One of the things about being a new father is the understanding you gain of how responsible you are for the behavior of your child. If your kid repeats the same bad behavior or continually gets into the same predicaments, don’t get mad at the kid, get mad at yourself for putting them into the same position. Your kid doesn’t know better.

This is a long way to get to the point of this blog, namely that Harry Redknapp should wear today’s cock up in Birmingham not Jermaine Jenas.

Everyone knows Jermaine Jenas is a useless tit. He can only pass sideways or backwards. He runs around like a chicken with a spastic colon, gets the ball passes it backwards and then runs at the opposition goal. To what end know one knows. He doesn’t tackle, score often or set up goals.

Jenas completely changes the dynamic of the team. No one wants to pass to him as they know the ball is going to go backwards. The defence doesn’t trust him to protect them and therefore sit further back, with the full backs uncovered. The other central midfielder has to pick up more slack and the attackers have to come back to collect the ball. I didn’t see the game against Liverpool, but all the comments I read said Jenas was awful and largely responsible for the loss. Last weekend, he was awful and responsible for Leeds’ first goal. Today he comes on with a minute left in regular time, he gives the ball away, leaving Corluka up the field, tracks back where he gets the opportunity to close down the winger who crossed to the eventual scorer but stands around and misses it while a knackered Curluka looks like a goat for missing the scorer. Nice work for three minutes.

But here is the point. We know Jenas is crap. The rest of the team knows it and the fans in the ground know it. But he is going to go out and play when he is asked. It is not his fault.

The fault lies with Redknapp. I don’t want to knock a guy who has kept Tottenham in the top four for the last three months. He knows what he is doing. In reality the team has only lost once in 12 games and is having its best season since the 1960s.  So why does he have such a blind spot when it comes to Jenas? Why keep playing the guy who is apparently getting worse and is directly responsible for goals against. Why can’t the manager see this? If it is a problem with squad depth, why did he bring him on as a sub? Why did we ship O’Hara to Portsmouth? The team was playing well until then. They worked hard to work an opening against a tough team. It was a huge let down after a strong effort. Redknapp should ship Jenas if only to stop the temptation of playing him again.  

And with all the rivals for fourth winning today, it puts huge pressure on the team and with Man city playing last place Portsmouth tomorrow, it is likely that three teams will be within a win of Tottenham by tea time.

Winnipeg in Winter

I think I am finally a Canadian. I now am getting smug about how freakin’ cold it gets here. It is a Canadian disease. It may have a contagious element or maybe repeated brain freezings bring it on. Whatever it is, it is the tendency to take pride in how ridiculously cold it gets is a particularly Canadian affliction. There is a strange pride in living in a place that can get to minus 40 degrees C. I wonder if people who live in the north of Sweden or Norway are like this and the southerners in Oslo and Stockholm have to endure northerners rabbit on about just how cold it can get up in the Arctic and how tough they are as a result and it’s a dry cold. I am sure they get asked the same question I have always asked…why on Earth would you choose to live in such a place?

So now having drunk the Canadian cool aid, I have watched with some level of glee at the fate of Britain and its complete collapse under the weight of a couple of inches of snow. It was quite amusing to see the BBC reporters talking about the country coming to a halt and the fears for the elderly as the temperature “plunged” to minus seven Celsius.

Of course, here is sunny Winnipeg it was minus 20 something and a couple of inches of snow is a light dusting. It was somewhat funny to think of those English chavs stuck in their homes with nought but pot noodles and some old tins of Hemlin. Puddles are freezing. Oh the humanity.

Now, I read that England is struggling with a rash of potholes. Welcome to my world.

Some of the pictures have been quite beautiful I must say. I think I can count on one chillblained hand the number of times it snowed in Ramsgate as a kid. Slush and it was gone the next day. Now, I am like an Innu I can tell about 20 different types of snow.

My wife asked how I dealt with my first winter here in Canada. I must say it seemed OK at the time. I had gone out and bought an absolutely ridiculous parker with a tube hood that would be good for the winter on Baffin Island. I soon ditched it in favour of the much more fashionable ski jacket. Much colder, but much easier to get in and out of a bus. I did manage to freeze my ears solid one afternoon walking to my friend’s house. Turning your ears into rubber isn’t nearly as painful as thawing them out. I did walk home one evening and was so cold I wanted to lay down and die. I elected instead to buy a car. It isn’t really as bad as it sounds – minus forty. It is just crisp and bracing and you dress for it. And you just get on with it and appreciate the heat when it arrives. It is also incredibly sunny here in the winter and the sky usually clear and blue, which is very different from the slate grey of an English winter.

There is a city here now and all the amenities of a city and lots to do in the winter. The one questions I have is those Scots who turned up here 200 years ago and said “aye, minus 40 and nowhere to live, let’s stay here!” Grand.