the bloody Tour De France just to hear James Richardson's voice the drip feed from pre-season jollies is the only thing sustaining us. Here's another priceless moment:

A surrealist protest against the cultural hegemony of football?

An idiot savant operating on pure instinct?

A strategic move to increase football's share of the US market by getting it on the front page of the ESPN website and on 'Sports Center'?

Or (more likely this) a highly talented young man with a very short attention span who was trying something in an utterly meaningless game. The first person to chirrup with 'he wouldn't have tried that if [insert name of gormless hacker from the 1970s here] was still playing' gets a playground cock punch. I hope Alan Shearer is that person.

star players and ridiculous new-found wealth, there's still something deeply City-esque about that incident. It just needed Stuart Hall to finish it off.

.....you see that down Underhill every week, only you don't have to take out a second mortgage to get in.

Gordon Strachan do that once but score. Only problem was that it was an own goal but I'll gloss over that.

Edit: It's here at 8.10.

a bit flashy, arrogant and skillful and he gets substituted for it!

Ridiculous, if he's going to mess it up and give away possession I'd rather watch that than the usual English way of hoofing the ball aimlessley up the field and all running after it.

of the commentators that really makes the clip. You'd think Balotelli had just burned the Stars and Stripes.

I did like Mancini's post match comments about their contretemps after the substitution:

When asked what Balotelli said to him as they exchanged words on the side of the pitch, Mancini said: "It was in Italian. In English I would find it difficult to give you the translation. But Mario is streetwise, he knows he was not offside."

trying to put on his bib. Oh dear...

So Dzeko shows him how it should be done: