I have to admit my first reaction to the game wasn’t a good one. Why do Treyarch insist on setting their storylines in the past? After the Modern Warfare games, I don’t think any of the COD fans wanted to go back to WWII, Vietnam or the done-to-death Russians vs. Germans. Yet here I find myself again, playing through the jungles of Vietnam and shooting at Germans with a bolt action rifle. I want modern technological warfare; I don’t want to go from a P90 to a 30-year old Skorpion. I don’t want to swap my Barret .50 Cal for a fucking crossbow.

With that said, I’m around 80% of the way through the single player game and so far I’m quite enjoying it. The variety of play – which has become a standard in the Call Of Duty series – is excellent and it’s great to go from sneaking around with silenced weapons to blowing shit up with an Apache helicopter. I was slightly disappointed however to be forced to sit through a cut sequence in which you get into the cockpit of a stealth fighter, only to find you don’t actually fly it or shoot anything from it, you simply point soldiers in the right direction. That’s not even me using journalistic license, you literally just direct them from point to point. Why did this have to be set up in a stealth fighter? It’s a GAME, if you’re going to put me in the cockpit of an extremely cool fighter plane, at least let me shoot something.

Also, I liked the realism of the Modern Warfare storyline (maybe I should say comparative realism) – the storyline in this game isn’t incomprehensible, I just got bored of it quite quickly. I can see the plot twist coming a mile away too. I’m not sure who Treyarch think they’re fooling with this rubbish – I’m starting to think they just can’t come up with any decent storylines themselves, so they constantly bastardise pre-existing stories and events. Honestly, they may as well have added a few levels to World At War and just re-released it.

Everything feels slightly more predictable in this one too – the best example I can think of is where your character repels from a chopper in Vietnam. As soon as you jump out of the plane you’re thinking ‘bet this gets shot down before my feet touch the ground’ … aaaaand there we go.

The game isn’t bad, it’s fun and it’s more or less what you want from a Call Of Duty game, I think I would have just much rather played Modern Warfare 3. I’m sure the multiplayer will be good, but unless Black Ops has an extremely good ending, I would say Modern Warfare 2 was (is) superior.

I’m a season ticket holder at the City Of Manchester stadium, and I’ll sit down there – I don’t like it, but I’ll do it because I’m near the front, and standing up throughout the game would be inconsiderate to those behind me. At away games however, we’re all standing up. We have to because we’re the minority and we’re trying our best to make our support known. Anyway, besides that, I don’t travel round the country to sit down for those 90 minutes; I’ve been sitting all the way to the game and I’ll sit all the way back. I’ve taken to just ignoring the stewards altogether now, and I will continue with my outright refusal to sit down. I don’t care if it gets me kicked out, I’m not sitting down at away games.

Inside the stadium, West Brom even had the phrase ‘Sit Down If You Love Football’ displayed periodically on the screen. Fuck off West Brom, no-one likes you anyway.

Luckily it’s insured (although it will take a month to get a new one) and strangely enough it still works pretty much perfectly but still, it looked so shiny before. Ah fuck it, I want an iPhone4 anyway, maybe the insurance company will decide they’re in a good mood and upgrade me. What? It could happen.

I always resisted getting a protective case for my iPhone as I like the way it looks without them, but considering this afternoons’ events I might rethink this approach.

Ah well, I’m going to try and take my mind off it with Fifa, enjoy your weekend – it’s Chelsea vs. Arsenal on Sunday.

My season ticket seats had already been taken, meaning we got another different seat for the game. Normally this would annoy me but actually the seats we ended up with were great, so I had nothing to complain about.

The Juventus fans were extremely loud and managed a reasonably good turn out – I was fairly impressed given they’d managed to bring about as many people as Blackburn did a fortnight ago, despite coming all the way from Italy.

The game was tight and tense, but we were treated to some exquisite passing from the Italians, who went 1-0 up through a long range effort that Joe Hart probably would have expected to do better with. After a myriad of chances for City (including Tevez missing his second open goal of the season), we finally equalised through an Adam Johnson goal, after he was put through brilliantly by the ever improving Viera. I genuinely feel we deserved to win this game, but a draw against former Champions League winners is nothing to be ashamed of.

The Spanish referee is also worth a mention, as he was excellent. He pretty much got all the decisions spot on (in my opinion) and did his best to let the game flow by playing the advantage numerous times. I also saw my first live game with the additional officials behind the goal, although I can’t really comment on their usefulness because they didn’t make or influence a single decision.

The seats are amazing and probably better than the ones I had last year; they’re three rows from the front, right on the half way line. I like being close enough to hear the players swear at each other, because that means there’s a fairly good chance they’ll occasionally be able to hear me swearing at them.

