This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Jump to more content from this blog About this blog. I'm Derek Robson. People call me Robbo. Legend has it I was raised in the furnace and smog of Teesside. Some might say I took the hard road. I like to tell folk I had trials for Middlesbrough, for Hartlepool and for burglary not guilty.
I've always loved sport. My job is to say it as I see it - whether it's in the bar of the Blue Bell or on this blog. You won't find me calling a spade a soil-redistribution implement. Follow me on Twitter Here are some tips on taking part and our house rules. Subscribe to Robbo Robson.
You can stay up to date with Robbo Robson via these feeds. When they're anyhting like you can't see anyone beating them. Reasons to be cheerful here. Fernandes is superb. Pogba's upped his game since someone better than him arrived. Van de Beek de Bork? If Maguire can avoid getting arrested, and the front three keep firing, well But not far behind 1st.
Not unlike the Toon Army I've had my doubts about Bruce. But he's been great. Wilson, Fraser and Lewis are top signings.
Trouble is, it's all the other shit isn't it? People know when they're working for a dysfunctional organisation. Just ask senior civil servants. Should be doing better but all that crap will trickle down onto the pitch eventually I dunno.
Miraculous effort last season. I think cos Wilder's so old school about it, it's easy to ignore how skilled and savvy United were, too.
The end of the season indicated tougher times ahead but a team to admire. Still hard to believe that drubbing last season. How that hurt the heart of Hassenhuttl. Hassenhuttl's higher hurdle has to be harder however. Hassenhuttl's hopes hang on Danny Hings. Mourinho is a busted flush. I mean it. It's a good squad but unless he's banking up lines of four and five and grinding out draws against the big boys he's got nowt to offer.
The team looks so utterly cheerless. Not Spursy. Except some bottling will occur. It all looks very boing boing. Still, out of conviction that Palace must drop, I'm giving the Baggies an arbitrary benefit of the doubt.
Bilic is always good value too. Moyes remains. Even the venal pornographers in charge couldn't cast him to one side like a rain-soaked jazz-mag in a lay-by.
Quite how this season is anything other than another long slog with the squad he has is beyond me. Honorable exception - Antonio. Think they'll get away with it again. And Moyes will be gone this time next year. I know why Klopp got all the gongs for last season but Nuno or Wilder deserved them just as much.
Such a civilised soul, too. Every time I watched Adama Traore last season I was reminded of a bloke with a similar name who once ran about like a man on an uncontrolled motorised scooter at the Riverside.
Different bloke though the one at Wolves. That's that then. You can ignore the entire season now you know how it will end. Hope that's distracted you from the cavalcade of lying law-breaking self-interested, untrustworthy fucktards that are dragging this country's name through the mud at every turn. Okay, it's been a while. But at least I've been more in the public eye than the Prime Minister. I've been on a holiday in North Wales.
The tent was real and actually used. The weather was less wet than the green grass would suggest. The waterfalls were many and bleeding beautiful and the wifi was as reliable as a policy statement on schools by the Education Secretary. I return to find that Twitter seems more obsessed with whether wobbling-jowled Tories can sing Rule Britannia at that toe-curling tradition that is Last Night At The Proms, rather than the fact that the Government seems to have a never-ending spaff of funds to splurge out on their nearest pals in the glorified Etonian wank-circle they call public policy these days.
But this is a sports blog, and sport has ducked in and out of the showers to bring us some interesting cricket and some fascinating footie. I copped on to some wifi for long enough to watch the Champs League final which, hyped up as some carnival of carefree kickaboutery, turned out to be predictably dull. Of all the glorified superstars of world football I find Neymar to be my least favourite. He spends a Grealishly long time falling on the floor during matches.
Indeed, shorn of all the intensity of a full stadium, the pratfalls and rolling around look even more desperate and, well, cheaty. More to the point, is anyone else utterly fed up with the replaying of penalty shouts where some pundit uses the well-worn phrase there was contact - as if the defender in question is less a footballer and more a 's predatory politician in a typing pool. Since when was touching a striker a criminal offence?
Truly the modern game has entirely embraced the dishonour of going down like a sack of spuds. He's entitled to go down. You hear that a lot. It's like me getting a bloke arrest for theft cos he was standing next to my car.
