Everton 0 v 0 Chelsea                                                            Sun. 18th Nov 2001

Att: 30,555

Report from last season's game

Everton: Simonsen, Pistone,Weir, Stubbs,Unsworth, Alexandersson, Gemmill, Gravesen, Naysmith, Radzinski, Watson
Subs: Gerrard, Pembridge,Gascoigne, Xavier, Ferguson for Alexandersson (74m).

I' ve been complaining for so long about Sunday footy, but a 2.O'Clock is just no good. It doesn't give you enough time to get a round of snifters in.

So the whispers in the County were right. Steve Watson was going to play at Centre Dash. Duncan must be in a real mess. It also doesn't say much for Joe-Max who couldn't even get a place on the bench.

Everton started the game brightly with some good crosses coming in from the right from Alex and Pisto. From Pisto's cross, Stevie Watson headed wide. The Rad was on top of his game in the early stages, and shot just wide after good work from Alex.

Mad Dog, who had just been booked for a late challenge, was well into the game when he sent the Rad clear. He pushed the ball past Terry who barged him out of the way just outside the box. Unbelieveably, the ref didn't even give a foul. Radzinski was really giving Terry a torrid time, and on two more occasions, he broke through, having one shot saved by Bosnich and the other just wide of the target. Everton were really in control for the first 30 minutes and really should have gone ahead on the half hour after superb work by Stevie Watson when he set up Scott Gemmill who had his shot superbly saved by the 'jessie' Bosnich.

The Toffees needed a goal after all this domination and it nearly came on the 40th minute, when Scott Gemmill was fouled on the edge of the box. Unsy took a very quick free kick that hit some Chelsea prick on the head and it went for a corner. Bosnich wasn't even looking when Rhino took it.

Half time 0-0

For the first 20 minutes of the second half Chelsea really came into the game and should have gone ahead after Simmo, who was playing with tremendous confidence, spilled a shot and from the rebound, Zola had his effort cleared off the line by Stubbsy. The Toffeemen were under the cosh during this time.

On 63 minutes, Davy Weir nearly broke the deadlock with a powerful header from a Gary Naysmith corner, but again, Bosnich made a tremendous save.

Everton were starting to play a little better now. The Toffeemen should have been awarded a penalty when some french geezer handled the ball as the Rad tried to put it over his head. Again, we were given nothing, which was par for the course with this dickhead of a referee!

With 75 minutes gone, big Dunc was introduced for the tiring Alexanderson, but the biggest cheer of the afternoon came when Bosnich went down like a bag of shite as he took a goal kick!! He was clearly in pain (which was quite funny) and had to be replaced by Cudicini.

The moment of the match came when Chelsea were awarded a free kick on the edge of the box. Zola, with one of his trade mark strikes, thought he had scored, only to be denied by a breathtaking save by Simmo. Everton and Chelsea were both trying to win the game and each had chances in the 5 minutes of added time. First Dunc burst through only to be denied by a brave save from Cudicini . Then in the last minute that horrible shit Hasselbaink volleyed over from 10 yards out.

All in all Everton had the better chances and we should have had it won in the 1st half. There were some decent performances. Simmo looks confident and the save from Zola was special. But the Blue Kipper star man is Davy Weir who had the ugly moaning Hasselbaink in his pocket all game. He even booted him a few times.Well done Davy!!!

Quotes

Walter :"If Chelsea had won they would have gone into the top three, so it shows just how much effort and commitment my team put in,''

"Nobody can ever doubt the effort of Everton's players - they gave everything.

"There were very few clear-cut chances and the game was very tight defensively"
"We have no complaints about the result, there were very few clear-cut chances and the game was very tight defensively.''

"Frankly, Duncan Ferguson was not fit to play, we knew if he was to come off the bench it would only be for 15 minutes, that's all he could handle.

"I had other options apart from Steve, but I felt that in say Joe-Max Moore, we had a player who was too similar to Tomasz Radzinski. We needed that extra physical presence and Steve certainly gave us that.

"He has played as a striker before, it may have been a long while ago - maybe even in a previous life - but he still remembered enough to give it a real go.''

Sausage: I fuckin hate that Hasselbaink. He's a moaning bastard.

