Warning: This article contains references to Wigan Athletic’s catastrophic 2014-15 season. If you do not wish to recover heavily repressed memories – look away now. Also: do not read the previous sentence.
Gaetan Bong, you are now and forever a Wigan Athletic legend. Not necessarily for your footballing achievements, but the fact your name bears a striking resemblance to Big Ben’s entire vocabulary. Or maybe one of those holes the Great Cornholio from Beavis and Butthead was so obsessed with. (“I need TP for my bonghole.”)
Even now I am tempted to list off at least six and a half dozen groan-worthy puns, bittersweet throwbacks to the otherwise unspeakable era of Malcolm cough–kay. To see Bong’s name on the team sheet was a rare moment of joy in an otherwise dismal six months of torturous gazing through the stinging haze of tear-stained eyeballs.
“Bong dulls the pain of another spirit-crushing Fortune-Holt comedy show.” – Headline in an unnamed publication, March 2015
These days, however, our old chum Gaetan must work much harder to impress his new supporters at Brighton and Hove Albion. With team mates such as Richie ‘Beach’ Towell, Lewis ‘The Wheat Biscuit’ Dunk, Sam ‘Baldrick’ Baldock and Bruno ‘Just Bruno’ Bruno at the club, one must rely more on pure sawker skills to seize control of local newspaper headlines.
And that’s not to mention Elvis Manu. Nominative determinism dictates that just like Arsene Wenger was destined for Arsenal, or like Jason Scotland was destined to play for Scotland Island (New South Wales), the ‘Ghanaian Elvis’ will surely find himself scooping up horse muck on a farm one day.
…Oh sorry, I meant to say ‘scooping up muck at Manure United’ there. Massive apologies for that oversight, which was surely a simple slip of the forked tongue!
I’d also like to point out that ‘Manure United’ and ‘Man U’ are two completely different clubs. One is the home of buck-toothed donkeys, the other, well…
Hmm, maybe I should have actually taken the time to watch these guys play football instead of writing a crummy ‘match preview’ based solely on names listed in the Brighton Wikipedia entry. Again.