The first thing that struck me was the lack of travelling support for Blackburn, as you can see from the picture:

I’d understand if City were playing West Ham for example, as the fans would have an extremely long way to travel for a 12.45 kick-off. Blackburn fans on the other hand only had a very small distance to travel to get to the stadium, so I think it’s fairly pathetic that they couldn’t fill that tiny section of the ground. I was even more astounded when at the end of the game Diouf felt the need to applaud the Blackburn fans, prompting me to scream ‘they only travelled 30 miles you dumb prick, what are you clapping them for’ … Football doesn’t bring the best out of me.

The second thing that struck me is that Mark Clattenburg is a shit referee. Seriously, I’m not just bitter because he wasn’t giving decisions City’s way, the man is not fit to be a Premier League referee. Some of the decisions he made were truly laughable, and booking Viera five minutes into the game for a nothing challenge started one of the worst refereeing displays I’ve seen for some considerable time.

Anyway, this weekend I’m off to see City vs. Chelsea, which should be an interesting game. I’ll just be praying Mancini doesn’t start Jo (or put him on the pitch at any point in the game) because the man about as likely to score as I am to get a phone call from Cheryl Cole asking me to wear her like a hat.

I’ve got scars everywhere, but over the last few years my hands have taken the vast majority of the punishment. Around 3 years ago I punched a brick wall and achieved what the doctor called ‘the most impressive’ boxer’s fracture he’s ever seen. Not really sure it was meant as a compliment but it kind of felt like one, plus it was Christmas Eve so I needed something to cheer me up. I’m fully aware that punching a brick wall was a moronic thing to do, but it wasn’t my fault. OK it was my fault but it’s done now so let’s move on.

As you can see from the X-Ray (which the hospital kindly let me keep and I found the other day, hence the post), I managed to break the bone in my hand in several different places:

The hospital managed to ‘forget’ my fracture clinic appointment and I ended up having a semi-permanent cast on my hand for a month, followed by …. nothing. They just took it off and told me to go home. As a result, my right hand is now missing a knuckle and it hurts whenever it’s cold, I can’t punch with it either (although that’s probably a good thing). Someone once told me I had a good case for compensation considering that I was never given a permanent cast or any sort of physiotherapy, but considering the injury was my fault I always thought I’d just leave it.

Since breaking my hand, I decided to try and be a little more careful with them (seeing as I’m a writer and musician, both of which rely quite heavily on my hands working). Unfortunately however, I haven’t done a particularly good job looking after them.

About a year later, one of our Jack Russells (named Maximus due to his love of fighting and hunting) decided to start a fight with a boxer who was at least four times his size. As you might expect the boxer ended up grabbing my dog by the neck and began throwing him from side to side. Fearing Maximus would end up dead I got in between them and tried to seperate them; I succeeded and managed to extract my Jack Russel from the situation, but not before getting bitten several times by both dogs, all in the hands. Another trip to the hospital followed, during which I recieved stitches and a tetanus jab, resulting in a whole batch of new scars and an overwhelming feeling that my hands were beginning to hate me.

In the 18 months between then and now, I’ve nearly chopped my thumb off with an axe (twice), trapped my right hand in a car door, sliced my finger with an extremely sharp cooking knife and burnt my hands upwards of 20 times on the oven, kettle, toaster and just about anything that’s hot. I’ve also (wisely) been permanently banned from the chainsaw and the axe at home.

So maybe my hands don’t hate me; maybe I’ve just got a subconscious desire to hurt them. Either that or I just don’t learn – my overriding attitude towards most things is ‘it’ll be fine’, usually stated confidently before I hurt myself and end up in hospital.

Having a hard time visualising it? Not surprising given I was having a hard time explaining it. Check out this video from Rob Ousbey that shows you what I’m talking about:

Does anyone else hate this? I can’t stand to watch it let alone try and use it. I’ll tell you why I don’t like it; it reminds me of those people who try to answer your question before you finished the sentence, inevitably getting it wrong because they haven’t listened to the whole thing. I hate it when people assume they know what you’re talking about when they don’t, or wrongly guess what you were going to say. Why not just wait till I’m finished?

Now Google is trying to do it too, and the worst thing is the EXACT same thing is going to happen. You’ll only get the results you were looking for when you’ve finished typing the whole query in the majority of cases.

Plus this is going to end up getting people into trouble. What happens when I’m searching for Arsenal Football Club for an article at work and I get four letters in before I’m distracted by someone asking me a question? Admittedly I’d never search for Arsenal and I’ve left work but it still illustrates the point.

Anyway, apart from all that, how much stress is this going to put on the Google infrastructure if they roll this out to everyone? Google’s already said it handles around 1 billion searches a day, so adding dynamically changing results to EVERY ONE of those billion queries will surely slow down their response for certain geographic groups? Or, perhaps more likely, they’ve already thought of that and have a system so strong in place that not only do they know they can handle it, but they know other search engines (by which I mean Bing mainly) won’t be able to keep up with it and offer a similar service.

I’m really not sure I like this. Some bloggers seem to think this could ‘change the way we search’. I agree, if Google carries on fixing something that isn’t ostensibly broken, they will change the way I search, because I’ll be doing it on Bing.

