This is the most important game of the season, well at least it will be until the next one. It’s an absolutely must win game.
Just as they did for this fixture last season, PGMOL have appointed confrère vassal and lackey, anthony “blue moon” taylor as the man in the middle. Fellow traveller, and ne’er do well manc, chris “selective myopia” kavanagh is on VAR duty. Clearly two minds with but a single thought.
Although I am not gifted beyond the ordinary with the power to pierce the inscrutable, I am prepared to venture, expect nothing from the ref, or VAR, and you won’t be disappointed.
On hearing moaning maureen’s diatribe regarding the apparent non-existence of our injury crisis, Boudica merely smiled with the satisfaction of a Cassandra, one of whose prophecies has at last been fulfilled. “I told you that he would say that”, she said haughtily from her high-backed chair like Cleopatra about to get down to brass tacks with an Ethiopian hand maiden. She proceeded, in the spirit of the season of good will, to express the earnest desire that maureen might contract botts, glanders, quartan ague, frog in the throat and the Black Death.
At this point in the eternal conflict between duty and personal inclination, duty should have won hands down. Unfortunately, personal inclination won out, and I tutted.
Any knowledgeable person could have guessed what would happen after that. No woman of spirit can sit calmly and have a man tut her. Seeking an outlet for her emotions, the Mem always fond of a family row, bore her end of the encounter briskly and before I knew where I was I became aware that I had sown the wind and was reaping the whirlwind. Angry passions were unchained. Good things previously corked up and stored away for use on some future occasion, were unleashed with vindictive abandon.
It’s wonderful to watch her in action, I admit. One seems to hear the bugles blowing for the Crusades and the tramp of the mailed feet of a hundred steel-clad ancestors, but there’s no getting away from it that she can go on for an age.
Eventually the storm abated and she concluded, with all the Cleopatrine haughtiness at her command, "Kindly let us have no more of this nonsense.”
As usual I was left savouring the bitterness of defeat, hopefully the only time tonight.
So, come on you Redmen, give’m down the banks!
Meanwhile, coincidence of coincidences, just as he did for this fixture last year, Lawro has predicted a one all draw. I find it difficult not to regard Lawro with anything other than restrained horror and loathing, and to consider that of all the human serpents that ever wriggled their way onto these pages, he is the worst.
Hopefully his attempted kiss of death won’t throw a spanner in the works and upset the apple-cart. 
I’ll take a scrappy 1-0 win to us. 
Really do need to recruit a new central defender in January.
