Is Carlisle facing his biggest test?
Clarke Carlisle has starred and won on Countdown, he has been crowned ‘Britain’s brainiest footballer’, and he has more than held his own on BBC’s heavyweight political show Question Time - but over the next four months he perhaps faces his biggest professional challenge yet.
And that is keeping the Cobblers in the Football League.
Carlisle is one impressive individual. He is one sharp cookie, and a man that is highly respected in football.
He is the players’ chief at the Professional Footballers Association, and the go-to man when the media want an opinion on the game’s issues from a player perspective.
On a personal level, he has turned his life around after severe problems with alcohol while a Queens Park Rangers player, and it’s fair to say he is an inspirational figure.
Oh, and I almost forgot, he’s a pretty good footballer as well, a central defender who was plying his trade in the Premier League less than two seasons ago.
Which is precisely why Cobblers boss Aidy Boothroyd has enlisted his services as he battles to drag the team away from the foot of the npower League Two table.
The Town manager will be hoping that Carlisle will be the man to organise and inspire his bunch of failing individuals into a team of substance.
He’ll be banking on him on being the man to be his leader on the field and, perhaps most importantly of all, to be the man to at long last ensure the Cobblers keep a clean sheet.
Something Town haven’t managed since September and the 3-0 win at AFC Wimbledon.
That is a scary statistic - but is it more scary than appearing on Question Time alongside firebrand Scottish MP George Galloway, and Tony Blair’s former director of communications and strategy Alastair Campbell?
Probably not.
So let’s hope Carlisle can rise to the latest big challenge that has been placed in front of him and rescue the Cobblers from the possible oblivion of non-League. That could prove to be a bigger conundrum than anybody at Channel 4 could throw at him.
Another week, another muddled few days of disciplinary action from the Football Association, with this time Robin van Persie and Benoît Assou-Ekotto the beneficiaries.
First van Persie gets away with planting an elbow into the face of Aston Villa’s Carlos Cuellar, and then Assou-Ekotto is not punished for a dangerous over-the-ball ‘tackle’ on Wigan’s Franco Di Santo.
Both were incidents where players could have suffered serious injury, both van Persie and Assou-Ekotto were reckless at best, malicious at worst, yet both get away with it.
The reason? Because the referees in both matches, when asked after the game, claimed to have seen both incidents and decided they were fair challenges.
Unbelievable.
The FA really do have to change this rule where the referee has the final say on retrospective punishment. I mean, some of them clearly aren’t going to say they have got things wrong are they?
Especially as that may mean them getting dropped from future Premier League or high-profile clashes. The FA should just be able to look at an incident, and if they think the referee has got it wrong, they punish the player, regardless of what the referee says he believes.
Andy Murray pushed Novak Djokovic all the way in a classic match in the semi-final of the Australian Open last week.
The Scot was a handful of winners away from beating the incredible Serbian in a five-hour epic, with Djokovic himself saying it was one of the best matches he had played in.
Yet still some people criticised Murray, implying he choked when it really mattered, and that he’s not good enough to live with Djokovic, Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer.
But, two days later, nobody was calling Nadal a choker when he lost a similarly epic encounter to Djokovic in the final.
It’s true that Murray is not quite there yet, but he is getting closer, he is improving, and mentally he was a lot tougher in Melbourne.
That is surely down to his new coach Ivan Lendl, who was coolness personified when he played, and with him guiding Murray this year, the Scot could yet silence his critics once and for all and win that elusive Grand Slam title.
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