The football transfer window is the exemplification of Sturgeon’s Law, namely: ‘ninety percent of everything is rubbish’. Except in this case, that remaining ten percent of players wish to spend transfer deadline day suckling a mug of baconated Bovril by the cyan glow of their favourite teletext page.
For the sake of claritainment (clarity + entertainment), here’s a more confusing straightforward explanation.
The last crisp in the packet, for whatever supernatural reason, is always the tastiest. In footballing terms: clubs will happily pay seven times the recommended retail price of a second hand inflatable dartboard during those final few hours of the window. All because they want a Sports Snooze presenter to stand at their ground’s front gate and look cold on camera.
Oh, let’s humour this obtuse metaphor a little while longer. Like Wigan Athletic, we already have one shoe buried deep in the quagmire, which is a good excuse to bunk off work anyway.
So what if those final crisps were each taken to form a new pack of ‘super crisps’? Chairmen whose name might be Roman have dedicated their working lives to assembling a packet of those ‘ten percenters’, a long-deserved premium product for the greased-up potato chip connoisseur of London town.
But as with all business, there exists one major pratfall to this seemingly golden commodity. What if the packet were opened from the wrong end, thus making that intended final crisp the first? Wouldn’t this make all January business a crapshoot of Oyston’s Blackpool Pier (believe me, it’ll happen one day) proportions?
Bingo. Yeah, Bingo – it’s an Indian brand of crisp.
Herein lies the ultimate irony of these thoroughly unsatisfying transfer window corn snacks – that ‘perfect’ crisp is actually the least healthy, and is thus likelier to rot your inner stomach with its extra salt and cow toenail shavings. In actuality, that ‘tastiest’ crisp is leeching flavour from its packet-mates to fuel a big money move to Monster Munchester United in July.
And there’s nought you, I or the former owner of an upmarket fried potato restaurant can do to prevent it. Little point fighting it, so… fancy a packet of Wotsits, Warren?
