there’s a very fine line between success or failure; between a white, sandy Caribbean island, a crate of rum and Keira Knightly, or five minutes in the upstairs room of a tavern with a toothless crone.
Outlook (on 19 September): Commitments on the south coast meant the Piedmonte manager was unable to attend last month’s auction in person. Instead he joined proceedings by Skype over three hours into the bidding. Unenviable, considering this would be his ninth tilt at the Kenna hindered by an unhealthy preoccupation with signing English players. As such his trophy cabinet’s emptier than a pint of Carling is of flavour. He joins the Newington Reds manager on dismal figures of just two podium finishes in eight seasons.
Removed from the absurdity of The Roebuck’s upstairs bar, the Piedmonte manager appears to have overcome his prejudice, buying just five players who hail from the green and pleasant land, although how pleasant the changing rooms will be after a mid-match visit from Jason Puncheon is up for debate. The rest of the team is made up of a German, a Welshman, a Norwegian, a Frenchman, a Togolese and an Irishman. The manager must be asking himself if all these Johnny Foreigners be able to play in a rigid 4-4-2 system reliant on long ball? Or will they just be a bad, uncoordinated, out-of-tune joke?
Box to box: Aaron ‘Rambo’ Ramsey, unsigned by Kenna managers, was player of the week (photo courtesy of Sveden)
THE CAMOUFLAGED Genoa youth coach may have been likened to a fictional Vietnam War veteran this week when he was caught in a bush spying on a Sampdoria training session, but he’s not the only Rambo making an assault on the football headlines.
The Twitter Users Obvious Jokes Club has been left scrabbling around the obituary columns over the last month as the Welshman’s goal scoring touch transformed from occasional sniper rifle to Syrian chemical weapon.
So convincing is his resurrection, there’s even a bandwagon swelling with passengers who claim Ramsey is better than Jack Wilshere. The injury-prone Englishman, who is yet to score or make an assist, was bought for £23m by Judean Peoples’ Front.
Another player to come in from the cold of indifferent Kenna form is Gylfi Sigurdsson. The Icelandic midfielder scored twice on Saturday as his Headless Chickens teammates Michu, Craig Gardner and Gareth McAuley also struck to help their team to the top of the Kenna for the first time since entering the league.
Aaron Ramsey joins nearly-namesake Aron Gunarsson, Jose Fonte, Frazier Campbell, Steven Whittaker, Peter Whittingham and Nathan Redmond as over-performing players left unsigned by Kenna managers at last month’s auction.
Come October’s transfer window they will all be in high demand as managers look to the sparse talent available to improve their sides.
In a first ever for the Kenna, this post was guest written by the manager of Team Panda Rules OK, who makes his debut this season. The manager’s account of visiting an MLS game on the weekend makes observations on the football viewing experience across the pond.
THE PANDA’S commitment to world and Jeff Kenna domination occasionally takes him to far-flung cities and underground sporting venues.
This weekend it was the Toyota Park Stadium in Bridgeview, Illinois, to witness Chicago Fire take on New England Revolution.
Having secured a ticket for $35 through the Chicago Fire website, I arrived parched at the stadium via the Windy City’s CTA railroad, one of several Chicago locations you may have seen in The Dark Knight.
The stadium itself was small, in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by a car park full of picnicking and barbecuing families – but unfortunately not a single drinking hole within camel’s distance.
Luckily my $35 ticket included admission to the Miller Lite Party Deck – a flat platform behind one of the goals where you are given a wristband entitling you to two free beers, a bucket of popcorn and a pitifully small hotdog.
Having sated my thirst with Miller Genuine Draft (a throwback to my youth), and witnessed a firework-accompanied murdering of the Star Spangled Banner, I watched the game begin with the lack of “bite” that can only come from a stadium full of American families and devoid of opposition fans.
Two intoxicated Fire fans who attempted to get the ambiance enlivened by shouting abuse at the opposition goalie from approximately 10 metres behind him (“Shuttleworth – you suck”) were swiftly ejected, presumably by one of the ball girls.
They provided the solitary atmosphere of the game, which fell flat despite its significance in the Eastern Conference, the five goals which it contained, and the fact you are allowed to stand to watch the match.
The football itself was technically good, played on the floor, at a semi-pace and without fear that a tackle might be made.
Largely anonymous was the Fire’s big player Mike Magee, a sort of tragi-comic figure who managed to win the man-of-the-match award despite ducking out of every header like a seal scared of the beach ball.
You can pick up a shirt with his name and number on for $149 at the club shop, which is far too much when you consider he is sh1t and the Miller is going for $7.50, although the red shirt is smart.
You can see Magee in action – complete with American Soccer-ball commentary – below.
Outlook (on 16 September 2013): Forty floors below the club’s Itchysack Park training facility, the FC Testiculadew manager mused behind his heavy oak desk. He had won the league and cup double on his first attempt. He’d broken records that year and shown up the rest of them to be the footballing simpletons they were, groping around in dark while his team had run away with the championship. He had created the master stroke of tactical Brambling, buying ineligible players to wilfully accept a forfeit and give himself an advantage by freeing up funds late on in the auction. It was an act everyone else found atrocious. Why? There was no cheating in the world, only winning, no matter what ridiculous code of honour those bungling fools at Kenna HQ tried to uphold. Chivalry doesn’t equal success, cunning equals success and success equals power, and power, true power, was everything.
In May the unthinkable happened: he’d finished second. This was definitely not part of the plan. FCT would have to win this season, and with Benteke and Dzeko on form his team had made a good start. The half a million paid for Juan Mata didn’t quite seem like the bargain it was a month ago, but the rest of the midfield showed promise. He was reasonably satisfied with the defence too, although Debussy’s performances were a worry. The truth was every player was expendable in the hunt for a second title. Very soon they would understand that.
He pulled a tasselled chord next to the desk. There was no sound for a few moments until the door creaked open and an elderly butler entered. “Have they assembled in the sacrificial chamber?” said the manager. The subordinate nodded in assent. “Good, tell them I’ll be there directly.”
The butler left the room. The FCT manager robed himself in a ceremonial cloak and pulled on the hood. It was time.
Outlook (on 13 September 2013): There’s something from the hip about the Dulwich Red Sox manager’s approach not just to the Kenna, but to life. Like a whirlwind he entered the competitive arena of last month’s auction – tail up, nose twitching, giving it the Barry – looking to buy any players he liked the sound of to build his smash and grab team. It didn’t work two seasons ago when the manager was in charge of the Lurliners and, like the DRS cricketing namesake, it’s still not the finished solution.
Dimitar Berbatov is one of the best striker’s around, five per cent of the time, and will not reflect his £24m price tag as well as Oscar. Osman’s a steady buy, Milner’s more part-time workhorse than creative show pony and Giggs – how long until age or another failed superinjunction catch up with him? Reid and Lowton are regular starters, but Martin Skrtel’s future hangs in the balance and Thomas Vermaelen is a shade of the former goal-scoring self who came to the Kenna four years ago. Freidel’s one appearance of the season will be on the Match of the Day 2 sofa.
