Burnley win the 2009 Championship Playoff Final

Greetings all, welcome to the first of a weekly post on the topics of all things English football (and occassionally European football).

I am a follower of a team that is constantly invlolved in a relegation battle to stay in the Premiership. I therefore spend my life going through fixture lists to establish where the necessary 40 points can be gathered from so that I can do the same next season. However, the last weekend provided a break from the Premiership and this grim task and allowed the FA Cup to take centre stage. The FA Cup though failed to deliver if we’re honest and provided no talking points of note (other than the usual Neil Warnock rant at officials). I have therefore decided to direct this first post at all things Football League.

Sky and the BBC currently cover the Football League and in my experience, this coverage adopts a sort of patronising approach of – look at the funny little clubs playing “real” football. This is best highlighted in the BBC’s dreadful post Match of the Day Football League Show with its awful e-mail sections so that “real fans can contact the show”.

As previously stated I follow a Premiership team and firmly believe that the Premiership is the greatest sporting competition in the world and deserves its balnket coverage in the English sporting media. It is high quality, exciting and provides numerous talking points. However, I still feel there is a place for the Football League and as a consequence I have numerous favoured teams in the various leagues. A glance through the tables will show that very few Football League teams have nothing to play for. This appears to be due to the adoption of the play-off system that allows solid mid-table clubs to cling to the dream of promotion right up to the end of the season. Indeed, the play-offs are so succesful that the Premier League are now considering adopting them to decide the last Chamions League place which would suddenly make clubs like Fulham and Everton have something to really play for between now and May.

The various battles that all Football League clubs appear to be involved in therefore make the football scores given by James Alexander Gordon at 5:00pm on Radio Five truly meaningful.

For reasons I have never understood I have always had a variety of favoured teams in the leagues and this allows a listener an emotional involvement in the scores given. As a summary my current wishes for the season are that Blackpool make the play-offs, Plymouth stay up, Norwich go up, Wycombe stay up, Rochdale go up and Grimsby stay up. I would heartily recommend all football fans adopting favoured teams in each of the numerous issues to be decided in the Football League as you can obtain strange degrees of satisfaction that are difficult to get from watching a turgid home draw with Stoke.

The reasons for these favoured teams are varied, but I would sumarise them into the following categories:

1. An amusing manager;
2. A fondly remembered ex-player from your team of choice;
3. A degree of locality;
4. An amusing strip;
5. A hilariously bad ground; and
6. A good experience on Championship Managers of the past.

There are Football League fixtures this mid-week and I would therefore urge everyone to pick some teams and see how they get on and I’m sure when you see the final scores you will either feel a little joy in the event of a win or a tinge of sadness in the event of defeat. This seems preferable to the Chamions League which also returns this week. I find the Champions League rather boring until the semi-finals as it is always the same teams year after year. For the record I expect all of the English teams to win their ties as Italian football is now rather ordinary compared to its Gazzetta Football Italia heyday.

So come on Plymouth at home to Swansea.

See you all next week.

Tom Craven (aka the DCF)