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What a night

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After having spent much of the evenings this week watching late night footy or being out and about with the Molton Brown boys, I was actually quite knackered and I wasn’t really looking forward to last night’s match at Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane.

By the way, I do recognise that despite being about football – the number one sport globally – this is still a bit of niche post for most readers, but MMIRIM, so I’m putting it here anyway.

But I watched, and thank [Deity] I did.

Grit, courage, effort, attitude, belief, damn hard work.

What a night.

There’s a thing that I have seen from watching almost several hours of football over the last n years, and that’s that the best teams somehow manage to grind a positive result out of games that they really shouldn’t be able to. And when you don’t play at your best, but you still manage to get a win: that’s the sign of a team that’s going places.

Me though, not so much. The adrenaline coursing through my veins meant that I didn’t get to sleep until about1:30, and amazingly – if anything – I’m more broken this morning than I was going into last night.

EDIT: Look, not everyone enjoyed it.
Here’s an excerpt from a Sunderland fans internet comment about the game:

“Shellshocked doesn’t go far enough to describe how I feel.
I feel utterly numb and inconsolable right now.
I feel like I ought to flog the cheap tat that is Sheffield hallmarked silver that’s in my collection to make a point. That place has always made vastly inferior crap anyway. I hate that village in Yorkshire. I hate everything about it.”

Mate. It was a 1-0 defeat.
Calm your tits, hold onto your silver collection, take a deep breath and try to enjoy your weekend.
Good luck with real life.

Day 99 – That was fun

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I must admit that when I sat down for Sheffield United’s match with Tottenham Hotspur yesterday evening, I wasn’t exactly brimming with positivity. We haven’t really got going since the resumption of the league (although not everything has gone our way).

But coming off the back of three straight defeats, with key man Jack O’Connell still injured and our midfield duo of Lundstrom and Fleck unavailable (shoulder injury and “physical discomfort” (??!?) respectively), we literally didn’t even have enough players to fill the subs bench.

Not that they had any choice in the matter, but the new format of one game every three days really doesn’t suit the smaller clubs in the league. Spurs have only played a couple of games since the restart, and were unbeaten, so they were well rested and looking confident.

Not. Great. Omens.

We started well, but after a bright 10 minutes, we were under the thumb. Defending well, but trapped in our own half and the commentators were just waiting for the inevitable.

I should point out here that I was watching in the living room, while Mrs 6000 went through her work emails on the couch opposite and the kids were in an online Scouts meeting. The beagle was dozing in front of the fire. An image of domestic bliss, albeit that I was watching in pretty much silence, occasionally muttering through gritted teeth, when suddenly, just after the half hour: Berge, Baldock, Basham… Berge!

It caught us all by surprise.

I exploded quite a bit.

The laptop was well caught by my wife on the second attempt after a brief – but entertaining – juggling act. The boy literally half fell off his chair, headphones dislodged, unwittingly amazed at the speed with which adrenaline can act.

The beagle has yet to recover fully.

If anything, this goal (and the instant reply, which was then disallowed) (hate the rule, not the ref) merely increased the tension in the household. It was a stressful remaining hour.

Of course, history will show that we added a second through Mousset and a third through McBurnie (which was when I began to relax), before Kane scored a consolation goal for them in the last minute.

I’ll pop the video up on here when it’s released later today DONE, because that was one of those nights I will always want to remember.

The beagle? Not so much.

 

Snowy football

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My brother sent me a photo, which I think came from the Sheffield Star newspaper, possibly more specifically from their correspondent here. It’s from last weekend’s Championship match at Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane, in which Sheffield United played Nottingham Forest.
The weather wasn’t great. The match finished 0-0.

But the photo needed some playing with in Lightroom, in my humble opinion. (See here for details of why I appropriate other people’s photography).

When I saw it, it reminded me of a dramatic painting, so obviously I made it into a dramatic painting.

Make it bigger by clicking here.

The blizzard conditions are obviously what makes this photo so eye-catching, but it’s the juxtaposition of that chaos with the stability of the horizontal touchline in the foreground that I really like. It’s almost cinematic.

I’m not an artist, but if I was, I think I’d like to paint something this good.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to content myself by attempting to make artwork out of other people’s photos.