Can we not find a middle ground between utopic and dystopic?

By: Martyn | August 7th, 2008

Footie or sex is an oft-posed and face-scrunchingly superfluous and neurotic question favoured by lad’s mags and the XXXL testosterone-fuelled beefcakes that try to dominate and belligerently fracture the perimeter of the pub’s conversational boundaries and airwaves. The two notions unquestionably do encompass some severely diverse, differing and dissimilar traits: When one goes wrong people want to tell or rant and rave to the world (via 6-0-6) about it, whereas when the other goes wrong the loudest mouths get shy and inhibited about informing the doctor, let alone every Tom, Dietmar, and Harjeep! But such differentiation does not perturb Dave Jones: He promises that the team’s fluid football will remain and lumping and lugging won’t be the name of the game. That’s right, meek football followers – sex and football can go hand in hand! Such pledges are admirable, especially to people like myself and 14k others who have invested in season tickets and thus want to be entertained as well as seeing the boys add 3 priceless and handsome numbers to the leader board. Going on the 3 years of Dave Jones we’ve seen so far, the pledge can be backed up by solid evidential fact – his teams do play a rather dishy and fetching style of the game.

The only drawbacks that have occurred with such a system is that because we aren’t a team full of world-beaters and our most artistic and innovative outlet McPhail 9 times outta 10 has an off-day we become a tad predictable. And thus, teams learn how to compress and suck the life out of us like a dementor in the Harry Potter series of books, our passing goes astray, creativity packs her bags and goes to stay at her mother’s for a few days, and heads drop and droop quicker than my eyes after watching a post-match interview with Steve Coppell. On occasions like this we may have to revert to the Italian monopolised catenaccio method of football rather than sexy football, but fighting fire with fire may be the only way to get some teams out of their shell. By gently peeling the potato rather than just attempting to boil it outright, we’ll have to switch systems throughout the game and operate cautiously and intelligently with a speedometer and gear stick. Entertaining football for 90 minutes x 46 matches is just out of the question I’m afraid. But if Dave Jones can implement a ball retention system that has us effortlessly and seamlessly switching between gears then promotion or a near-miss would definitely receive the plaudits it deserves and even have some of us fans crowing about the team and manager’s endeavour, rhythm and tactical discipline. For a change!

Anyway, the season begins at last in less than 48 hours time. We get into the swings of things with a home encounter against my mid-table tip Southampton. Let’s hope we do better than our opening home fixture last season, a single goal loss to Stoke. I not only hope we’ll do better than that, I truly believe that we will. Call it hasty, call it silly, call it whatever you like: But I reckon we’ll win a fair few goals this weekend and start the season with a bang. So I say…

Cardiff City 4 – 1 Southampton

I’ll curse the following by saying they’ll score – Whittingham, Johnson, Surman, Parry, McCormack.

I’ll be back on the weekend to relay how I felt our players performed, who caught my eye for Soton, any other titbits that were relevant and interesting, and probably to reflect on how wrong my prediction was. Bloooooooobirds!!

Strawberry-faced p.s. I really did jump the gun over Oruma. He came and went quicker than the sun this summer.