Oi out there! It’s me, Olly Wollstonecraft, innit? But I’m better known on our side of the pond as The Sports Geezer.

You might have read my shite in the Runagate Rampant, or seen my beauty-filled visage on Sky TV 6’s “Best Fookin’ Sports Show of the Century.” Either way, doesn’t matter to me — I’m just happy to be bringing you my original common-man take on sport, all the way from old Blighty. I call this column “Fillin’ the Ol’ Onion Bag”…and welcome to it!

Better put away your assault rifles and shut those cheeseburgerholes, because here we go with some good old American bullet points:

• The Barclays Premier League is a joke this year. Well, more like every year, innit? But this year has started out worse than ever. The same old sad overhyped zeppelins sit atop the table and do sweet Fanny Adams with it while the greatest and noblest clubs of all, like my beloved West Brom (Go the Baggies!), are dead last. Seems like if you make a mint in kit sales — or you’re propped up by the money of an exiled Thai ex-president — you can just waltz right in and buy your championship right there. There hasn’t been such injustice since Jade got singled out as the big racist one in the Big Brother house when Danielle and Jo and Jack were all giving an earful to Shilpa Shetty too.
• Speaking of Manchester City, it looks like Thaksin Shinawatra’s money is out of the team’s picture. But now the new sponsors from Abu Dhabi are supposed to be all peaches and cream? As my mate Nick-o says, “Out of the saute pan, into the whatever they use to cook Abu Dhabi food, whatever that may be.” Couldn’t have said it better meself, Nick-o. But I like the idea of the Blues having the entire OPEC at hand to buy up every single good foreign player before Man U can get its fat little hands on ’em. Talk about cocking a snook at Sir Alex!
• Oh and didn’t wee Shaun have himself a game last week against West Ham…and isn’t he of a domestic vintage? The wee leprechaun is mad for it!
• I was in Belfast to witness Ronnie O’Sullivan and his utter demolition of Dave Harold in the Northern Ireland snooker finals. It was a great and glorious triumph indeed, “The Rocket” is unstoppable once he gets going on. But hello, what’s this I read in the Grauniad about the match: “…a delicate positional cannon was required to prise the brown away from the pink…” Me lad, I’ve made that shot dozens of times since I was 15! Rim-shot, cymbal crash. I’ll get me hat.
• Notice how a lot of subcontinentals are getting their frilly undergarments in a Delhi twist over the plans to launch an English Twenty20 Cricket Premier League. What, they can launch an Indian league bolstered by Bollywood stars and nouveau riche telemarketing supervisors, and we cannot? That having been said, though, anyone else have the idea that this league will start out looking like Stacey out of “Gavin and Stacey,” but end up more like her slag of a friend? (Not that I wouldn’t still have a bit of the bigger one, of course. Just saying.)
• You know who I miss? The Boo Radleys. What a great band, what a lovely bunch of guys. Spent a drunken pubcrawl with Martin Carr (great bloke, voice like a bag of spanners) in 1993 that ended with him smashing a Marks and Spencer display window and spraypainting “LIVERPOOL 4 EVAH” on the mannequins. To this day, I think C’mon Kids is brilliantine, a misunderstood work of deep feeling torpedoed by Martin’s angry contrary working-class soul, and a ferocious bitch-slap at the Gallagher Brothers and Damon Albarn…but then again I still own three different Roni Size albums, so what the bangers and mash do I know?
• Guess what? I have decided to follow the American football NFL league this year. Why? you ask. Well, because I can, is all. Also, we’re inundated with the “other” footy news anyway, might as well have a stake in it. Here’s where you come in — suggest your pick for what my new favorite NFL team should be, and why, and I will go with the best answer. This will make history, and become the most important thing in the world. I have only a few warnings: No horrible teams that have no chance of winning, as I am a front-runner; no teams with embarrassing ethnically-based nicknames (I’m talking to you, Minnesota fans); no teams that are also owned by arseholes who are currently ruining Premiership squads. As my uncle Niall used to say, “Let it blast, make it last.”

Alright, that’s enough from me this evening. Cheers, ye bastards.