Glossary

In order to assist our readers, please make a note for your records of Beesy’s official terms of reference for tournaments and competitions:

FIFA Soccer Jam
Michel Platini’s Anyone But England Symposium
My goodness how awfully clever of them cup of nations

Amstel Cup
European Vans Trophy

Mr Big’s Big League of Unimaginable Bigness
Coca-Cola Purgatory
The Coca-Cola League of the Damned
The Coca-Cola Abyss

The Bert Millichip Memorial Pendant
Milk Cup
Europe’s Premier Club Competition Named After An Obscure Paint Brand

Milk Cup: Bees 0 – 1 Some nondescript championship side

Ugh, why bother?

Bristol City and the least important competition this season

And yes, that includes the Painted Van Trophy.

Truly the milk cup is beginning to serve as the canary for the ills of football today. In doing so the competition is now even more pointless for lower league clubs than for those who harbour aspirations of actually winning the thing.

It is perhaps the momentum-sapping second-game-of-the-season clash with boring championship teams with aspirations far above their station (and reality), teams who will put out an XI of fringe players who spent last season on loan and still win 3-1 (as Bristol City surely will).

It could be the knowledge that even if we were to win we’d perhaps end up with an away tie at a premier league club in front of 9,000 fans, or it could be the poor TV and victory money on offer (which is as nothing in comparison to the FA Cup).

Or it could be them all together, a conflagration of circumstances together smearing the milk cup with a taint of futility that would have even Nietsche reaching for the self-help motivational tapes in despair.

So meh, we’re not going.