Do you remember our trip to Wolverhampton back in November? It isn’t a trick question – and we completely understand if you’ve chosen to forget any memories you may have of that particular city. The hosts, they sang “we’ll never play you again” as if to have us think the concept of playing both home and away during a season had been scrapped. But now it seems we were wrong to laugh them off as silly billies.
No, it seems the good folk of Wolverhampton are meteorological marvels, able to foresee things that us mortals and the Met Office could not. Maybe we will never play them again as the tears of dark clouds continue to fall upon our naive heads. Yes – if you hadn’t quite got what we were trying to say by now, it’s that we have very little confidence that we will be playing a game of association football this weekend.
For the sake of routine, what would we be up against? A Wolves team in second place and who haven’t lost a league game since Gillingham turned ’em over last month. The shock of that defeat has spurred them onto four straight wins. And now let that concern grow even further – we’ve conceded 22% of our goals in the first 15 (a league high), a period in which they’ve manage to score nine times (a league high). Switch on and all that!
But what does it matter? Just add this one to the growing list of Tuesday night games to come we reckon…
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| 02 Nov 2013 | A | Sky Bet League One | 0-2 |
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[expand title=”REFEREE WATCH”]
The man for whom this weekend’s work will no more likely stretch further than calling it off than it will involve wearing a dress is Eddie Ilderton. By this point of the season, the cards really start stacking up when you look at an ref’s record but Mr Ilderton has one of the most modest we’ve seen of late. In the 20 games he’s officiated in, he’s handed out just 39 yellow cards and three red cards. He must be a calming influence…
We were about to say that our record in games that have featured Mr Ilderton as the man in the middle was pretty formidable. But then we checked the third of the three, the 100% record becomes 66% and frown marks start appearing. However, Meatloaf did claim that two out of three ain’t bad… and the only defeat was the FA Cup game against Rotherham United, which leaves two out of two in the league. Hashtag points.
This season for Eddie Ilderton:
Games: 20 — Yellow: 39 (1.95pg), Red: 3
Our record under Eddie Ilderton:
P3 W2 D0 L1 F10 A2 — Yellow: 2, Red: 0
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[expand title=”FIFA 14 VERDICT”]
Unfortunately, FIFA 14 doesn’t come with a game mode where you can douse the pitch in water and then get Hayden Pennyfeather to perform a pitch inspection. So we didn’t do a FIFA 14 verdict just yet…
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Titan Bet continue to offer a risk-free £10 wager if you sign-up today, but unfortunately it isn’t possible to have a punt on whether this game will go ahead. There are 70 markets on offer at present, with a home win priced at 4/1. The away win, by comparison, is 1/4. The odds on both teams finding the back of the net are 17/20, and its evens on the goal tally coming in over 2.5. Other options are available, should you prefer to go elsewhere.
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Am pretty sure it was “you’ll never play here again”.
Which may not be true, but after the last experience I’d doubt many fans will make the same trip, thus “you’ll never stand there again” would have been more appropriate.
In which case, we stand corrected 🙂
But we won’t change it… because it’s annoying enough to write a match preview for a match that is unlikely to happen!
To be fair, a few hundred people heard “we’ll never play you again” and I heard “you’ll never play here again”. Weight of probability suggests I was wrong 🙂