Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Yellows 0 Forest Green Rovers 0

It’s not easy thinking of what to write about when things are going well. You need a bit of drama and farce to get your teeth into. Everyone loves a good moan, but nobody’s given us a freakin’ bone this year.

So if there’s a void, then fill it. Before yesterday’s drab 0-0 draw with Forest Green Jerome Sale (I think) and Peter Rhoades-Brown engaged in a baffling conversation about the need to freshen up the squad within the next couple of months. And that was before the game.

Well, the soothsayers they spake the truth. Collapse! Catastrophe! A bloke behind me declared Potter ‘not as quick as Yemi’ and Green ‘just shit’. A caller to the phone said he didn’t agree with the signing of Green anyway, which suggests he’s spotted an otherwise imperceptible link between Green’s ‘greedy’ past and his profligacy in front of goal.

Yeah, let’s blame everyone else. Let’s blame them for our misery, our wasted money, our bad job prospects, our missed educational opportunities, let’s blame them for our sexless marriages, our worrying embarrassing ailments, our social failings and our addictions. It’s all so much easier that way.

Losing is a dirty addiction; people love losers, they’re so needy and The System is always to blame. Newcastle are on this self-pitying scag; the deeper in the shit they go, the more erratic they become. And we all love it because it deflects you from the truth. Winning is difficult, but it’s built on being boring and corporate. Great teams bore everyone else to tears because their success is monotonous and calculated. When they lose or draw everyone salivates… and then they win again.

We were flat against Forest Green but we didn’t lose and Matt Green missed a bunch of chances, but he was there to take a swing at them. It was generally a pretty awful spectacle, but we’re still top. The short answer to the problem is that we forgot to do the basic things that make us the best team in the division. The answer is not to tear the place to pieces and sign, y’know Jamie Cook or someone, it’s to get back to the basics, work our way through the gears and start winning again.

Stop press: Shit, we’ve only gone and signed ‘son of Joey’ Jamie Cook. Apparently we the fans contributed. Given that the 12th Man Fund was boasting an impressive, but not player-buying, pot of £4,900 suggests that the contribution is either a PR masterstroke or Jamie’s standard of living is akin to a living in a Brazilian favela. Welcome back Jamie, you might find the place has changed a little bit since you were last here.

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