Roy Hodgson, are you watching?

Roy Hodgson, are you watching?

Roy Hodgson, are you watching?

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By Max Grieve

Unless you’ve been staring directly into the Sun with your ears sealed up by industrial grade cement, you’d have seen or heard that Emile Heskey scored a bicycle kick over the weekend.

Perhaps I’m being generous – any ‘bicycle kick’ is, of course, subject to conditions. Heskey didn’t so much push off the ground as lift his legs out from underneath his body and fall gracefully, but the kicking motion wasn’t so horizontal as to label it a scissor kick. It was a “Bicycle Kick Presented by Emile Heskey” and the world smiled.

A boom rang out across the country as he fell back to Earth, and kangaroos scattered towards the sea, where there were sharks and jellyfish and crocodiles, because this is Australia; a land where everything is coloured red by dirt, blood or the backs of spiders. 

It was like watching a 1000-year-old tree falling from the skies. Heskey looks hot, and altogether weary of the world. His muscles were sculpted by overzealous stonemasons, but he doesn’t seem to want to use them. His eyes are tired and heavy, and he struggles to point at things with any enthusiastic intent. Emile Heskey doesn’t look as though he really cares for football any more, but then he kicks his feet over his head, and trots away; delighted.

The seeming phenomenon that is training a camera on an individual for ninety minutes continued, with Heskey the subject of the week. 'Heskey Cam’ was the future consigned to history, along with flying cars and horse extinction, but Australia, forever at the forefront of technological advancement, declined to listen to popular demand and broadcast 'An Evening with Emile’ anyway. What followed – that is to say, a lunging toe-poke and a semi-overhead kick – was enough to suggest that the proposal for a 'Grant Holt Cam’ should not yet be abandoned.

Elsewhere, Alessandro Del Piero won and scored his second penalty in as many weeks to feed the dream-like state that the A-League finds itself in as Sydney came from behind against Perth Glory; Sydney’s second a positively indecent chip from ex-Blackburn “star” Brett 'Bretty’ 'Emmo’ Emerton.

Heskey and Del Piero continue to captivate the masses as Western Sydney Wanderers shake off the afterbirth and learn to walk; goals fly in from coast to coast as all ten sides refuse to go unbeaten; and the odd onlooker wonders when John Aloisi will rip off his suit to reveal a full playing kit, and take to the field.

Meanwhile, the Premier League remains Heskey-less. I’ll let you decide which is the best competition on the planet.