I hate this football shit!
There appears to be Blue Skies over St Andrews with the arrival of Harry Redknapp and his coaching team set the challenge of stopping the rot and keeping the Blues in the Championship. Blues fans are once again optimistic, loving being Blue for the first time since Zola took over. Bluenoses seem excited for the final home game of the season and Harry’s only home game this season by making it a sell-out for Saturday.
But, through all the positivity coming out of B9 and with everyone looking up at those Blue skies it feels as though someone could come along and piss in my pocket!
I can’t relax about our situation. I am happy, and I think for the final three games the management set-up we have is probably the best we could have hoped for to give us a shot at staying up. But with just 2 points between us and Blackburn and with two tricky games coming our way I can’t be blindly optimistic.
I know if Blues go down we go down together and there is part of me that thinks we need to go down to hit some sort of reset button. It will smack the Board around the face about how not to run a football club. It will enable us to start over with fresh ideas, possibly a re-jig of playing staff. I also think if we go down it will galvanise the fans even further. How that would manifest itself I do not know – protests, more partisan support on match days I do not know, but something will ignite.
Saturday will see us host Huddersfield Town, riding unexpectedly high in the play-offs this season, and depending on how their fixture with Wolves pans out could have cemented their play-off spot before arriving at St Andrews.
It will be interesting to see what sort of a team Redknapp goes with on Saturday. I saw comments about the team that played at Villa lacking pace. Is that something that will change against Huddersfield, or will Redknapp stick with physicality over speed to get a result?
Either way there is a big question mark over whether or not Harry will ever pick Frei in the starting line-up. I was one of the surprised ones not to see him in the squad last Sunday, but there must be something that Harry has seen in him during training that he’s not fond of. Either way, it’s not a ringing endorsement for Ewan Chester. As it was, only 2 players signed by Chester on behalf of Zola in January made it into the starting line-up on Sunday – were they unlucky, are they not of any real benefit, or do they just simply not fit into the Harry way?
In my eyes, I cannot see Blues setting up any different than we did Sunday. First and foremost, we have to be difficult to beat then worry about scoring goals after that. We can’t lose if we don’t concede. I know it probably lacks ambition, and the full house on Saturday will want to see their Blues team go hammer and nail at Huddersfield to get the win, but the stark truth of the matter is that we’re not good enough to defend in a gung-ho approach.
My Starting XI would be:
GK: Kusczcak;
RB: Nsue; CD: Bielik; CD: Shotton; LB: Grounds;
CDM: Kieftenbeld; CDM: Davis;
RM: Stewart; CAM: Adams; LM: Maghoma;
ST: Jutkiewitz
Having said that, I would be willing to throw a couple of the U23 players on the bench, Wes McDonald being one. One thing has been apparent since we sent Cotterill out on loan is that we have no options out wide on the right. A problem that really needs to be resolved for the start of next season.
I will head to St Andrews on Saturday in both trepidation and expectation. It’s a horrible way to feel going into a must win game of football. One thing is guaranteed, We will Keep Right On!
The Blue Nomad 