The World XI Challenge

Many moons ago, the splendid @candersonftbl and myself were sitting in Barcelona's El Prat airport, trying to pass the time before our flight back to the UK. This inevitably led to several XI-related gauntlets being thrown down, taken up, exhausted and discarded. I'm pretty sure we got through EPL XIs, La Liga XIs and Great Hair XIs pretty quickly, as we often did back then.

The challenge that I remember best from that day was as follows: to take two representatives from each footballing confederation and create the strongest possible unit of XI and manager. I don't remember much about how we respectively composed our XIs, but I do remember that Charlie was left with one centre-back spot free with only an African choice available and, completely of his own volition, picked Steve Gohouri to fill it. You should remind him of that whenever possible.

For some reason, this challenge popped into my head today and I resolved to confront it again. Here's what I ended up with:


Have a go yourself and send me your XI at @robbro7. If anyone manages to compose a better XI than mine whilst including Shane Smeltz, I'll PayPal them a fiver.

A Friday Haiku

A je ne sais quoi
As mad as a bag of kites
Fabien Barthez

Things Joleon Lescott Acquired This Month

Jimi Hendrix's First Record Deal

Royal Wootton Bassett

Crown Jewels of Serbia

Michael Stipe

'Why Always Me?' T-Shirt

This month was a modest one for Joleon - the financial crisis in the euro-zone is having profound effects even on the super-super-super-rich. In the grip of such fear, Lescott managed to limit his spending to a mere £250,020,015 of his estimated £24.6bn monthly salary.

He plans to spend the next four weeks exploring his new Wiltshire dominion with his vegetarian indie-God man-servant.

Vennegoor Vrijdag

by Jack Lang

Winning isn't everything,

Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink.

Jack Lang is all about poetry and futebol and Twitter.

Week Nine: la revancha del pass completion

	Attempted	Completed	Completion%
Man. City	5460	4596	84.1758
Chelsea	5414	4505	83.2102
Arsenal	5289	4321	81.6979
Swansea	5043	4113	81.5586
Man.United	4918	3964	80.6019
Tottenham	4115	3278	79.6598
Wigan	3950	3085	78.1013
Liverpool	4744	3640	76.7285
Fulham	4384	3342	76.2318
West Brom	3970	2975	74.9370
Everton	3401	2525	74.2429
Newcastle	3887	2864	73.6815
Wolves	3990	2927	73.3584
Bolton	3911	2814	71.9509
QPR	3830	2750	71.8016
Sunderland	3829	2698	70.4623
Norwich	3633	2551	70.2175
Aston Villa	3439	2395	69.6423
Blackburn	3258	2189	67.1885
Stoke	3094	2074	67.0330