Sven Bender considers buying a gold pack for his FIFA Ultimate Team. (Getty)

Bundesliga champions Borussia Dortmund will play La Liga champions Real Madrid in Champions League group D on Wednesday and Borussia midfielder Sven Bender means business. How serious is he taking this behemoth match up? So serious that he's stopped playing Real Madrid in FIFA 13 just so he can focus on the actual team.

From Reuters:

"I have stopped playing Real Madrid (on the games console) in the past week," the 23-year-old Germany international told reporters on Tuesday. "It will be a real highlight to have them in the stadium and not on playstation."

It's an odd proclamation to make at a press conference -- especially when playing them in a video game could be classified as a form of scouting. But modern football is weird like that. Expect Bender to try and get in Cristiano Ronaldo's head by telling him that he sold him to FSV Frankfurt for €8 million in manager mode.

Norwich celebrate the only goal in their win against Arsenal. (Getty)

Norwich earned their first win of the Premier League season by beating Arsenal 1-0 at Carrow Road on Saturday. It was a poor performance from Arsenal marred by a goalkeeping error from Vito Mannone that led to Grant Holt's goal, but the London club can't blame their poor form on a grueling trip from London to Norwich since they opted to take a private jet. A 15-minute ride on a private jet.

While environmentalists protest the seemingly extravagant decision, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger says there is a perfectly logical explanation. From the Telegraph:

The flight, which would have taken around 15 minutes, has been criticised as "absurd" by Green campaigners.

Arsenal lost the Premier League match 1-0.

Wenger said at today's pre-match press conference ahead of the Champions League game against Schalke: "Usually we take the train and there was no train available, so in the end we decided to fly because we had to drive up on Friday afternoon at the moment when you never know how long it lasts."

Andrei Arshavin, meanwhile, has escaped criticism by taking his imaginary space ship to the match. Here he is in his cosmonaut suit...

Ozil wears his "phantom" adidas boots against Sweden. (Getty)

There's a brand war raging (well, happening) and the battle ground is Mesut Ozil's feet. Ozil fans and foot fetishists may have noticed that the midfielder, now out of contract with Nike, has alternated between wearing his usual Swoosh (as he did in Real Madrid's match against Celta Vigo on Saturday) and all-white "phantom" adidas boots (as he did in Germany's match against Sweden last week). Though Ozil is apparently keen on making the switch to Nike's German rivals, the American brand had a clause in his deal that allows it the option to match any offer he gets from another company. And so his flirtation with adidas prompted Nike to file a lawsuit against him.

From Soccer Bible:

According to Özil and his representatives, no contract has been agreed with adidas. However the court has questioned Özil's motives to start wearing adidas boots, finding it unlikely that Özil would switch boot brands without a deal already being in place — athletes rarely leave a sponsor without having

On most days, the Dirty Tackle mailbag is stuffed full of complaints that, we simply do not pay enough attention to Paraguayan non-professional junior football leagues. "It's an outrage," says reader Paolo Anderson. "Why are the nurses stealing my medicine?" adds loyal fan Karl Rodriguez.

Well, today this grievous error has been rectified with news of a mass brawl in a game between Teniente Farina and Libertad. In the final minutes of the match, the referee sent a player from each side off, sparking a fight that involved all players and substitutes, and which featured more than one "spirited" flying kick.

The reason you see no match officials intervening or issuing punishment is that they fled the field when the brawl broke out, and dismissed all 36 players from the relative safety of the dressing room.

The club presidents were both quick to lambast the officials for their lack of courage, while conveniently failing to criticize their players for trying to beat seven shades out of

Acting! (Grupo Comediarte Teatro)

A Barcelona theater group is using images of local diving legend Sergio Busquets and villainous finger-stomper Pepe in ads for acting classes. The pictures of the two players on the ground, Busquets peeking out from behind his hand and Pepe covering his face in apparent pain are accompanied by the words "Do you like to act? Theater classes for every level."

20minutos.es quotes Comediarte, the group responsible for the ads as saying that the inspiration for the campaign is from "the great debate on whether there is always acting to draw cards."

There has been no word as to whether Comediarte will further this theme by having a series of footballers as guest lecturers.

(ladystork.com)

Modeling clothes is so boring. It feels like...it feels like...I don't know what it feels like, but it makes my stomach hurt more than the time I had ice cream for breakfast and dinner. I want to go home. I want to take off these grandpa slippers and play football. When will this be over?

A Veria FC player just happy to not be on a bus. (veriafc.gr)

While Greece's cash-strapped amateur clubs take on brothels as shirt sponsors, the country's top-flight clubs, also cash-strapped, are taking far more tedious measures to balance the books. Veria FC, currently seventh in the Greek Super League, made the 497-mile trip to fourth-place Asteras Tripolis by bus instead of plane as one of two harsh measures to save money on the day.

From the AFP:

The northern Greek team traveled by bus to southern Tripolis on Sunday to play league rivals Asteras and they also avoided staying at a hotel overnight by returning straight after the match.

That meant leaving early in the morning for the eight-and-a-half hour drive to reach Tripolis, losing the match to Asteras 3-0 and then getting back on the bus for the return trip, a total of 17 hours in transit.

The team arrived back at their home base at 5am on Monday morning.

If you're going to re-evaluate your career as a top-flight footballer, I would imagine that a 17-hour bus trip sandwiching a 3-0 loss

St Johnstone recorded their fifth consecutive league win on Saturday with a 2-1 home win over Kilmarnock. Nigel Hasselbaink scored the winner in the 90th minute, but not before committing one of the worst open goal misses of the season.

While the epic miss gives off-the-scale readings on the Schadenfreude-o-meter, eagle-eyed DTotD fans will have spotted the true highlight this clip: the Kilmarnock players who tackle each other during Hasselbaink's initial through-ball.

On the occasions when a striker is able to put the ball into an open goal, thats the kind of defending that gets you in trouble.

This has been the Dirty Tackle of the Day: a chronicling of unfortunate events.