Filed by: Officer Taylor
The poor old Guardian gets it in the neck from the SAGP again this time. Their insightful and vivid (though increasingly fatuous) columnist Harry Pearson writes:
That old chestnut about how there aren't the characters in the game anymore is nowhere truer than at the club the German press sarcastically refer to as ``FC Hollywood''. Stefan Effenberg, whose history of character-ful behaviour reached its apotheosis when Germans paid him the signal honour of naming an obscene gesture after him (from the Cruyff Turn to the ``Effie'', a stiff-fingered salute - and they say standards of behaviour are falling, I ask you) has left.
There are three offences for the price of one here!
The tragedy of this is how absolutely, trivially easy it would have been to get this right:
Stefan Effenberg's history of idiosyncratic behaviour reached its apotheosis when Germans paid him the signal honour of naming an obscene gesture after him. (From the Cruyff Turn to the ``Effie'', a stiff-fingered salute - and they say standards of behaviour are falling, I ask you.) But now he has left.
All of this could have been avoided very easily had Pearson simply taken the trouble to read his writing out loud to himself before submitting it for publication. And once more, we can hardly help but sigh at the ineptitude of the so-called editors who failed to catch this monstrosity.
We are so depressed by this whole litany of incompetence and apathy that we can't motivate ourselves to think of an amusing sentence. It's dark outside even though it's only quarter past four. Honestly. What is the point?