A big football day...

Before

There’s anticipation aplenty. We need to win. Away. At the Hawthorns against a good West Brom team that are going to finish in the top half of the table. We’ve had more than our fair share of luck and both S***s and Newcastle are not going to slip up today.

The week has been building to this three o’clock crescendo. There’s hardly a meaningless game (if such a thing exists in any case) to be found among the fixtures. Foremost is us away to West Brom, where a win would make S***s and Newcastle results inconsequential. Then there’s the small matter of Citeh and *** battling it out for the title. I know all that about the Middle-Eastlands stadium and the money changing everything, but while they may have parked the bus, Citeh have never sent a centre forward out to cripple our fullback from the kick-off. They have never behaved with total disrespect, their manager has been Mark Hughes but has never been Demento. They don’t have hair-transplant Shrek upfront. The list goes on.

After

The main thing, were third.

Happy St Totteringham’s Day!

Let alone a moveable feast, St Totteringham’s is one that (heaven forbid) isn’t guaranteed to happen in any given year. The day (which should, in the opinion of anyone worth talking to, and all dissenters should be lined up and shot, no loss to humanity or the gene pool, be a national holiday) falls on the day when it becomes mathematically impossible for S***s to finish above Arsenal in the league table. I would like to see it fall on the first day of the season, when we start in the top division and they’ve gone down. Failing that ideal scenario, the sooner the better. Final whistle of the last game is way too late in the year for my liking.

We were third after more huge slices of luck. We’re lacking. We finished way off being contenders. Third is fine, at some stage we looked like competing, but we never did and were dead lucky to get third. We have a squad with too many long term sick-notes (Diaby’s played about twenty minutes in twenty years and limped off every time – and he keeps trying and he picked up the original horrendous injury during what was a decent run of games for us, but how much longer?). I think we need to go back to 4-4-2. We need to stop being the only team in the world who’s management and fans talk about ‘wingers’. They went out around the mid 1960’s. They’re fine as one-offs but wide players who bang in fifteen goals a season and add plenty of assists don’t come along every day and you can’t manufacture them. We’ve been blessed with Overmars, then Pires and Ljungberg, but those guys and their likes don’t come along every day.

We either need to retrain the likes of Walcott and Gervinho to understand that they have to patrol their touchline, hitting the opponents goaline as often as they do ours acting as additional fullbacks when we defend. They need to understand that by the time they jog back before running, or even think about running back, it is already too late and that they need to work so hard up and down their flank, and get back as soon as we lose possession, with no thinking to do. Or we need to get some proper wide midfielders in. It’s an easy game. If your leftback and left-mid, and you rightback and right-mid decide to work in tandem on each side, and attack the opposition while making it between impossible and uncomfortable for them to attack us down the flanks, then a great part of your set-up and tactics are already sorted.

I don’t think they will, but I would like to see whole loads of media, ‘Sir’ Alex Ferguson brown-nosing media, publish apologies for all the rubbish they’ve published, all the “squeaky bum time” and “football, bloody hell” quotes they’ve trotted out as if this dreadful bully-boy were some sort of genius. All those creaming themselves at every Scholes touch of the ball (or of an opponent’s Achilles tendon), all those using the words ‘evergreen’ and ‘Giggs’ in the same breath, all those willing to do their marketing for them and to refer to their sad, cobbled-together stadium as the theatre of dreams, all of you owe all of us an apology.

Most of all, heh! In your faces. Done down by your noisy neighbours. Won: nothing. Weep away, glory-hunters. Snatched in the dying seconds, better still. We had the Citeh QPR game on the telly and whatever else we could get (focused on us at WBA on a couple of laptops). Later there’ll be a chance to watch again, to think things through, but for now what an end to the season, and: Utd, S***s, Newcastle, here a big friendly wave (kiss goodbye to the title (1) and Champions’ League football (3) and (conditionally) to Champions’ League football (2)).

I suggested the Demento "football, bloody hell" line to MM before Alan Davis tweeted the same.