Tangled up in Blue
Certified Senior Citizen⭐
Can't wait for the next instalment.:'(
Can't wait for the next instalment.:'(
At it again Barna! :D
:D Cheer up mate, it really could be worse!
Um how?
I suppose we could be wound up mid April before we're even relegated.:'(
BTW the sort of drilling that you seem to associate with Business English classes went out of fashion in the late 70's/early 80's.It's all websites, hi-tech cdroms/DVDs/Presentation Practise and decent textbooks these days.
La plume de ma tante et mort? :tumbleweed:
I'm afraid so Tom.:)
Seriously, we've been relegated before and we'll be relegated again. We aren't going to be wound up, I don't think that we are even going to go into administration, though that wouldn't be the end of the world. What we do have a sniff of is a new stadium, which still seems to be lurching towards construction, which will allow us to compete more easily with the bigger boys. Yes it's painful. but things worth having often are! Wait and see.
:)
I agree with you about the relegation business.It hurts but its not the end of the world.We've been there before and as you say we'll be there again ( who knows maybe even straight down next season and out of the League which is exactly where we were heading before Tilly and Brush took over).
I wish I could share your optimism about not being wound up or going into administration.I suspect one or the other(or maybe both) is in store for us fairly soon.
As for the new stadium I'll start to believe in that when(or if) the foundations and first bricks are laid.
Talking of Business English,remember what Keynes said when he was asked why he was more interested in the short term and the medium term rather than the long term.
"Because in the long term we're all dead."
I'd like to hope that we'll all still have a football club to support at least in the short and medium term.
Absolutely. The real problem is that however much we anguish over the travails of our beloved SUFC, there is very little we can do to affect things, just sit and hope.
I like the old saying "...and he said, cheer up for things could be worse, so I cheered up, and Lo! things got worse." Until they do, I shall endeavour to be cheerful for both of us.
Can't wait for the next instalment.:'(
And here it is! This one's about the Yeovil home game on Easter Saturday (03.4.10) ...
Ever since I've hit my middling years, I've been more susceptible to the influence of 'mumbo-jumbo' ... otherwise known as all that metaphysical guff that devotees of 'The Celestine Prophecy' might call 'karma.' So when I heard the words 'going down' as I stepped into the lift at Croydon Travelodge on setting out for this game, I automatically interpreted it as an adverse omen.
This was the game where The North Bank was partially re-opened for home fans and as a committed nostalgican, there was no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to re-visit a part of the ground I had not been to since our 3-0 defeat against Barnsley in February '94, a few days before I emigrated to Cornwall. My memories of TNB go back to the early '70s and a little spot near the North-West corner flag. I was a sensitive lad and was somewhat over-awed by the big boys who were part of 'The Pak,' so I hung out there where it was less boisterous. I returned to that spot on this gloriously sunny Spring afternoon and basked in the atmosphere created by 'The Blue Voice' with their enthusiastic vocals and booming drum. Unfortunately, the same stridency and urgency was not replicated on the pitch and there was a glaring discordancy between sound and performance. I felt that the fans were let down badly in this game, a game in which our closest incursion on the Yeovil goal came from a misplaced header from one of their defenders. I think this performance was as lacking in heart as the Barnsley one I mentioned. You can live with defeats like the Charlton game I last attended at the Hall where the players have given their all and lost in unfortunate circumstances. What really rankles is when we've not given enough, particularly in our current plight. I know there are mitigating factors - not getting paid on time, for one - but this one still left me with a really deflated feeling. I've virtually erased the miserable details of this game from the memory banks as I only returned home from this latest tour last night, so it might be worth sharing just a few lines from notes I made at the time ...
"Johnny Herd throws are our biggest danger"
"Malone's crossing! Straight to keeper x 2"
"Malone looks like John Gordon Sinclair in Gregory's Girl" (all curls and gangly)
"Laurent - infuriating" (anyone who's seen him knows what I mean)
"Crawford - eager and determined"
... anyway, I enjoyed a few pints before and after the game with some esteemed Zoners, so the day itself was a bit of a jolly even if the game wasn't. I also had the pleasure to meet one of the Yorkshire Shrimpers - all the way from Selby - who had a fantastic tee with a Sammy Shrimper original motif on it, replicated from those very programmes that I used to read at half-time in the 'Seventies North Bank.' Talking of whom, it was good to meet the man behind this moniker - great badges, Tony! :clap:
Cheers for the drink post Yeovil, Rob, always good to see you.
