Today's lesson: Remember to turn your flash on when you come out of an elevator and find yourself staring at Chelsea's starting XI. Even still, I like how blurry Joe Cole fancies up his warm-ups with that scarf.

~~~~

Randomly ended up having lunch beside a former Wolves executive (who had no delusions of the club staying in the Premier League).

One of the television channels at Chelsea Football Club "Russia TV". Roman Abramovich must be pissed that technical difficulties are preventing him from watching The Andrei Arshavin Comedy and Out of Place Rants Against Women Drivers Hour.

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Met up with former editor of The Spoiler, Ryan Bailey for drinks.

There's a door next to Lampard's crotch. ... Sounds about right.

Today's lesson: Always tip your taxi driver well. Upon experiencing your awesome generosity and overall wonderfulness as a human being, he just might reveal that he's a season ticket holder and member of the club's gym, where injured players apparently congregate on matchday.

Alright, everybody here's the thing. I'll be hopping a plane to London tonight, in part to catch the Chelsea v Wolves match at the Bridge on Saturday. So your regularly scheduled programming will be interrupted between now and Monday, but unless I end up passed out in a pub somewhere for the next four or five days I hope to share pictures and tidbits from the trip while I'm there.

Another day, another head shot. This really is the final straw for American girls soccer, though. I mean, the hair pulling and dirty tackles are one thing, but to take aim and obliterate an opponent's face like this on a free kick is just way over the line. And totally hilarious.

After the jump, a special bonus DTotD.

First things first that's Tigre midfielder Matias Gimenez in the picture above. Dressed as a tiger. Holding two live chickens. With a demonic look on his face. In what appears to be the backyard of a meth lab/child abductor's hideout. I have no answers for any of that. I found the picture here.

On an international break Tuesday, this qualifies as noteworthy all Austria's Paul Scharner has to do now is suffer disfiguring burns on one side of his face and he'll be a Batman villain.

[Photo: Reuters]

All the stuff being covered outside the unfriendly confines of the award winning Dirty Tackle...

A puddle of mud proves to be Notts County goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel's best friend. [Extra Footie]

It was inevitable: the Elizabeth Lambert dating video parody. [Tauntr]

Bookmaker stops taking bets on new Scotland manager because their chief executive is on the SFA board.

According to Football Italia, Samuel Eto'o has cemented his reputation as the Oprah Winfrey of footballers by giving each and every member of the Cameroon national team, which he captains, a £30,000 watch simply because they qualified for the World Cup.

Meanwhile, every other national team captain is cursing his name for making them look bad.

Manchester United having already bucked the Premier League trend by raising ticket prices this season and selling Cristiano Ronaldo for more money than actually exists in the world are now taking somewhat odd cost-cutting measures, according to The Sun. In addition to logical reductions like trimming the staff at MUTV, the club are also apparently forbidding groundsmen at their training ground from taking any left-over bread for morning toast and the former players who act as hosts at Old Trafford can no longer take up seats to watch the game, nor can they eat the left-over food put out for guests, instead being given packed sandwiches.

There's a lot to be impressed with in this clip. Mostly in how #20 was able to nail his opponent square in the face at such a sharp angle and that said opponent quickly recovered to go after it.

The clip ends too soon, though. I have a feeling #20 didn't come out of that corner unscathed.

When you think of a professional footballer's mode of transportation to a match, you probably conjure images of pimped-out limousines with built-in hot tubs, strippers and maybe even a personal pizza chef.

Well, for footballers in the United States (who aren't Davey Becks) it's not like that.

Though Sunderland's Darren Bent finally got his call up to the England squad, it appears even he is a bit bored with the international break. So bored, in fact, that he sprung for the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 deluxe edition and is wearing the included night vision goggles around a dark house.

A friendly between Uruguayan clubs Paysandu and Cameta turned not so friendly (see what I did there?) when defender Carlos Eduardo decided to play a little prank on the linesman. While Eduardo's Paysandu teammate was being stretchered off the pitch, he went up to the linesman and, in his own words:

"I said, 'Boy, you're very jumpy' and threw water on him, which was very hot.

Well hello there.

I see you've caught me wearing an old Argentina national team shirt. Naturally, I'm wearing the old one because it was significantly cheaper than the new one and because it was the only one I could find in the dryers at the laundromat. ... Why am I wearing an Argentina shirt at all, you ask?

Two years ago, when he was still playing for Chelsea, Lassana Diarra would rather would rather flee in terror than speak English and now he's apparently going out of his way to insult the Irish in the frightening language.

After France won the first leg of their World Cup qualifying playoff 1-0 over Ireland on Saturday, Diarra allegedly went up to the home side's Keith Andrews and made an insulting comment that was so bad Andrews refused to reveal what it was:

"I don't want to say exactly what he said, but he knows what it was, which was a disrespectful comment and it was typical of him, to be honest, and the way that he was.

Soon after the start of Saturday's 0-0 friendly between Italy and Netherlands, an Italian fan ran out onto the pitch wearing a Superman t-shirt with "Cassano in Nazionale" (Cassano in the national team) written on the front and back. Once he got his shirt message of support for the ignored Sampdoria striker seen (hooray for s-words!

The matches to watch after you realize- AHHH LOOK OUT GARETH BARRY THE FLYING GIANT IS GOING TO NINJA KICK YOU!!!

Saturday

Russia v Slovenia at Luzhniki Stadium The beginning of the end of the long, drawn out process that is World Cup qualifying is finally here with the first leg of the playoff fixtures.

