The Other Wearside

McCoist in new ITV threat

McCoist: Unhappier times

Tactics Truck: No times wasters please

Cilla: Must stay al least 100 yards away from

The Onion Bag can exclusively reveal that Ally McCoist will reassemble the old ITV team he worked with on their weekly highlights programme The Premiership if he becomes the new Sunderland boss.

Blind Date

The Premiership was ITV's answer to Match Of The Day only with added commercials, and sponsorship bumpers featuring Robbie Savage's mum. The show only lasted three years after it became apparent that the TV channel had paid too much for it and people would rather watch Cilla Black on Saturday evenings.

McCoist was a pundit on the programme along with Andy Townsend, Robbie Earle and Terry Venables. The anchorman was Des Lynam who sacrificed his final salary pension and knighthood to desert the BBC for commercial telly.

White lines

If the former Scotland striker beat off competition from Sam Allardyce, Roberto Mancini, Gerard Houlier et al, he has promised to assemble the old gang to coach the players at the Stadium of Light. Des Lynam will introduce the players to each other on match days, Terry Venables will try to flog them home editions of Prozone and Townsend will point out where they went wrong by drawing little white circles around them on video playback.

For this he hopes to be reunited with his Tactics Truck. This was a mobile editing suite which Townsend sat in during the old programme and wheel reluctant players in so he could show them how rubbish they'd been.

Jumping the shark

While the Tactics Truck was mistakenly believed to be nothing more that a ITV OB truck, it does in fact belong to the Onion Bag and travels the nation, driven by a crack(pot) team of satirists desperately trying to come up with new ideas for stories. Duffman, the editor of the Onion Bag, would be willing to sell the truck to Sunderland.

"Its clocked up a fair few miles over the years." he told our intrepid reporter Larry Gak "but in many ways its not changed. There's still that skid mark on the toilet wall left by Andy. I'm not cleaning it up."

Offers are expected to be in the region of one pound.

Duffman