The Bates Motel on wobbly, expensive wheels
by
Mickey Blue Eyes.

This internet thingy is dead good isn't it? Freedom of speech and opinion and all that. Never fails to needle the politically correct, control-freak ranting righties of this world. Best of all, it frees you from most of the establishment owned media because you don't need it………except maybe to know what their most recent attempt at manipulation looks like. You can pick and choose what you say and who you say it with. Just think, it might even be the start of genuine democracy, since it can't be suppressed without obvious overt measures. Once the Thought Police start shutting down or censoring the main providers you'll know the game's up. Orwell was right in principle about establishment control of information but he didn't foresee the internet. So get out there and have your say wherever and whenever you want. Make the most of it while you can. Airstrip One looms.

Pity the same doesn't apply any more to footy because we have just had yet another two weeks without a game. Yet another scattered league programme. And what FOR? A bottom line of TV advertising revenue and/or viewing figures? See, control comes in many guises and at many levels.

In the case of TV, the Beeb tried to convert us into enthusiastic indoor bowls viewers by changing the appearance of the game. Their winning formula consists of dressing the participants in dazzling multi-coloured shell suits (strangely similar to the ludicrous incandescent garb worn by cricketers), trainers like moon boots and bowls in primary colours such as bright green, pink and yellow. Unfortunately, the game is as interesting as a suet pudding salad or grits-with-custard. But those colours will make all the difference ey? The TV Bowls Format Brainstorming Session must have been as surreal as Salvador Dali on crack cocaine.

In the meantime………the pain-in-the-neck Gravesen transfer rumour. Let's leave aside for the moment that he has delivered a total of maybe 5.5 good games for us while the rest have been a mishmash of unstinting, generous distribution to the opposition and fist waving alarums. Fact is, he's just had 4.5 good (and only averagely good fer chrissakes) games in a row. So his agent spreads the story he's leaving. Coincidentally, precisely as forecast by Smiffy, Abel's imminent departure means his game "suddenly" picks up………only for him to get biffed out of it in a mad bad moment by Paul, an episode which leaves you not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Put together, these are classic examples of what is rotting the game to the point of worthlessness. As if you needed to be told - not with the still fresh examples of The Don, Bally, The Ears and The Barmby Creep.

If Gravesen can't or won't control his agent then he too should be shoveled off for the highest price. If he wants to set the record straight all he has to do is pick up the phone, instruct his paid spiv accordingly, and then announce publicly what his instructions were. If the agent doesn't do as he's told, fire him. After which we might be inclined to believe something The Gravedigger (or any other footy player) says. No wonder the game resembles a slimey fish-market. Sadly, some fans are beginning to fall for all this PR coprolite. Mark my words, yes, it will all end in Gazza-style tears of self pity. And the lesson will be exactly the same: Too late the hero.

To demonstrate the point Gazza duly appeared on the "Frank Skinner Show," wherein said brummy Skinner displayed unctuous chat show affinity for the tearful one's dissipation. Gazza even made a favourable TV impression, except for being on the trembling lip of another flood from his tear ducts because of his omission from the last World Cup squad. That said, anybody who tells Murdoch's shithouse journos to fuck off has my whole hearted support. Pity he didn't do a full job and knock the disgusting bastard's teeth down his throat. Chance missed and an even greater pity it wasn't Murdoch himself. Exclusion from the squad was Gazza's own fault of course. However brilliant, his type of personality will never understand this because, like too many Brit Generation Xers, he's far too busy looking for the permanently elusive "good time" somewhere at the epicentre of a baaad hangover. It will always be someone else's fault. That is his and their real tragedy. Life is passing them by in a haze of cheapo, ironically named Happy Hours.

While Gazza's playing gifts and life drown in ennui and Guinness malaria, young men like David Beckham and Michael Owen somehow manage to apply themselves in spite of the media leeches surrounding them. Somehow applying common sense to their considerable abilities they manage to play the kind of unforgettable footy which will probably bring them sports immortality, chance and injury notwithstanding. For all Gazza's irresistible chirpiness he's one of those individuals who leaves you feeling melancholic for what was lost, not what was achieved. At the end of the show, he and Skinner were draped around each other singing "My Way," standard last refuge for defeated maudlin obstinacy. Like seemingly everything else Gazza does it was comically out of tune, media tragedy-as-cheap-spectacle and sickening because of it.

