wacko

Kuyt is the finest average footballer I've ever seen. He has every mental attribute a footballer needs in spades, it's the physical stuff that he lacks a bit.

I wondered what he was on about. I was thinking, "Surely, she of all people will know."

Pretty much, yup.

Er ballert und ballert und ballert die Bälle raus. The German commentator creaming over Gerrard's FA Cup final goal in '06. Really stuck in my head that. Don't know why.

Willkommen im Forum, Engländer.

Since when does Gillett have a majority stake?

I win Bill Gates in the lottery, buy out Hicks, Gillett, Glazer and Abramovich. Stamford Bridge is turned into a speedway track. Old Trafford is shipped piece by piece to Liverpool and re-assembled, upside-down over Woodison. The Man Utd and Chelsea squads are sold to Pedigree Chum. Stephen Hawking designs a Kop that can hold twelfty million and I spend the rest building an artificial mountain into the side of which shall be carved the faces of Shankly, Paisley etc. That or the robot army.

A lot of them do have rather unrealistic expectations. It is unbelievable that they haven't won anything in so long, though.

As it happens, "lahm" is German for "lame". He doesn't get stick for it, although that might be because team-mate Schweinsteiger's name means "pig mounter".

He's pretty much right, though. Carra is hard enough to understand for native English-speakers, let alone foreigners. My ex spoke fantastic English, but barely understood a word when we were in Liverpool. The NHS is utterly s*** compared to German healthcare. And finally, of course it's quieter in Leverkusen, Andrei. It's a bloody village.

Probably, but Gerrard is very effective there if we can get the right man for the middle.

After repeated viewing, my take on it was that the minimal contact did actually throw Babel off-balance after Fabregas had just pulled him in the opposite direction. I think the fact that Fabregas had also just had a grab at him might have been a factor in the ref blowing for the pen.

He was very underrated before on account of playing in the Bundesliga. Not worth £18m in a million years, but £5m would have been a proper bargain.

Lahm's a cracking player. He always plays well for Germany and in the CL, as crap as the Bundesliga is. It's a good place to pick up bargains, mind. Low transfer fees, and even Bayern consistently let their best players run down their contracts to one year and often nothing. Fergie could have had Hargreaves for free if he'd thought about him a few months before the World Cup instead of after it.

It's one thing being left out, and another being left out for Kuyt. I'd much rather Crouch were playing with Torres and Gerrard on the right.

That's brilliant. I know a few Ukranians, and that is soooo typical. They like their gaudy bling.

Is there a podcast of that show, do you know? And is the book just a dictionary or something to read? I find this stuff fascinating, but I'm not a linguist (in the linguistics sense), so I don't enjoy anything too dry. The Irish have some rather unorthodox expressions, but I'd never considered they were literal translations from Gaelic because the Irish I know don't speak Gaelic and I think of them as English native-speakers (I've associated literal translation with speaking second languages, I guess).

Could well be. Most of the Irish I know seem to be from Dublin, though, and speak awful English. Certainly in England the amount of slang people use tends to be more closely tied to social class than where they come from. Anyone who actually teaches English for a living is very conscious of which words and phrases they use, though, which makes the usage of slang only relevant for exchanges/mixing with English-speakers at large and is entirely irrelevant when talking about (decent) teachers. Even if you never used a slang phrase in your life, if you talk like Sir Humphrey from Yes, Minister, Johnny Foreigner is never going to understand you.

It all depends, really. I've gone to great lengths to hide my Hull twang as I don't want my (mostly) German students 'ferning werk'. A former colleague of mine was from Norn Iron, and I barely understood a word he said. I dread to think what his students made of him and how they speak English. On the other hand, some Oirish and especially Scottish accents are wonderfully clear (think Alan Hansen), while others are a nightmare to understand (King Kenny, Rab C. Nesbitt). Strong Scouse accents are VERY hard to understand for foreigners as Scousers mumble and slur a lot (as opposed to, say, my own Hull accent, which just sounds s****). It's generally a question of how clearly people enunciate syllables: it doesn't take too long to get used to non-standard vowel sounds (the problem with Hull accents), it's excessive elision (omitting or running one sound into another) and the resulting very fast speech that causes the most problems (the problem with Scouse accents).

Nope, not at all. Germany has much more lax rules regarding non-EU footballers than the UK. That's why there are so many more South Americans in the Bundesliga. I f***ing love Rafinha. Far and away my favourite Schalke player. Not the best player in the world, but he's got that Jamie Carragher do-or-die attitude in spades. He's tiny, but always the first in there when there's any aggro, and he'd die for the cause. I'd have him in an instant (though my mates will hate me if we steal him away).

No it isn't. Players get a lot more protection from refs.

There's a first one?

That must be it. He couldn't possibly actually like being at Chelsea, could he?

But we have good full-backs and sub-standard wingers.

That depends on if and for how much Momo goes. Of course Masch's leaving would weaken us, but I think another Torres-class signing up front or on the wing would leave us stronger overall. In an ideal world, both, but it remains to be seen what's financially realistic.