Weekend fixtures — March 1st & March 2nd

Absolutely dreading this. Supporting Stoke over the last few years has been an absolute chore. So little enjoyment, so much boredom, so little joy. Genuinely the worst period of supporting the club and I can remember Alan Ball, Brian Little and League One in the 90s. Genuinely feel like I can't be arsed because the script has already been written and I'll be wasting 4 or 5 hours of my Saturday in the cold when there are lots more enjoyable things I could be doing with that time.

 

Be interesting to see what we do in the FA cup on Weds before our game with our West Yorkshire friends.

As with all the top 4, must win game.

 

In your own words Sam, the Boro charity bus is ready to roll up…

 

Doesn't work against Stoke . Blackburn, Cardiff etc on terrible runs recently got wins against us. We don't take advantage of other team's charity we only dish it out.

Really can't see a way out of this situation now to be honest. The whole club is broken and when relegation happens it'll be well deserved.

 

Obviously we will be hoping you go full strength, Chelsea will be favourites but feels like it wouldn’t be a massive shock for you to get a win there.
If we can get back some of the missing players from the Watford game and no new injuries I think we can give you a good game(better than last time anyway!),having no luck on that front at the moment though.

 

We’re on the beach, you only have to score a goal against us and we crumble.

 

And there lies the problem. Our top scorer this season is own goal

 

Cov at home. Another big game. Really could do with winning this. Win this and we go 8 points clear of them.

 

Good of A&S Police who knew about our fixture in July to move it 17 days before the game.

Wankers.

 

I can't see how it can possibly do us any good. We have a fairly high wage budget so FFP would be a real problem down there. We'd really have to shop in the bargain basement to stay within the rules. And we said that relegation from the Premier League would be the reset we needed and get us winning games and scoring goals again and it ended up being a total disaster. Why would relegation to League One work out any better? I can see things getting really bad for the club if we go down.

At the end of the day, most 'big' clubs that go down to League One don't bounce back straight away. For every Leicester, Wolves and Norwich for whom relegation worked out well for them and allowed their clubs to get out of their losing cycles and shift momentum forward again, there's a Charlton, Portsmouth, Coventry, Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Leeds, Forest, Ipswich, Sunderland, ourselves in the 90s etc etc who get stuck down for a number of years and have a really miserable time. The law of averages says it's far more likely to go badly than be a blessing in disguise. I'm the same as you, not sure I have the stomach to go through it again.

 

I loved our 3 years down there, but any more would have been a drag. We'd have gone up the first season without the 15 point deduction, lost in the playoff final to Donny too.

 

Makes it a 6am wake-up to get a train from Nottingham to Meads. Head will probably fall off if I see us lose for about the 7th time in a row

 

Leicester away .... Going to be tricky! We do seem to do pretty well away from home, sitting in and then building from that (except Stoke, where we were just shit).

Looks like it will be a 3k away following, which is pretty good for us. We have been starting so slowly recently, so I hope we keep it tight as I can't imagine Leicester missing the chances that we have gifted recently.

 

Just saw that Leicester went to extra time last night. I presume it was their strongest 11?

Might help keep the scoreline respectable

 

Think they made around 9 changes

 

Massive game at Deepdale. Preston will be up for it as a win puts them into direct contention, and both sides will know the outcome of West Brom v Coventry before kick-off.

Good time to have an strong away record...

But what a weekend for the play-off chasers. Even Norwich host outsiders Sunderland.