Still, that's the way some humans are built and therefore there's nothing which can or should be done about it, except by the individual concerned. Each to his own gene pool. In the end Gazza will have to live with himself long after all the media hangers-on have left in search of some other sucker. Which is why I fervently hope he manages to turn himself around before it's too late. Football is the least of it. Good luck, Gazza. You'll be a long time out of footy and you don't have much else you are good at. For you, it will be a huge personal achievement not to end up sobbing face down in a flagon of bad English ale.

So the FA, of all people, show that there is such a thing as society with an attempt at a five year plan. Try this:

http://www.the-fa.org/newscontent.asp?Artid=2393

Entirely predictably, a radio "business" journo (read: politically correct arsehole) described this yet again, and again I shit you not, as "communist," as in totalitarian east European "communist." You have to hear these wankers first hand to credit their lying dogma. Listening to them is akin to feeling something move against your wellies in a swamp. If it wasn't for courageous and clear-sighted men like Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky in the US and Tony Benn and John Pilger in Blighty these economic nazis would have a clear run. You shudder at the logical social conclusion of it all. You shudder too at what the future holds for Generation X. At least you do if you have a sense of humanity about you. Otherwise you get as opaque as a deadbrained flake staring at a box-set of "The Sopranos" and convincing himself it is anything other than a soap-opera whitewash of organised crime.

Actually, the FA proposals aren't wholly bad considering these are mostly the same gobshites who helped foist the current money-mad set-up on us. Maybe the penny has dropped. Or should I say "revenue streams"? You are entitled to ask why the dummies don't just start up a wholly owned TV footy channel and make sure the money circulates fairly and constructively for the good of the game. You will of course come up against our old friend Vested Interests. You pays your money but they don't give you much choice in the matter.

So here's a safe bet: Adequately consulted, properly informed and fairly asked, the fans would put together a better framework for administering the game than any number of Suits and marketing consultants in full gush with their clapped-out, demonstrably failed erudite simian nonsense. The FA proposals are a reasonable start but they go nowhere near far enough. Of course probably they will be quietly ignored or tucked away in half measures. We'll see.

In direct contrast, in politically correct right-wing "market" fashion, Smiffy went out and bought Jesper Blomqvist………or is it Blomquist………or Bloompissed………or BoomAndBust………for a knock down price of zero except for his wages when he plays. No play, no dosh. Jezzy, Jezza or Jester (the nickname will depend heavily on how he performs, if at all) is also injury prone so it can be seen readily that this is a "market" master stroke by Smiffy, since Cost + Product Type = Brand Appeal = Brand Sales = Profits = Economic "efficiency." You'd throw up at all this if it wasn't for the fact that someone would whinge we don't have an efficient "marketing" policy for sick bags with an embossed club badge, © Intellectual Property Rights/Branding Inc. PLC Ltd. Spa. GmbH. Needless to say, Jesper got injured in his first day's training and couldn't even play in a reserve match. Oh well.

(Nice soft word, "market" isn't it? Forms a homely mirage of market stalls with awnings, which of course is it's prime propaganda purpose. Anything to divert attention from rigged reality.)

Thus, Smiffy is impeccably politically correct because he knows the price of everything and the value of nothing and sells it at a premium. Who gives a shit if it's all a wicked lie which always, ALWAYS, ends in mass unemployment and a slump? Gotta keep up the "revenue streams" (rip offs) and "cash flow" (debts). Just keep using the buzzwords la. Tell everyone you aren't afraid of hard work or long hours. It'll be alright in the end. You'll see. It is only a blip that a quarter of our population exist in poverty. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists live! In modern Britain everyone has the right to buy a Barratt cardboard box or a multi-million pound player and live happily ever after in globalised Milton Friedmanville. If you can afford it………like the current outrageous entrance charges to the match.

