Fuck me, I really be arsed with this tonight. To be honest, I was hoping I'd get home and the blog would have written itself. It wouldn't be that hard to programme an AI to do it. All you have to do is say a thing is like another thing a few times, swear and add YESSSS! when a good thing happens and 'fuck's sake Pool or some ellipses to suggest the mute sound of frustration and despair when a bad thing happens and yer away. It's a MCLF generator and you've got yer very own pointless blog. You'll not be rich in no time at all.
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| Gary Madine on a fruit machine: A vain attempt to inject some frivolity into a depressing experience. |
Pfffffffffffffft. Lets do this.
I like a night match. I like the way the floodlights make the night more 'nighty' - look out from the stands and the black is blacker than it was when you walked up to the ground. I love the way from outside, the ground has a halo of light around it. I love the fact people get there a bit later so there's a kind of sudden scrabble to get to your seats and the atmosphere comes on in a rush because Saturdays allow you to anticipate more, whereas a midweek game has to fit around work and all the rest of it and you don't really think about it till you're actually almost there.
That's the positive bit out of the way.
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C'mon. Stay with me.
Theo does a good thing early on. Patino takes a corner. It is a good corner. Madine heads not too far over. It's not a bad header. Hurray! We are footballing wizards. They are shite and we're definitely going to batter them. Callum Wright skins someone. Ole! We're knocking it about crisply and cleanly.
The general mood is calm. Sedate. Appreciative. These are our heroes, fresh from heroic deeds in darkest Yorkshire. We love you Blackpool we do. We're going to purr and applaud now we're good again...
The general mood is now getting a bit flat. We've moved it about fairly nicely but very little has happened as a result. Gary Madine is running quite a lot. Not very quickly mind, but quite a lot by Gary standards. Not much else appears to be going on. I have a look at the clock.
TWENTY THREE MINUTES HAVE PASSED!
How? Hull are complete wank. They just seem to knock it out of play and run into us and then all run back. I hope we can hurry up and score then they have to do something different cos this game is shite. Our initial crisp, fresh approach is getting a little frustrated. Creases are starting to show in our passing you might say.
Hull have an attack. An actual attack! I'm so convinced they're utter shit that I'm not even worried. There's some kind of scramble in the box. We clear. There's a second or so where we're jubilant as the Hull fans clearly thought they'd scored and they hadn't. C'mon Pool...
A whistle punctures the complacency. A roar from the few hundred who've come from Big Fleetwood. Fuck's sake. I have no idea what went on there but now we're fucked. It's the reverse of Huddersfield away. They don't even have to run into us and be shit at attacking any more. They can just stay behind the ball.
We then manage about 5 minutes of vaguely decent football that culminates in a nice ball by the Mountie that at first seems too deep, but is actually perfect for the late run of Kenny 'can't stop him scoring' Dougall who finishes really well, slamming the ball into a pleasingly taut net and putting everything right again.
We obviously just needed a kick up the arse! Things will get better from here on in. We're a momentum team, get one, we'll get three and they're not scoring three in a month of Sundays. I'd bet my house on it.
I'm honestly struggling now not to say 'what happens next is we are complete wank for the next hour' because that would spoil the narrative. I could say 'the highlights of the rest of the game are Gary Madine doing a bad slide tackle and Gary Madine getting pissed off that no one seems arsed about pressing. I could mention about when Jimmy Husband comes on with an austerity haircut, obviously calculated to save him money on 'product' being the other talking point in a sea of sewage but that would mean you wouldn't be eagerly reading on, to find out what happened next.
I could say 'watching our defence tonight was like watching one of those ill conceived projects where a shit band gets the holographic image of someone dead to sing alongside them and it always looks shit - the ghost of Luke Garbutt doesn't add an awful lot to living souls who make up the rest of the back 4' - I could say that 'Williams looks like a cross between a hopeful horse who has found himself in field with the gate open and run through into a place he's never been before so is just cantering about looking confused and not sure how to find his way back.'
I could bemoan the fact that it's fucking blindingly obvious we need to move the ball quicker but that every time we try to pass it first time, the effect is so utterly horrible that I understand why we all take two touches and then turn around and fall over as a way of mitigating against the agony that ensues when we try owt else.
I could cite the lack of squad depth that means the subs actively make our performance worse, which is a bit like saying 'then the Ed Sheeran record finshed and a Stock Aitken and Waterman megamix came on next' I could describe how that I'm so unconvinced that we'll score that even when we attack, I'm just slumped on the back of the seat awaiting the inevitable moment when Theo spins around and skilfully takes the ball out of play with him or we spoon a looping long ball to Jerry like we genuinely think he might have suddenly grown 5 inches since he last touched it.
I could say, even Patino can't pass the ball tonight.
I could wonder how we end up with CJ at left back and Jimmy, looking like a yr 8 kid whose mum dragged him to the barbers playing on the wrong side of defence.
