When Manchester United took the Carling Cup Sunday, no one could claim surprise.  They’ve dominated every table they’ve chosen to sit at all season.  However, no one quite expected the goalkeeper for Man U, Ben Foster, would credit his success in blocking almost all the penalty shots he saw past extra time to secure the win to his coach’s iPod.

(Okay… this would probably be cheating, but that’s not what we mean)

Ben’s ‘keeper coach had video of all the opposing team’s shot takers in previous attempts at other matches cued up on Steve Jobs’ music industry-killer and rushed over to Foster to give him one last refresher.  Fully visualized and aware of his opponent’s tendencies, Foster blocked penalty kicks with rare precision and locked up the hardware with assistance from his coach’s hardware.

Best of all: unlike the shenanigans with video involving Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, there’s no explicit rule against doing so in the tournament’s rulebook.  Therefore, no one’s getting in trouble for this.

Also, we suspect Chelsea and Microsoft are already talking Zune promotional deals.  Plus, Steve Ballmer and Roman Abromovich will have so much to talk about.  After all, how many people have practical monopolies on key product tacitly approved by their governments? (We kid, gentlemen… please don’t disappear us.  Especially you, Ballmer.)