If you can't……well, you're merely a lazy scrounger, so just sign here and shuffle into the benefits queue like all those workshy engineers, computer teckies and financial and banking services people recently dismissed to the scrapheap. They of all people must understand it is important to pay them and their families low welfare money to force them to accept low paid work, while it is even more important to encourage those with loadsa dosh to pay less taxes because they need even more money to encourage them to amass even more dosh. Geddit? No? Then go live in a REAL cardboard box under some bridge. That's your one dimensional freedom to choose and it gets narrower by the day. Huge numbers of mass redundancies are in progress right across the West. Quite soon there won't be enough cardboard boxes. Better hurry.

Me, I am on the side of the teenage Latvian girl who slapped unelected kept man Charlie Windsor with a bunch of flowers in protest at bombing runs on the innocent. It might make the empty headed berk actually think, instead of cutting ribbons and taking our money for doing nothing much. But I doubt it. Seems to me the Brit establishment can't complain about this since Blair-Brown and co. are quite ready to allow you to assault your kids any time you want. If you can batter your kids out of impatient rage why can't a reasonably idealistic if naive Latvian belt Charlie with a bunch of flowers without being dubbed "mentally ill"? Any day now, One Flew Over The Latvian Gulag Archipelago.

Which presumably is where our unloved and unwanted chief constable Norman Bettison would send offenders like the mobile dotty potherb who clocked a couple of bobbies with a baseball bat during a Remembrance ceremony in St. John's Gardens. Norman says the guilty party is really…………Society! Which means all of us, even though we don't exist according to that fucking mad harridan Thatcher and her ilk. Now, I don't know about you, but I am unacquainted with the batsman or his motives. I don't know anybody else who is. I don't even like rounders. And for raw personal and philosophical reasons I have a lot of reverence for Remembrance Day and what it means. Like too many others I need no lessons from Bettison in that matter.

But as we all also know, Norman is one of the masonic-style bizzies who helped whitewash the South Yorkshire police in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster. So much for HIS "social conscience." Of course that was before typical Home Office sensitivity sent him to be CC of a city, ours, which plainly and justifiably loathes his living guts. I bet Norman just loves wearing his uniform and epaulettes and masonic apron………strictly in a social way you understand. Too, too tacky, our chief constable is, like the Home Office Suits who appointed him against our expressed wishes.

Sponsor tackiness also inspired a pretty good Social Idea during the week: That all MPs and other corporate Suits should wear visible adverts for their sponsors. So any of them who are members of, for example, wacko organisations like Opus Dei, the Masons, the Orange Order, the CBI or the Institute of Directors would have to have their logo on view. Another example: Fat, corrupt, lying Kenneth Clarke would have to wear a cigarette company BAT logo and/or a list of deaths caused by tobacco addiction. And so on. The mind boggles at what Nigel Hamilton would have on his suits if they weren't in the pawnbrokers and he in the deserved doghouse. Sound idea if you ask me, and I couldn't give a shit whether you do or not. Meantime, predictably, Blair has reduced the role of Parliament's anti-sleaze officer because said function is making corruption too difficult for MPs. No surprise there, then, not while the Fraud Squad too are deliberately kept understaffed and out of the greasy hair of corporate business (read: fat, thieving bastards). What else do you expect when Blair-Brown and co. have been all-expenses-paid guests of politically correct, born-again "christian," American/Australian Rupert Murdoch?

Against this background the Professional Footballers' Association had a completely politically INcorrect 99% vote in favour of strike action if they don't get a larger share of the TV money paid into the present rotten-to-the-core set up. And because it is politically incorrect they have my complete support. Seems they want £25 million out of £500 million, which is less than the cost of Juan Veron in the fish-market. This will be used for players down on their luck either through low pay or injury. Sounds fairly sensible and decent to me. So what does the right-wing media do? Well, what it ALWAYS does………attacks the employees and defends the employers. That's how journos stay in their jobs, by toadying. The same old tiresome reactionary tripe gets trotted out about the game's highest earners, who will receive no benefit from the strike.