I could say that, to be honest, inhaling fumes from burning plastic whilst having my gums lacerated with a rusty scalpel by a dentist with halitosis in a pit of scorpions, listening to Ian Chisnall slowly read erotic literature would be more fun than most of this game. And none of that is fun. Just in case you think Chissy reading erotica turns me on. It doesn't. It's a fucking metaphor. Imagine him pompously saying kinky stuff. It's horrendous. You'll never feel sexy again. I've ruined your life.
I'll just say... They scored again in the first half when we all ran to their player like we were in the playground or, as they lad behind me put quite eloquently 'Is their lad magnetic or something, why did we all go to him at once' - the Hull player just then passed it square to another Hull player who had about 20 seconds to line up a shot and twatted it in.
I'll just say we were even more shite in the second half. Nothing happened other than Connolly had a shot from our one half decent move. They scored a third when everyone except Thorniley just gave up and even though Jud made a very good block, no one else was arsed after Jud did that and it looped in via deflection.
Maxwell having a row with a lad in the stand was the most engaging thing that happened in the rest of the game. We managed to summon absolutely no real pressure at all. Hull looked quite astonished that they were actually any good and even though their entire tactics were to fall over and pretend to be dead for ages, despite that spectacular lack of ambition, they still managed to have chances to score more goals, which is some feat by us to make a side who aren't actually trying to score goals, look like they're going to score goals.
Why the fuck I stayed to the end I don't know.
The whistle was like the mercy of an overdose of morphine in the midst of agonising pain.
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Everyone was shit.
It's mad how football turns. On Saturday, I couldn't have asked for more from the team. It was electric. It was fierce, it was brave. The ground was a cauldron.
Tonight was rank. Shit football in a half empty ground. I was convinced that we'd turn what we'd done against Sheffield to our favour. I was convinced that the injustice would fire us and we'd be everything we can be but we just looked flat, tired, languid.
I know I take the piss with my Madine stuff. I know he's not really the answer to all life's problems*, but honestly, when Madine looks the most 'up for it' in terms of pressing, you've got a problem somewhere. It's like trying to use a tank to do a police chase. I can forgive Jerry for looking knackered. I can forgive Patino for being a kid and fuck it, I can forgive them all if they come out on Saturday and do anything but that. Hull came to spoil and we just let them spoil. We so rarely tried anything and when we did it was a predictable thoughtless run or a long ball that we made a half hearted attempt for. Someone near me said 'the 50/50s aren't going for us' but we seemed to make them into 30/70s by just not having the buzz, snap, aggression that we need.
We missed Lavery. We certainly missed the good Lavery from Saturday, bu we even missed the shit version of Lavery who crosses it into the stands and falls over instead of scoring because no one (apart from the tragicomic efforts of wor Gaz's determination be a one man pressing machine) put them under the sort of pressure that Lavery does after about the 8th minute.
It was one to forget. It happens sometimes. We win, we're champions elect, we lose, everyone deserves pushing out of the airlock and we're stupidly emotional about a game that cannot be relied upon to serve up what we want from it. That's why it's good. Football is up and down. It was dire but Saturday is another day and we cannot contemplate playing like that again cos that would be horrific.
*To be fair, given that my drive home was the radio banging on about democracy falling to bits and shenanigans in Parliament and all that, I would say Gaz Maz as PM would be good craic. He'd just look surly, shrug a lot and say 'I dunno' to the big questions and talk about aliens and expensive leisurewear but such is the shambles, I think it would probably be a step up. To be honest, now I think about it a bit more, I think Richard Keogh (oh, how I miss him) would probably be a half decent PM cos he'd do some quite eloquent talking and be honest about stuff and probably be quite likable and I reckon, at the moment, a random person who was vaguely human and tried hard would be preferable to the whole of the political class. Which is an off topic observation, but frankly, I don't give a fuck cos I've nothing left to say*** and the whole blogging experience has left me feeling a bit hollow tonight**
**that's not your fault though, if you've made it this far, then I appreciate it and it's genuinely above and beyond and you can, at least know you're not one of those glory readers who only reads when we're winning.
*** Actually I have thought of something else to say, which is this - I know the FA**** don't really take our appeals seriously, but we've got pretty good grounds to appeal on the basis that 'you're getting mauled by the tigers' thing where they claw the air and sing that is fucking dreadful and they deserve the points taken off them for that.
**** You might wonder why I've not bothered discussing the ref but I literally can't be arsed anymore. They're all shite and he was shite, but we were worse, so there we are*****
***** It really is over now. The end. We will be better on Saturday. A lot better. A world better. We'd better had be.
Onwards.
**** You might wonder why I've not bothered discussing the ref but I literally can't be arsed anymore. They're all shite and he was shite, but we were worse, so there we are*****
***** It really is over now. The end. We will be better on Saturday. A lot better. A world better. We'd better had be.
Onwards.
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