This is the jam Deco is using to get his adrenaline pumping for Portugal's World Cup qualification playoff match against Bosnia tomorrow. I think.

[Photo: AP]

As the world of football continues to mourn the suicide of German goalkeeper Robert Enke on Tuesday and the crippling depression that led to it, mentally challenged French national team manager Raymond Domenech had this to say in his Friday press conference:

"People can say what they want, when they want.

This is going to be the strangest, most illogical football rule you see all day, so prepare yourself or your brain just might melt and slide out your ear...

Second division club Portimonense won their Carlsberg Cup (Portugal's league cup) first group phase by simply substituting in a 19-year-old goalkeeper (pictured above.

AAAAHHHHHHHH I AM ARTUR BORUC AND THIS IS A LIST OF THINGS THAT MADE ME ANGRY THIS WEEK:

1. STILL BEING INJURED AHHHHHH I STILL CAN'T PLAY AND IT'S DRIVING ME INSANE!!!!!! I THINK I'M GOING CROSS EYED AND I'M STARTING TO LOOK LIKE BILL MURRAY IN CADDYSHACK!!!!!!! THIS IS HORRIBLE!

Compilation Fridays are back and this one is for anyone who thought American girls soccer just suddenly turned epically violent in the last two weeks. This video is from one high school team over one season in 2007. There's stuff in there that would make hardened Premier Leaguers take jobs at Hello Kitty shops.

Noted world leaders Fat Ronaldo and Israeli President Shimon Peres meet at a hotel in Sao Paulo. Fat Ronaldo discusses how he forgot to wash his upper lip. And how he ate his necktie on the way over.

[Photo: Getty]

All the stuff being covered outside the unfriendly confines of the award winning Dirty Tackle...

Insane video taken Rafik Saifi of the Algerian national team as their bus is attacked by rock-throwing Egyptian fans. [Goal]

Rangers not happy with their "moronic" fans. [STV]

Even when wearing a dress that went through a broken shredder, Abbey Clancy still looks hot.

The members of Manchester City not busy with international duty finally met the man who pays their massive wages for the first time yesterday in Abu Dhabi, ahead of today's friendly against the United Arab Emirates (which City lost 1-0). The awkwardness of the occasion is evident especially the shot at 10 second into the video where it appears they just finished talking about the weather and now have absolutely nothing left to say to each other.

Cristiano Ronaldo

This is not the kind of erotic foot massage I had in mind. ... It is kind of relaxing, though. Putting me to sleep faster than one of Iker's stories. ... If Portugal tries to make me play I'm just going to cry and maybe pee my pants a little bit. They can't make me play with a hurt ankle, tear-stained cheeks, and a the distinct smell of pee wafting from my pants, can they?

Last Saturday's derby between Hamilton and Motherwell produced a few DTotD worthy tackles and some fine goals, too. Our interest in the game, however, is when Hamilton's overly excited manager, Billy Reid, celebrates his side's second goal (both scored a man down) by jumping up and grabbing the advertisement board above the dugout, which he rips off, causing him to fall on his ass (4:28 into the video).

Although they lost the away leg of their Copa del Rey fixture against Real Madrid 1-0, third division Alcorcon still completed their shock 4-1 aggregate upset over Spain's most expensive team and advanced to the fifth round (of eight) in the tournament.

For Alcorcon, this was their championship, though, and without a doubt the club's defining moment (it was only founded in 1971).

Japan are in South Africa for a friendly on Saturday and while they're not going to the lengths that Germany are falsely rumored to be for the World Cup, they are taking precautions that are a bit worrisome for a country about to host one of the world's biggest sporting events.

Team media director Ichirota Fukushi tells The AP:

"The players are free to go to the beach in front of the hotel, but we've told them not to go out after dark.

Mike Ashley has really done it now. In his efforts to rebrand Newcastle's stadium as sportsdirect.com@St James' Park, which I'm pretty sure is just a dyslexic email address, Ashley forced supporters to launch their own bid to buy the club from him and end his reign of embarrassment.

Well, Sting and the rest of The Police (you know, the other two guys who aren't Sting) are backing the Newcastle United Supporters Trust's totally originally titled "Yes We Can" campaign to gain control of the club.

Everybody hates French national team manager Raymond Domenech. This is a well established fact. When he's not getting called "a man who seems intent on messing them [France] up" in the press by opposing players, he's getting booed by his countrymen and laughed at by his own players at the Paris Bercy Indoor Masters ATP tennis tournament (as you can kind of make out in the horrible quality video above).

In a match from Argentina's Liga Regional de San Francisco between Sociedad Sportiva Devoto and Rivadavia de Rio Primero, the referee showed a red card to a Rio Primero defender for his goal-saving handball in a way that was either very nice or very creepy, depending on how you look at it.

It's finally happened. Fat Ronaldo has admitted that he's a chubby tub of goo. (A very talented chubby tub of goo, but still a chubby tub of goo, nonetheless.)

In an interview with Globo television, The Fat One, who has 11 goals for Corinthians this season, said that he wouldn't call himself up to the Brazilian national team right now, that he will put forth perhaps the greatest effort of his career to make the team, and that he thinks the first half of 2010 will be vital blah blah blah.

Well, it's official the maddening buzz of the vuvuzela will be heard at the World Cup (assuming you don't gouge out your eardrums for fear of suffering through a month of aural torture before then). Says SABC News:

During the Confederations Cup earlier this year, players and the international media complained about the noise made by the vuvuzela.