See, it's important that the players, of all people, aren't allowed to set an example for successful industrial action. Can you imagine where all this might end? The fans in "ordinary" jobs might get encouraged into restored self-confidence by their idols. Then they might do the same thing and defend their families from poverty caused by redundancy. Can't have that, not when Blair's "New" Labour has gone to so much trouble to Brown-nose the international banking/corporate system instead of formulating alternatives to protect our citizens against routine corporate rip off. But those days have long vanished and won't return until millions of lives have been ruined. Again. Until then, your low wages and redundancies are their only answer. Just look at getting-poorer India, the Philippines and Indonesia, prime examples of Western "enterprise" at its best. Yeuk.

Then our annual accounts came out. Great! The overdraft was down by more than half, which screwed the Melledrew Tendency good style yet again, especially those who forecast an increase thereof. But that's all too easy and is now at the point of boredom. So let them suck on the increased borrowings as a substitute coating on their dummy. You have to leave them something to ease their sour envy.

Ah, bugger it………no. Let's push their pram into the Mersey right in front of the Kings Dock site and watch them swirl away on a flood tide of constructive action instead of an ebb tide of misery. Fact is, in their apparent hatred of any potential success by the club the Tendency talk more venomous gobalooncack than the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail combined. Meanwhile, said Sun demonstrated its attention to recent awful events by the ringing lead headline, "Queen has rubber duck in her bath." Sounds like it was written by a member of the Tendency.

Tuesday, a meet in adjacent waterfront licensed premises with an elderly friend. Whilst ordering, my courteous companion asked the kid behind the bar to play some decent Sinatra instead of plates of solid pus camouflaged as contemporary popular music CDs. Whereupon said nipper pounced with, "This isn't the Legion yer know!" Spluttering, said companion countered, "I've got good friends in the Legion!" ………and was finally flattened with, "Dwindling numbers though ey?" Which left me chewing the bar top in grateful hysteria. But the pimply bar child did turn off I Wanna Bang Me 'Ead On The Wall by Sid Snot And The Heswall Turd Burglars. Mischievously I almost asked him to play, gawd help us, some Mantovani. Unfortunately I was too busy gurgling happily into my beer, lying on my back and kicking my legs in the air and so missed a great opportunity. It was a priceless moment.

The Generation Gap, don't you just love it. Funniest of all is the way the Xers talk such garrulous swill about this week's Greatest Band Of All Time and their Greatest Lyrics Of All Time. Invariably it is about someone you have never heard of and never will hear of because they are, well, unarguable decibel-stiffened pigeon shite, actually. Watching them dance is to witness a bear scratch its crotch on a tree. Friends, this is a serious business this taking the piss out of Generation X. We must intensify our efforts. They are the first agitated hormone stream in history to be deadly mass-pompous about not very much at all. Arnold Schwarznegger, Quentin Tarantino, Sylvester Stallone, The Simpsons and Sid Snot are not cultural options. Generation X have got it coming and we have to deliver it in spades………but only if we can avoid falling about in helpless laughter.

And right on cue came, sit down because you'll need to, a University of Bristol computer programme (c/o the Hewlett Packard professor of sell-what-we-tell-you-to) for………oh SHIT I can hardly stop laughing………Disc Jockeying! Yes, there's no need at all to tolerate anymore the little whingeing pricks who haunt every CD player everywhere in the western world moaning, "Have yer got any Sid Snot?" It seems this programme measures the average requirement and selects accordingly. Don't ask me how, since computer pyrotechnics of any kind bore me shitless. Whatever, you can guarantee it will select the same old head banging shite you get from the Heswall Turd Burglars. I understand this is called "rave." Actually it is as musical as a group of bin lid bangers in Belfast. Then again, there are times when said binnies STILL sound a hundred times better than the rest of the attack on sanity and taste.

Sunday, at last, a MATCH! albeit rearranged to satisfy, what else, TV. And in town were the top division's most expensive, underachieving tail-end charlies, Chelsea. Fat Ken Bates led the charge waving his latest set of accounts and spouting his usual line in pungent dog cack. Thing is, their accounts (like everybody else's) are even uglier than Bates's fat gut and his reactionary diatribes. No surprise, then, when Bates managed to fuck up the Wembley redevelopment in spades and then went on to blame the rest of the world. Fat Ken is a proper extreme right-wing product of the Awful Eighties, exactly the kind of barrow-boy bonehead who helped manufacture (and will preside over) the looming economic horror. He is a carbon copy of the cold-blooded jaunty cheeriness of Blair-Brown and co., with exactly the same freedom from any sense of moral purpose. Like them, he can make a hash of anything and wear an annoyed and puzzled look afterwards………especially when they come up against someone with a genuine moral grievance and the articulation to go with it, as did messenger-boy Blair when he was summarily booted out of the Middle East with a flea in his ear.

