Bubbled Over and Staging Wanderers

Out of Europe before Christmas. I’m struggling to be gutted about this.

You may or may not have noticed that ISS has not bothered previewing any of the group games since it appeared that the club couldn’t be bothered to field a team that showed any real intent to win any of the games. I’m not angry about this you understand, sacrifices need to be made if we are going to succeed in the league, and if they’d had the chance to do it again, I’m sure everyone involved in picking the team would have done the same, and I make them right. Last night, a home win would have been enough to virtually guarantee a post-Christmas jolly up on mainland Europa, but even with a suitably competent gaggle of pro’s, we came up short. The bubbles done good, and you can’t begrudge them their win after a dramatic rearguard action (ooh er). It’s negatives into positives time, and nobody will even remember the names of our group mates should be make the top 4 or beyond. Still, would have been nice to keep the kids around a bit longer. As it is, they’ll be off on loan, with only the beano to Shamrock left for them to show us what they’re made of.

Speaking of beano’s (and Irishness), It’s my stag do on Saturday. The original plan was to do a few bits, head over to The Lane, show the non-spursers of the party what a proper football team look like, and follow it all up with a few libations in the evening. Actually, no, the very original plan was going to be a trip to watch us play Stoke next Saturday, but having got everything booked, the powers that be decided the game needed to be moved to 4pm on Sunday, so it ballsed that plan up. We then tried to get everyone else tickets for the Bolton game this Saturday, but due to the late moving of the Stoke game, all tickets for Bolton were sold out by the time we enquired, so that was out. To compound the misery, Bolton have been in such shoddy form that their fans didn’t fancy yomping all the way to London to watch them get beat, so the lower bit of the away section has gone on sale to Spurs fans, where we would have all easily got tickets. Moral of the story: don’t plan anything around a Tottenham game.

Still, it’s my own fault for getting hitched in the middle of our best run since the 60’s, so I won’t be there to witness what should be a fair old thwumoxing (real word) of the Wanderers. Despite last night’s defeat, the word rags and floating cyber letters will tell you that we’re doing pretty well at the moment, and an out-of-sorts Bolton will be no match for our current might; that annoying ‘D’ from the hashtag predicted to drop down yet another place come 5pm on Saturday and Spurs up to second in the standings, the only possible outcome. A lamentation of our own inconsistency would usually follow, but in a similar vein to the M-People before us, we’re movin’ on up. Like trying to stack domino’s end-on-end, it used to be that Spurs could only ever put together 3, maybe 4 wins at a push before it all came crashing down. We’re made of sterner stuff these days. It’s more like stacking oxo cubes, or yoghurt pots, or something not quite so structurally flawed.

Bolton’s recent form is what you could only describe as ‘stinky’. Their opening day trouncing of Quipper made them look like a side who’d spent the summer quietly building something a bit good and knew what they were doing. Turns out they don’t. Even the old battering ram, Kevin Davies has lost his mojo. He’ll score on Saturday though. He always does.

So as we hammer in our fifth of the afternoon, spare a thought for your usually present blogger, who’ll be God knows where, doing God knows what, all in the name of a good old fashioned single man send off. I’ll trust the lilywhite lovelies to handle this one unsupervised.

I can smell the dirty pint already. 5-2 is my ludicrous prediction.