Chounize

IT IS WISE AND GOOD TO EMAIL YOUR BANK DETAILS TO FACELESS HACKS

Football managers never say anything, because they are all hysterical c
hildren who can only "rant", "blast" and "slam". Shades of grey? Not for these people, it's all about the red mist with them. Permanently picking fights, the whole unhinged lot of them. Thank be to Rupert that the good gentlemen of the press are on hand to hold them to account and prevent things from getting really stupid.

That, at any rate, is your opinion if you are suggestible enough to allow the national media's headline writers unsupervised access to your brain, in which case the Fiver invites you to dwell a little longer on the capped-up bit above. Thanks.

And now a disclaimer from Arsenal's manager, a man who is routinely caricatured as a bitterly superior loser, most recently after his side's defeat by Chelsea, after which his statement that "this was not a demonstration of football" was isolated and widely disseminated. "I would just like to say that I was full of compliments and praise for Chelsea after the game and I find it completely unfair from the press that you take one word of my press conference to turn it in a kind of probe every time," ranted Arsène Wenger this morning. "You did that at Villa [where Wenger reportedly dismissed Martin O'Neill's team as gaudy hoofers], you did that at Chelsea and every time," he blasted. "If you look at the intent of my press conference it was positive towards the opponent. If you want, we can have a press conference and I can say nothing, don't worry," slammed Wenger.

Your fair-minded Fiver was [giddily swilling free wine] at Sunday's press conference and can confirm that Wenger did indeed refer to Chelsea's "efficiency" and "fantastic defending", which, it is true, were the attributes that distinguished the home team from the visitors. We can also confirm that Wenger's previous comment about Villa playing long balls was made during a larger, accurate tactical deconstruction of the Villa-Arsenal game.

So how come the spin placed on his words by some scurrilous news-spewers generally portrays him as a bitter and deluded man? Because the people who run much of the media in this country are seedy and misguided connivers who reckon that disingenuously fuelling ever-more celebrity spats is precisely the way to reverse nosediving paper sales? And, just possibly, because any praise Wenger proffers to opponents often seems to be delivered in the same forlorn tone that a prudish Miss World participant might adopt when explaining that she did not win the top tiara because she declined to take part in the demeaning swimwear round? That lady is in the wrong competition, of course, with her high principles and long dresses. Might the same be said of a man who is devoted to economic prudence and a relentelssly cerebral playing style in, of all places, England's Premier League?
QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I broke my mum and dad's window when I was little, I also broke the patio chair and blamed it on the dog" - record-breaking football freestyler Dan Magness admits that he hasn't always been a ball-juggling genius.
COWBOYS AND INDIANS

The Fiver's city-boy cousin, Buy Sell Buy Sell Braces Rolled-Up £50 Note Convertible Turbo-Powered Tig Extension Smug Smiling Square-Jawed Floppy-Fringe-Covered Smackable Face Fiver, lost his job recently as a result of losing 97% of the Bank of England's gold reserves after making a bet with a young woman in a St Moritz après-ski lodge. (Could he feel a certain part of the unfortunate woman's anatomy without using his hands? "Hur hur, well worth state assets in the region of £5,000,000,000,000 is what I'm saying," he laughed, as the Swiss police hauled him down the clink.)

Anyway, after a lengthy extradition process, he was sent bouncing down Threadneedle Street on the bones o'his buttocks with only a £37m pay-off in his back pocket to protect him. All he does nowadays is sit around in his pants and vest, with a few absorbent £20 notes within reach, watching episode after episode of The Good Life on UK Gold in the desperate hope that the one where Margot dresses as a nun comes on. A grim state of affairs, though it does mean he's constantly on hand to advise us whether or not stories about finance in football are hot air, or hot air and pish.

