If it’s sunny optimism you want you are dashed well in the wrong part of the interweb. Get out while you can. A dull sense of foreboding has donned its slippers and smoking jacket, put its feet up and is idly flicking through the Raymond Chandler novels, having made itself quite at home at AANP Towers over the last month or so. While the lilywhite machine has gradually run out of steam, those rump-fed runyons at l’Arse and Chelski have ground out win after blasted win, and from this pessimistic viewpoint it is nigh-on dashed impossible to envisage the much-needed away win tonight. The combination of the Chelski attack-dogs misfiring and our heroes suddenly revisiting 90s dance and discovering both the key and the secret to ripping up an opposition defence just seems a little too unlikely. Fingers crossed AVB and the Brains Trust have a slightly cheerier outlook, what?
Having beaten Man Utd (away) as well as Man City and l’Arse, it is of course eminently feasible that we will run amok tonight and leave this particular ‘orrible lot rueing the day. And then of course there is the Bale factor – 15 seconds unsupervised would probably suffice.
The pessimism, however, emanates from the occasional fallibility of our high defensive line (neither Daws nor the magnificent Vertonghen could really, truthfully, hand-on-heart, claim that spinning around, scampering back and making crucial tackles in the blink of an eye are really their respective fortes), which means that one cunning diagonal pass and it’s Hugo time. And damn their eyes, Mata, Hazard and Oscar have been slipping in cunning diagonal passes since the womb.
On top of which, our heroes do not quite have the perfect balance of earnest toil and mind-blowing ingenuity. Things do still tend to tick impotently sideways and out to the wings. The van der Vaart-shaped hole remains, the cunning diagonal womb-bred passes conspicuously absence. And on Saturday by golly there were an awful lot of passengers in lilywhite.
Woe, woe, woe. And we haven’t even kicked off yet. If you have got this far down the page you will probably have inferred that AANP is going to be awful company this evening, so spare a thought for my old man AANP Senior, and pray fervently that the A-game that briefly surfaced for 15 glorious minutes against Man City is rekindled tonight. Our season just about hangs on it.
One reply on “Chelsea-Spurs Preview: A Dull Sense of Foreboding”
Almost hoping someone does an Adabayor and gets sent off early so we have an excuse. Wish list for next season is a purveyor of womb-bred around the box trickery. Preferably Spanish speaking and slight of stature. Everyone else has one – or more (Mata, Hazard, Oscar, Aguero, Tevez, Nasri, Silva, Suarez, Coutinho etc etc). Iniesta or his mate would do nicely!