Four whole days before the start of the next football season, and we’ve just decided to sell one of our key players.
But that’s fine, because we have more than adequate back up and squad depth for that position.
Oh. Wait. No. No, we don’t.
OK, so maybe not at the moment, but there are still [checks notes] a whole four days before the season starts. We can surely find exactly the right player(s), get them signed, registered, trained up and adapted to our system in the next 72 hours, so that they’re ready to go on Saturday evening, right?
Well, probably not.
But at least we got a HUGE sum of money for him.
Considerably less, you say? Like what?
Oh, so like less than half what you originally told us, and now some of which we have to give to another team?
This wasn’t planned, but quite by chance, it’s almost a year to the day since I waxed lyrical about the Checkers Xtra Savings Plus card in my post: Xtra Savings Plus.
It wasn’t an ad than, and it still isn’t an ad now.
I give Checkers R99 a month, they give me several benefits including free delivery on my Sixty60 shopping, extra personalised deals around the shop, and 10% off one shop a month. That discount can be up to R200, and it always is R200, because I carefully hold fire on the big (expensive) items that we need, and lump them all together in that one shop so I make sure that I get all the benefit of that R200.
I’m not daft, hey? Despite what they say.
Today, I did even better than usual:
That was on a shop totaling about R3,300 before discounts. That’s more than 30% off, and while it’s still a lot of money to spend (because life is f*****g expensive!), it’s also R986.66 better than it could have been.
I’m still telling you to sign up. It’s such a good deal: spend a bit to save a lot.
Absolutely:
Best mundane grocery shopping thing I’ve ever done.
How’s the whole 6Music thing going, then?
Yes. The 6Music overseas listening thing, which started here, and continued all the way through to this much more recent post, which has been doing HUGE business for the blog. Zeitgeist.
Yes, you can still listen to 6Music outside the UK, but it’s a really crap experience. It’s via a page on a browser, there are frequent breaks and crashes, but there are no bells, no whistles, no rewinding, no listen back later options. It’s seriously basic. When it works.
But it does work. Mostly.
However, I’ve found that using a VPN is still the better way to listen. It’s a pain on my phone because it drains the battery quickly, it makes all my other browsing slower, and all my ads are…
NOTHING BEATS A JET2 HOLIDAY!!!
…on repeat.
But it does work SO much better than the straight link.
“Wow. He must be very special,” I hear imagine them whispering, and yeah…
And they are going from strength to strength, with several (or more) new locations being added all the time: Canal Walk (which has a Checkers), V&A Waterfront, Gardens Shopping Centre etc etc etc. It’s just a great system, and you can get some free parking by signing up on my link:
TRE162273
…when you get the app on Apple here, or Google here.
Still down for a good time
Ostensibly, there’s one more month of winter left down here. We’ve had quite a lot of rain already this time around, and after 10 crisp, cool, sunny days, yesterday was a whole 28oC. And then the next cold front hit us. So how are we staying warm at night?
We’ve had that duvet for 13 months now and, well, it’s that “No Ragrets” image all over again. I cannot fault evolution when it comes to the down of the Hungarian Goose, or fault the goose-plucking (careful now) farmers plucking their geese. It is so deliciously light and warm, but without the rubbish bits of the goose, like the honking and the poo.
This one was another success story.
We can dance if we want to
Let’s tie it all (well, some of it) together. I heard this song on 6Music while I was at the shops this morning, not buying a duvet. It’s fun, it’s mad, it’s… The Safety Dance.
Right. Let’s light the fire and prep for this incoming nastiness.
No matter who wins this afternoon’s little matchup in North London, it’s going to be a massive struggle for them to stay in the Premier League next season. The last six clubs promoted to the top flight have come straight back down, and between them, scored a record number of points. And not a record number in a good way.
Why is this? Well, the gulf between the two leagues has always been opening up, but it seems that soon after Covid, it widened into a chasm of epic proportions. And if you were in there when this happened, you now seem to have some sort of protection against relegation.
So suddenly, you have the likes of Bournemouth, Fulham, Brentford and Brighton battling it out for European places. And no offence to those clubs, but they’re not exactly historically the biggest teams. But they were in the mix when it counted and now they are the new biggest teams.
Of course, 95% of it comes down to money. Plucky performances and passionate support can only do so much. And how on earth are Championship cubs meant to compete when there’s this level of financial disparity?
When you don’t have European football, and when you don’t have an assured place in the Premier League, you simply can’t attract big players. And the double whammy is that the opposition can. And thanks to English teams performing way above the average in the European competitions this year, there could be as many as 10 of the 17 existing teams in the Premier League playing in Europe next year. Six of them will be in the top tier on the chart below, another four in that second tier.
There’s a lot of money splashing around for the other clubs when you aren’t in those top two bands.
Spurs and ManU might have had absolutely awful seasons this time around, but they were still miles clear of the relegation places. There’s just no competition anymore when it comes to going down. And while that might be a very comfortable position for the established clubs, it will slowly(?) kill the league.
Of course, I hope we go up this afternoon. We have played brilliantly all season and we deserve to celebrate with something to show for it. But at the back of my mind (and those of dirty l**ds and Burnley fans, if they’re being honest), is the tinge of realism that next season will be a hard watch.
Still… let’s deal with that if and when we have to. COME ON YOU RED AND WHITE WIZZZZZAAAAARDS!
EDIT: OK, a few days later now and that didn’t go well. But I have just spotted this:
Spotted this advert on the socials earlier. I don’t need my pool renewed, nor am I an Ad Wizard, so I didn’t really pay that much attention, but…
… doesn’t Western convention mean that those two images should be there other way around to make the product and process in question seem worth spending your hard-earned money on?
This looks like a huge own goal. But at least it’s got some water in once it’s finished.
I’ve mentioned somewhere that when I pop a paid-for post on this blog, I let you regular readers know by attaching the tag “Black Label Fund” to it.
That’s because adding “sponsored” means that the posts are disregarded, and therefore useless. But adding nothing means that you might think that those things are my actual views.
Nope.
Anyway. Long story short(ish), I’m clearly going to have to change more going forward. Because:
But I’m not sure that my current drinking habits are now economically viable.
Much like paying a ridiculous amount for getting a helium balloon filled, I guess that’s inflation.
