Five things that are annoying me this week

1. The way Premiership broadcasting rights have been split up this year. I used to have a routine for Saturday mornings: Roll out of bed, make myself some tea, read the paper, watch the triple-header of Premiership games on Sportsnet, and yell obscenities at my TV. It was nice. This year, Sportsnet is still showing games on Saturday mornings, but Setanta now has the rights to the first-choice matches at 10 am. Which means that most weeks, if I want to watch United or Liverpool, I have to drag myself out to a pub somewhere.
   
   And that raises a whole host of other issues, like pub #1's breakfast being crap, pub #2's waitresses acting as if I'm wearing an invisibility cloak, and pub #3 being populated by an unnecessarily high percentage of creepy guys. Yes, I'm cranky. But some weeks I just don't want the hassle of changing out of my pajamas, you know?
   
   
2. My soccer league's playoff tournament this weekend. It isn't the tournament itself that's annoying me -- I'm looking forward to it, although I'll probably be dead by Monday after playing seven games in two days. It's the fact that I'm going to miss the Liverpool-Chelsea and Man United-Arsenal games.
   
   Not that they'd be on a TV channel I could watch anyway.
   
   
3. Frank Lampard. I finally got around to watching the England-Macedonia game and I still can't figure out why he hasn't been benched yet. David Beckham was dropped because he didn't do much apart from taking free kicks and sending in crosses, and important as that was, it wasn't enough to justify his keeping him in the starting XI when it was pulling the whole team out of shape. Now it seems like Lampard's got a similar problem with Lampard. He doesn't really tackle, his passing has been mediocre, and he's not even scoring those lucky deflected goals right now, which as far as I can tell was his main contribution in the past. So why not drop him -- at least until he gets his form back -- move Steven Gerrard into centre midfield and bring in a proper winger on the right?
   
   
4. My ongoing quest for turf shoes. I have small feet, so I usually end up with kids' boots rather than the adult version. But turf shoes in small sizes are virtually impossible to find here. And it's made more difficult by my slightly irrational dislike for Nikes, and my belief that soccer shoes are not meant to be gold, or blue, or -- god forbid -- pink.
   
   
5. This article about female athletes using sex to promote themselves and their sport. (Thanks to YNWA for linking me to it.) I don't have a problem with the premise that sex sells, per se. And it's not as if male athletes don't do it too. But female athletes being treated as pin-up girls does bother me, for a couple reasons. First, there's the assumption that their only value is in being attractive -- that however good they are at their sport doesn't really matter. Of course, being good-looking helps male athletes as well -- I doubt that David Beckham gets all those ad contracts just because of they way he can bend a football -- but they do have to have the skills to back it up. I can't think of a male equivalent to Anna Kournikova, for example.
   
   The other thing is the assumptions about just what makes them attractive. For the women, it's usually being skinny and pouty and dainty, whereas for the men, it's being strong and muscular, going out there and getting all sweaty and dirty. Why can't that be sexy for women as well?