GYAR! Shiver me main brace and splice me timbers, hold on to your dubloons fair readers for tis time for Cap’n BBM to tell you a tale of ghostly revenge, vast piles of gold and mad Villains. A tale we call – the Curse of the Claret and Blue Pearl… Gyar!

Legend tells of a team in the Premier League that time forgot, a team everyone outside the West Midlands struggles to recall when asked to name all 20 Premier League clubs, a team run by a mad pirate king called Gerard Houllier who’s time in charge has been so inconsequential and unnoteworthy that the club’s very existence is doubted by the so called scholars at the FA who need solid proof before they’ll believe in something so ephemeral.

But that all changed a couple of weeks ago me old buccaneers.  Like that bit at the start of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, it suddenly all got a bit foggy around the relegation zone, the issue of who was going down becoming cloudier with every Wolves and West Ham win, Johnny Depp started doing a Brummie accent claiming his new character was based on Jasper Carrott. Then, emerging from the ghostly mist into the clear waters of the bottom three a long-forgotten vessel with claret and blue sails started a hootin’ and a hollerin’ towards the Championship. Aston Villa had returned from their long stint of being totally unnoticable – and they’d gone stark, staring bonkers in the meantime! Gyar!

And is if to underline how much Villa’s absence from national headlines has got to them, they’ve somehow managed to top Man City in the blowing huge amounts of money on average English players stakes after spending £24million to sign Darren Bent. Gyar! “We are absolutely delighted to have Darren here and we know he will be a tremendous asset for the months and the years ahead,” said an eye-patched Houllier’s pet parrot.

“His arrival sends out a clear message about our ambition. We’ve brought him down here to spearhead our efforts and to help build something strong and lasting at our club.”

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