Mourinho's Notebook - Flawless Hair, Richie Rich & Booky Wooks
Cristiano Loves Cristiano
We all know that CR7 likes himself. He’s fond of his own appearance, that’s no secret. And he’s fond of that appearance in any shape or form it may take. That includes sending a hair stylist once a month to see that his wax statue’s hair remains flawless.
See, Ronaldo has a wax likeness at the Museo de Cera in Madrid. The figure has real human hair, imported from India. Apparently Cristiano makes sure that one of his cronies drops by to brush and attend to that Barnet as regularly as possible because, like, perfection. To be fair, the thing does look mighty handsome for a slice of candle reject.
Oh, and the lad can dance too. Maybe. This is probably fake, note all the sharp footwork comes in close ups, so you can’t tell if it’s a stunt double.
Fergie vs Becks
Speaking of pretty hair, David Beckham was Ronaldo’s predecessor in so many different ways. But he displayed a far greater variety in his luscious locks. His many, many different haircuts ranged from stylistic trailblazing to the plain embarrassing…
He told a funny story on Graham Norton’s talk show this week of returning to Manchester United for the first game of the season with a Mohawk. It was the Community Shield at Wembley, and Becks had strolled in with a hat to disguise the thing, but you can only hide from Fergie for so long. Fergie says shave it off, Becks says no, Fergie says yes… cut to David Beckham in the Wembley Stadium toilets, an hour before the game, hurriedly shaving his head. Here, let him tell the story:
Ain’t Whelan Too Good
Wigan chairman Dave Whelan has had his fair share of controversies. Like his recent FA suspension for racist language in an interview. However he also did some superb things in his 20 years in the role, such as taking them from League Two into the Premier League and winning an FA Cup, to name a couple.
Whelan resigned/retired from his post this week. The 78 year old feels that he can’t keep up any longer and needed to step away. He won’t be selling the club though and his family will retain their majority control. Taking over Whelan’s place as chairman? His 23 year old grandson, David Sharpe.
Sharpe has been groomed to take over this position for the past year and a half. The lad’s been around this football club his whole life and has reportedly impressed. He was rewarded at Christmas last year with quite the present: a place on the board.
As far as actual management goes, his only real experience was in running the club’s fish and chip stand, which was named Sharpy’s in his honour. Except that it closed due to the fact that it only really sold anything on match-days. So… maybe three or four decent days of sales per month and that’s during the season.
According to the Daily Mail (named and shamed), David Sharpe likes golf, skiing, going to the gym and Breaking Bad. All information clearly pilfered from a quick scroll down his twitter profile, the lazy hacks. He’s younger than most players, and now gets to boss around guys far older than him thanks to his grandfather’s privilege. This oughta be fun.
Read A Damn Book
A bunch of EPL footy players have helped launch the annual Premier League Reading Stars promotion for 2015 by revealing their favourite books. The aim of the game is to promote literacy among kids, by closing “the gap in reading ability between seven to 15 year-olds who are underachieving and those who are reading at the expected level”. Wonderful cause.
Anyway, for the favourite book thing. A player from each of the 20 clubs acted as representative – well, sorta, since Chelsea’s guy was Mark Schwarzer and he’s been released to play for Leicester – and they picked their number one children’s book and number one adult’s book.
Some curious choices there too. The children’s ones saw plenty of classics, Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling, Maurice Sendak, Dr Seuss, etc. However Adrian, goalkeeper for West Ham, his favourite kid’s book was the Official West Ham United FC 2015 Annual. Jonjo Shelvey (Swansea) went for a similar choice in his adult tome, with The Official Swansea City Quiz Book.
There were several sports books. Biographies of Sir Alex Ferguson, Trevor Brooking, Johnny Wilkinson, Muhammad Ali and a few more. Some golf books too. Plus Spurs’ Ben Davies picked David Peace’s wonderful The Damned United. Obviously Joey Barton went deep, his selection was The Republic by classical Greek philosopher Plato.