MOTD is back - C/D

Hansen and Lawro, for all their chummy BBC bonhomie that manifested itself most irritatingly at Euro 2004, must have known that their Saturday night stock could only increase when compared with the likes of Townsend and McCoist. Sure enough they were quick, to the point, relatively cliche-free and gave equal time to all the clubs.

What d'ya reckon ?

It was...OK. I did worry a bit just where talk of "reproductive organs" and "finding my wife in bed with another man" would take us and Kevin Day (or whatever his name is) was useless - it struck me as the sort of environment in which Wrighty (he's irrepressible!) would say something dubious and it would be encouraged.

Nice to see Strachan and Houll again.

Ironically, The Championship on ITV is quite good. True, it keeps Aha's 'The Sun Always Shines On TV' as its theme music; and instead of getting good pundits in, it just omits pundits altogether. But the coverage seemed reasonable balanced between teams - as long as you support a team in the Champions' League. League's One & Two only seem to get a minute's highlights for the entire two divisions - why don't they get their own show? At least half the fun of watching the old Nationwide League Extra was the comically bad defending and wacky goal celebrations.

I wz trying to think of where I saw adrian chiles. He was pretty bad.

But it doesn't matter: I loved the demolition job on everton and bergkamp's goal on his 500th appearance.

Is this an Unamumo pastiche?

Who was it then? Portillo?

(is this one of the more strange thread de-railments ever?)

Friar Luis of Leon said 'as I was saying yesterday...' when he resumed teaching at Salamanca university after three years in prison, but that was because of the Inquisition.

I think, but I'm probably wrong, what happened with Unamuno, or one of the things that happened, was that during the civil war, Salamanca was quickly under the rule of Franco's lot and Unamuno was in charge of the university. There was some kind of meeting and someone, possibly the peg-legged one armed psycho-freak (Millan-Astray?) shouted 'death to intellectuals', much to the approval of his fellow fascists, and Unamuno, or someone, responded admirably.

I'm sorry if that is not specific enough for our purposes. I think it is covered in the Paul Preston book whose title I cannot recall but which consists of little biographies of important figures in the civil war. I haven't got it with me, so I can't have a look. I think the person who shouted 'death to intellectuals' was the same person who said of Garcia Lorca, 'I'm going to shoot a bullet up his arse for being a queer'. If it wasn't the same person, it would be in my epic screenplay, 'Guernica or Bust'.

I very much approve of this thread derailment and I shall not rest until the matter is solved.

People who might know: M. Skidmore, D. Moore.

Our Lady of the Indoors says she thinks it was probably Unamuno.

I will try to find out who the Basque parliament person is.

My guess:

Dolores Ibarari (?), La Pasionaria, who came back from the Soviet Union admidst scenes of great emotion. She wasn't a man though.

I do hope Linekar was echoing her. You can take him out of Leicester market, but you can't take the Leicester market out of him.

http://tallermanual.tripod.com/radio/descripcion/v03.htm

Why won't pictures work for me today?.

I think it must have been the 'proper' parliament as she was MP or whatever representing Asturias, both before and after. But I don't know.

I thought we did very well last night, me and Cabbage. We were the intellectual equivalent of Cissé and Baros.

Salamanca - rumour has it there's also a skeleton having a wank. So the expression 'I've got a massive bone on' must be anatomically correct after all.

I think Peter searches Spanish cities relentlessly for bits of smutty sculpture. He was really proud of that one in Barcelona where one chap is trying to bum another one.

I couldn't see the frog even when someone pointed it out to me.

Mooro, you're a very very cheeky man.

Miller was funny, on the skeleton, really, though he is naughty.

But I don't get his dislike of 'waffle', ie. great punditry. I have long stretches of videotape with nothing but BBC footy punditry, where the tape cuts when the actual football starts. (I have at least one witness to this fact.)

Welcome back... now, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?

MATCH OF THE DAY 2 tonight

Manchester United 2-1 Arsenal

Liverpool 3-1 Blackburn Rovers

I am not Chiles's greatest fan, but his hair actually looked better to me tonight.

I liked the way they lingered on the implications and precedents of the first game; the sense of mulling it over (and this is not, I think, only Arsenalphobia; Lee Dixon, white bracelet and all, did much of the mulling, after all).

Wenger said something about somebody wanting all things to go against them. 'What do you mean by that?' 'Nothing'.

I was glad to see that Liverpool won, and it struck me that I would enjoy seeing them really going for the title, for a change - I mean, being top in spring, etc. I hope that happens, one day, I think. But I thought that commentary on Gerrard was possibly biased / misguided. I like him a lot! But I worried that he was Diving, today, for various of the not-given penalties that the team called stone-wall pens.

Also: footage, during the game, of Fabio Capello leaving the ground. Perhaps somebody, possibly called Mike, could tell me whether MotD footage has ever before included such thoroughly extra-game, non-match footage during what is notionally still the match.