Three-nil! I mean three-nil, not one-nil or two-nil but three of them and away from home, at St. James’. The shame of it, the ignominy, I can’t believe it. It’s taken me a few days just to think about it but it will be at least next season until I might get over it, that is if we end up in the same league.
It’s just too much to think about and too hard to bear, what with all of the comments and jokes at work. It wasn’t meant to happen. It’s not that it’s never happened before but that was a long time ago and I was there and did Shearer miss a penalty? I seem to remember and it took a long time to recover but I guess I’ll get over it.
But there was an air of inevitability about the result, perhaps not the score but certainly the result. They’d got a new manager, under a firestorm of press coverage for all of the wrong reasons and we’d just been knocked out of Europe. Both of us were struggling for league positions. A win for the Toon would certainly have seen us safe for another year and would have put them in a very precarious position. A win for the Black Cats has seen them lift themselves out of the relegation zone to 15th and the only (slight) consolation is that we have stayed at 13th. Unlucky for some?
Five more matches to go and 18th place is the one to worry about. It is beckoning. It will be a hard job for the bottom two to escape relegation but there are six of us, perhaps even eight clubs that are still in the fight to avoid the drop. Every match is going to be a tense even and the weekends are going to be nail-biters.
It’s not the end of the world, life will carry on and the world will keep turning. There are more important things to be concerned about. The banter will be fun and the gloating will be good humoured. I’ll be gracious and humble, after all it has been a long time.
I guess I’ll get over the result, especially if it means that we are both in the premiership next season but not the score. I mean, three-nil!
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 