A pleasant surprise
I spent most of Saturday evening fretting about how Caley had dropped two critical points at home to Raith, handing Dundee a crucial foothold in the scrap for promotion to the SPL. This is the problem with being at a wedding at the back of beyond, and last checking the WAP at five to five - I assumed 3-3 was the final score, so imagine the shock I got when I got home on Sunday lunchtime (I was sleeping in a hostel, not a ditch, honest) to find that Richie Foran had scored an overhead kick in the 94th minute to nick the win. The highlights on Caley's official website show that it was probably the least impressive overhead kick ever scored, but it could have gone in off his Irish ass for all I care. Inverness are now 4 points clear with 5 games left, and though there are plenty of banana skins left for us, Dundee have only one home match left. It is in firmly in our hands.
I slagged off the first division a lot earlier in the campaign, and for good reason; the standard is dire compared to 2003-04, when we won it before. But it's increasingly apparent that the gap between SPL and us is no bigger than previously - it's just a sign of the drop in quality of Scottish football as a whole. Whoever wins this division...surely either us or Dundee now, with Ross County having to play so many games in the next four weeks that their players are bound to keel over with exhaustion...will have the chance to make the same impact as St. Johnstone have this year, and the team who are relegated will find it damned hard to get results in the lower tier.
Saints a breath of fresh air
And so we seamlessly move onto St. Johnstone, whose delightful 4-1 hammering of Rangers last midweek was vindication of their season, and the very promising development of Derek McInnes as a young manager. No cagey defensive football for the Perth boys; only the top three have scored more goals in the league this season. And that's on a strict budget as well. Chairman Geoff Brown runs a tight fiscal ship (the Conservative Party should really take heed) and they don't have the financial concerns of...well, pretty much every side below them. Long may their run continue, though it's hard to believe that McInnes won't be lured away from McDiarmid Park some time in the next 12 months.
Lennon the cheap option, but bound to end in tears
So far, so good for Celtic's interim manager (at least they don't have to call him a "consultant" like Iain Dowie at Hull) with two wins out of two so far. Appointing Lennon as boss for the long term would be an awful risk for Celtic, though, considering his lack of experience. He's not even been anyone's assistant so far. Frankly, it would be like Rangers appointing Iain Durrant as manager.
That said, it's hard to see who would be interested in the job just now, unless the Parkhead board unleash a war chest the size of a small country's GDP. Mowbray's experiment has failed miserably, and left the club with a lot of players who don't look, at least at the moment, as if they are good enough. And if Lennon continues his good run, aided by Robbie Keane's good form, it will be very difficult not to give him the job permanently. The Irishman is carrying Celtic just now, however, and if he chooses to return south in the summer it is tough to see Lennon keep the results going.
Laws of gravity dragging Burnley down
How things have changed in a few months. Before Christmas, Burnley were every neutral's favourite Premier League team, playing flamboyant football under Owen Coyle and crushing allcomers at Turf Moor. The signs of a downturn were there before Coyle eloped to Bolton, but the form under his successor, Brian Laws, is a catastrophe - just one win since Xmas. Losing three goals in seven minutes at home to Manchester City should surely be the final straw for him, though surely if Laws spent as much time on tactics as he does on his stylish hairdo he would be more succesful. God knows why he chucked their half decent centre-backs out of the team and replaced them with Leon Cort (a Stoke City reserve) and Michael Duff (by name and by nature). You couldn't just drive a bus down the middle of their backline on Saturday, but an entire fleet of battleships.
To cap it all, Burnley's fans have started misbehaving in recent weeks, and sullying the club's reputation. They look increasingly doomed, with or without a managerial change, and as time passes, fewer and fewer people are sorry about it.
And the weekend's other last minute winners
Arsenal again came up with the goods late on at the weekend, to keep themselves in the title race. But, sure enough, they were cursed by my tipping them for glory in my last post, and promptly dropped two points at Birmingham. It's going to be awfully hard to overcome Chelsea now.
And, having written such praise for St. Johnstone, what are the odds Dundee United will thump them tonight?
L.
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