TWELVE hours on the couch with Bozza and Bulldog: it sounded like a perfect evening.

In reality, "Super Saturday", like any all night party, reached a noisy glorious peak (Victory vs Roar), coasted into a singalong with Chelsea and finally descended into late night excess with Viewer's Choice.  When it comes to football, I like to party hard as much as the next girl, but I must admit I just couldn't keep up the pace.

The past week has shown me clear cut proof that I have a binge football problem and I'm beginning to wonder whether cramming in 15 hours of matches over 3 or 4 days may be starting to affect my enjoyment.  Here's how it went :

Thursday

Bright and early start with The Socceroos in Limerick.  Beautiful football, Ireland outplayed, Timmy does his usual cheeky stuff.  Surely even Fossie must be smiling. Watched Carney's awesome goal a dozen times and thought about what CCM had lost when they failed to persuade him to come to Gosford this season. Come back to the A-League, Dave. The coaches will love you and you might even get a tan.

Friday

F3 Derby. Thinking about it all day and fired up bigtime by the time we get to Bluetongue. A-League are giving away what look like bar mats in team colours to wave in the air - or maybe they're to wipe the sweat from our anxious brows.  Copped a painful ball in the head from Pedj before the game - a taste of things to come as he has another cracking performance. The first half is brilliant stuff and Kwassie nearly scores. Matty has his goal wrongly disallowed for being offside. Once again, I fail to understand why we can't use a video ref in such instances - the game has stopped anyway, so not disruptive.

Couldn't hear what Matty was saying to Sarah Ho as they left the pitch at half-time. Sounded like "hey baby, how about we use a bit of 21st Century technology?" She laughed and tossed her ponytail. Second half we got suckered in the first minute but good old Boogs came back with a birthday goal. Last half hour not so thrilling but our defence still looked amazingly solid, even without Doig. Good result but we should have won.

The big question for me is : What has happened to The Marinators ?  Since changing positions from behind the goal, they seem to have diminished in numbers and I'm sorry to say The Squadron put on a much more impressive show, flares and all. Bring back the bagpiper.

Saturday

Settle in for the long-awaited football marathon, which gets off to a less than sizzling start. Much as I love Boz and Robbie, watching two grown men play table soccer does not make for riveting television. And let's not mention Santo Cilauro's holiday snaps of his dad in a Korean "House of Ill Repute".

Watch GazCoastUnited decimate Fury and two questions arise :

1.      Why don't we save time and just give Smeltz the Golden Boot now ?

2.      How come Hutcho gets a yellow card every time he opens his mouth, but Fowler can't get one even standing on his head ?

Victory v Roar was, as Harps would say, "fabulous entertainment." As the match goes on the poor man is out of control with excitement. And don't you just sense there are so many more matches like this to come this season?

Sunday

Open the Sunday paper to find that Fossie is the only person in Australia who sees the Socceroos victory over Ireland as no cause for celebration. Why ? Because Ireland play "English-style" football, which is really not challenging to any quality team. So stop feeling good about our World Cup prospects, ok ??

Watch 10,000 Nix fans (more than we had) brave wet, chilly weather and rip their shirts off when Bertos scores a screamer. Ifill looking good as well.

Meanwhile over at the SFS the pitch is also wet, though there's not a cloud in the sky.  Some sort of weird "European" football tactic apparently (Fossie - please explain) though it fails to give Sydney any advantage and the match is for me, less than exciting.

Or maybe I'm just losing concentration. Give me a week to recover before we take them on. That should give me time to binge on all the matches I videoed.