Dodgy Boston

Whenever the tannoy guy at Barnet reads the League Two scores he always announces Boston as "Dodgy Boston". And quite right too. Boston won promotion from the Conference ahead of Ragenham & Deadbridge a few seasons back, but when some of these "irregularities" came to light they were fined £100K and docked 4 points, however, controversially these points were docked in the forthcoming league season and not for the season just completed. The latter would have denied them promotion.

Now the scale of this has come out it's hard to disagree with the (under) statement that Boston derived "an unfair advantage over other clubs who operated within the law." What I can't agree with is the claim that "This case should act as a deterrent to anyone considering tax fraud". Quite the reverse it seems to me. All you have to do is say "I'm scared of prison" and you get off scot free. Meanwhile you keep your place in the Football League, and the half-million or so you have trousered in the meantime, albeit they presumably wanked most of that off on Joachim, Whelan etc. I don't usually think that football clubs should take these issues to the courts but surely Dagenham have a case here. A strong FA would kick Boston all the way down to the Ovaltine Lincolnshire Sunday League Division 8 and tell them to never darken our door again. A strong FA - I crack myself up.

The only other point about this article is the strange sub-headline "Inmate irony". Either someone mis-spelled "innate" or this is a superb piece of Level 3 irony at least.

As for me, I'm off to Loftus Road tomorrow for what will surely be another netbusting goal extravaganza as Crystal Palace come to town. It's anyone's guess whose onion bag will bulge the most but it should be lively.