Saturday 8 May 2010

Uncertain outcomes

Ann Arbor, Mi: My sleep has been disturbed more than once by media calls, some indignant that I am not immediately available to go a studio. And, no, they haven't been asking about the permutations in League 1 today. For my thoughts on the election, go to my Analysing British Politics blog.

I have never been to Boundary Park. One match I did think of going to was fogged off. In the early days of the Premiership, Oldham actually played at that level. But the far from prosperous town lives in the shadow of Manchester in football terms.

Composer Sir William Walton was born there and tried to avoid going back. Roué Duff Cooper was the MP in the 1930s (when he was our ambassador in Paris after the war his wife had to comfort his official mistress after he started chatting up a likely prospect at an embassy party). Duff had little interested in manufactures, but enjoyed eyeing up the mill girls.

What has this got to do with football? It's what they call 'local colour' which you fall back on when you don't have something useful to say (or it has been said already by the likes of Charlton Athletic Online). It has been an exhausting and often frustrating campaign and I am close to being 'written out' on Charlton. I have my line: Parky is a decent manager at this level, we are a League 1 team playing League 1 football, but it can wear thin through repetition and over exposure, just like Gordon Brown.

Unfortunately while we are playing today I will be giving my paper on the bovine diahorrea virus here in Ann Arbor, Mi. I hope our players get the runs, but in the direction of the Oldham goal. We need the big mo going into the play offs, rather than losing it at the last hurdle like Dave Cameron, regardless of results elsewhere. Of course, you can burst like the Clegg bubble and still get a result.

This evening I will be dining in a 'cute' town called Chelsea. By then I hope that Charlton will be set up for their first play off leg at home against Swindon.

No comments: