Robert Green

The new football season is about to begin and all the clubs and their fans are behaving exactly the way they always do- Liverpool fans think they'll win the title (they won't) and are trying to sign someone awful, Manchester City are buying everyone who has ever seen a ball, Everton have signed a guy who once scored a goal for Leeds. For nothing, obviously.

However, at West Ham, things have taken a bit of a strange turn.

West Ham coaches have been hurling abuse at Rob Green in order to prepare him for the new season, when rival fans are expected to swearily torment him over the blunder that gifted USA an equaliser against England in the recent World Cup. I don't know the details of the torment the blundering goalie has to suffer, but I can imagine Green and his coaches limbering up each morning with a few bloomin' bunglers and silly sods before moving on to an intensive session of more obscene insults and then winding down with a couple of choice hand gestures and maybe a slanderous allegation concerning the keeper's mother.
At least one day a week they probably fling rotten fruit and empty beer cans at him, and it is not inconceivable that a member of the club's administrative staff has disseminated the keeper's email address so that fans may bombard him with Photoshopped images of his person being violated in the most grotesque ways. Or that Avram Grant has hired a band not unlike Sherlock Holmes's Irregulars and ordered them to jostle the keeper whenever they see him in the street and perhaps daub offensive slogans on his car and house. So, yes, Green should be well prepared for the season ahead.

Rob Green yesterday, just after Avram Grant took the piss out of his hairstyle.