Frozen planet comes to Gander Green Lane but Sutton United survive.
In tough weather conditions it was never going to be a Mona Lisa game, but Ajiboye took his goal like a great artist. Bouzanis made two excellent saves to keep us alive in a tough game. At times Barrow dinked the ball around nicely but were wasteful up front, no matter how many corners they got. This game was not in my view an awful one, scrappy in tough weather conditions is how I would characterise the game. As Matt the Manager says post-match, the team put bodies on the line to get this result and you could see that in the last ten or so minutes when we retreated into our shell to defend our one goal lead. In the circumstances, a good result bearing in mind we have six injured players, it takes us from seventh heaven to super sixth.
The weather conditions influenced the game and those stood on the terraces. Dress code for today’s game for me was Uniglo Heattech crew neck long sleeve t-shirt with matching Heattech gloves with a few layers. Today was colder than the Tuesday game against Mansfield where I saw some bloke wearing what I thought were oven gloves on his hands. Now if you want awful then then the first half of Sutton v Mansfield was awful with today being an improvement. In both our games today against Barrow, on Tuesday it was Mansfield with us winning both. That is what counts. How we go about getting the job done is secondary. Football is a sport and entertainment is not guaranteed, it randomly happens. I get that at the premiership level football is marketed as an entertainment product, Man Utd have the theatre of dreams but recently it has had more nightmares that you would care to imagine. I get that if you have spent anywhere from forty to ninety pounds on a game you may feel aggrieved if the game is not ‘entertaining.’ I tell you what is entertaining -)
“Waking up at six AM on a cool warm morning
Opening the windows and breathing in petrol
An amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard
Watching the tele and thinking about your holidays”
If its entertainment, insight, and beer you want and you need it bad then a Jim Good Lunch is one place to start for what is known in the jargon as your match day experience. I learn something about the game from every table I have been sat at for the pre match lunches. Then for your post-match experience the players bar is the Ibiza experience with sunshine provide by AB’s gold jacket.
Coming up this week is the Papa John Trophy game against Stevenage. I am not boycotting this trophy, just have not go the time but be assured if we made it to a trophy final at Wembley, I would do a John Terry and rush to the game to get a pizza the action.
All is well in the Sutton Garden but no matter how well you are doing both the games over the Christmas period and in the depths of winter are where a team’s fortunes can go down as well as up. Then after that we enter the business end of the season. If at the end of all that we finish higher than the seventeenth place that Harrogate achieved on their first season in EFL 2 that will do me. Onwards.
