Stoke City vs the Mighty (preview)

Mad good painting by Alan Bickley (not Alan Buckley who used to manage Grimsby)

YES! We've NOT BEEN IRRADIATED! It's important to appreciate the positives I think. On the other hand, hey baby, I wanna know-oh-oh-oh Jordan Gabriel is injured. Life is about ups and downs I suppose.

I'm really looking forward to going to where they used to make plates and that. Other positives include the fact it's not raining (which would also have been a positive had we been irradiated), we've sold loads of tickets and there's therefore nowhere I'd rather be than the begambleawareandifthefunstopsstop Stadium this afternoon. When there's a proper noise, nothing on earth is better. 

I like Stoke. I used to work there. It's kind of like what I imagine a town in Eastern Europe that used to have an industry that died when the Soviet Union left is like except blokes call each other duck which I don't think happens in the former Warsaw Pact nations.

I do sometimes wonder when we go to places like Middlesbrough, Stoke or Sheffield where we get shit like steel and bowls and spoons from now and whether it was a great plan to not make stuff any more and just have call centres, play centres and vaping shops for people to work in instead of factories and that. Nowt up with vaping, playing or ringing people up but it's not very useful if a global conflict fucks up the supply chain.

Stoke is like much of the formerly industrial England in that it has become a place where rapacious landlords buy loads of houses and behave like cunts in the name of profit for the sake of profit and to be honest, if I was in charge I'd shoot every one of them with an anti aircraft gun cos exploiting poverty simply because you can is evil. Which brings us neatly to Russian Oligarchy and that. Fuck me, the world is complicated and dickheads seem to do quite well out of it.

Abramovic always seems to me to have a surprisingly fluffy beard and to be grinning about a joke he's not going to share with the rest of the class. I also wonder if the reason we hate Russian Oligarchs so much is because they got rich exploiting an opportunity and weren't 'landed gentry' types and why we seem to just not give a fuck that the Duke of Westminster and all them lot are rich as fuck and basically, they didn't toil down the plate factory for years to get where they are today either did they?

This is the sort of cutting edge analysis you simply don't get on Sky.

In conclusion, no one has a clue what team Critch will pick and as for Stoke, oatcakes remain one of the nation's under appreciated delicacies which those melts who thought leaving the EU would 'ruin our cuisine' completely overlooked. If oatcakes were french, that sort of person would be fawning over them and calling them something like "a regional, traditional charm, truely earthy food from the people, you must try them darling"

I reckon it will be a tight game, with a late goal but I don't know which way it's going to go. I'm going to go for a last gasp scruffy winner from Dujon Sterling from a corner.

UP THE POOL!