"This one's hot air and pish," he snapped this morning, when we asked him whether reports of Liverpool being taken over by two Indian business tycoons sounded realistic or not. (It had been suggested that Mukesh Ambani, India's wealthiest man, and Subrata Roy, some other dude, were willing to pay off Anfield's £237m debt in return for 51% stake in the club.) And sure enough, he was right: Liverpool's cowboys quickly denied the deal, insisting no negotiations had taken place, while a spokesman for the Indians this afternoon added there was "no truth" to the report. "Now will you get out of my bedroom?" shouted Buy Sell Buy Sell Braces Etc Fiver. "Margot is about to start singing numbers from The Sound of Music. Don't ruin it for me, it's all I've got left."
ADVERT OF THE DAY

"The sale of the football club and its associated assets presents an opportunity to acquire a long-established south London club (founded in 1905) currently playing in the Championship division of the Football League and currently enjoying success in the FA Cup (next match against Aston Villa in the fifth round)" - this morning's blurb in the FT in which Crystal Palace ("projected revenue for season ending May 2010: £13.8m") are put up for grabs.
FIVER LETTERS

"Re: bringing down Manchester United (Fivers passim). How about a Ponzi/pyramid scheme? I borrow £1bn from the banks and buy out the Glazers and then leverage the debt against the club. I sell a couple of players and make a few quid. Then another Fiver reader borrows £1.1bn and buys me out, they leverage the debt and sell a few players to make a few quid. We keep doing this until all Fiver readers have owned and make a few quid off of a team that is, by this time (about six months by my calculations of the readership) reduced to playing in the City of Manchester Stadium's car park and fielding a team of 11 tourists who happened top be walking past. The only downside is that one of us needs to take the fall and let the club go bankrupt. How about that bloke Paul Jurdeczka?" - Mark Guthrie.

"My plan is even more fiendishly simple. I will simply become president of Uefa and make it illegal for a Big Cup club to be in substantial debt … hold on" – Samuel Field.

"If the fans and supporters of Liverpool and Manchester United are completely serious about showing their absolute displeasure at how the clubs they support are being run by American owners, they should put aside their differences for one day and boycott the 21 March match between the two teams at Old Trafford. An empty stadium for 'the world's biggest club game', broadcast around the entire world, and watched by one in 10 people, would send out a clear message to both sets of owners, and the rest of the world, and surely make their stewardship untenable. Have they got the stones to do it, though?" - Steven Brindle.

"In response to Ben O'Neill and the other pedants who disbelieve that Louis Saha would have to cross Ts or loop Gs and Ys in signing his contract (yesterday's letters), can I explain that having to bracket (Frequently Damaged) after his name would allow him to complete the repertoire" - Richard Duff.

Send your letters to the.boss@guardian.co.uk. And if you've nothing better to do you can also Tweet the Fiver now.
BITS AND BOBS

Man Utd defender Rio Ferdinand has withdrawn his appeal against a four-game ban he received from the FA for elbowing Hull's Craig Fagan. Oh, sorry, let the Fiver rephrase that: new England captain Rio Ferdinand has ...

Paul Gascoigne has been arrested for the second time in two days after being taken into custody, with another man, by police called to the Blackwell Grange Hotel in Darlington. A Durham police spokesman said: "Both were subsequently released. No further action was taken against Mr Gascoigne and the other man accepted a fixed penalty notice for a public order offence."

Liverpool boss Rafa Benítez will not be snapping up Bordeaux striker Marouane Chamakh any time soon. "I think that we will not sign him - but I will not say [any more]," he mused mysteriously.

Napoli fans will wear masks of Pierluigi Collina's face at Sunday's game against Inter in protest at what they perceive to be bad refereeing decisions against their team.

The insurance branch of BBVA, Spain's second largest bank, has agreed a scheme to give free accident cover to up to 500,000 fans attending matches every weekend. "The object is for fans to feel that we are 'football's bank'," chirped Javier Bernal, business development director of BBVA, whose cover will offer to pay €25,000 for an adult in case of death through injury at a match, provided they're in possession of a valid ticket.

And judge Rafael da Silva Marques has issued a ban on matches kicking off in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul when the temperature tops 35°C. "I think it's a measure for workers' health and we must think about that," he decreed.