The balmy weather has finally broke and my teeth are chattering like Yootha Joyce on meth. Sub-zero winds sheeting across from the fields, all the logs lashed down under several tarps outside. Fucking New England. It’s like a nuclear winter. At least I have my satellite dish and 56-inch TV. Ian Darke and Macca telling it like it is. Fox Soccer Channel in HD. I saw a coyote the other day outside an abandoned farmhouse it has adopted for the winter. Wild animals living amongst us here in Plasticland. The suburbs expanding their manicured tendrils out into the forests. More and more yanks are getting into the English Premier League these days. They watch it on telly and talk about it using their own vocabulary, which sadly is being slowly adopted in the UK. Expressions like “assist”, plus a growing obsession with stats and Man of the Match (soon to become MVP, mark my words) indicates that a dead-end has been reached. It’s the start of the Great Cultural Merging, the thin end of the zombie apocalypse wedge. Some of them have even been over there to attend games, probably infecting other shitheads with their agonising suburban virus in the perfect cunt storm. I picture hordes of vacant-eyed ghouls swarming the filthy neglected streets near football stadia. JCL disease mutated into a cell-dissolving epidemic that causes peoples’ flesh to drip like candle wax, melting their replica kits, sagging until they are skeletal from the waist up. Their internal organs protected by polythene megastore bags worn as shirts, their legs a mass of oozing nodules, scaly and hardened under an ozone-less sky. Lurching, Frankenstein’s monster-like, in the general direction of foodstuffs. The only thing that keeps them going are the brains of real football fans who they pursue relentlessly, to gang-scoff, sinking rotten teeth into their skulls and draining off the knowledge they so greatly desire. The fact that their team has bought success, or is controlled by heartless aliens with no emotional investment, doesn’t bother them. They just want to devour the brains of real fans and wallow in the fake glow of fake success. Their faces bear a familiar lifeless gormless soulless dickless cuntless expression as they stumble towards their Mecca, dripping flesh and blood and the occasional eyeball. Stooping, scooping armfuls of manure from the police horses and launching it aimlessly into the air. Unintelligible cackling and moaning passes for banter, and their terrace “songs” sound like the ghostly strains of a foreign army dying of hypothermia. These clueless fuckers will be roaming the streets looking for people like you, as the petrol runs out and Jaffa Cakes rot on supermarket shelves.

And don’t be thinking it’s limited to the British game. Longtime sports fans here in the US also complain about the JCL invasion. Red Sox fans at Fenway Park, actually glad that the Sox were shite this past season, hoping it would send the zombies to Yankee Stadium instead. We’ve all been JCL’s at one time or another, but it usually assumes a more innocent form than the current hideousness. For instance, I remember a record stall in the Underground Market around 1977-78. We used to go and look at the records and the lad behind the counter probably thought we were clueless 11 year old divs. When he learned I had a copy of the Angelic Upstarts’ “Teenage Warning” on red vinyl I saw a new respect in his eyes, although it could have been raw hatred, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, these JCL football zombies have no such devices at their disposal. All they have are jester hats, face paint, mobile devices and Estuary accents. Argh! You know what you need to do, Tatlock. Move fast and move now.

Otherwise we’ll be living in garbage strewn tent cities surrounded by immense packs of wild dogs. Fox Soccer Channel, Sky and MOTD will still broadcast intermittently via pirate relay stations that strive to remain undetected by the melting football zombies. You’ll have to keep fit, living on veggie shakes and riding stolen vehicles. In a croc-skin hat with a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a pair of .50 calibre revolvers, mowing through the stumbling plague victims like a speedboat over a bloody swamp. Your missus nagging you from the back seat for drinking and driving and not wearing a seatbelt.  Fuck all changed there, then, I suppose. Only kidding, Tatlock. Always wear a seatbelt. Most of the worst cases are Chelsea and city supporters hellbent on finding delectable football brains to pick at and glean a clue. They also eat babies, the sick bastards. Mutated footballers’ carcasses litter the freeways, their egos inflated as big as dinosaurs but completely harmless.

In the meantime the David De Gea nightmare continues, Phil Jones is thanking the stars he’s not Colin Gibson following his howler in Geordieland (talking of bloated mindless animals in replica shirts) and the Bittermen are being professionally bastardly in ways that would make Muammar Gaddafi cringe if he wasn’t in a hole somewhere with a big knife up his arse. Goodbye…