Our hobo hell

To what we would love to think is their eternal shame, Messrs Cort and Kabba have performed so appallingly this season that Beesy’s first home game joke about buying a hobo lunch if neither of them scored for a month has come to pass.

We would love to say this comes as a surprise to us, but in truth we’ve been planning how to buy a hobo lunch since, er, the second home game of the season.

So while we hope against hope that the loan window sees the arrival of at least one striker – assuming Charlie Mac is fit enough to resume full-time – your dutiful correspondents are left with the task of finding a homeless person who doesn’t bite for whom to buy lunch; very difficult when we can’t remember when Southend away is.

Here are some ground rules:

• Lunch will not be bought anywhere we have to pay a cover.
• Lunch has to be bought away from where either of us live, work or occasionally travel, as we certainly don’t want a reputation as buyers of food for homeless types.
• Homeless person must not swear at/threaten to kill us prior to the purchase of lunch.
• Main only, by which we mean perhaps a sandwich and a bag of crisps.
• Centrepoint don’t like our bet. At all.
• Which is pretty fucking ungrateful if you ask me, they could just pocket the money and tell us they bought a hobo lunch. The whole point of using Centrepoint was so that we’re as far away as possible from the hobo.
• The hobo will get food, not cash, so no booze or heroin.
• Watch this space for the new expanded Cort, Kabba and Weston bet…

Brentford 1 – 1 Oldham: classic division three

If an experiment in financially inexplicable merchandising were conducted to bottle the smell of division three, the lunatic manufacturers could do worse than boil this match down.

An open first 15 minutes gave way to a dominant Brentford performance against unambitious opponents, only for a lack of attacking penetration and moments of defensive disorganisation to prevent a better result.

Both sides could have taken the lead inside the first five minutes only for the first half to degenerate into aerial attrition, marked only by Sam Wood’s obvious discomfort at left back in Ryan Dickson’s absence – doing no favours to Beesy’s confident assertion that the pair will swap positions this season. Auxilliary left winger Sam Saunders was the brightest spark, and it was his run across the box that drew an unnecessary foul, allowing The Grey Goose to open the scoring from the spot.

With James Wilson enjoyably showing himself to be far too good to suffer Pawel Abbot’s flat track bully routine it looked like a rick would be needed for Oldham to draw level. Cleveland Taylor dutifully provided, giving the ball away in his own box after Mark Phillips had failed to clear, although a superb lofted finish was still needed to capitalise.

Oldham’s gaggle of serial whingers can reflect on a job well done targetting the referee as the discipline-free Taylor perplexingly escaped so much as a booking despite kicking the ball at a linesman, shoving Sam Saunders in an altercation in front of the referee and kicking Sam Wood long after play had stopped – at the feet of the same linesman he’d already kicked the ball at.

Brentford threatened to get a winner with Wilson always menacing from corners, and Steve Kabba almost finished a slick move from the left, but with Oldham playing for the draw the game petered out instead.

Price 5 – Foster 6 Phillips 5 Wilson 7 Wood 5 – Taylor 5 O’Connor 5 Hunt 5 Saunders 6 – Weston 5 (Kabba 6) Cort 5

Bees 0 – 0 Brighton – lack of penetration and vulnerability at the back

Much like a thoroughly disjointed lower league football match that amounted to little more than a flurry of set pieces and long balls, this match report will take the form of bullet points of things we have learned:

• this was a highly boring game.
• Liam Dickinson is still nowhere near as good a player as he seems to think he is.
• Carl Cort needs more games to get his fitness up, as does Steve Kabba.
• O’Connor and Hunt are not good enough to play central midfield in League One, much though we would like them to be. We should add that O’Connor has already tried and failed in this division in that position.
• Hunt’s long throws are counter productive when they’re lobbed at static players every time.
• Lewis Price seems to be terrified of crosses, and it appears his defenders already lack confidence in leaving the ball to him.
• Mark Phillips was oddly lacsidaisical, and worries us.
• All of this can be resolved, and we very much hope it is

Price 5 – Foster 6 Bennett 6 Phillips 4 Dickson 7 – Saunders 4 (Taylor 6) O’Connor 5 Hunt 5 (Bean 7) Wood 6 (Kabba 5 )- Cort 5 Weston 4