The Tenner Bet was once heckled at a wedding in Leicester over the length and volume of its eyebrows.
It took the Tenner Bet to leave Belfast to realise that there was actually anything wrong with those woolly strands. I mean, it's not as if I'd anything to cross-ref against to demonstrate what it was that people found so offensive about them. Oh, how they stared, though.
Mrs Tenner Bet has family in Leicester. Hence the wedding. Actually, make that weddings. At these functions, I would be regaled of stories about how City would have won the league if it wasn't for institutional bias at the Football Association, how Leicester Tigers were the greatest rugby team in England, nay the world, and how local crooner Engelbert Humperdinck was . . . nah, not even they thought that.
I listened intently, nodded my head politely, and agreed when asked my opinion. Leicester is pretty much your average English town, red brick houses with corner shops at the end of streets which eventually give way to duel carriageways that carry you to the nicer parts of the area. Here you see strangely constructed middle-class homes that have asked for planning permission in the way that Dennis Nilsen asked strangers if they fancied a nightcap back at his place.
That sentence right there is about as offensive as I've ever been about Leicester - so what it is exactly that I have done to incur the wrath of the football club, I'm not quite sure.
You may have already heard that something like 17 of the 18 favourites on the UK football coupon won at the weekend, thus ensuring the bookies a massive, suppurating bloody nose - for the second time this season.
And who, you might ask, was the one team not to win? Yes, it was Leicester City. And which team did the Tenner Bet need to win last weekend to turn a £100 profit on one bet and £250 on another?
Well, Kasper Schmeichel, we can't all have perfect, blond threads but how about this for a deal - if I refuse to stick you on my betting slip this weekend and you leave my brows out of it then can we call it quits on whatever perceived slight I am supposed to have inflicted on the good people of Leicester? Yes? Thanks, love.
THE BET
Phew, well, I'm glad that's been sorted out. Not least because I've just noted that Leicester travel to Burnley this weekend to face a team that has not lost at Turf Moor all season. With that in mind, I'm going to blow a big fat raspberry in the face of Kasper Schmeichel and co by sticking Sean Dyche's team at the top of my docket.
The Lancastrians are flying, City have been labouring in their last two matches and news of Nigel Pearson's health problems might just have had a unnerving effect on the dressing room. It's taking a contrary punt but at 2/1 I have no truck with that. For similar reasons, I like the 11/10 available on Manchester City to beat Arsenal at the Emirates. Anyone who has watched Arsenal in the last fortnight will tell you that the wheels have fallen off the Wengabus and City were utterly ruthless at Old Trafford on Tuesday night. Finally, QPR (4/6) should have too much for Blackpool - who have been a mess since Barry Ferguson took charge - despite recent stumbles of their own. The treble pays 9.52/1.
SEASON'S TOTAL
-£69.53 Bloody Leicester City.
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