Oh no. Not this lot Again
Meek and shivering, you emerge from a dank, decrepit, overcrowded bombsite of a dressing room after an awkward 15 minutes of tripping out of your school uniform and into your games kit without accidentally catching an unwanted glimpse of your neighbour’s unnecessarily exposed todger. Studded up and padded up, you steadily but awkwardly clump, clump, clump your way across 20 yards of gravel and onto the pitch like a load of ladies in heels.
It’s been a difficult day. As if it wasn’t hard enough lugging around your kit bag, design folder and the trumpet your music teacher told you to buy, even though you can’t muster a note on the thing, maths was an algebraic nightmare and you could really, REALLY do without this game so you can get home and make a start on that essay that’s due for tomorrow. And watch Home and Away. But here you are, and you’ve got to make the best of it.
Just as you start to imagine getting through this last hurdle of the day, fate hammers in the final nail in the locker. You’re playing those big bastards again, the ones who are blatantly about 25 but still play for their school side so the games teachers and governors can have another hollow piece of plastic-wear to pin on the old trophy board. There’s no way this lot are your age. You’re pretty sure one of them used to go out with your older sister’s mate and you’re even surer one of them’s wearing a wedding ring. You mutter something to the teacher in protest, but he doesn’t want to be there any more than you do. The more you complain, the longer it’ll take him to get the game started and the darker it’ll get before you get home.
You all hate playing against this team. When you first saw them, you thought the school had received a delivery of 11 pre-fabricated brick shit-houses. In your last meeting, you got battered, bullied and bruised for the best part of an hour before salvaging a bit of respectability when their immense frames started to tire. But you didn’t salvage the result.
‘Oh well,’ you mutter to yourself. ‘Here we go again. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be one of those nights.’
I imagine that’s kind of how a lot of footballers feel when they play against Stoke. After Muamba – thank God he’s on the mend – after our recent run and after our ill-fated, ill-refereed contest at the Britannia, this probably wasn’t the game we wanted. There was a funny feeling around the Lane last night. It was surreal, quiet at times. Our play lacked spark. We were all expecting a hangover after Saturday. Maybe this was it.
Stoke did the kind of number on us you might have expected, defending deep, taking their time and hitting us with a scrambled goal from a set-piece. How ripe we are for the smash and grab. We’re like the little shop that’s been broken into a hundred times and still doesn’t put the bloody shutters down at the end of the day. Still, Stoke probably missed a trick by not using their long throw-ins. Just get the ball into our box. That’s all you need to do.
Who can blame them for getting bodies behind the ball? With Ade missing, we were left – quite literally – short up front, with crosses therefore largely removed from our attack. Except when Bale swept in an absolute beauty for Rafa to rescue a point right at the end. Scant consolation though. I’ve never come out of a game where we’ve scored a last-minute equaliser feeling like we’ve lost it, but that’s how I feel now. We really needed a win, as much as we’ve needed one all season. At one stage, with everyone just below us winning – and I mean everyone – it looked like it would be the kind of night where you just need to grab a comfort burger on the way home, pour yourself a whiskey and cry yourself to sleep. Thanks to some more late drama, two of those results ended up going our way. But not the one we really wanted to go our way.
For all that, the match and maybe our season swung on a minute of fluctuating fortunes, in the way it did during stoppage time at Eastlands. Bale’s swirling, swerving effort flew back off the bar and seconds later, we were behind in customary fashion. Against the run of play in terms of territory, but then again we didn’t look like making the most of a virtual monopoly of possession. When crosses are pretty much negated, you need to play through the opposition, picking the lock with quick thinking and quick passing. But there was no snap or precision in our play. Then there was our endless stream (or should I say streak) of terrible set-pieces. Quite why we don’t take any short corners – particularly in the last 10 minutes when the opposition are all huddled deep in their box – is a mystery to me. Maybe we should stop expecting our set-pieces to get better. Maybe Harry’s accepted that we’re just really, really bad at them and that’s that. At least in that respect, we’re consistent at both ends.
Louis was more Haha than Saha. You know things are going badly when you urgently need a goal and you take OFF a striker. Then again, there’s the question of why we started with only one up front in a game we had to win. We’re a shadowy, shallow caricature of ourselves, over-passing and under-defending. Forget cutting the mustard – Niko can’t even spread the mustard playing on the right. Bale aside, we’re one-paced, predictable and ponderous. Lennon, where are you?
The only entertainment came from trying to figure out what the Stoke fans were on about. ‘Boring, boring!’ they chanted. They were bloody right too. Then again, the flow of the game wasn’t helped by an over-jittery referee who insisted on stopping it whenever someone went down. Stoke played on it perfectly from beginning to end, overcoming sudden bouts of pain long enough to send in a free-kick (before suffering an immediate relapse) or sprint back onto the pitch after crawling off it seconds earlier. Obviously, I’ll never be the athlete those boys are, but I do suddenly remember the way I used to get out of games lessons…..