Pre-match, a meet with The Editor. Turned out he was interviewed Saturday by CNN after onward referrals by WSAG and PaulC on our proposed move to Kings Dock. Which is very interesting because CNN are an international media organisation with next to no interest in provincial anywhere, never mind England. But, surprise! surprise!………it turned out the first person interviewed was, talking of morals-free right-wing boneheads, fat local commissar Suit MP, Peter Kilfoyle, whose recent political career has been flushed down the drain reserved for "New" Labour politicos slimier than whale shit on an ice flow, and that's virtually all of them.

By a strange coincidence, not, this follows a similar puff-piece in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. This too featured photographs and an interview with the very same talking Suit. Of course he is trying to undermine our bid and has been ever since the bidding process. He only broke cover during the last few months, hence the piece in The Guardian and the CNN item. Which is great for us because now all Evertonians know where they stand with him, especially readers of Blue Kipper who remember his denial of such activities. And guess what!? Everything he said is logged in the data base, so we have him bang to rights.

Anyone want to make book on how the CNN item will get edited by the time it is broadcast next weekend? Or how and why an obscure provincial commissar Suit gets pushed into the media limelight twice in as many weeks? Anyone want to bet on what Kilfoyle says on the Kings Dock during his regular meetings with government ministers and civil servants, to say nothing of the time he spends with English Partnerships (who own the KD site) and the North West Development Agency ?………Both of whom are projected partners in our preferred bid. No wonder people despise politicians like Kilfoyle. With a bit of luck and some democratic encouragement this will rebound heavily on him. Which will be nice, especially since he looks and sounds like a scouse Ken Bates. Follows the same kind of policies too.

Chelsea arrived with the usual Foreign Legion, half of whom you have never heard of. The ones we HAVE heard of are pretty impressive: Zola (even now), Petit and Jimmy Floyd. Don't ask me to spell Jimmy's surname because I always, but always, get it wrong, usually because I am so busy admiring his play. But ever since Ranieri arrived and got them playing discredited Italian catennacio, now abandoned, they've been like an overpaid circus of a team. Lots of outstanding individual technical skill subsumed to an apprehensive team formation. Pity………for them. We have our own problems.

Yes, and there we were contemplating yet another absolute mongrel of a team formation. Steve Watson up front alongside The Rad. Sandro at right back. The unfit Yin on the bench with Abel. Presumably the peroxide one is still groggy from the smack he got off Paul during the match against the Skunks. So it was Davey-Stubbsy at central defence. Simo deservedly made his full debut. Everyone else in place. No Blomquist, injured.

We were all over them from the off yet again, even with that wonky team formation. We played good tight stuff, moved the ball well and limited them to a few breakaways. No question we were the better team throughout the first half, odd moments apart. And when required Simo plucked the ball out of the air or smothered ground shots in a way we haven't seen in a long time. We all know how Zola's corners swerve and fizz into the far post, the brilliant little bastard, and he did it again all afternoon but Simo was equal to anything he produced. Surely it did his confidence the world of good?

The defence was solid too. Even Jimmy Floyd's battleship shoulders and chest got nowhere. And that means he gets frustrated, and that meant he eventually got booked. And that made me grin because I think he's one hell of a player.

In midfield we were helped by Ranieri's weird decision to push the Gallic Pony Tail wide left where he could pout to his heart's content and do no harm. It was a loony decision and enabled us generally to hold the central spaces, albeit untidily, irritated only by The Brilliant Little Zola Bastard. And that made me frown. He just goes on and on and on, doesn't he? It seems like every time he gets the ball it is like a surgeon measuring a cut. I love him as much as Jimmy Floyd and wished they both played for us. But it feels like it will be a long time before we can get players like them, hopefully after we have destroyed Kilfoyle's efforts at sabotaging our KD bid.