Who knows. I didn’t particularly like the suggested searches when they rolled it out, but I don’t really have a problem with them anymore. They even occassionally offer some hilarious and borderline offensive suggestions, although the bores at Google have all but gotten rid of this. But I don’t like the Google comparison ads sneaking their way into our results and I definitely don’t like the instant search, or live search, or whatever you want to call it.

Someone has just told me you’ll be able to turn the feature on or off, so as not to annoy people like me. Kind of stepped on my rant a little but it seemed like it should be included. So maybe I won’t be Bing-bound for a little bit, but I still don’t like Google at the moment. Fuck it let’s all use Yandex.

While all that probably sounds more interesting and important that football, it isn’t. So I’m focusing on the highlight of my week – my trip to White Hart Lane to see Spurs vs. Manchester City.

OK so it turned out it wasn’t the best game in the world to be a Man City fan (you know it’s not going too well when the only thing you’ve got to cheer is your keeper’s repeated brilliance), but it was the first game of the new season and I couldn’t have been happier to be at a Premiership game again. I was two rows from the front and directly next to the Tottenham fans, with only a thin line of stewards seperating us. In fact, I was so close I thought I’d take some pictures:

Now I have to admit I’m not the quietest person at the best of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever shouted and sung as much as I did last Saturday. The Tottenham fans were actually better than most clubs I’ve visited; they were loud, reasonably funny and didn’t spend too much time with their mouths shut.

Their ‘banter’ was all very predictable, ‘we’ve got Champions League football’ was about the best they could muster. Us City fans on the other hand, short of any footballing-based insults given last seasons results (although we did manage to get a few dodgy Harry references in) resorted to picking out individual fans and asking if they’d gotten lost on the way to Stamford Bridge.

By about the hour mark, any semblance of civility had disappeared and both sets of fans had degenerated into personal insults and some genuine aggression. But hey, that’s all part of football in this country. Nobody threw anything or tried to get past the increasing number of stewards and police, so it was actually quite good fun. I guess all’s well that ends well.

Moving away from the Tottenham fans, why do stewards at football games insist on trying to get the crowd to sit down? It’s fucking stupid. Nobody stays sat down for more than thirty seconds and most either ignore the stewards entirely or just outright tell them to piss off.

Anyway, that was more a review of the football game than a review of my week, but then again I don’t really care. I’m off to enjoy my weekend of football and trying to get through my ever increasing to-do list. Enjoy your weekend, unless you’re a Tottenham fan.

Anyway, I spent the first half of the week complaining that the weekend went too fast and generally bitching about the fact I had to go to work. So nothing new there. On Thursday though I took a trip up to the ITN building in London to discuss copywriting for the web with some guys from Channel 4 News. It was an amazing experience and the C4 News guys I met were bright, welcoming and extremely engaging. I even got to see Krishnan Guru-Murphy sat working at his desk, although I resisted the urge to drop my professional exterior and demand a photograph for Facebook.

Friday saw another extremely frustrating train journey and a 12 hour working day, but I did manage to write a prediction for UFC 117 for one of my clients which turned out to be spot on. Speaking of UFC 117, I stayed up till 6.00am with my good friend Rob to watch it and I’m glad I did – the Anderson Silva / Chael Sonnen fight was incredible, with Silva winning by submission in the final round after being battered for 23 minutes by the challenger. It was an amazing finish and had me shouting insults at the American at the top of my voice. I really don’t like Chael Sonnen; he’s arrogant, moronic, brash and I couldn’t have dealt with seeing him be the only one to stop Anderson Silva.

Today, after getting up late, I’ve managed to finish my work for the week, feed my growing addiction to ‘Fruit Flakes’ and now I’m sat watching Manchester United beat Chelsea in the Community Shield. Or at least it’s 1-0 at the moment.

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday, if you’re anything like me you’ll spend most of it unable to shake the knowledge you’ve got to get up for work tomorrow.

I HATE the summer football break. This year I was less bothered than normal because we had the World Cup, but after watching England demonstrate their unique ability to be utterly fucking useless and a final that was essentially a Dutch team attempting to kick the shit out of 11 Spaniards, I quickly went back to missing English club football.

I couldn’t have been happier this afternoon to find Football Focus back on BBC1 (even if it was entirely centered around the lower leagues, which kicked off today), and once I hear that beautiful Match Of The Day theme tune I’ll finally be happy. I can also stop complaining about staying up late to watch awful friendlies on ESPN. I just can’t watch anymore football with American commentators. I’m sure they’re lovely people who aren’t in any way retarded but they have a distinct ability to talk the biggest load of bollocks you’ve ever heard instead of talking about the football. Oh and it’s a six yard box, not ‘the six’.

Anyway, enough about the infuriating Americanisation of the beautiful game, I’m in a good mood today. There’s UFC 117 on tonight, Manchester United vs. Chelsea tomorrow and the Premier League next weekend. All I’ve gotta do now is survive the week at work in between…