Besty
10th in Div 2
Tottenham Hotspur
Poch'. Girls who work in the NHS. Calling up Sky and threatening to leave to get a better deal on his broadband and sports package. Hummel football kits of the '80s. Jurgen Klinsmann. The Super Bowl.
Arsenal. Jose Mourinho. Fixed odds coupons. Horoscopes. Tony Stark. National toxicity around the England team in tournaments. The barbers.
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A gentle giant with a friendly disposition, Steve Bestwick, or "Besty", is a popular, bashful and hugely likeable lad with a secret he doesn't like to show off about. You see, Steve is a superhero. When I say he's a superhero, I mean he used to be. In a previous life. Or at least, he's convinced that he was - because Steve is the direct descendant of 'MaƱana', known across six galaxies for his uncanny ability to predict the future.
As a real-life superhero code-named 'The Big Shadow', Steve despises the unrealistic, glamorised Marvel replica of his species. Steve does not wear his underpants on the outside of his clothing. He angrily disputes that genuine superheroes gain their powers by being bitten by spiders; or that they crawl out from meteors that land from outer space. Modern day superheroes grow up in Watford, just outside the M25.
Hollywood's misrepresentation of his kind has inspired Steve to look elsewhere for his cover story; which is why he works incognito in a far less successful area of entertainment, as the Clark Kent of independent world cinema. No one's spreading lies about superheroes in miserablist social dramas from Iceland, right?
There is, however, a sadness in The Big Shadow's life: thus far, despite a considerable amount of time, effort, grinding of teeth and expense, Steve has failed to demonstrate any of the powers he claims to have inherited. He's literally 'super-powerless'.
It's even more frustrating that those who doubt him use his lifelong support of Tottenham Hotspur to put him down: "If you can tell the future, why would you choose Spurs - they haven't won a trophy for 14 years, and that was only the Carling Cup?!" Heartbroken after the departure of Pochettino in November 2019, Steve hoped that Mourinho's unwelcome approach of winning ugly might at least deliver silverware and prove everyone wrong about him. But yet again the negative outcome was another thing that The Big Shadow failed to see coming.
So when old pal and former colleague, Damo, regaled him of adventures in The Preds, Steve saw an opportunity to set the record straight. What better way was there to re-write the wrongs that Daniel Levy had done to his reputation and prove once and for all that he could see ahead in time, at least as far as the upcoming weekend's fixtures? The slight niggle is that, at the time of writing, there are still more than 40 regular human Predsters above Steve in the Preds tables, all of whom have a better claim to having clairvoyant superpowers. How does Steve handle this discrepancy of logic? He's welcomed all those in Divisions 1, 2 and most of Division 3 into his superhero fraternity. The more the merrier!
Steve. Not always the best, but always the Besty.