Which makes the achievement of our technically limited midfield all the more admirable. There's only one way to combat that kind of skill and that is to run until you drop and tackle like your life depends on it. Well, that is what Nic-Gemmo-The Gravedigger-Gary did. Nic and Gary didn't get as free as we hoped so they were limited mostly to defensive stuff. And because they won the ball more often than they lost it we kept making inroads through their defence, usually through quite sharp wing movements down our left.

Inevitably we created chances: Stevie missed narrowly with a header, top right bar………Nic and The Rad both had cheeky shots through defenders legs from right of the D………and Bosnich made a magnificent diving right-side save from Gemmo after a neat move throught the middle set him free via Stevie. Rad got away, left side penalty area and hit a good ground shot but Bosnich was equal to it again. There were others.

It is an indication of how much we have improved this season when the man of the match was yet again one of the opposing centre backs, this time a young man named William Gallas. I can pay him no greater compliment than to say Le Boeuf and Dessailly won't be missed. The boy can play, really play.

Annoyingly, the half came to an end with no goals. You have to score when you're on top because the loathed squad-rotation-substitution system means the play pattern can be artificially affected at any time. The subs system absolutely stinks and the sooner it gets reduced the better. At this point I had the distinct impression that Chelsea had something in reserve and we didn't. Lack of a goal made me a bit apprehensive.

Second half, the Pony Tail inevitably got shifted into the centre and it made a huge difference to the balance of play. Gemmo and The Gravedigger harried him mercilessly but he still managed to get balls out to the left and to Zola at inside left. This was never better demonstrated than when the superb little gett drifted beyond three tackles from the left edge of the penalty area, got to the D, and turned and bulleted in a shot that would have been one of the goals of the season. I swear the turn and shot were made in a space no more than half a metre. It screamed over the right bar by millimetres with Simo no more than a startled rabbit. Meanwhile, he had his own private duel with Simo from corners but he lost that one by a long, long way.

So the pattern shifted decisively in Chelsea's favour. They looked dangerous every time they broke out after one of our uneven attacks. Stevie got more ineffective as the game wore on, though The Rad skated through whenever he was given a reasonable opportunity.

Then came a supreme moment. Free kick to the Lahndaners, smack centre, twenty five metres out. Jimmy Floyd and The Brilliant Little Bastard shaped up. I said, "Fuckface Zola's gonna take it and he's gonna hit it into the top right corner of the net." The whole immediate area of me beloved Lower Street End turned and advised me to go and copulate. Jimmy Floyd stepped over it. Zola hit one of his special swerves, the one that moves over an ellipse with a minor chord of two metres. It swerved and headed unerringly for the top right corner. Simo dived instinctively and clawed at it with the help of his chiropodist. He got enough on it to get it onto the bar and over. Zola's head went down. Even he was ready to concede defeat after that. And if Simo can't draw strength from beating one of the most brilliant players on this planet then he better go study home economics.

So The Big Yin was brought on in place of Nic and Stevie dropped back to right midfield. Within seconds he raced clear and left footed a superb pass out to Gary, clear on the left and closing at high speed, only one man between him and the goal. He had a head of steam and looked on odds on to go past the defender, knocked it beyond him and went after it like a greyhound. At the last second the defender (it might have been Gallas) got a boot on it and it ricocheted away. Damn, our last real chance, though we kept pressing forward hopefully.

Yet one more measure of our improvement was our slight disappointment in not winning after giving them a real game of it. Once again, chances missed in the opening phase have cost us dearly. I know it is a pain in the arse but it is honestly the case that we are having absolutely no luck in front of goal. Nobody can fault the team's effort or genuine cohesive teamwork. Given our circumstances, the change is remarkable from last season.

So here we are, one game to go in the six game sequence I suggested would decide Smiffy's future. I said he would need to get a minimum of nine points to stay. Guess what?………He's got six. Next up, Leicester and their banana skin and Akinbiyi. The latter, subject to appalling media treatment this season, scored against us in the same fixture last season. Oh well.

But at least there's only one week to the game. You never know. We might even get our game back if enough of us told them what to do with their TV money. Or even, so help me, threatened a speckies strike……………………