Sixer’s Soapbox: Spurs add to an already cruel February

It may be a taxing time for Harry Redknapp, but Pete Sixsmith sees his Spurs team show Sunderland exactly what you need to be a Champions League team.

T S Eliot (not a renowned football fan) wrote that “April is the cruellest month”. For Sunderland fans, replace April with February and you have a truism if ever there was one.

February sorts out the teams who will and the teams who won’t. Go into March top of the League, be it FA Premier or Northern, and the chances are that you will finish the season there. Ditto at the bottom.

Hit a slump in February and you can wave goodbye to a top six finish – it happened in 2000 with 2 points out of 9 and again in 2001 with a similar return and with an FA Cup exit thrown in.

This year we have played three games in February and have lost all three. We have scored some good goals, played some neat and tidy football – and have defended like Stockport County on a bad day.

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Soapbox: Things I will never do

Having not missed a match home or away all season, except on the odd school night, Pete Sixsmith laments opting out of  the Chelsea game on the grounds of cost. Instead, the Horans’ sofa takes one hell of a beating.  

I have a short list of things I know that I will never do in my lifetime, things like never voting Tory or taking up English folk dancing. One of the football related things I vowed I would never do (alongside banging a drum at a match) was to pay £48.00 to watch a run-of-the-mill Premier League game.

Now, one of my golden rules has been broken. I have never ever voted Tory (or Lib Dem – they’re the same, aren’t they?) and you will never see me skipping around a market place with bells on my feet and waving knotted hankies at all and sundry. However, I do wish that I had spent £48.00 on Sunday on a ticket for Stamford Bridge.

If I had children (poor little sods) I could regale them in my dotage about how I was there at SJP in 1990, Hillsborough in 1973, Roker for the Manchester United replay in 1964. But I would not be able to say that I was at Stamford Bridge the day Sunderland slaughtered Chelsea (Paul Merson’s words, not mine).

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