At home to Sheffield United with seasonal expectation.
Someone, somewhere, thought it would be a good idea to have us playing at home on the Friday before Christmas. And so it came to pass that forty thousand people will be thrown onto a transport system creaking under the weight of the German Market, the annual Christmas Up Town Drinkathon and huge swathes of the country going home via the busiest motorway intersection in Europe, to watch Sheffield United be put forward as a pre-Yuletide sacrifice. You can guarantee that whoever that someone was, they won’t be near any of it.
Still, it’s just one more obstacle on our road to world domination so welcome to what another little genius is bound to call the Hawkeye Derby, because as we all know, if that save hadn’t been made the rest of the season would have been exactly the same, we’d have got relegated and nothing different would have happened at all, ever.
They’ve got a manager who they got rid of when they were bottom of the league last time they were in it. They went down and he went on to become Watford’s Manager of the Month before coming back now they’re bottom of the league again. Talking of return they’ve also got Cameron Archer, who we’ll be getting back if they go down, or some such agreement when we sold him to them. Boubacar Kamara’s suspended after the Battle of Brentford and there’s another couple of injuries that probably won’t have cleared up in time.
Sheffield United are, in the words of the song, getting battered everywhere they go. Not to put too fine a point on it we, at Fortress Villa Park, are unbeatable. No matter how many players we have injured or suspended we could pick replacements from out of the crowd and win this one. And when we win, everyone knows what the table will look like. Merry Christmas.
