4. The future’s bright, the future’s Orange. – It was certainly fitting that on such a uniquely ridiculous day, the current leaders and only unbeaten side in the League should lose their match and record to the team planted firmly at the bottom. Even more so to a team whose steadfast dedication to the Hyacinth Bucket school of grandiose has them insisting the current hue of their famous strip colour is still ‘Old Gold’, when it’s quite clearly some kind of dirty orange. Not quite as orange as Holland’s Oranje perhaps, no. Nor as Tangeriney as Blackpool’s jovial sea side number, but still orange. It may indeed be ‘old’ gold, but a gold that’s so old it’s now become orange, or a version of gold before they’d worked out what gold actually was, and then decided that that was gold, and this was actually orange. Not helping my peculiar fixation on this, was the fact that everyone in Wolverhampton seemed to be orange. Or ginger to be more precise (and fairer.) Literally (in the Redknappian sense) every single crowd reaction shot and valedictory end of game euphoric crowd pan revealed wave upon wave of ginger people, in orange shirts, including at one point a teenage Sideshow Bob in a plaster mask. Aside from unleashing my inner colour Nazi, the game proved more testament to the unpredictable, fatalistic, nihilistic, Sods-lawian, Fergusonian ‘bloody hell’ nature of football. A man with preposterously high cheek bones scored two, one off his back, and the visitors failed to create anything of note in the second half as the oranges played for time as early as the 60th minute. But who can blame them? Despite what Arsene Wenger thinks (which would be a great title of a book I want to write) a team like Wolves have every right to play to their strengths with survival on their minds, and it’s up to the more talented, visiting side to break them down. Put simply Arsene, “Oranges are not the only fruit.”
5. Hoof! There it is…Huth! There it is. – We’re currently living – for those who hadn’t noticed – in a post Allardyce world. It’s a glorious age of free flowing loveliness where the Premier League can rack up 41 goals in a day and even Wigan and Blackburn can churn out an exhilarating 4-3 in front of the thousands of people who never seem to be at the JJB. It takes allsorts though, and for those odd souls still missing a little bit of Big Sam, thank the burly, hoof ball heavens for Stoke City. Along with almost every other top flight fan in the country, Stoke’s followers got to enjoy a raucous, passionate, end to end, high scoring encounter, topped by a last minute winner in dramatic circumstances. Only Stoke though God bless ‘em, did it in such a uniquely Stokian way. Their first was probably a foul, and offside and poked in by a huge obstructive striker a yard about amidst a goal mouth scramble. The second came off somebody’s back, and probably their arm, before it fell in off the lumbering steamrolling thigh of Robert Huth. The third was quite a decent goal, or what commentators call a very decent goal when they don’t want to say good, and usually when they’re being patronizing or talking about Stoke, by which they mean a long free kick which the defender bundled in at the back post. But oranges are not the only fruit. I doth my cap to you Pulis, you are a maverick in these times.
This article was first published on FootballFanCast.com
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