Talking a Load of Balls

At least this time I didn't drop my watch into a bath full of water - Tottenham really have to stop making these dramatic Champions League comebacks with their last minute goals.  It isn't good for my stress levels.  To be honest, I still don't really believe that we''re actually in the Champions League final - part of me still suspects that we all suffered some kind of mass hallucination and that Moura didn't really score a literal last minute winner.  Perhaps in the Netherlands they are all celebrating Ajax qualifying for the finals and are ascribing our delusion of an all-English final to Brexit-induced madness.  But, apparently Spurs are in the final, where they will meet Liverpool.  All I can hope is that Manchester City win in the league on Sunday, denying Liverpool the Premiership title and that they'll be so demoralised that the scouse bastards just don't turn up in the final in Madrid.  I dream of seeing all those deluded and arrogant Liverpool fans staggering around in a daze on 2 June, realising they've won nothing and saying things like 'Eh, eh, call the bizzies!  We've been robbed!  It was our year! Eh, eh!'  God, I hate those scousers.

But, as I've noted before, this isn't a football blog, although this is going to be a post of two halves.  So, let us move on to one pf the more usual subjects we dabble in here - politics.  Most specifically, those local election results which pundits have been trying to pick the bones out of for the past week.  Actually, political punditry is a lot like football punditry in that a lot of balls is talked, with most 'judgements' being based on personal bias rather than any sort of objective criteria.  Anyway, the narrative that most of the media seems to want us to take away is that both main parties did badly because the electorate wanted to punish them over their failure to deliver Brexit.  The flaw in this narrative is that while the Tories performed disastrously, Labour lost less than a hundred seats.  Now, it is true that, arguably, they should have done better and picked up seats from the Tories, but it was hardly a disastrous result.  Disappointing, yes.  Nut and electoral meltdown?  No. And if the electorate were sending a message about Brexit, then it is a very confused one, as the main beneficiaries of the Tory meltdown were the Lib Dems and the Greens, both pro-Remain parties.  If they were angry at Brexit not being implemented, why didn't they vote UKIP?  But UKIP suffered its own electoral meltdown, losing seats left, right and centre.  So, did the results actually reflect a shift to a pro-Remain stance in the electorate at large?  Well, you can't really draw that conclusion, either - the Liberal Democrats have traditionally always done well at local level and the Greens' profile had been boosted by the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations.  Perhaps people were voting on local issues - it was a local election after all.  Maybe they just wanted their bins emptied once a week.  Then again, maybe they voted on environmental issues.  The fact is that we just don't know enough about their voting intent. Meaning that, at the end of the day, we just don't have a clue what those results mean, if anything.