The important news of the day

It was one of those weekends that produced plenty of news: hat-trick for Berbatov, hat-trick for van Persie, defeat for Man City, goal for Bent on his debut.

There was plenty of controversy too. Despite Gary Caldwell blatantly whisking Cesc Fabregas’s legs away when he was clean through on goal, six yards out, Roberto Martinez came out to slate Fabregas.

He said: “I know Cesc very well. He knows how to buy decisions from referees. Cesc comes from a different culture – you do not cheat if you take a decision from the referee: it is because you are clever and you are getting something for your team. In England, to do that is cheating.”

Elsewhere, Charlie Adam requested a transfer to try to force a move to Liverpool, where he’ll play the first half a dozen games and then become to them what Scott Parker and Steve Sidwell were to Chelsea.

And then there was all manner of trouble over the female assistant referee at the Wolves-Liverpool game. Richard Keys and Andy Gray said someone would have to go down and teach her the offside rule, before Keys turned his attention to Karren Brady’s claims of sexism in football by saying: “See charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism? Yeah. Do me a favour, love."

Perhaps it’s time someone showed Keys where the ‘off’ button sits on microphones, considering he was also responsible for this…

… and thought he was off air, but wasn’t, when he said of Theo Walcott: “You’ve been shite, son, in your daft pink boots – absolute rubbish. Get up, you stupid little boy.”

With all this to discuss, it was inevitable TalkSport would lead on one of these hot topics this morning. You’d think. Instead, what they actually ran with was an analysis of which teams have the most English players in their squad.

Of course, Arsenal came bottom of TalkSport’s ‘league’ of teams with the most Englishmen, allowing them to show a massive picture of Arsenal's foreigners and to state we can’t be proud of our team because it doesn’t represent our home nation. Click here to read.

But here lies the flaw in their argument. What their ‘analysis’ actually does is to point out a clear correlation between clubs with few Englishmen and clubs at the top of the Premiership. For example, the top five teams in the Premier League - Arsenal, Man U, Chelsea, Spurs and Man City - are all in the bottom half of TalkSport’s table of clubs with the most Englishmen.

Meanwhile, the bulk of TalkSport’s ‘most English’ clubs – Blackpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle, West Ham, Wolves – are in a relegation battle.

So, if they really cared about this issue, and did any form of genuine analysis, they would have concluded that if you buy English, you end up shit. Buy foreigners, and you go up the league. Football, you see, is about coming as high up the division as possible, not about buying as many Englishmen as possible.

But then I suppose TalkSport isn’t about football. It’s about controversy.