review – The Jeff Kenna League

Five most likely questions in Kenna managerial post mortems

SPORTING Lesbian were crowned Kenna champions for the second time in their history on Saturday.

Despite a late charge from Cowley Casuals, Sporting jogged over the line after a fantastic goal from Alexis Sanchez.

The Sporting manager collected a tidy £175 prize pot, having also picked up manager of the month awards for October and December.

The other big winners were Cowley Casuals, lifting the Canesten Combi Cup and finishing second the manager banked £125.

The Walthamstow Reds manager finally picked up silverware after 10 years of trying, scooping Jeff’s Unfair Play Award.

Wondering whether the Reds manager had a hitherto undiscovered talent for signing undisciplined players all this time, chalkstripes in the Kenna HQ speculations department were almost tempted to go through the archives, but it was late in the afternoon and happy hour was about to start at Tiger Tiger.

For the first time ever, Alan Hansen has broken down his coloured performance chart into week-by-week league positions (see below).

Which prompts the question: with the body of the season lying on the coroner’s slab what will club boards be most keen to ask Kenna managers in the season review?

Here are the five most likely enquiries:

Still Don’t Know Yet: “After a rocky start the team started to play well and were then dire all season. Why didn’t you attend any transfer windows?”

Bala Rinas: “You’ve finished third again and you’re the only manager in the league to keep his side in the top four for the whole season. You’re quite lanky and you’re good with numbers. Are you Arsene Wenger in disguise?”

Young Boys: “Looking at your side’s performances in winter, would you describe yourself as a fair-weather manager?”

St Reatham FC: “The side were pushing for a top four finish for the whole season but dropping four places in May is clear evidence you now lack resolve to finish something off. Why can’t you bring your Chobham Common form to the dressing room?”

Hoxton Pirates: “Can you take your cutlass on the way out? And the Koran?…No, no, leave the khat and the RPG launcher.”

Alan Hansen’s coloured performance chart

Kenna season 2014-15 form guide and league positions

Prize breakdown

Subs: £500
Champions – £150
Runners up – £50
Third place – £25
Wenger Trophy – £12.50
Canesten Combi Cup winners – £75
Manager of the Month – £12.50
Jeff’s Unfair Play Award – £25
Committee costs – £37.50

Sporting Lesbian – champions and MOTMx2 = £175
Cowley Casuals – Cup winners and runners up = £125
Bala Rinas – third place and MOTMx2 = £50
Lokomotiv Leeds – Wenger Trophy and MOTMx1 = £25
Walthamstow Reds – Unfair Play Award and MOTMx1 = £37.50
Judean Peoples’ Front, Young Boys, FC Testiculadew and St Reatham FC – MOTM = £12.50 each

Kenna table – final standings

Kenna week 38 - 2 June 2015 — Kenna week 38 – 2 June 2015

The Kenna 2013 end of year review

Andorra — Fail from the chair: The fifth most popular Kenna post of 2013

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

Bramble jersey handover 1Feb13 anon — February: Bramble Jersey handed over

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.

Somali pirate Lego — May: Pirates 7-1 Catalans

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)

A playful slime treatment — Not for footballing reasons: The most popular post of 2013

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.

Olisadebe review: the best, the worst, the mediocre

UTOYA ISLAND XI’s back five rocked the record books by failing to register a single point between them for the whole Olisadebe Euro 2012 tournament.

It is the first time in Kenna history that a team’s goalkeeper and four defenders scored nil points in a competition.

The defensive shower of Shay Given, Per Mertesacker, Andrea Ranocchia, Marcus Antonsson and Dejan Lovren either put in an awful shift or didn’t even go to Poland or Ukraine due to form or injury.

“Obviously some of my targets didn’t come off,” said the Utoya manager, whose strike force of Ronaldo and Lovenkrands were named the most mediocre of the contest.

Don’t Know Yet, whose manager was making his debut, had the surprise top strike force of Fernando Torres and Titus Bramble player Georgios Samaras.

Team

Best – The Euroscpetics: 157 points
Worst – Make Party: 76 points

Player

Best – Jordi Alba (The Eurosceptics): 39 points
Worst – Wojciech Szczesny (Testiculadewland), John O’Shea (Just FEMEN): -1 point each

Strike force

Best – Samaras and Torres (Don’t Know Yet): 39 points
Worst – Ben Arfa and Kuyt (Bwing on the Euwos): 5 points
Most mediocre – Ronaldo and Lovenkrands (Utoya Island XI): 24 points (average: 24.21)

Midfield

Best – Xavi, Pirlo, Gerrard and Veloso (Every Pole’s a Goal): 72 points
Worst – Lampard, Robben, Malouda and Pranjic (Don’t Know Yet): 17 points
Most mediocre – Tziolis, The Ox, Ozil and Konoplyanka (Testiculadewland): 45 points (average: 43.28)

Defence

Best – Cech, Alba, Terry, Alves and K Papadopoulos (The Eurosceptics): 85 points
Worst – Given, Mertesacker, Ranocchia, Antonsson and Lovren (Utoya Island XI): 0 (zero) points
Most mediocre – dead heat between Kranjar, Silva, Rosicky and Husyev (Hoodyanika Bolokov), and, de Jong, Khedira, Busquets and Erikson (The Horn of Africa): 45 poins each (average 42.71)

Alan Hansen’s coloured performance chart

George Bush gets down — “No, no, no, that’s wrong. This is how you ask for marajuana in Coldharbour Lane.”

LIKE KING Kenny’s chances of being down with the kids of Brixton, the season is well and truly over.

To complement January’s big mid-season review, the Kenna has added the second half’s performance chart to the mix (below).

Back in early January, Lokomotiv Leeds had enjoyed a prosperous Christmas and dislodged FC Testiculadew from the top of the table.

FCT’s response was emphatic.

Producing what will probably turn out to be one of the highest-scoring months in Kenna history, Wayne Rooney & co were so rampant for the first four weeks of the calendar year that their manager wasn’t even inclined to attend the February transfer window.

Having lost Yaya Touré to the battlefields of Africa, Lokomotiv’s form nosedived in January and February, leaving FCT to sail over the line.

Meanwhile at the other end, Polonia Forsyth didn’t exceed average performance for the entire season.

Lurliners, Vasco De Beauvoir and the Dan Terry Seduction almost joined them.

So what does the aristocrat of Match of the Day punditry make of all this?

“Pace. Power. Determination. FC Testiculadew have it all in hatfuls.

“Solid at the back. Tight in midfield. When they get the ball in the final third, they’ve got that killer pass that makes all the difference.

“If I were to describe them in one word, it would be ‘quality’.

“When I was at Liverpool…”

We’re sure Alan will be back to provide some more insightful analysis in the near future.

Alan Hansen's coloured performance chart 2011-12 — Alan Hansen’s coloured performance chart 2011-12