All Action, No Plot

1. Dragusin and That Tweaked Back-Four Reasonably enough, Our Glorious Leader persisted with the VDV-at-left-back-and-Dragusin-in-the-centre gambit, all concerned having performed passably well in midweek, and our opponents yesterday having already been relegated. Indeed, as with Burnley a couple of weeks back, the fact that Sheffield United were literally a Championship-standard team does skew the takings […]

1. Shiny New Formation AANP is a creature of habit. Meals at the same time each day; lights out at the same time each night; a dram of the good stuff at the same time each morning – one knows where one stands. One knows what’s coming. And it was in this spirit of continuity […]

1. Left-Back: Skipp A penny for Emerson Royal’s thoughts, what? Truth be told, the lad seems to harbour such delusions of his own ability, genuinely convinced that no finer player than he ever trod the earth, that he probably viewed the selection of Skipp as a means of protecting him for the City game on […]

1. Bissouma Being something of a glutton for punishment, and having had younger members of the clan to entertain during the live production, AANP treated himself to a repeat viewing of this one, and was actually struck by the fact that, aside from a couple of key shortcomings, this was not quite the horror-show that […]

1. Set-Pieces Those who know AANP best would describe him as a cheery fellow at all times (actually that might represent a slight mangling of the truth, Ms AANP tending to use terms like ‘grumpy’ and ‘stubborn’ and so forth), but the point is that I’m the sort of cove who, even after last night’s […]

1. Corners Again, Blast It Some have, understandably I suppose, raged that our first half was various shades of abysmal; and on the telly-box last night Ashley Williams, not a chap to whom I’d ever paid much attention previously, drifted into existence and promptly plummeted in my estimation by opining that the other lot were […]

1. Our Defending for the First Goal Odd to say now, or course – hindsight and all that – but for a third or so of the game (the first of them, in case you were wondering) I thought our lot looked pretty sharp. Newcastle started the game bursting at the seams with vim and […]

1. A Pretty Discombobulating Plot If your route home from N17 yesterday evening was one of those ruminative ones then I can pop a comforting arm around your shoulders, remove the arm to pop a hand on the Bible in order to swear that I’m telling the truth, pop the arm back around your shoulders […]

1. Winger to Winger It only took eight months, but with Our Glorious Leader reasoning that right-footed chaps on the right and left-footed chaps on the left might be a ruse with something about it, within five minutes we had drawn blood. Bentancur, Bissouma and Maddison as a midfield three might have attracted a murmur […]

1. Kulusevski On The Right… That AANP reacts to Kulusevski’s deployment on the left by burying his head in his hands and noiselessly weeping is a well-known truth, and just to hammer home its salient points the Swede kindly offered a live-action example of precisely its ills, within the first two minutes on Saturday. He […]