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| Fabianski, L | WHM | £ 3.00 |
| Robertson, A | LIV | 0.5 |
| Ake, N | BOU | £ 5.00 |
| Egan, J | SHF | £ 1.00 |
| Valery, Y | SOT | £ 3.00 |
| Matic, N | MUN | £ 4.00 |
| Trezeguet | AVL | £ 3.00 |
| Sterling, R | MCY | £ 35.00 |
| Bernard | EVE | £ 0.50 |
| Gray, A | WAT | £ 3.00 |
| Rodriguez, J | BUR | £ 5.00 |
| £ 62.50 |
| Arrizabalaga, K | CHE | £ 10.00 |
| Shaw, L | MUN | £ 16.00 |
| Stones, J | MCY | £ 0.50 |
| Stevens, E | SHF | £ 0.50 |
| Doherty, M | WLV | £ 6.00 |
| Anderson, F | WHM | £ 14.00 |
| Vrancic, M | NOR | £ 0.50 |
| Townsend, A | CRY | £ 2.00 |
| McNeil, D | BUR | £ 0.50 |
| Origi, D | LIV | 0.5 |
| Heung-min, S | TOT | £ 25.00 |
| £ 75.00 |
| Pickford, J | EVE | £ 7.00 |
| Alderweireld, T | TOT | £ 13.00 |
| Ogbonna, A | WHM | £ 3.00 |
| Zinchenko, O | MCY | £ 1.00 |
| Ward, J | CRY | £ 0.50 |
| Grealish, J | AVL | £ 6.00 |
| Pereyra, R | WAT | £ 3.00 |
| Salah, M | LIV | £ 10.00 |
| Ward-Prowse, J | SOT | £ 1.00 |
| Jimenez, R | WLV | £ 0.50 |
| Rashford, M | MUN | £ 25.00 |
| £ 70.00 |
| Pope, N | BUR | £ 2.00 |
| Sanchez, D | TOT | £ 5.00 |
| Coleman, S | EVE | £ 5.00 |
| Pereira, R | LEI | £ 7.00 |
| Gomez, J | LIV | £ 4.00 |
| Deulofeu, G | WAT | £ 10.00 |
| Almiron, M | NEW | £ 3.00 |
| de Bruyne, K | MCY | £ 15.00 |
| Bowen, J | WHM | £ 0.50 |
| Aubameyang, P | ARS | £ 20.00 |
| Samatta, M | AVL | £ 0.50 |
| £ 73.00 |
| Patricio, R | WLV | £ 10.00 |
| Schar, F | NEW | £ 3.00 |
| Cathcart, C | WAT | £ 0.50 |
| Diop, I | WHM | £ 2.00 |
| Mee, B | BUR | £ 2.00 |
| Willian | CHE | £ 8.00 |
| Fernandes, B | MUN | £ 0.50 |
| Buendia, E | NOR | £ 2.00 |
| Tielemans, Y | LEI | £ 15.00 |
| Calvert-Lewin, D | EVE | £ 4.00 |
| King, J | BOU | £ 0.50 |
| £ 50.00 |
The Kenna League chairman has called Professor Thomas Chamberlain from the Lyle Centre to help find 12 months of missing posts from the Kenna blog. Chamberlain sends Dr Nikki Alexander and Jack Hodgson to Kenna HQ. They are with the chairman in his executive office.
NIKKI: I can see this body’s been here for quite some time. Let me get my big camera with the circle light on the end.
CHAIRMAN: That’s not why I asked you here. The last 12 months of Kenna blog content has gone missing.
NIKKI: But there’s a dead body in the corner of your office. It looks to have been decomposing for nearly a decade. There are blow flies here so long they’ve chalked out some football pitches and are on the second four-year cycle of their own World Cup. Who is it?
CHAIRMAN: That’s just the spirit of the Kenna. It died at the 2012 Euros auction when the Dark Lord unmasked himself as the tactical Brambler.
JACK: Let’s take a closer look at your desk.
CHAIRMAN: What’s that you’re holding?
JACK: It shines UV light to find evidence. It’s a called a jizzlamp.
CHAIRMAN: I’d rather you didn’t….
Jack switches on the device
NIKKI: Good God!
JACK: The jizzlamp doesn’t lie.
CHAIRMAN: Ignore those stains. They’re nothing to do with the missing Kenna posts. They’re to do with a website that’s unrelated.
JACK: Unrelated how? Like a stepmom?
NIKKI: Or a MILF?
CHAIRMAN: That website material is nothing to do with this.
JACK: I need to get Clarissa on the blower.
CHAIRMAN: Well, it certainly wasn’t that sort of content.
JACK: Hi, I’m going to send you some data from the Kenna HQ porn laptop.
CLARISSA (on speakerphone): Interesting.
CHAIRMAN: Why are you calling it the porn laptop?
JACK: Because the jizzlamp doesn’t lie.
CLARISSA: I’ve run the data you sent. There are about 50 posts. Most of them appear to have been about someone called the Dark Lord.
