"The second half has started? Hold on a sec while I finish this blade of grass..."(c)Gordon Griffiths
Ahah, my studio runner is presently handing me a piece of news. Apparently, a petition by the Football Widows Association has been officially approved by the FA, meaning the next two Saturdays have been cleared of Wigan Athletic action. Well, we’d better make the most of it… Dave, get the 10-hour longplay tapes and set the video recorder – it’s time to further enlarge the buttcrease in JWAW Towers’ communal sofa! Saturday night’s alright for biting into a large bucket of meat and potato flavoured popcorn with added pea wet.
Let me consult my schedule here. I’ll just cross out ‘meticulously plan this week’s posts’ and add a new note to be double underlined: ‘make it up as you go along’. Dave, get the cheesy muzak and load up that teletext feed, because we’ll need it tonight – we’re going live completely nude and unscripted. You can leave your underpants on, though, otherwise I’ll sell you off to one of the fansites for half a packet of Monster Munch and a can of Hippy Shopper dandelion and burdock. Again.
Erm… ah, I’ve got it! Welcome to the first in a new series entitled ‘Midweek Madness’, a name I certainly did not think of just now. It is definitely worth every last penny of that new £5billion deal to keep non-exclusive pseudo match reports here at STBC (Small Time Blogger Central) for another three weeks at the very least. See, that money will only last until the end of February when you account for our proposed takeover of Kerguelen Island, the location of JWAW’s new web host.
It’s the heating bills that drain your account.
Speaking of desolation, that eight point gap to Championship safety was ironically healthy in that it reset expectations to below zero – as if they could sink any further. I didn’t read Saturday’s post as it had too many long words and sentences that I didn’t understand, but I assume your author was seduced by Twitter and finally bought a subscription to the Self-Pity Alliance. He’ll be waiting months for confirmation – the backlog of applications is immense. But that didn’t stop #wafc fans flooding the SPA’s inbox last night…
Forest lay back and observed Latics playing around for a while before furtively exploring their artificially expanded backline – with Gullit-esque seggsy results. Whether they created that space or it was already there, Britt Assombalonga’s 34th minute goal definitely made effective use of it. Chris Burke rolled a ball through Sherwood’s green and vacant lands, and success was inevitable; suddenly Latics felt as isolated as a certain French-owned Antarctic island.
The visitors’ interest was, by contrast, fleeting. Sweet (no.) 16 Kim Bo-kyung cooked up his team’s ‘best’ ‘effort’ of the half (and indeed the game) with a 25-yard hoof from cow corner, but Karl Darlow wasn’t about to ‘pull a Green‘ on this occasion. Still, one strike on target is better than not even making it past your team’s own dugout. Isn’t it?
Meh.
In any case, such things are rendered insignificant when goal scoring is an automated process for your opponents. With the herd (Herd?) separated once more, sheepdog extraordinaire Michail Antonio distracted Latics’ stragglers while Chris Burke bolted through the unmanned fence towards freedom. A befuddled Al Habsi could barely offer a limb (lamb?) in retaliation.
That third goal seemed inescapable since the Forest fire was spreading, and Farmer Mackay’s static sheep were now relegated to spectator status. By the time Henri Lansbury skipped through the daisies with alarming ease to increase his team’s profits by a further 50%, Latics’ lactic acid had already rendered them near-immobile.
As the remaining minutes became weeks and subsequently months, members of the assembled audience could be witnessed mashing the fast forward button of the TV remote they had brought along just for this occasion. Sadly for all Latics concerned, it had no effect.
Full time eventually came over an hour too late to prevent the visitors’ ‘never been battered’ record taking a further cricket bat blow to the worryingly exposed sensitive parts. Heck, a 62nd minute concession would have been preferable to a Nottingham Forest training session – and it wasn’t a fun, ISS64-style affair with South American-tinged tunes blasting from the tricked-out tape recorder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYO7SXfJe3E
£5billion worth of situation analysis LIVE from Kerguelen!
At this point in time, a mere draw would be a significant moral victory. But our conundrum is thus: you do not survive with IOUs earned by moral victories, nor do you avoid League One with a point a game. Forget Midweek Madness, this was… Midweek Sadness. And you can groan all you want, for you are fully within your rights to do so in the current circumstances.
Recently I stated that I would indeed show my arse at the top of King Street if we get out of this. Looks like my butt cheeks will be staying in my pants after all. And I’m such an exhibitionist.
Oooh I bet you really want us to get out of this now, eh? Let me know when it’s happening so I can avoid Wigan town centre that evening! 😀