Wheels Wonders #3 - Diets

Wheels Wonders #3

This week Wheels wonders about diets - are they a good thing in football?

Diets. We see them on the telly everyday & now the footballing world is eating them up with relish, but what are the implications for the game?

Well, if you listened to Mrs Wheels you'd think everything from Diptheria to a fault on your rack & pinion can be cured with some diet or other. I even heard of some German club giving their players coffee enemas before every game, coffee enemas? Not for me, I'm a tea man & always will be.

Having said that when I coached at Arbroath we swore by our pre-match diet, it was mainly pasta, yeah, pasta the fuckin chips yer bastard!  But seriously diets are part of the game & are here to stay so lets examine a few.

Well, over at Genoa the gaffer there, Sir Frank Hirst has them on a pre-match of Champagne, caviar, snails eggs, fava beans & truffles.

Then he takes the players on a tour of his Pre-Raphealite collection in the study before they head off for their monacle fitting.

A bit hoity-toity for my liking but it's his money & he's entitled to spend it as he will. As long as they don't start digging around his offshore Cayman Island accounts I'm sure he'll be fine.

At Fernerbahce however things are very different. A player who owes me a few kilos currently plays there (mentioning no names Macedo, you've got 5 days you cnut or its wheelchair netball for you), & he revealed their daily diet which is strictly adhered to:

BREAKFAST:

1 large bottle Pepsi &/or 12 Panda Pops, 5 rounds of toast, 4 rashers of golden syrup, 1 washing up bowel of Golden Grahams.

LUNCH:

19 Dairylea Lunchables & an enormous twix

TEA:

Fish, chips, mushy peas, faggots & gravy, chicken Bhuna Madras followed by sticky toffee pudding, cheeseboard, 5 pints of lager and a box of Thorntons.

BEFORE BED SNACK: 

Nothing, the players each have pizza duvets.

Liverpool under manager Gino have a completely different, more existentialist approach to the whole concept of food.

They fly in a top chef from a different capital of the world for each mealtime. Today for instance, if we look at Gino's online blog we can see: 'Today I flew in Monsieur Cardimon from the gastronomic paradise that is Calais. I had told the lads they were in for a proper treat today and I wasn't mistaken. The starter consisted of a hollowed out ashtray filled with celeriac baking soda & topped with an aluminium jus. The lads went at it like there was no tomorrow, the clashing of spoons was defeaning!

Then followed ionised Haddock, Cuthulu cheese (cheddar that had been heated to 1000 degrees C, then exorcised by a genuine Jesuit priest), a pea foam and scrapings of turnstile. It was like Xmas for the lads, a bit of salt & pepper & it was gone in no time.

Finally the pudding. What a triumph this was! Yep, one whole Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, braised, poached, oiled, MOT'd and served on a bed of lemon cursors, magnifique! 

After that, it was a quick glass of juiced donkey cocks and then to bed, superbly prepared for the game to come.'

Well as you can see, clubs do things different ways these days. I had to change a lot at Sao Paolo but I can safely say that the lads have really taken to the strict Paelithic Vegan + chips diet, and their recent results bear testimony to that. 

So, until next time friends, adious and be lucky

Nick Wheels, gaffer