Craven Cottage Newsround

When I mentioned earlier that the players were happy with the second goal on Saturday I really meant it.  I haven’t seen a goal celebrated so happily for ages.   Then they forgot to defend…

Says the official site.

“Six points might look like a lot but if we win and Birmingham lose, it goes down to just three points,” he said. “We need belief and confidence. We need to win on Saturday, and then we can look at Birmingham’s result.

“When our games are over I’m always looking for the other results; Birmingham, Wigan or Bolton. We need to get three points behind Birmingham. Their next game against Wigan won’t be easy and then they have Everton so we need to believe in ourselves.”

Nice bit from smfifteen about Pride Park.

I get all that, but for whatever reason I’m not as down on Pride Park as I am about the other stadia of its ilk.  Dunno.  My girlfriend went to uni in Derby in the 90s so we actually went to a few of the first games there.  It felt quite exciting at the time, and they had a half-decent team.  I remember Igor Stimac really looking the business at the back, Paulo Wanchope was about as fun a player as you could find, and they had bit part players like Dean Sturridge and Deon Burton who could be pretty handy on their day.  So perhaps that’s why I quite like the place.

The city itself is interesting too.  We used to hang around the city centre a fair bit.  Pubs, more studenty ones perhaps, but still, there was always stuff to do.   This time Hade suggested a few of her old haunts and it was quite odd.   Both of the first two pubs we went to had “Pub business for rent” signs on their front walls.  These pubs had been thriving ten years ago, served cracking food at tiny prices.   Now?   Only crisps available, no people in there, really bad tasting Guinness, and toilets… well, they’d clearly given up on dealing with those.   Which is fine, you don’t go to pubs to go to toilets (well sometimes…), but it did feel sort of indicative.

As you walk around Derby you see the same sort of thing.  A lot of the old shops are out, boarded up, whatever.  But there’s also a load of new things there too.  Some fairly nice looking new build residential buildings dotted around the place, and a number of roads looking like business is booming.   The retail park where Pride Park stands never used to have much in it; now it’s full up.   So it’s hard to know if Derby’s a town on the up, or one that’s feeling the economy’s pinch.   Both I guess.

Not that any of this matters, and it’s only my half-baked impressions on one day up there after 10 years away, but it was quite a strange feeling.  We both left feeling that perhaps Derby isn’t what it was, but then nothing is ever as good as it was, is it?  Particularly as we were younger then…

Anyway,  idiots and weather aside, it was a pretty good day.