A bit late, but as they say, that’s better than never at all. Or, considering the quality of my photography, maybe it isn’t. I will say my pics are actually getting better, perhaps aided by that fancy new forty quid camera I shelled out for, but still nowhere near any sort of journalistic standard.

Not to be making excuses for the recent general lack of updates, but the absence of league action makes you kind of unenthusiastic, even lackadaisical at times. Besides, it’s close season and I wanted a rest, you hear? Expect to be fully updated on arrangements for JWAW in 2010/11 sometime in the near future. Meanwhile, enjoy these snaps from the Latics-Hull encounter back in May.

As ever, a selection of the best of these is available in higher quality on the Illarterate Flickr channel. 100kb-plus versions of most of my photos from last season can also be obtained by contacting me.

Still to come is media from the Arsenal game, though considering my recent workload I wouldn’t hold your breath for anything in the next few days. Still, I may surprise you.

Latics' own Super Starjumpin' Stoj somehow managed to beat the Germans. How? I dunno.

This year’s so-called premier football competition (international-wise, anyway) has left a horrible taste in the mouth that, in my opinion, marks it as a low point in the history of world football.

Now, we’ve become used to widespread professionalism, which some people may term as ‘cheating’, in the domestic game. It’s something of a given, what with all the money and plastic fakery flying about, and the very nature of the FA Premier League in 2010.

But the World Cup, historically the gentleman’s competition, is meant to be a festival of fair play, an example of the spirit of the game we all know and (sometimes) love. Sadly there hasn’t been too much of that in South Africa.

And what are FIFA doing about it? Sweet Fanny Adams. Well, what else would you expect? Blatter and his cronies set a dangerous precedent when they decided not to penalise Thierry Henry or the French FA for the infamous ‘Hand of Frog’ in the slightest. In the process, they effectively condoned cheating, a benchmark for what would come in the 2010 World Cup: bad play acting and amateur dramatics aplenty coupled with officiating you’d usually see down at the Soccerdome on a Saturday afternoon.

You could point to the number of weak referees FIFA have appointed in the interests of ‘fairness’. I couldn’t see Howard Webb, for example, falling for the umpteenth dive or deliberate handball from a player clearly attempting to bend the rules in his favour in the same way a guy from, say, Mexico, who with the greatest respect would probably be relegated to his country’s third division having failed to award one of their ‘Big Four’ a 50:50 penalty decision.

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