Cock-Up Cup strikes again

Well, they did it again. Having chosen to hold the draw for the Carabao Cup at 11.15am in Beijing — so 4.15am here — the Football league contrived to then start it 22 minutes late.

This being pretty much the middle of the night back home, no television channel was broadcasting the event, so the handful of lunatics who wanted to keep track had been advised to do so on Twitter. When, by 4.25am, no updates had appeared, many will have lost interest.

Those who stayed around need not have bothered. There are not many great games in the Carabao Cup third round. Most of the big guns are at home and there are no local derbies, unless Bournemouth versus Brighton, on the south coast but 100 miles apart, counts. In fact, the only thing keeping the competition in the news, is how relentlessly abysmal and amateurish the procedures have been this year.

Maybe that’s the ploy. Maybe the organisers have found a smart way to draw attention to their competition; or maybe Carabao simply translates as cock-up.