Yes, SW19 has returned from foreign climes again. I’ve missed travelling.
I went to Athens, by the way, where sadly I dipped out on the chance of watching Olympiacos vs PAOK last Sunday.
Games in Greece still seem mostly behind closed doors, and hopefully we never go back to those half-life atmospheres ever again.
It was a bit surreal watching ERT (the national broadcaster), and seeing Tomas Vaclik interviewed by a local presenter entirely in English, with no subtitles or translation.
I did discover the hard way what “It’s all Greek to me” really means, though I did pick up a new appreciation of Monty Python’s Philosophy Football sketch.
And watching that skit will probably be like us at the Abbey Stadium tomorrow.
I’ll be there – your editor was tested as negative last night, and I got the same result for the Day Two Rona test as well.
So a proper SW19 report will be winging its way on Sunday, which you can happily ignore.
We come off the back of Men vs Boys (aka Wigan), and the Palace Mario Pizza game, a fixture most people have probably just checked the result of.
At least we gave a number of youngsters their debut last Tuesday, and the rate things are going they’ll all be first-team regulars by the time we play Portsmouth away.
Your editor paid to watch the Wigan game on streaming, and while I think we did well in the first half, it was still a mixture of them being better and us still having a bit of a soft underbelly at times.
In the case of the latter, the amount of times we end up going behind suggests that.
What would you give to have a Jason Goodliffe, or a Danny Bulman, or a Barry Fuller type player right now? Or even a Danny Kedwell?
We could do with them in their prime. Come to think of it, they could do a job as players now.
Maybe we could persuade Sutton to let us borrow JG for a couple of games to replace Paul Kalambayi, who’s going to be out a while?
Losing him (PK, not Goodliffe) alongside Will really buggers things up, and puts even more pressure on us releasing some funds for January.
The club’s core business is, and always will be, what happens on the field of play. Something that seems forgotten at times.
Are there really no free agents who would be happy to play at the back for a couple of months?
True, I know it doesn’t quite work like that in real life, and there’s a reason why there are so many players kicking their heels right now.
Whatever, we travel to Cambridge tomorrow needing another Lincoln type performance and result.
I’m never sure about these type of games, to be honest. The Us are middling like us, and it will either be 2-0 to them or a draw.
We might even win, but the snorts of derision on that suggestion are very loud.
I have to admit, while I’ve definitely been to the Abbey before, I genuinely cannot remember when.
It’s one of those ones where I didn’t even do an SW19 report afterwards.
One could be forgiven for forgetting we faced them in the Conference days, and no doubt we’ll have a decent turnout tomorrow.
Yet for some reason I remember us playing Histon more than them at that time. And I bet you’ve all forgotten they ever existed.
I don’t have a complete memory blank about playing the Us, mind you. I still remember the Littlewoods Cup game at Plough Lane…