In 1968, the New York Jets had a 32-29 lead in an AFL game over the Oakland Raiders with just over a minute to go. NBC, who televised the game, had a pre-scheduled feature of a made-for-television children's film called "Heidi". The game ran a bit late and the last minute or so of the game was pre-empted. The funny thing was no viewer had seen the Raiders come back to score two touchdowns to beat the Jets that evening.

At long last, here's the Premiership top 50 rankings after a Christmas hiatus that extended into February. It goes without saying that I have a profound respect for Brandon Funston over at Yahoo in sorting out his Big Board rankings. Then again, soccer is a hard sport to quantify and justify your rankings; at least Funston can spew out a week's or month's stats as objective reasoning as to why that player is ranked the way he is. So much has changed for a month and a half since I put the rankings on the backburner and as you can expect, there are some wholesale changes.

It's not often I'll play news reporter, but here I go, reporting some of the most interesting news articles I've found today and in the last couple of days revolving around the beautiful game. Today's highlight is Arsenal finishing a much-ballyhooed transfer with Zenit St. Petersburg to bring Andrei Arshavin to the Emirates for an "undisclosed" fee. Good signing for Arsenal, but inevitably what does this mean for your fantasy team?

It wasn't quite an exciting weekend of games in full, but the end results were no less interesting to absorb. Manchester United expanded their all-time Premier League record of consecutive clean sheets with 12, but was it enough to pip a resolute Everton side? Elsewhere, it was a topsy-turvy day with a few games surprisingly ending up in blanks and a few others where goals were in surprising abundance in the most unlikely of places. Then, there was the big game before what we call in the States, "the big game", and that was Liverpool squaring off against Chelsea.

I take that a good deal of you will take part basking in a tried-and-true American tradition: pigging out on Buffalo wings for the excuse of watching the Super Bowl. There are a few juicy Premiership appetizers before Sunday's big game with Manchester United hosting Everton, the Northeast Derby (Newcastle playing host to Sunderland), and a super headliner in Liverpool taking on Chelsea at Anfield.

This should be a fairly brief recap column than you might be accustomed to seeing with the odd mid-week matches, which were nonetheless quite mesmerizing. Rafa Benitez's side keeps cracking up like the gaffer himself while Chelsea struggled to put away Middlesbrough and Manchester United did the business in a big way at West Brom. The who's who of studs continued their hot streaks and a few newly transferred debutants made a first good impression for their side.

As we near the end of January, the transfer window is picking up as expected, even if the transfers themselves haven't been big-name splashes. I'll try to make sense over this transfer mad dash and what it means to your fantasy players, as we break down the mid-week matchups.

A few scrapfests transpired this weekend amongst the top Premiership sides: Manchester United needed a late match-winner to overcome Bolton and their superb keeper, Jussi Jaaskelainen, Arsenal had their fits at Hull, and Felipe Scolari would have to pay special thanks to Juliano Belletti and Frank Lampard for saving his bacon and post. Meanwhile, all eyes were squarely on Merseyside on Monday night as Liverpool and Everton butted heads for the first of two Merseyside derbies this week.

The Premiership title race has been turned on its head over the past week and meanwhile, Manchester City are hot on their 100 million pound pursuit for Kaka as January transfer talks are just beginning to heat up. It's just another walk in the park (or back to the grind) as far as your fantasy teams are concerned this weekend and it's time to weed through some interesting matchups on the weekend's ledger that could be causing some Catch-22's in your lineup decision making.

Oh lordy, this is one of those weeks where you can't sum up a week with just a title to describe it. Overshadowing the build-up to the pivotal Manchester United-Chelsea clash was Rafa Benitez's astonishing rant of Sir Alex Ferguson that seemed to wake the echoes of a Kevin Keegan memory. Fergie after all has been notorious for playing mindgames with managers at the helm of contending sides. Had the "fat Spanish waiter" finally cracked under the pressure of keeping Liverpool atop the Premiership?

The Premiership finally cranks up into action after last weekend's FA Cup third round matches and all eyes are likely locked on Old Trafford when Manchester United host Chelsea. I'll fill you in on the fantasy implications of Sunday's momentous clash as well as the gameweek's fixtures you should consider when selecting your fantasy roster this weekend.

Hope you all had a fantastic holiday break. Wow, 2009. 2008 must have been the fastest running year of my life and here we are. It's incredible to note that we're a little more than halfway through one of the more enthralling Premiership seasons in recent memory, with 18 games to go, and I thought I'd sum up my team-by-team thoughts on the Premiership so far as we head into the turn of a new calendar year. Did your team make the grade in the book of yours truly? Read on to find out.

It feels a tad funny previewing the following round's set of matches before Boxing Day, but Christmas complicates things and so, I'll write a brief match-by-match preview to get ready for Week 20, with most games scheduled Sunday just a couple of days after Boxing Day. Sound good? Alright, let's have it...

I know I was going to skip the normal recap column, but I found this run-of-the-mill bizarre week in the Premiership to be more noteworthy than I thought at first that it deserved a quick write-up. Liverpool and Chelsea are spinning their wheels again, which means that United are the biggest winners of the weekend in more ways than one than a folly exhibition trophy of Club World Cup winners that ascertain their supremacy as "world champions". Yes, assuming two wins versus Fulham and Wigan puts United level with Chelsea and only a point back of Liverpool.

We're entering the most important and one of the more enjoyable parts of the Premiership season: the holiday games. This is where the Premiership title contenders make their biggest pushes while the clubs at the bottom half, look to avoid the dreaded relegation zone and the Christmas superstition that comes with it. For fantasy managers, it's a turning point in their seasons as well. Some teams are in the thick of their fantasy league's contention, but they're mirror images with the leaders' teams.

A change of scenery could do some good and as you can see, the rankings are formatted a bit differently. For some reason, the copy-and-paste straight from Excel didn't come out as right. So, I'll have it in this table format from now on. A change of scenery could do a few United fantasy players some good and hopefully they find their scoring boots. A changing of the guard for Cristiano Ronaldo's top spot might work the Ballon d'Or winner some wonders too.

It was surreal to see The Big Four stuck in goalless draws a few weeks back, which surely should not come as a surprise that The Big Four were all stalemated as the Premiership title race was stuck in neutral. Elsewhere, the focus of world football emanated from the Camp Nou where Barcelona sought revenge for Real Madrid's coronation-turned-beating in taking a double-digit lead over their bitter rivals in the Spanish league.

There's an old Pepsi commercial that aired in the UK in of course, that fabled year, 1999, which featured Manchester United players and the gaffer Sir Alex Ferguson. In the commercial, United found themselves 3-nil down going into halftime, leaving Fergie to give an inspired pep talk, backed up by tossing each player a Pepsi in order "to be more positive". To which, of course, Peter Schmeichel joked in batting down the Pepsi can and claimed he was only joking. (You can find said commercial here.)

A lot to sift through today, as somewhere in between the Champions League group stage, the in-progress FIFA Club World Cup, and El Clasico in Spain - ahem, Catalunya - is another run-of-the-mill weekend in the Premiership. You might want to say bon voyage for a week to all Manchester United players, and in fact, two for some, as they prepare for the Club World Cup, but some others will get their last kicks in Saturday against Tottenham.

I know I've been discounting Ashley Young a bit on the rankings of late, but fact of the matter is, even if he doesn't score, he's a near-double digits a week man in Yahoo, in the same vein as Shaun Wright-Phillips. However, that two-goal game-winning performance was inspiration enough to launch Ashley back in the top 5. Also, a mild bump for Captain Scouse and a big bump up the board for one Scouser-turned-Galactico-turned-Geordie. Enjoy.