Good afternoon guys and welcome to the second Thursday blog. Now before I start, I had a look at last week’s first of the series and I couldn’t help feeling, that the way I started with ‘Hello everybody’, made me sound like Dr Nick Riviera from The Simpsons. Every time I see it now I hear his voice. Trust me, I am nothing like the character.
This week has been all about going back to work after being on holiday for two weeks. Three mornings of 4am rises has certainly worn me out. Ok, the half past three finish is good and my plan is always to go back to bed for a couple of hours but it never works out that way and before I know it it’s 9pm and I need to go to bed if I am going to get a decent sleep before work the next day however with the wife liking the TV to be on, I usually only manage about 4-5 hours sleep. The good thing is that my rest days are today and Friday and there is no one else in the house except the dogs and I can do as I please. I can even walk around the house naked if I want and put on some swing music to go with it haha. I don’t by the way, honest.

I mentioned the dogs there. We have six dogs, five poodles, of which 1 is a standard and 4 are toy, and a pug, which really belongs to Elise. At the moment we have four pups also, that were born on October 27. I only remember that because they were born on my birthday. Typical that, my birthday and I am not the centre of attention. I will have to become a diva to get some I think. Anyway, the four toy poodle pups were sold within nine days, probably because their date for going away to new homes was December 22, just in time for Christmas. At £750 a pup, that’s a cool 3 grand, which almost pays for our holiday next year. This is our fifth, maybe sixth, litter of pups from the different dogs (bitches) and they generally pay for our holiday each year.
This week I have been in the middle of a fall out between my wife, Alison, and eldest daughter, Elise. They really rub each other up the wrong way and being in the middle is one of the most frustrating things ever. They are both as stubborn as each other but, to be honest, Elise can be very annoying. Nothing is ever her fault. There is an excuse for everything. Alison thinks Elise does nothing around the house (pretty standard around the world if you ask me) while Elise thinks that no one else does so why should she. The kids all have jobs around the house and to be honest, they are pretty shit at their jobs. I don’t know how many times I have spent my day off tidying around the house because of their failings. Alison is way too uptight though and needs to chill. Every house, I am sure is untidy at some point, and if everyone in the house works then it becomes very difficult to keep it tidy. Throw six dogs into the mix then I am sure you know where I am coming from. We used to have a cleaner who would come in twice during the week but she seemed to spend more time talking on her phone so we got shot of her. Anyway, as I have told them, I don’t want involved in their fall outs, they can sort it themselves.
Last week I said I would ask the family if I was allowed to put their picture on here. The kids said they didn’t mind but Alison and one of the toy poodles said no. So I can now properly introduce you to the two girls this week with Elise being the top picture and Janene being the bottom.

Pos			Team	P	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	Pts
1			Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk	29	16	3	10	68	56	12	51
2			Montpellier HSC	29	13	7	9	45	33	12	46
3			RSC Anderlecht	29	14	4	11	47	40	7	46
4			CLUB BRUGGE KV	29	13	7	9	48	46	2	46
5			Dynamo Kyiv	29	14	3	12	45	39	6	45
6			AZ	29	13	5	11	55	51	4	44
7			São Paulo FC	29	12	7	10	50	40	10	43
8			River Plate	29	11	10	8	52	45	7	43
9			Independiente	29	12	7	10	40	38	2	43
10			Rubin Kazan	29	12	6	11	46	37	9	42
11			Flamengo	29	11	8	10	53	52	1	41
12			Santos FC	29	11	8	10	50	55	-5	41
13			FC Augsburg	29	11	7	11	42	40	2	40
14			Dinamo Zagreb	29	11	6	12	33	42	-9	39
15			Standard Liège	29	10	8	11	40	44	-4	38

We have entered into the new Top 100 Youth Cup and have been handed a home draw against Borussia Dortmund Youth managed by Lee Reynolds. Being a first division club, Dortmund have much better resources than we do as Brugges and we will have our work cut out to win that one. Another problem we have is that we only have six youth players. I have my backroom staff working on bringing in enough youths to field a team and I also know a couple of boys that live down the road from me who will probably play if their mum allows. I must give a mention to organiser Stephen Beddows, who made the draw live on the blog. He done a tremendous job with his running commentary but I think he has to have a word with his cameraman, who had obviously been on the drink beforehand. The camera tended to drift to other things and there was certainly some indiscipline behind the scenes.
Our captain, Oscar Duarte has been the subject of an £8m bid from AC Milan. At Brugges we don’t hold any player back and if Oscar wants to go to Italy then we won’t stop him. Preferably we would like to keep him for the rest of the season but if we can find a replacement then he is free to go. He is currently thinking over the offer and will tell us over the next couple of days.
Overall, its been a quiet week in Belgium as the country recovers from being mixed up in the atrocities in Paris a couple of weeks ago but we hope to put on a good show tonight in Brazil and bring home the points to strengthen our promotion bid. The players are knackered but I know they will find the strength to impress me.

Well that’s it for this week. Maybe a bit short on humour but I am not in that place today with so many things going on in my mind. However, I hope you enjoyed the read and I will be back next week with another view on the past week. Thanks for reading.

Ciao