From Injuries to Ireland
It was a terrible shame to hear about the injury suffered by Rowan Vine last week and I wish him well with his recovery.
We certainly felt his loss at the weekend’s game against Preston, not having a player of his quality in your side makes you realise just how good he is. He is someone that can suddenly make an impact, a rare breed of footballer that can have you on the edge of your seat in excitement and his absence was felt heavily on Saturday.
He gets his fair share of stick, I’ve heard him called lazy or unproductive, I prefer to think of him as mercurial! He is a classy player though and a real joy to watch and it’s a great pity we’ll be without him for the remaining games.
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Talking of the Preston game what a hilarious result that was! How often have we sat there and watched Rangers throw away leads over the years knowing exactly what’s coming? It’s happened time after time after time and it was brilliant to actually be on the other end of it for once.
As soon as that board went up for four minutes injury time I just knew we would equalise and when we did I couldn’t stop laughing! It was a travesty of justice for Preston, a thoroughly underserved point for us but good lord it made my night!
It’s a great sign as well that this team just will not give up no matter how poor they are playing. They always say the sign of a good side is to pull results out when you don’t deserve them. Based on that performance we’re on our way to being a bloody good side!
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So we move onto face Hull City this weekend, one of the season’s unlikely trio of promotion chasers. I’m a big fan of small clubs doing well but Jesus what an awful Premier League it’ll be if Bristol City, Stoke and Hull all went up, the other 17 teams would be over the moon I’m sure.
I quite admire Bristol City’s moxy and out of the three of them I’d rather like them to do it, Stoke are Stoke and Hull make such a girly fuss about us it’d be brilliant to throw a spanner in the works on Saturday.
It won’t be easy but it’s great to be going into games like this knowing we’ve got as good a chance as ever to get something out of them. It’s even better not having to go into it crapping yourself about getting to fifty points though!
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More doubts have been cast over Luigi De Canio’s future this week and frankly I’m starting to get a bit worried that he isn’t that settled here. Getting mugged on Saturday night wont have helped none either.
He hinted in an Italian interview this week that he would consider his future in the summer. Maybe he’s playing hardball, I hope so but I also heard reports from Italy early this week that we were sounding out former Cagliari manager Marco Giampaolo. I dismissed that as rubbish at the time but who knows?
Hopefully this will all turn out to be nothing more than a poorly translated article as whilst there would be a queue of fantastic managers a mile long wanting to get into this club I don’t think another change would help us right now. On top of that I’ve grown quite fond of the little fella and would hate to see him go.
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When Adam Bolder joined Sheffield Wednesday on loan he had the following to say
“I am quite an attacking midfielder, hopefully I can get box to box, get some tackles in and hopefully come up with a few goals.”
I cracked up at the time, an attacking midfielder indeed! Well who’s laughing now eh! Two goals in the Steel City derby must have surely earned him a some sort of place in folklore and probably secured a permanent move in the summer for him too.
Bolder’s exit seems imminent and, like many of the players we’ve said goodbye to lately, he played his part at the time but the club rapidly moved past their abilities.
Normally it’s quite difficult to work out who will go and stay in the summer, this year things look pretty cut and dried, Bolder will surely be followed through the exit door by Rehman, Barker, Walton, Bailey and Nardiello and with doubts hovering over Jake Cole and Damion Stewart’s long term involvement it looks to be another summer of change in the offing.
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A massive congratulations to Martin Rowlands on his return to the Irish international set up, Gigi promised to have a word in Giovanni Trapattoni’s shell like if he kept up his good form and it looks like he’s been good to his word!
Rowly still has to make the cut from the initial 40 man squad down to the final 28 but looking down the list of the other midfielders picked he must stand a decent chance of that. He’s in the form of his life right now and it would be richly deserved.
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And finally, I spent some time last week upgrading the blog site to an improved software package and hopefully this will work out better than the old one. Comments are open once again and fingers crossed the spam should be controlled so please feel free to comment on all our posts below and I’ll be back next week with another Ron Around.
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