If there is such a thing as a god of marketing (and we very much doubt there is), then it has shown grace and favour towards us by ensuring the fixture computer splurged out Crawley Town at home the weekend before Halloween. You know what that means by now – we talk of creepy crawlies, attempts to avoid horror shows and scoring plenty of ghouls (hells bells – even we’re embarrassed by that one…)
Let’s push all the promotional patter to one side for now and look at the task that awaits us on Saturday. There’s not much to go on if you want to consider our Football League record against them. At home last year, we lost. At theirs last year, we drew. If we think that order exists in football, then we’re nailed on for a win. But football doesn’t do ‘order’; the sport is by its very nature defined by the chaos that exists within those who run the damn thing. When would you like your World Cup sir?
There are, however, more credible reasons to believe we can go out there and do the job at the weekend. Crawley’s recent form is scatty; two victories in six and a 3-0 loss at home to Port Vale on Tuesday evening. Now, our recent form isn’t a great picture either, but we do have three wins in six and the luxury of coming into this off the back of a 3-0 away victory at Crewe Alexandra on Tuesday.
We’re informed that their victory at Stadio El Lamex last season is their sole triumph over us since the opening day of the 2007/8 season. We’ve *actually* got a pretty decent record to defend against our visitors… in 17 games between us and them, we’ve won nine, bagged 25 goals and scored one of them from the bloody halfway line. OK, one of those wins was a Conference Cup game, but who cares?
David Gray is back from selling his records (presumably) and we expect him to go straight in at Number Two tomorrow, with Jimmy Smith being the one to miss out. Otherwise, the team should probably remain as the one that started at Gresty Road on Tuesday night. It’d make sense to us. And hopefully Francois Zoko will end the barren run of scoring no goals in one consecutive game. It’s getting a little concerning(!)
FIFA14 Verdict:
Boro’ line-up:
Day; Gray, Ashton, Jones, Hartley; Morais, Heslop, Doughty, Freeman; Zoko, Burrow
Having said we’d stick with the same team as Tuesday, you’re forgiven for wondering why we’ve changed things around up front. And the answer is… ‘we don’t know’, but then again it’s our FIFA14 so nurrr. Now, what do you want to know? Well, we ran this game. Like, we totally ran the game. Jordan Burrow hit the crossbar, but every cross found the goalkeeper and it finished 0-0. That’s the game in a sentence.
Bookie Bashing:
We appreciate that bookies can follow demand when setting prices, but we think the prices we’ve seen so far reflect league position and nothing else. The best odds on an away victory come from BetVictor at 11/8, whereas you can find us 23/10. There is definitely money to be made by holding your nerve then! Both Teams To Score for us again too – we just like to cover ourselves. At the time of writing…
Team Tarot:
