The special Fiver-issue biohazard suit

- Jacob Steinberg
- theguardian.com, Friday 23 January 2015 11.16 EST

The FA Cup won’t go anywhere without its heavies these days. It’s changed.Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images

SHOW ME WHAT YOU’RE WORKING WITH

When Weird Uncle Fiver announces that he has a twitchy a$$, The Fiver knows the drill. Code red. You just have to act as fast as you can possibly can, sprint upstairs, don the special Fiver-issue biohazard suit, run to the nearest phone, realise that it’s quite hard to use a phone while wearing a special Fiver-issue biohazard suit, remove the special Fiver-issue biohazard suit, call the Environment Agency, wonder whether you should hold your breath to stop the fumes coming in, realise that would make it impossible to speak on the phone, take too long to make up your mind, pass out for a few minutes through lack of oxygen, wake up, dial the phone, tell the Environment Agency that it’s happened again and then put the special Fiver-issue biohazard suit back on and wait for the agents to arrive. Soon the entire neighbourhood will have been evacuated and a containment tent will have been set up. Can’t be too careful.

But hopefully they didn’t react in the same way at Manchester United’s training ground when Louis van Gaal started talking about the strange sensation he experiences in his backside when his team plays 4-4-2. The critics have said that playing three at the back has left some fans pining for the rich entertainment United provided when David Moyes was their manager, because at least they had a few yucks and giggles back then, but Van Gaal will not budge. And if it looks like he’s squirming in his seat, there’s a jolly good reason for that; it was definitely not because he had stuffed a gerbil up there. “I said to my players I was squeezing my a$$ but I knew that was the wrong expression,” Van Gaal said, as the assembled hacks choked on their sausage rolls and tried to remember the internet acronym they hear the kids using these days when someone is offering too much information. “I meant I have twitched my a$$ on the bench because we were out of balance. We won against West Ham playing 4-4-2 for instance but all the time it was twitching your a$$ and I don’t like it.”

By the standards of press briefings most managers make, this was a remarkably open admission. Maybe a little too open. Quite a lot to digest on a Friday afternoon, while it could be argued that a team that has had hundreds of millions spent on it thanks to the keen negotiating skills of Ed Woodward should be able to play in any system. But Van will not budge. He’ll squirm and look a little green and hope no one notices, but he will not budge. “I know that with 4-4-2 the stats are giving positive results, we have won more with 4-4-2 in a diamond, but when you analyse the games then we have twitched our a$$ on the bench,” Van Gaal said, before expressing his hope that United do not take the challenge of tonight’s trip to Cambridge United in the FA Cup lightly, else he might be sitting even more uncomfortably than usual. Although not as uncomfortably as The Fiver, who’ll be watching the match alongside Weird Uncle Fiver for company. And he’s just called to say he’s ordered a couple of burritos.

LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE TONIGHT

Join Simon Burnton now for Ghana 1-1 Algeria and then at 7.55pm GMT for Cambridge United 1-3 Manchester United.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I’m looking forward to working with ITV’s talented pool of commentators and pundits on some of the very best football there is” – Mark Pougatch rocks up at ITV … by replacing unbuttoning’s Adrian Chiles as their main football anchor.

FIVER LETTERS

“So the Fiver’s now doing its own version of MTV Cribs (Barry Glendenning crashes Mr Em’s gaff)? OMG, like wow, dawg! What’s next? The Fiver’s version of MTV Beach Party, which replaces Miami and healthy looking people with the Grand Union Canal, Weird Uncle Fiver and some Purple Tin?” – Grant McPhee.

“Re: Martin Odegaard (yesterday’s Fiver). Can I be one of 1,057 tedious Fiver readers to update you on what I was doing when I was 16? I had just been hired by Dunnes Stores and was paid the princely sum of £2.70 per hour, which kept me in £16 Pavement CDs and a weekly dose of alcopops. Take that teenage wunderkind” – Graeme Neill.

“Re: Trevor Marshallsea’s pedant-baiting letter regarding footballing clashes between countries with lots of syllables in their names (yesterday’s Fiver letters). Surely the honour of the wordiest meeting of football sides still belongs to the combined 15 syllables of 2010’s Trinidad and Tobago versus Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. If the ‘record’ was set in 2010 and two subsequent clashes between Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso fail to break that record, then said record must still stand. Even the removal of assorted ‘ands’, ‘thes’ from that Caribbean clash would only result in a 12-syllable tie. Seriously Trevor, what did you think was going to happen?” – Ben Graham.

“Why oh why, Trevor, must you play with our pedantic urges, we are putty in your hands. Here’s an 18er: Inverness Caledonian Thistle regularly play Hamilton Academical” – Tom Moore.

• Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver. Today’s winner of our letter o’the day is:Grant McPhee, who wins a copy of Six Stickers: a journey to complete an old sticker album.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The terrifying truth behind the magic of the FA Cup, as uncovered by the Exploding Heads. It’s real good, dawg!

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BITS AND BOBS

Chelsea have liked what they’ve seen with D Costa this season, so much so that they want Shakhtar Donetsk’s version for £20m.

Iran coach Carlos Queiroz has got the funk on, all right, after his 10-man team lost 7-6 on penalties to Iraq in the Asian Cup quarter-final, which had finished 3-3 after a wild extra-time period. “I don’t have many comments about the referee because if I make comments today I finish my career and I don’t think after 34 years of my career I deserve to finish it here,” he seethed.

West Brom want a free transfer and fancy a bit of Shola Am£0bi.

West Ham are hunting for transfer window scraps, and their sniffing has led their collective nose to Darren Fletcher’s door. “I always think at this stage of the window, if you do get something nailed on you have to take it because you might end up with nothing if you don’t,” cheered Sam Allardyce, giving Fletcher the soft sell.

Barcelona coach Luis Enrique isn’t fussed about Luis Suárez’s lack of goals in his first few months in Spain. “It’s about adaptation, there is no magic formula,” he parped.

A friendly between VfB Stuttgart and Albanian first division club KF Laci has triggered manipulation suspicions after irregular betting patterns were recorded. “There is no suspicion against Stuttgart. Quite the opposite,” cooed German football suit Andreas Rettig.

Ah, Graham Westley, it’s been too long. Here he is getting ready for Stevenage’s League Two clash at Shrewsbury. “If you are going to break records, you have to look at facts,” he Rafa-ed. “I look at facts and think to myself it has been six red cards against opposition at their home ground. Wow. What happens to officials when they go into their stadium? When you go to a place like Shrewsbury with a home record like theirs is, the one thing you want is not an official that’s going to be put under pressure, a crowd that’s very good at working the official. A club that’s very good at working the official.”

And Crimea could set up its own league which would be legally compatible with Uefa, according to the Russian minister for sport. “Uefa has suggested setting [up] an independent Crimean structure, which would unite the existing football federations of Crimea and Sevastopol,” declared Vitaly Mutko.