Life is cruel.

Right now, they're imagining those balls to be the heads of Blatter and Platini

It's not hard to get a yellow card in the EPL. Heck, several of them are dished out each week by the discipline-givers, the order-preservers. If it's not down to a card-happy ref hellbent on injecting himself into the game, it's the peril and danger of dealing with the foreign flopping crowd, the porcelain superstars who fall in agony at the slightest hint of bodily contact. Just ask whoever has to mark Didier Drogba each week.

And yes, this simple yellow card has come back to haunt our brave American heroes at Fulham, for the final Fair Play standings were just released. It turns out the relegation-escaping marauders at the Cottage missed out on that unlikely UEFA Cup spot by 0.02 points, or, to put it more bluntly, 4 yellow cards.

Somewhere in Manchester, last week's red card hero Richard Dunne just unclenched his squeaky bum.

Four yellow cards is so slight considering the grueling nature of the entire season. It's 4 half-arsed lunges for a 50/50 ball, it's 4 Drogba flops, 4 ticky-tack fouls, 4 separate incidents in which Cristiano wept.

It's also a crying fucking shame, because I was really hoping that the farce that is the Fair Play League and its backdoor Europe entry could have been exposed, a bit like the times during the college football season when I crave a BCS in ruins and left for dead at the side of the road.

To think a team so close to being relegated could have actually had a UEFA spot. It almost boggles the mind as much as it did to see Bolton playing in Europe this season. So strange.

It's also a nice slap in the face to Thaksin, to see his Euro dreams realized right after he kicked his girlfriend Eriksson out of the moving car.

I hope Man City can honor their UEFA spot with several scintillating 1-0 wins to the likes of Anderlecht, Braga, FC Cologne, and many others.

[thx Sean P for bringing it to my attention]