Far more entertaining was Bayern's annihilation of Barcelona. Mas que un club? The whole thing's imploding and Lionel Messi is off. If they let him. Which they must. Unless 17 years of faithful service count for nowt.
Warnock and Messi? It's a perfect combination - like ice-cream and gravel - or Trump and Truth. Seriously though - actually I'm quite serious so maybe I mean Realistically though, it would be bloody wonderful if he had a couple of seasons in the Premier League. I know Lineker and Piers Morgan have a tedious fake-Twitter spat over whether Messi or Ronaldo is the best ever - it's like disagreeing about what you favourite colour is and I wish they'd just shut the fuck up about it - but Messi is the one I like watching most.
And I really wouldn't care which monstrous moneybags of a team grabbed him. Except that I'd love him to pop up somewhere that's just struggling a bit: Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, Newcastle even.
The sort of place that would quite simply form itself into a giant hand and spend the next nine months pinching itself with glee. It'd be like Juninho popping up at Boro but times about seventy thousand. I'm sure the lad has bills to pay and places to be, and maybe Saturday night down the Bigg Market isn't exactly what he had in mind, but dreams, my friends, dreams are all we have right now.
Meantime, I've enjoyed the cricket, despite the fact there's been days when it felt like the bubble they've been played in was nothing less than a sophisticated carwash. Of most interest, beyond Zac Crawley's ludicrous and Jos Buttler's return to batting form being coupled with the occasional indication he couldn't catch a hazelnut in a laundry basket, has been the never-diminishing greatness of James Anderson.
Sometimes you have to get a cricket ball in your hand to understand how what he does is so utterly remarkable. It's like watching Ronnie O'Sullivan knock in a and then missing the reds off your break-off shot when you get down the snooker club.
Anderson's control, the way he sets up batsmen with forensic cunning, the fact that his averages go up and up even as he approaches 40, suggests that there's no reason why he can't carry on snarling and grumping his way to victims in a couple of years.
In a year where sport has felt remote, detached, and, when Neymar rolls around and Liverpool players jump up and down on a podium in celebration in front of no one, it has felt downright absurd just watching a master of his craft in action makes life a little - no, a lot - more bearable. I might add that it's good to see a highly competent Englishman at a time when those leading us are entirely inept too. Friday, 11 September Premier Predictions. The Premier League is back.
It's like it hardly went away. Posted by The Tees Mouth at 53 comments:. Posted by The Tees Mouth at 12 comments:. Tuesday, 21 July Good Citizen Kane. If there's one thing I haven't missed about the football, apart from standing inside the Riverside Stadium and weeping tears of quiet frustration, it's the meticulous pulling apart of people's psyches by both national and social media alike.
However I'm nowt if not a hypocrite so here's the pennyworth I'd be delivering in the Blue Bell if I could find a mask through which a craft brew lager could pass. Exhibit 1. David De Gea. De Gea has been for most of his seven years at United the only truly reliable performer in a sea of banality. Just think what he's seen come and go since Fergie's departure.
I say 'departure' but when you see him up in the stand they named after him, it looks more like he's floated up to some heavenly plinth, from where he, Godlike, glares down on the wrecked landscape of a beautiful world he once created. It's kind of how Tony Blair regards the Labour Party.
De Gea's brilliance kept United competing in - and even swinning - the odd trophy here and there. He saw off the grisly horse manure that Moyes put in front of him after Fergie's Lord Mayor's show. He was a cornerstone of excellence amongst the monotony assembled by Aloysius Paulus Maria van Gaal - yes his name is almost as ponderous as the football his United played.
And when Mourinho arrived with a footballing philosophy that had all the inspiration of Matt Hancock's Parkour video, still the Spaniard's keeping stayed as firm as the lacquer that still sweeps back his hair. But in the last two years, and lockdown's no excuse, this exemplar of goalying has gone from Master Craftsman to Mr Bean. Every arching tip round the post seems to be the precursor to an inept flop to the floor.
He has the air of a man who catches a falling vase, calmly replaces it on the shelf only for the whole cabinet to collapse in front of him. Cliche dictates that a manager who shows faith in such a crumbling reputation is to be admired in this day and age. I disagree. Solskjaer needs to get shot of him.
I'm reminded of the rapid decline of Joe Hart, and Roy Hodgson's bewildering faith in him despite the fact that he had a lot of trouble stopping hard shots to his left.
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