A troublesome showing from wor Alan this week. After a stellar season debut last week, he now seems distant, petulant and uncomfortable; it was like watching a man who was completely unsuited to media work, rather than the man who we know and love who is triumphantly unaware that he is completely unsuited to media work.
The problems began after watching Newcastle; this statement is invariably true. Perhaps affected by the ongoing troubles of “His” club, Alan twice stumbled on the pronunciation of the word “confidence”- which he rendered as “conference” and, ironically, began to lose confidence. I took the liberty of transcribing his comments over the VT of Blackburn’s first goal:
“It’s a…it’s a..er..wide..em ball in. Samba, and um..Samba. Decent header“.
Breaking this down, the first thing that stands out is the repetition. Insanity is said to be repeatedly doing the same thing expecting different results, and while that is certainly true of Newcastle’s play, Alan’s mild indignation is not going to stop Samba getting on the end of that free kick. Ultimately though, the final sentence betrays a sense of resignation and grudging respect; for the finish at least, if not for verbs.
Alan was possibly affected by the presence of Hansen, the man who truly embodies the inimitable qualities of Alan-ness. Clearly missing his favoured plaything Mark Lawrenson to idly paw at, Shearer was rocked early by Hansen’s bullish presentation of a compilation of Rob “Furious” Styles’ Greatest Penalty Mistakes. This briefly roused Shearer into a diatribe on Styles’ refusal to admit his mistake to prove that “he’s man enough“, but just as quickly he lapsed back into helplessness, plaintively adding “But they don’t come out and say that. Why?”.
The superiority of Hansen was cemented when he openly laughed in Shearer’s face at the opinion that West Bbrom could have scored more, cutting him dead with the drippingly sarcastic “Yeah, definitely“, which could only have been worse had he then done an impression of a disabled person and said “DURRR, BY NABE IS ALAN SHEE-A-RURR“, while attempting to lick his elbow. A nervously giggling Gary Lineker then talked over the league table (as if we can’t read), and Alan was left too broken to even groan at the headscratchingly bad “Geovanni / Nirvana” pun. My only hope is that this is an early trail for a new BBC documentary series in which Geovanni Deiberson Maurício Gómez conducts a lively debate on the concept of nirvana. The series will see him tackle all the big questions:
- Why don’t referees come out and explain their decisions eh? Are they scared that they will get a selective highlight package of all their mistakes?
- How can nirvana be “consciousness without surface”- being at one with everything, yet also the void?
- And how did I, Geovanni Deiberson Maurício Gómez, piss it all away at Barcelona and Benfica, then end up at Hull?