A solitary bikerish bloke came away from there having set up a jamboree of top tunes that took me back to my brother's old vinyl collection ... The Band's version of 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' followed by 'Up On Cripple Creek' and then Creedence's 'Born On The Bayou.' QUOTE]
All now re-bought on CD though I still have the vinyl originals.
Talking of originals I saw John Foggerty here last summer.He was (almost) as good as when I saw him with CCR at the Albert Hall in their only UK gig back in the 70's.Sadly there's not much chance of Robbie Robertson,Levon Helm and Garth Hudson ever getting back together again.:(
Good report Rob, and good to see you pre and post match for the Yeovil game. :dizzy:
By the way mate it's my sad duty to confirm you are indeed the official SUFC Jonah having not seen the team win in any of the ganes you've seen this season, and I fear a banning order may be coming your way mate. :)
A solitary bikerish bloke came away from there having set up a jamboree of top tunes that took me back to my brother's old vinyl collection ... The Band's version of 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' followed by 'Up On Cripple Creek' and then Creedence's 'Born On The Bayou.' QUOTE]
All now re-bought on CD though I still have the vinyl originals.
Talking of originals I saw John Foggerty here last summer.He was (almost) as good as when I saw him with CCR at the Albert Hall in their only UK gig back in the 70's.Sadly there's not much chance of Robbie Robertson,Levon Helm and Garth Hudson ever getting back together again.:(
I owe a great deal to your vinyl collection. It helped to make me the connoisseur of classic retro for which I am righteously renowned.
Ha.I'm not retro.I can even remember the 60's and I was there! ;)
Talking of retro, it's time to take you back to 1984 ...
I've had a wariness of Leeds matches ever since I had a brick thrown at my head by one of their lads at Selhurst Park in 1984. I was living in London at the time and used to do a bit of ground-hopping with a mate of mine who is a Leeds fan. We were doing our psychiatric nurse training together and were working regular hours for a change at a Day Hospital, so these ESSO (every Saturday & Sunday off) shifts found me watching games in London as a neutral as well as intermittently watching our slide back into the old Division Four that year. It's been quite strange in recent years to see us line up against 'the damned United,' another pleasing reminder of Barrie Williams' fantastic line that "football is a capricious misstress."
I was staying in York at my old ground-hopping mate's for the week-end and I roped in his lad, my godson, to join us for the game. I got him a ticket for the away end and he was delighted to be a Shrimper just for one day, revelling in the disloyalty to his dad who had tried to turn him into a Leeds fan for twenty years. Before we went to our separate ends, we parked up on an economically-challenged housing estate about a mile away from the ground. We were greeted by the smoke from a freshly burning cardboard box near a Church on which we'd later see some feral street urchins climbing up. We also had our first sighting of multi-tasking among males for the day as we pulled up - a couple of track-suited guys were demonstrating their skills in smoking, drinking cans of lager and walking simultaneously. Unusually for me, I also decided to drink lager that lunch-time as it was quite warm. My mate knew a safeish pub called 'The Imperial' not far from the estate's borders where we could bask in a bit of urban reality sunshine from the beer yard out the front. There were some guys out there who it was best not to look at and the rozzers passed by at regular intervals in case any Southend fans had strayed into inhospitable territory. Looking out on the estate from the barred windows of the bogs out the back, I was reminded of a scene from 'Billy Elliott' with its images of police running up and down roads like these back in '84 - when the miners' strike was in full flow - banging their truncheons on the doors of 'the enemy within.' Leeds has always seemed a tough place to me and I was glad to be with a mate who knew the territory.
I guess it's time to talk about the game now ... with reference to yet more searing analysis from my contemporaneous notes. We fought an ultimately doomed rearguard action and were undone by the persistence of a little bundle of energy called Max Gradel. He suffered a clash of heads in the first half and needed bandaging up. I couldn't help thinking about Paul Gascoigne's infamous remark regarding Paul Ince's supposed resemblance to a pint of Guinness when he sported the same look during England's World Cup qualifier against Italy in '97 - but the truth is we had no-one able to create any signs of pure genius from within our ranks. The only glimmer of hope came from Johnny Herd's early throw-ins but these were all effectively dealt with by our hosts. The game was wrapped up as securely as Gradel's wound when their buoyant sub Becchio headed in their second with just under ten minutes to go. Though Leeds looked well short of Championship class, they showed how to win without playing well. As for us, I couldn't see where our next goal was coming from. All I could see was a team falling like a brick into the League's lowest tier, just like in 1984.