Early Doors - Your morning briefing blog

Chancellor Alistair Darling lays out his first budget later today, and while the concerns of everyday working families are all well and good, the real question is - how will it affect the average Premier League footballer's bank balance? CAR TAXES This is the point where Early Doors squeezes into...More

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The more astute among you may have noticed that Early Doors wasn't particularly verbose first thing this morning.The reason, sadly, is nothing more exciting than rank lateness. And as Eurosport is a French-owned firm, the company Tardy Slip is a masterpiece of bureaucracy, spanning six distinct sections over 53 pages. Early...More

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Football may well be a funny old game but some things, it seems, are never going to change.Alex Ferguson venting his spleen at any official who dares cross him is one. Arsene Wenger's myopia is another. Sepp Blatter's incessant ramblings yet another.And, sadly, Middlesbrough's penchant for giving their critics far...More

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Rugby players are a refined breed - well-spoken, clean-shaven public school boys who call the referee "Sir" and ensure that their inappropriate groping goes no further than the bottom of a ruck. Or so Early Doors thought until the emergence of Danny Cipriani, who once appeared on an MTV show...More

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Of the three Chelseas pictured in this morning's papers, Early Doors is least interested in the one that beat Olympiacos 3-0 last night. The Sun clearly agrees, devoting considerably more attention to Our War Hero Prince Harry's snub-nosed bit of skirt Chelsy Davy.Deliberate spelling mistake aside, Early Doors cannot remember...More

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As Zeljko Kalac creaked down to his right, attempting to save Cesc Fabregas's good-but-not-great long-range strike last night, it was all too easy to remember that this was the man Martin O'Neill once considered worse than Kevin Poole. Aussie Kalac spent the 1995/96 season at Leicester, where he committed numerous...More

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Aim far and wide and there will be no limits to what you can achieve. Well, at least according to Early Doors's motivational guru at a recent seminar on attaining success through self promotion.We prefer the 'seduce and destroy' method championed by Tom Cruise's Frank T.J. Mackey in the film...More

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For all those at Upton Park on Saturday, it may come as something of a surprise to find out that Frank Lampard's sending-off was only the second worst decision of the weekend.Lamps was dismissed against his old club for ersatz tag-team wrestling with Luis Boa Morte, bringing back an old...More

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Three weeks today David Beckham will find out whether he has been named in Fabio Capello's England squad for the friendly against France. This week Becks has been saying that he may miss out on the squad named by Signor 'individual strand of hair' due to a lack of match fitness -...More

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BBC bosses are not noted for their sense of humour - as shown by the continued existence of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.But Mark Thompson and his fellow mandarins might have broken off from sacking thousands of people to allow themselves a brief smile yesterday evening.Even...More

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