Everyone is having a laugh at Manchester City

When it comes to parody Twitter accounts, few have hit the heights as consistently as @BoringMilner, which pokes fun at the England and Manchester City footballer whom most fans view as being, well, less than incredibly interesting.

Some recent @BoringMilner posts that have been retweeted by the account’s 150,000 followers include tweets about one of his neighbours still having up his Christmas tree after Twelfth Night, that Sunday nights just are not the same without Heartbeat on television and that the space on his Sky+ hard drive is now at the record high of 97 per cent.

@BoringMilner is approaching the 1,000-tweet mark but, until recently, Milner had not bought into questions about the account. Maybe Milner should have resisted a little while longer because, now that he has broken his silence, it would appear that the account was being kind to his personality.

Milner said that, if people think that he is boring, well, as long as he has got an English Premier League winner’s medal, he does not mind being perceived as dull.

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Another Manchester City footballer copping it from certain quarters is Edin Dzeko after the Bosnia-Herzegovina striker made a fool of himself in a recent post-match interview.

Dzeko scored Manchester City’s last two goals in its 6-0 English Capital One Cup semi-final first leg victory over West Ham at the Etihad Stadium. But when Dzeko faced the media in the tunnel after the game, the big centre forward said that it was not easy winning 5-0 at home to an English Premier League team. Dzeko was suitably embarrassed when the person behind the camera pointed out that Manchester City had won 6-0 and that Dzeko, having played the entire match, had no excuse for understating his side’s victory margin.

Capital One, sponsors of what used to be plain old English League Cup, could not resist trying to generate some cheap publicity out of Dzeko’s inability to count past five. The finance company’s media manager resisted the temptation to send a cane to their Manchester City counterpart so that the football club’s communications supremo could deliver six of the best to Dzeko as punishment. Instead, Capital One mailed an abacus to Dzeko so that he can keep count of his team’s scores in the future. With Manchester City having scored 59 goals in 21 English Premier League games alone, Dzeko may need to use the second row of abacus balls at some stage.

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And in another bad news story for Manchester City, it would seem that Citizens fans are similar to Dzeko in that they are not the sharpest tools in the off-the-pitch box.

Ladbrokes, the biggest bookmaker in the United Kingdom, has quizzed more than 10,000 English Premier League supporters on the history of their favourite sides, with questions covering players, managers and other titbits of trivia.

Manchester City may be the English Premier League favourite on the park but the Citizens are relegation candidates in the trivia stakes off it, with only Stoke supporters faring worse than fans of Manuel Pellegrini’s high-scoring team.

According to Ladbrokes, which published the results of its ongoing English Premier League quiz, Crystal Palace has the supporters who are most knowledgeable about their club’s past and present, with Eagles fans glad all over to score 6.96 points out of 10. Hull (6.71) and Everton (6.30) rounded out the top three, while Stoke (3.04), Manchester City (4.10) and Fulham (4.10) were the bottom three.

One can have a go to the English Premier League quiz at http://www.ladbrokes.com/how-well-do-you-know-your-team/. Never will one know how many people have answered questions wrong deliberately while masquerading as fans of their most disliked side. However, one cannot imagine that many people would bother impersonating Stoke supporters. Port Vale fan Robbie Williams has got better things to do with this time.