Saturday, January 09, 2010

More disappintment: City 1-1 Blackpool

I sometimes wonder if those on the "inside" of football live on the same planet as the rest of the world generally, and fans in particular.

Take today, City after a bad loss on Boxing day to Plymouth, and THAT game against Peterboro took on Blackpool on a horrific day. Freezing temperatures and ice still saw over 19,000 fans, including a travelling support from Blackpool watch one of the few games on in the League programme today.

City were missing Jay Bothroyd from the team sheet, with no explanation (has he gone somewhere?), and Chopra on the bench for McCormack, and young Josh Magennis leading the line. They went ahead after just 9 minutes via Mark Hudons's header from a corner. Magennis was winning everything that came his way until he went off with a suspected broken leg (the ref gave a throw in for that tackle).

With the average height in City's midfield and forward line reduced to about 3ft 6in after Magennis's injury it was always going to be tough.

Blackpool equalised after 28 seconds of the second half, and piled on the pressure. City faltered, and looked most likely to concede again. When McCormack was substituted the fans sang "You don't know what you're doing" to Dave Jones, even though his replacement, Chopra was greeted enthusiastically. To be fair, I didn't think McCormack had played that well anyway, but others obviously thought differently.

The other song the fans sung (me included) when we were roundly under the cosh was "where's the money gone?" I like about 10,000 others have already signed up for the 2010/11 season ticket in what was widely seen as an attempt to give Dave Jones around £3m to spend in the January transfer window. However, City face a £2.7m tax bill to be paid by the end of this month, as well as carrying around another £20m in debts. I would be most displeased if money I've paid to the club 7 months before I needed to, to help the club fight promotion was used to pay the bloody tax man!

Anyway, back to the match, or rather the post match press conference, where Dave Jones allegedly said amongst other things, Supporters are entitled to boo and cheer but I've said before that I don't understand booing your own players."

Hasn't he twigged? We're not booing the players (much). We're booing him.

Up the City.

next up Bristol City on Tuesday in the re-arranged FA Cup match. My money's on a second postponement. If Bristol's pitch was frozen last weekend, it'll be frozen on Tuesday night.

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