NIKKI: The tactical Brambler.
JACK: Nikki, this really isn’t the episode to develop a love interest.
NIKKI: Don’t worry about me. I’m still seeing that Yank.
CHAIRMAN: Alexi Lalas?
ALEXA: Playing The La’s, There She Goes
JACK: Heroine. Here, in your desk drawer.
CHAIRMAN: It’s morphine. It belonged to my father. Mixed with beer, wine, gin and tonic, cognac, tobacco, diazepam and a changing family dynamic it’s actually quite useful for the early stages of bereavement.
CLARISSA: I found something here about football chants.
CHAIRMAN: Oh yes, I published some chants based on Newcastle United and the potential takeover by….of course!
JACK: What?
CHAIRMAN: The Saudis. Don’t you see?
NIKKI: See what? A dead body in the corner of your office and a desk that looks like a painter’s radio?
CHAIRMAN: It was the bloody Saudis! Those thin-skinned tyrants. They must have deleted all that content because they were offended by the football chants.
CLARISSA: Before you get carried away, may I ask if you ever backed up the Kenna website?
CHAIRMAN: What’s that?
CLARISSA: From what I can see here you didn’t back up your site before changing your hosting arrangements.
CHAIRMAN: No, it must have been the Saudis. I bet they’re working with vice chairman. That rat.
NIKKI: Didn’t the vice chairman come up in a toxicology report a couple of summers ago?
JACK: The whole league did, after the Dmitri Kharine Russia World Cup auction.
CLARISSA: Mr chairman, you didn’t back up your site. That’s why the posts have gone. It’s nothing to do with the Saudis.
CHAIRMAN: Then why did I receive this invitation to the Saudi consulate in the post today?
JACK: That’s a receipt from your local butcher.
CHAIRMAN: The swine.
Full scores available from The Rub
Test Team 57 – 45 Cowley Casuals
Dynamo Charlton 66 – 46 Hairy Fadjeetas
Clotted Cream First 46 – 40 TNS
Barry Town 43 – 75 Daggers
JPF 30 – 43 Lowry Travel Tavern
Fat Ladies 43 – 43 Magpies (Magpies progress as they less players who scored no points)
So Good 46 – 68 Young Boys
Bala Rinas 51 – 44 Pikey Scum
Cowley Casuals v Bala Rinas
Dynamo Charlton v Young Boys
Clotted Cream First v Magpies
Daggers v Lowry Travel Tavern
Project Restart was not going well at Kenna HQ.
Having proclaimed himself champion in March because his side were top of the table, the chairman of the world’s leading London pub-based fantasy football league was hoping the season would be called off.
In addition a technical error meant all the content from the Kenna site from May 2019 had been deleted.
Kenna news, tables, teams, cup competition details and even the football chants about the Saudi takeover of Newcastle. All gone.
‘Damn it!’ said the chairman, slapping his desk in frustration, ‘There’d normally be hyperlinks to at least three other pages by this point of the post.
‘The last thing I have about a Devonian winning last year’s cup on 17 May 2019 containing Westcountry slang so ludicrous some pasty muncher will be toppling my statue.’
To add to his problems, and there were many, the restart had seen the Chairman’s XI toppled two places to third place despite the continued imperiousness of Bruno Fernandes.
Trophy-less challengers Test Team (please ignore) not only resumed their place in first, but saw their striker knighted for services to free lunches, Sir Marcus Rashford.
While the Kenna purist hopes such sanctity in a team’s ranks cannot win the title, the Kenna realist sees the parsimonious Dynamo Charlton manager just two points off the lead chasing his first championship and the Dark Lord lurking in fourth chasing his third.
And what of the cup competition? There’s no record of how the last 16 matches went and there’s as much trust among managers in the Kenna as there is among officials in the Lubyanka.
The chairman said: ‘With another five weeks remaining, the last 16, quarters, semis and final could be played in the last four.
‘We’ll call it the Lockdown Cup.’
And that appeared to be that.
Tuesday 30 June
Tuesday 7 July
Tuesday 14 July
Monday 20 July
Monday 27 July
In response to the Twitter shoutout from Deserter for pub memories.
Back in 2006 when beerintheevening.com was the New Testament and hangover’s only lasted until tomorrow lunchtime, my mate Balmers and I often enjoyed a London pub crawl on a Sunday afternoon.
On a jaunt along Mile End Road one cloudy August sabbath, we chanced upon a pub called Soma. It had a horseshoe bar and windows overlooking the main drag, but what really drew us was the dystopian novelist Aldous Huxley, who named soma as the drug of his Brave New World.
It was early in the day and quiet, so when we ordered two pints of Red Stripe and launched into a Huxleyan analysis of east end pubs and their control over society we caught the attention of a woman drinking alone at a table.
She was blonde and probably in her late thirties, more than ten years our senior at the time. Nevertheless, for two single men her smile, femininity and spontaneous conversation made for a sparky introduction. We joined her. It was fun.
