The Second, Last Throw of the Dice

Another week goes by and a couple more players in blurry photographs appear on social media holding the ubiquitous Poppies shirt, standing alongside an increasingly panicky looking Jim Le Masurier.  That poor bloody shirt has been handled by so many temporary visitors this season it must feel like it's on a table in the entrance of a Primark store on the first day of the sales.  I'm not sure how many more times we'll be welcoming kinda-nothing players who are of a level and quality that the prospect of a handful of paydays at a struggling Poppies side seems like a good career move.  Surely we can only have so many more changes in personnel if not performances before we're all reaching for "deckchair" and "Titanic" cliché.

A look at the League table, best done like my Missus watching a horror film - through fingers or from behind a cushion, squeaking, "has it gone yet?" paints an ugly, stark, but clear picture.  Basically us or Sudbury are going to fall off the footballing map at the end of the season.  As we have yet play Subdury we have no idea how indifferent a team they are.  Were it not for Nuneaton's latest demise they would be sitting above us in the table.  As it is, with Nuneaton's results now a distant irritant, we sit 4-points proud of Sudbury.

We know very little about the club who are standing between us and consecutive relegations.  What we DO KNOW is that not only do they have 3 or 4G pitch, but they now have permission for a second artificial pitch.  TWO artificial pitches to make money out of, while we continue to try to play on our flooded or frozen cabbage patch with, seemingly, no chance of ever getting just the one new surface.  They also seem to have a positive outlook to the remainder of the season, making a big feature on their social media of the run in, grandly calling it "THE RUN IN!"   They also count, switching between the blog and Wikipedia with masterful aplomb, former Poppies players Jamie Griffiths, Bradley Thomas and former Poppies Assistant Manager Dean Greygoose among their less than stellar array of old boys.

What they don't have is a terrific number of supporters or the best of luck when it comes to teams going bust.  They had managed to do the double over Nuneaton and must have been less than chuffed when those results were wiped.  Their attendance against local rivals Needham Market attracted an extra 300 fans (more than double their average gate) to the hotly contested B1115 / B1078 derby.  Nor do they have, unlike us, the very strong likelihood that they'll be playing a 38 year-old defender as a makeshift centre forward for the rest of the season.

But, probably the best thing they have over us is they don't seem to share our almost crushingly fatalist outlook and our world-weary pessimistic self-destructiveness somehow magically allied to a blind belief that we are still some sort of force in non-league football.  The bastards.

Probably nice guys and may even be able to play a bit of football. 
Unlikely to reach double figure appearances for the Poppies between them 
as we scramble around for a magic personnel formula rather than
try old-school nonsense like playing with heart, passion and fight.