Fixtures. It’s one of those football words that really adds to the richness of the game. I remember when I was about nine and our Cub Scouts pack joined a league. We couldn’t believe it. A league! With fixtures and a league table and everything! It was like real football. I remember after a few games I came home and said to mum that if anything our league seemed a bit faster than the professional game. We didn’t have many fouls or throw ins, so the action could go on uninterrupted for ages, I reasoned. Mum gently suggested that the professional game was also quite fast. But that didn’t matter to me, I was in the thick of things, a real football league.
Anyway, it’s always exciting to see the fixture list for the new season, especially when you have weddings to attend. We have one in Darlington on 6th September. I was hoping for Sunderland away on the 5th, but joy oh joy, there’s no game! So I can get on with the weekend without worrying about football.
There is another wedding, this one in Leeds, but I can’t remember when that is. I think it’s November, which means I’m probably not missing much then either. So hurray.
The list is here. We aren’t allowed to reproduce the list (read this if you want to see just how daft modern football is) but a quick analysis won’t do any harm:
Portsmouth away – cracking start and should be a grand day out
Blackburn home (likely to be moved for European reasons)
Chelsea home – early season fun
Then it gets messy, with Villa away, Everton home, Wolves away and Arsenal at home, then West Ham away, Hull at home, City away, Liverpool home, Wigan and B’ham away then Bolton at home. We might go through that lot without winning a thing.
Of course thing have moved on and Roy’s made us good, but still a run of hard home games and (well, any) away games is a troublesome prospect.
December gets easier for a time, and January and February look okay, then we have a half-tricky run in (away to Liverpool, home to Wolves, away to Everton, home to West Ham, away to Arsenal). So it’s all about the middle of the season. There seem to be some fairly poor sides in the division this year so hopefully no need to worry, but I am concerned that fixture related issues can lead to hard runs of games which can lead to a loss of perspective (I kept telling people last year that even if we had a great season we’d lose a third of our games and all the misery this would entail) and therefore a bit of unecessary negativity. We shall see.
