Foreign Halliday. Subs Fail To Make an Impact As City See 3 Points Fleeting
It’s approaching one of the highlights of the year, the clocks go forward, the sun comes out and so do the women in theirtight, white jeans. Now the hectic March period is coming to a close, City head off for warm weather training in Portugal and by the look at Phil Parkinson’s face during his post-match interview with the Pulse it was clear he wanted to ring Stelliosat EasyJet and cancel the entire thing as punishment!
After returning home at 4am from rainy Reading and playing “Sexy Monopoly” in a local bar, the week couldn’t really get any worse, especially when the sexiest Monopoly gets is when it’s the fixed sticker game at McDonalds where you can ponder the thought of winning one of 500million 10% off vouchers for Woolworths or failing that, a soggy hash brown.
This Fleetwood game day started off well - David Markhamssmurf-like blue woolly hat had us all giggling like a group of ladies at an Ann Summers party, though the only eggs we were handling in the Press Box were of the Cadburys Crème variety and Simon Parker wasn’t prancing around the stand in his crotch-less underwear pretending to have an elephant strapped to his waist.
Filth aside and back onto the footballing matters, we were also witnessing Gary MacKenzie completely boss the game with his fearsome Scottish stature and solid presence, he’s the sort of guy who would do anything to defend and protect a Kinder Surprise Egg and adopt the toy helicopter inside of it -I feel he’s going to be a pioneer who paves the way for others during the final batch of games this season, especially with the injury to Andrew Davies.
Along with Gary Mac, the day belonged to Chris Routis who had admitted in his pre-match interview that he likes to visit cafes and randomly select locals to talk to and build up his broken English – after seeing him pick up his eyes from the pitch when the cheerleaders were at VP there’s no doubt in my mind that these “locals” were ladies.
It was a mere 10 minutes in to the afternoon when Jon Stead opened the scoring and from there on in it was a question of “how many” rather than “what if” as Fleetwood looked limp all over the pitch and wish there were back home only a few miles away from the delights of Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Mick “Shakira” Shackleton was whipping out reggae classics throughout half time over the stadium speakers, I only needed a can on Lilt and in that very moment I was in tropical country! The music seemed to have an effect on the team and after 5 minutes into the second half, Crazy Chris Routistapped in the second and those confusing Yorkshire accentsseemed to translate into his native French language as his celebratory dance moves (which reminded me of a sack of wet firewood ;)) appeared to have sealed the win.
We all know what happened next, the final 10 minutes were crazy, the way City crumbled after the first Fleetwood goal went in was about as attractive as the sight of seeing a girl pick her nose, it wasn’t pleasant and it made me feel queasybut it was Andy Halliday who completely lost his bearings.
Instead of “belly bouncing” the Fleetwood winger and taking the yellow card, Halliday was left moonwalking backwards without knowing his surroundings, it was like he had stared at the eclipse too long on Friday and he was left “wet eyed” – it gave Fleetwood confidence and the arse completely fell out of an assured, comfortable afternoon for City’s defence as the equaliser was smashed home inside of the box.
Parkinson was fuming during his interviews after the game, none of the 3 subs did enough to prove their worth in the final 10 games of the season, Zoko who had an excellent game at Notts County proved how unpredictable he can be after fluffing a glorious chance in the final moments – if he hit the target it would’ve been the perfect get out of jail card.
