Watching Brief!

I was just thinking to myself, what am I going to do this Saturday, as there’s no Premier league games until Boxing Day. I have informed my other half that shopping is not on the agenda, so there’ll have to be an alternative. Then I remembered that the traditional Christmas morning final, the Steel & Sons cup, had been switched to this Saturday instead. I then realised I could ‘kill’ two birds with one stone as United’s Irish cup opponents, Harland & Wolf Welders F.C., were one of the finalists. That means I not only get to see a match, I also get a look at the team standing between us and the next round of the ‘cup’. I asked a United contact after last Saturday’s game, if Tommy still had United’s forthcoming opponents watched, adding that after watching the 3-3 draw at Loughgall, it didn’t look like it. The spokesman assured me that not only did we have them watched, we actually had a plan for dealing with them. To say that this plan came badly unstuck, was to put it mildly, as my contact assured me that the players didn’t have the game down for a 3-3 draw. If they had played to get a 3-3 draw it would’ve explained how they missed three sitters in each half and how they allowed the home team to score 3 goals when they only had five chances. It would also have explained why our manager took off the only player who looked likely to unlock the home defence. Yes the Mark Picking substitution was a bit hard to fathom, but maybe he just wanted to give Austen Friel a run out before the visit of the Coleraine scum. Whatever his reasoning it meant we made a proper ‘horlicks’ of the game, wrong tactics, poor finishing and schoolboy defending. Of course I was also informed at the time we lost to Dundela in the County Antrim Shield, we’d had them watched also. Maybe having the opponents watched has no material benefit, as the teams we have beaten this season, with the exception of Portadown and Crusaders, have been pretty mediocre to say the least. But it is the season of goodwill, so I just hope Tommy and the boys can get it right for Boxing Day and also for the Irish cup. I would just like also to wish all United supporters a happy Christmas and remember the old saying, ‘East or West, ‘Sport is the best’!