Bring it
Hola. So, as you'll have noticed (regular readers including those that fear the comments section) that the site has changed again. It's an annual refurbishment and this year it's about making it easier for me to drop in and write like the old days when this place was set up like a traditional blog.
Social media dominates and has killed off most places like this because, guess what, everyone is a blogger now and people prefer 140 characters to 10,000 word epics. I love a bit of Twitter but also enjoy being able to craft the occasional muse here, for the more patient amongst us. Most of those throw-away articles of yesteryear tend to be better suited for real-time conversations in Twitter, so I have no idea whether the new look here will inspire me or not. I'd move to something like Wordpress if I could but this place also houses the physical mp3s for The Fighting Cock which equates to thousands of downloads per week = bandwidth expense and Squarespace, bless 'em, gives us unlimited width.
As for the comment section, all legacy discussions dating back to the very start have been archived since changing to Disqus, which is what you see below this article. This change means no more alias accounts and abuse. So a fresh start, be it one that has rendered many old readers shy.
Football then, yeah?
November. What a month.
(H) Villa
(H) Anderlecht (cup)
(A) Scum
(H) Hammers
(A) FK Quarabag (cup)
(H) Chelsea
It will make or break us, right? We've not lost since the opening day. We have a mean defence. We have a decent goal difference thanks to battering Bournemouth 5-1 but make hard work of killing teams off. This has left us with a reasonable rate of momentum but not quite at the tempo we need to settle into the top four placements and start posing questions about likely ambitions for the rest of the season.
The flux in the top bit of the Premier League continues to persist, perfectly illustrated by Chelsea's attempt to recapture their history and get relegated. I'm sure true fans will remain loyal if they did go down. All 200 of them will turn up for Championship home games. Sure, it's borderline ridiculous to suggest they'll struggle for that much longer. It's also in the small print for them to upstage any potential for Tottenham happiness, so don't write them off just yet.
Yet their wobble along with the inevitable Arsenal choke (please, for the love of everything in the universe apart from what festers in the swamp down the road, don't let them win it) and City periodically hiccuping, the 'top four' isn't a certainty to be the usual suspects. For now. Give it until Feb 2016.
Manchester United have a wealth of talent, much like Chelsea, but continue to fine tune in a reoccurring cycle, never quite able to navigate around familiar obstacles that they keep walking into.
Klopp's Liverpool are transitioning and until their fitness levels increase, gengen won't have that much of an impact on the rest of us. Jurgen also needs to acclimatise to the wall of no noise. Not much kop compared to the colourful atmosphere of his Dortmund peak.
Leicester, Palace and West Ham are the jesters, 'aving a larf with aspirations that they're not meant to play a part in, so they get patronised by most whilst we wait for their implosion. Them not imploding would make it all so much more entertaining. Apart from the Claret and Blue team. The Olympic Stadium was, after-all, built for amateurs.
November and the festive period will no doubt separate the boys from men and in Tottenham's case, make men of boys. It all starts with tonight. With no disrespect aimed at the visitors and their predicament, Spurs need to use the occasion as one of those statement defining moments. We brushed aside the injury plagued Bournemouth away from home, so in our own patch we need to dismantle Aston Villa, box them up into eleven little parcels and mail them back to the Midlands apologising for the damage inflicted on their night out.
Harry Kane is back in the goals. A follow up session will really bury the concerns of early season in a shallow grave whilst he climbs the tallest tree and roars like a beast once more. It's also a requirement to be professional for the sake of a buffer and the aforementioned momentum. We've got them lot at the weekend. Never an easy place to go and Wenger is currently 'in' (which might change after their visit to Munich). With Ozil reinventing football according to all the think pieces about how brilliant this £40M player is (because we need statistics to make a player as much as we need them to break them) - three points against Villa is a good foundation to start from before we venture into Mordor.
Traditionally, losing away to the scum rejuvenates their season. In addition, beating them at the Lane tends to turn them into unbeatable b*stards. So either way we're screwed. However, this time they're in form. So if we win, that's the title in the bag for us. Nothing wrong with my mental algorithm here, I promise.
Anderlecht is squeezed in-between the two. That's three games in a week. Bit of rotation (sacrifice?) on Thursday night could be pivotal for Mauricio Pochettino also. If we lose mid-week and the lose the weekend, then it's full on panic stations where those waiting to pounce will do so and start screaming for an English coach...you know, like, I don't know...Tim Sherwood. Win both games and then just refer to my algorithm: glory.
West Ham then arrive for another attempt to generate a t-shirt tagline. They've beaten all the 'big teams' away from home so I guess that means we're safe.
Quarabag will only matter if we beat Anderlecht. Then it's manager-less Chelsea. What? It's bound to happen. It's the law that demands you sack your coach before you play Tottenham. Bringing it full circle, Jose will probably still be in charge and they'll dick us and win and then go on to conquer their physical and psychological fatigue.
You nervous? Dizzy? Bare-chested, thumping for it?
God have mercy on the buzz I have at the time of writing if we fail to win tonight.
