This will be my last visit to our “ones to watch* series before the end of the season.
You’ll have to judge for yourself whether or not our readership, ably assisted by the Coventry Ninjas**, got it right at the beginning. For my part, with three of the five – Portsmouth, Charlton and Barnsley – fighting for second place and another two still with a chance of the playoffs I’m inclined to think they didn’t do too badly.
The problem is that the sixth club is Sunderland, and that’s who they are all fighting with.
Fleetwood Town
Sixer’s Substitute’s Soapbox: Fleetwood grab a point at Stadium of Light
Malcolm Dawson writes……….rather like Chris Maguire and Josh Maja, Pete Sixsmith has had a lot of football this week, yesterday …
Sixer’s Sevens: Fleetwood Town make their point
This going behind early’s getting to be a bit of an issue but at least we can come back from it this season, which is just as well. The bigger question is – will we do better as our injuries abate and players get fully up to speed? We’re still unbeaten and in the top 4 but I’d like to see us keeping clean sheets and popping in a few more goals. On paper, the teams we’re putting out look capable enough of winning but on the pitch maybe they are just not quite there yet.
I imagine the 29,000 spectators who were at the Stadium of Light this afternoon will be harbouring similar thoughts. Pete Sixsmith was one of them and we’ll know for sure what he thinks when he sends us his match report tomorrow. As a taster here’s the seven word text he sent as the final whistle blew:
The First Time Ever I saw Your Team: Fleetwood Town
John McCormick writes: I don’t know what Pete Sixsmith’s on about in his opening paragraph.
I can’t disagree with his comment about the average Rugby League prop forward but saying Maths sums are hard is a bit much, and surely he knows that some metals are soft. Perhaps his phrase “ very hard” covers both wood and metal. That kind of ambiguity is one of the niceties of the English language. Another nicety is the way it allows the construction of beautiful prose, words which flow and transport the reader to another world, place or time, but I suppose all languages have that power and it’s up to the writer to wield it.
Which Pete does once again, as he transports you to the coast of Lancashire via the Northern Premier League:
The Fleetwood Town Who are You? “we surprise people every year”
John McCormick writes: Ben Knapman writes a fan column for the Fleetwood Weekly News and Blackpool Gazette. He did a two hour run earlier this year to raise funds for the Bradley Lowery Foundation. If that’s not enough he produces a You tube blog about Fleetwood Town. And he does it all on top of his studies, which I reckon are just about to begin once again.
Yet, when M Salut was about to give up the search for a Cod Army volunteer for this week’s “Who are You?”, Ben found the time, stepped into the breach and did an excellent job of giving us an introduction to a club few of us would have expected to be meeting in the football league.
Over to M Salut and Ben:
The SAFC vs Fleetwood Town prize Guess the Score: can we spoil Joey’s day?
Monsieur Salut explains why there may or may not be a Fleetwood Town ‘Who are You?’. At least Guess the Score continues unaffected … (stop press – we now have a willing volunteer – see comment.)
Looking at the sheer number of fixtures in League One, I did wonder whether we’d be able to maintain “Who are You?” on a regular basis this season.
So far, so good. But Fleetwood Town – their stadium may be called Highbury but it houses only 5,327 fans – has proved a tough nut to crack.
Burton, Scunthorpe or Peterborough – who’ll join Sunderland, Barnsley, Charlton and Portsmouth?
UPDATE: we saw the poll had grown, improbably, to 11,000+ votes with Coventry way out in front on 26 per cent. Couldn’t blame Jimmy Hill this time but something was clearly up. For the culprits, go to the Coventry site Sky Blues Talk … but don’t get too cross as our lot would gladly have done the same to them. The poll, unsurprisingly, is suspended …
After Colin reposted our “who’s going up?” poll (on the left, below) in one of the Question and Answer sessions with our owners there was brief flurry of voting, as you might have expected given the number of visitors we had. And then things slowed down until, by the weekend, things were at a trickle, although votes were and are still coming in. Again, this was to be expected as the eyes of the football world were on Russia, where eight or nine ex-Sunderland players were taking part in the World’s most prestigious competition outside the Third Division. We now have over 800 votes cast, which is enough to be going on with, although Colin in his gut feeling poll, had almost as many when only one vote was allowed per person.
Barnsley drop, Burton and Posh replace Luton and Scunthorpe, Walsall get off the bottom in our promotion poll.
When I first put this poll up
, a mere week ago, I wrote
“this is predominantly a Sunderland site and we aren’t claiming results are totally unbiased… …Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that SAFC fans have not been blindly optimistic.”
After only a week I would not able to add a lot to this statement, were it not for two things. The first is that the poll was tagged to promote it to all League One fans for over 24 hours before it was promoted on our facebook page and then on Colin’s subsequent posts on this site. This gave us a small (very small, as it happens) hint of what the whole of the League One fanbase might think. The second was that Colin’s own poll closed, with some findings we can bring to bear on this one.
The bookies say Sunderland, Barnsley, Charlton, Portsmouth, Luton and Scunthorpe. What about you?
And so we have it: the fixtures are out. You’ll be getting your fill of dates, and conjecture from all over, no doubt, and enjoying the pre-season buzz of anticipation that it brings.
But when you’re tucked up under the sheets, reading Charles Buchan’s “Football Monthly” with a torch and reality bites, do you think you’ll win League One?
Or even get promoted?
If you do, please let us know. If you don’t, let us know who you think will make the grade.
‘I won a few things with them and had a little bit of success’
No game, and no need – or desire – for a relegation review so soon after the last one, which means I’m taking another meander around the Northwest to bring you up to date, more or less, with some of the clubs on this side of the Pennines.
I was going to title this piece “take a walk on the west side” in homage to wrinkly Pete’s propensity for including songs. You’ll find out why I didn’t at the end.
