Musn't Grumble

Genuine question: Is Thorniley available? Concussion injuries will usually rule out a player for up to two weeks.

I suppose the referee could always argue that Forrestieri shouldn't even have been on the pitch assuming that Ihiekwe had done his job right earlier.

And yet earlier, Towell scores and volleys the corner flag towards the crowd and no yellow card for that? By any yardstick, the referee appears to have had a gripe towards Fessi that he didn't have for another player.

Decent player in a poor side.

Things could be a lot worse.... Like all those Arsenal "fans" that call radio stations like Talk Scroat, use the collective pronoun "we" and have never seen the Gooners play except for the MoTD highlights show on telly. And next week, if results go the wrong way, they will all become overnight Man Ure "supporters" anyway.

I don't recall Thorniley losing a defensive header all game until Bodvarssun won one late in the game. He fitted in well and looked very assured as he did against Higuain in the Chelsea game.

At £375k, clubs today could pay a hundred times more than this and still not a get a player anywhere near as good as him. 116 caps for Sweden... That's World class.

I didn't go... I refused to pay £46 to watch a behind closed doors game.

Or the EFL could simply take the parachute payments out of the calculation altogether. If relegated PL clubs had to be sustainable without the parachute payments in their new circumstances, that would level the playing field. Besides, aren't parachute payments designed to help the club fulfil their contractual arrangements with players and staff so that they get paid?

Have you got a battery for an Ericsson?

Why not go the whole hog and take refs and assistants off the pitch altogether. Just have four referees in the stands watching TV monitors? Then they they can just argue with each other and call in Mark Lawrenson if they can't agree after, say, fifteen minutes. On a serious note, VAR (or Hawkeye or whatever other names they use) works in cricket and tennis because the ball is in play for only a few seconds and they only review that last point or the last bowl. There are no consequences of playing on and bringing play back as there is in football.

If Thorniley can play like that on regular basis, I can assure you that it won't be years before he plays against opposition like that every week. I have to admit that Thorniley versus Higuain was one of those battles that had me face-palming before the match. How wrong was I!

I was sat level with the half way line a couple of rows above the dug outs. So that would be midway between both sets of fans. For 89 minutes, I literally could not hear anything from the home supporters. The Wednesday end was rocking and a cacophony of noise. i don't think that Chelsea understood their own irony when they took advantage of a brief respite in the Wednesday Wall of Sound to chant "You're not singing anymore". A priceless moment that will stay with me for a long time. Well done, Wednesday supporters... You were utterly magnificent. We might have lost the battle, but we ain't lost the war!

When I first started watching Wednesday as a nine-year old, we used to get complimentary tickets if you played for the school footy team. There would be four or five of us, all of similar age, and we always used to go on the Leppings Lane end and stand in front of the dozens of bus drivers who watched the match ahead of taking folks back afterwards. Invariably, that is where the away fans also went. Never a hint of trouble. All this territorial stuff and segregation seemed to start in the late 60s. I vaguely remember a documentary on "football hooligans" being shown on TV and I suppose this helped recruit the nutters which culminated in the penning up of fans in the 80s. Hopefully, we might get back to something like normal, as we knew it, because I would shudder to think what would be made of any parent these days allowing their nine-year old to attend a football match without adult supervision. Somehow, I doubt it, though. Those days are long gone.

Crikey, Paul Smith. I'd forgotten about him. He was brought to Wednesday from Hartlepool by Chris Turner in the same deal that also brought Graeme Lee. The idea was that Lee would launch 60 yard slide rule humps up the field for Smith to run onto and smash into the back of the net... What had we become, indeed?