Bonfire of the Profanities

**London is Europe's largest soccer city with 12 professional teams to choose from (can you name them all?), but when Chelsea became Chel$ki, Queens Park Rangers took over their mantle as the slowest draw in the West (of the capital). QPR, who play in London's most unappealing and uncomfortable stadium, Loftus Road, briefly shone under Terry Venables in the early 1980s, reaching the FA Cup Final, but since then have been the epitome of an uninspiring club stuck in mid-table quicksand. Yanks Roy Wegerle and Juergen Sommer both donned the blue and white hoops.

Now all that could change as they are owned by the egregious Flavio Briatore, motor-racing tycoon and former joint-owner of the Benetton clothing chain, who has delusions of grandeur. First QPR hiked tickets for away fans by a third to an EPL $70, and then Briatore announced he was talking of changing the name to Queens Park City, wiping out the club's 126-year history with a 'year zero' change of name.

The EPL is not short of shifty owners like Roman Abramovich and recently departed Thaksin Shinwatra, but at least those two did not change their clubs' names. Billionaire Briatore is 58 and wholly unphotogenic, but has managed to date a string of supermodels nonetheless (he is married to one 30 years his junior), and in 2003 became the first man to impregnate Heidi Klum.

**Inter boss Jose Mourinho has admitted he was tempted to coach England this time last year. "In a certain moment I considered being England national manager," he told the press this week, apparently refuting the widespread suspicion that he was never interested.

However, he certainly did not jet into London from Lisbon for talks with the Football Association, as The Sun, Britain's biggest-selling daily, fictitiously reported at the time. You would think the Rupert Murdoch-owned rag would have the resources to check its sources better or do its own research, but while I was at Yanking Around, I found interview quotes I had personally garnered miraculously appearing in The Sun, of course unattributed.

** Given tabloids do all they can to stir things up, I take my hat off to interim Newcastle coach Joe Kinnear for aiming a volley of expletives at certain hacks in his first press conference. I once asked a Sun journalist why his rag was trying to unsettle Wayne Rooney before the 2006 World Cup with a series of unsettling articles. Another time a Mirror journalist agreed with my assessment that US sports writing was superior to the UK's, blaming....tabloids like the one he worked for. They really make me ashamed to be British, especially when I see them on an airport rack alongside other countries' NEWSpapers.

Incidentally, if you have not heard the rant in question and are over 21 years of age, check out the Guardian's surreal rendering of it in an Apple computerized voice: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/audio/2008/oct/03/joe.kinnear

**SERIE A has announced it intends to ape the EPL and break away from the three other FIGC divisions. In a country where match-fixing and sinister hooliganism still hold sway, can't Italy just break away from UEFA until they sort themselves out, please?

** FA Chairman Lord Triesman has resurrected the S-word (salary cap) at just the right time for the Premier League with the world's economies stalling (West Ham have just seen their January kitty evaporate). Just hold the thought that the NFL has had seven different winners since the millennium to the EPL's three and that those three alone will contest the title for the foreseeable future. A wage cap is essential to restore the competition, period, let alone any regulation to curtail the dicing with bankruptcy beloved of soccer clubs.

**I'm not one to say 'I told you so' that often, but looking at Tottenham, who outspent all others in the summer to the tune of $135m, propping up the EPL with two points from seven games, my prediction on the first day of NSC in July that Juande Ramos would sink Spurs to the bottom of the Thames River looks an astute piece of commentary...or just plain lucky ;)

- Sean O'Conor