da bet7：
da luck：
On a day that was geared towards celebrating our return to the big time, this particular Saturday evening in a damp and dreary North-East turned out to be something of a washout.
With the Championship title still very much up for grabs – due to Reading dropping two points against Crystal Palace at the Madjeski stadium – a win at Middlesbrough would have given us all to play for going into the final weekend of the season.
However, a couple of weeks ago in my very first blog entry for this website, when looking forward to the month of April, I commented on the fact that Saints never do anything the easy way. In fact, such is our penchant for the dramatic, I firmly expect the club to announce that they will be running courses over the summer months entitled, “Life. How to make it difficult for yourself!” The first lesson of which will be free of charge but will entail students to try and convince the ticket office staff that tickets actually exist and are supposed to be on sale!
Going into this match, the omens were good. Our two previous promotions to the top-flight (in 1966 and 1978) had all but been sealed in the penultimate match of the season, both away from home. Middlesbrough also had the worst home league scoring record in the division going into this match, as they had only found the net a meagre 20 times in 22 games at the Riverside this season.
On top of which they had not won at home in their previous five attempts, and to say that most Saints fans were optimistic, if still a tiny bit apprehensive, would probably be an understatement.
Our midweek win at Peterborough put us in the driving seat as far as automatic promotion was concerned, thanks in part to West Ham’s failure to acquire all three points at a Bristol City side who were desperately trying to save themselves at the other end of the table. With West Ham’s next match on Monday night, we had the chance to clinch automatic promotion and pull within a point of Reading at the top. And despite the best of starts, which was given to us thanks to Billy Sharp’s lightning quick goal after just 46 seconds, we conspired to throw away a winning position in a league match, for the first time since 29th September 2009 when we lost 3-2 at home to Bristol Rovers.
The timing of the ending of that run of not losing after taking the lead could not have been worse, as now we have to hope that West Ham slip up yet again in their Monday night match. By doing so, they will take the pressure off us on the final day. Our last match of the season is at St. Marys, against a Coventry City side that bade farewell to the Championship on Saturday, along with Portsmouth. The general consensus among fans is that we will win with no problems at all.
This was the same feeling that fans had going into the Portsmouth match, and look how that turned out! Teams that have nothing to play for can be at their most dangerous, as if the pressure is on us to get a result, with a nervy and expectant crowd on their backs, things can quite quickly go wrong.
I do not want to dwell too much on what went wrong at Middlesbrough, because a lot of it has been said already in previous blogs, and nothing has changed. Yes the referee was awful, but then again so were we, especially at the back where we never looked comfortable up against a Middlesbrough team who had an obvious height advantage.
Before kick-off, I had us down to draw this match, so in a way a defeat does not make much difference, and I still believe that we will get promoted on Monday night when we are not in action. This will leave Saturday as a day of celebration, not only of a job well done, but in typical British style, a job that should have been completed a few weeks ago.
[ad_pod id=’writer-1′ align=’right’]