At some point I made my excuses and headed to the gents (this wasn’t the first pub of the day). The world has many ways to fleece you out of a pound and one of these was on the wall by the sink – a gumball machine dispensing single-use, chewable toothbrushes.
Buoyed by nothing more than the whisper of a promise only I could hear, I inserted a quid, twisted the handle and received my disappointing Kinder Surprise.
Back in the bar, it wasn’t long before the friendly woman outed herself to us. She was a lesbian, she said, and had come out a few years ago. I suppose she found us entertaining and clocked we weren’t complete tossers. Or she could smell toothpaste.
The easy tone of our conversation thus far, and more Jamaican lager beer, meant we could easily switch to the woman happily answering our innocent questions about her sexuality and life experiences. Privately, I mourned the pound coin.
The woman announced her partner was joining her in the pub soon and she would be delighted to introduce us. Terrific, we said. Another lesbian. Surely she’ll add to the craic.
Sadly, that wasn’t the case. The partner arrived and was quite the opposite of her other half. She had a shock of dark cropped hair, wore a jumper of red and black hoops and wasn’t impressed with us at all. It was like meeting Dennis the Menace the day Gnasher died.
In a futile attempt to salvage the day I got in a round. As I stood at the bar, the death knell of our chance encounter sounded behind me: ‘So…which one of you mows the lawn?’
Balmers could be a wally sometimes, but you had to admire his matter-of-fact delivery.
We debriefed in the Blind Beggar on Whitechapel Road.
After the formalities of getting in a couple of pints, finding a table and christening Dennis the Menace, I told Balmers I’d wasted a nugget on a crap toothbrush from a gumball machine.
He laughed: ‘So did I!’
According to beerintheevening Soma was closed down and boarded up by the following summer.
NEWINGTON Reds all but won the Kenna League on the weekend, but failed register a double.
The debutant manager at Clotted Cream First defeated Reds in a tense Krakow Cup final.
The Wile. E. Coyote of set pieces Trent Alexander-Arnold was the difference, a clean sheet and two assists earning him 13 points.
“Trent be a helluva bhuy, gert lush ee iz,” drawled the Devonian manager of The Cream.
“Fan zee zat, a Janner scoopinnt Krakoff dreckly ee be int Kenna? Although I was savage to see me bhuy Ake gettin minus two. Madazza barbed wire badger, ee iz.”
While Clotted Cream First shaved Reds in the cup, in the league second-placed Hairy Fadjeetas are in no danger shaving anything.
Third placed Fat Ladies also appear unlikely to shave anything from Hairy Fadjeetas’ 13-point advantage this Saturday. Fadges take Raheem Sterling into the game, while Ladies rely on Americ Laporte.
There’s an outside chance Bala Rinas could spring 18 points into third place if Gerard Deulofeu and Ederson combine.
Newington Reds 30 – Fab 2, J Evans 7, Robertson 7, Coady 1, C Taylor 0, Mili 1, Hojbjerg 2, Camarasa 0, Babel 1, Murray 7, Higuain 2
Clotted Cream First 33 – Lloris 1, TAA 13, Ake -2, Lascelles 7, Nordtveit 0, McArthur 4, Xhaka 0, H Costa 0, Barkley 2, Kun 7, Austin 1
IN a week of dramatic football comebacks the Kenna failed to deliver in spectacular fashion as Newington Reds marched undisturbed towards a maiden league title.
Glenn Murray and Gonzalo Higuain (as I said, unspectacular) were both on target to put yet more distance between Newington Reds and the rest of the league.
However, the weekend will be far from a Sunday stroll for the trophyless Reds boss, who will be keen to claim the double by outperforming Kenna debutants Clotted Cream First in the Krakow Cup final.
It will be no easy task. The Devonian manager at ‘The Dairy’ lists final-day specialist Sergio Aguero and set-piece maverick Trent Alexander-Arnold among his ranks.
Battle for second place in the league sees more pressure heaped on the Hairy Fadjeetas manager, who topped the table for most of the season before being usurped by Reds.
Going into the weekend 2008 Kenna champions Fat Ladies ‘snap at the Fadge’, and Ladies’ trio Eden Hazard, Jamie Vardy and Virgil van Dyke are favourites to overturn a 10-point gap.
Not only are the Fadges missing Roberto Firmino to injury, but the boss has been under intense scrutiny from United Arab Emirates authorities for some time.
Rumours abound in the Persian Gulf the Fadges boss fled the region stowed away in an Emirates cabin drinks trolley having formed a relationship with an airline employee.
The Yorkshireman’s exact whereabouts are unknown outside reports from the Swiss Alps he was seen in an Irish bar buying two pints for himself at the same time and telling anyone who would listen he ‘couldn’t give a fucking bollocks’.
At the other end of the table, where the bottom five face relegation, the Kenna’s only Somali manager dropped into the danger zone. Danny Baker has since deleted a tweet.
Full scores available from The Rub.
