Grant & Pulis. A Stark and Damning Contrast in Commitment!

So, Avram can't show up for the game at Stoke because it is a religious holiday. Some mumbo jumbo archaic nonsense dating back 3000 or so years means that Avram has to take the day off.

Dear God! Does the guy really BELIEVE that God is sitting up in Heaven with a big book, noting down everybody's fate for the following year? He must have been in one foul mood in the 1940s then! A Cohen. Die. B Cohen. Die. C Cohen Die. E Cohen. Die. Hang on, this is getting a bit repetitive. Let's take that whole block, how many is that? Six million. Phew, big number. What the heck. Die in the camps.

I don't mean to be facetious here about the Holocaust but come on, just apply a little bit of common sense and it sort of blows a hole in the idea of Yom Kippur doesn't it? Does Avram really believe that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust at the will of God? Does Avram really believe in this personal involvement of God, such a personalised determination of the fate of individuals? Doesn't history question the wisdom of this idea?

Look too closely at all these religious practices and they often assume a level of absurdity, but from the outside, this one just about takes the biscuit. I can understand the idea of a pilgrimage. I can understand a fast. I can understand daily prayers. But the idea of God writing an individual's fate in a book?  Of everybody's individual fate in a book? Get real surely!

So, Avram can't show up because of stories invented 3000 years ago, when people did not understand the world in the way that we now understand it, in a world where superstition held sway and in a known world where there were so few people that God, had he been so minded, might just about feasibly have recorded names on "Live, Die, Prosper and Flounder" pages in a big book and get through everybody in a single day.

But now? The very idea of God writing in a book is surely ludicrous. Can't the guy use an Apple Mac or a PC? Can't he work in Excel? Think about it just a little and it becomes a Monty Python sketch. Why didn't he tell Moses that he was noting the names down on a computer? Why did he use a tablet of stone and burning bushes? Why was God so behind the times 3000 years ago? Why couldn't he access computer technology back then if he is so clever and so ubiquitous. Just imagine the effect on the Jews if Moses had come down from the mountain with an ipad and iphone! Bless Moses with miracles? Why waste time turning staves into snakes and sending down plagues of frogs when, with a little help, Moses could have said, "Let there be light" and installed electricity into the Pharaoh's palace before dropping an atom bomb in the desert to reveal the unbridled power of God? "Let my people go or I'll nuke every one of you!" would have stopped the Egyptians in their tracks a long way short of the Red Sea. It's why Israel survives as a state in the modern world after all!

So Avram can't make it because of his religious beliefs, religious beliefs that do not stop Jewish doctors, nurses, soldiers and policemen working in Israel on Yom Kippur. But Pulis? His mother died yesterday but the Stoke manager still showed up at half time to give his boys a motivational talk: and they responded by fighting to the last and snatching a vital victory.

We head to Stoke at the weekend and I ask you, who would you respect more as your manager, who would you want to play for? Absent Avram or pugnacious Pulis? Stoke will go into the game with a winger and lots of crosses, without Etherington, our battleplan will be based on no wingers and Avram's prayer!

Sack Grant now.