The View From The Patio

A pleasant lie in but we still get up fairly early for us, to go out and stock up on meat from the farm shop and spices from the Indian shop. All life’s necessities.

Daughter drops a late rescheduling of her evening on us. The sleepover tonight is off and has become a party instead, finishing at around 10pm. Bugger. Means our plans for L to meet me after the match in Derby will have to be scrapped so that we can collect her. Daughter informs us she’ll be absolutely fine walking home on her own. Ahemm. As the well-known author and sometime poet Rae Earl would say ‘HELLO?’ Fourteen-year-old girl walks home alone in the crime capital of the World. I don't think so. Mind you Rae would also have said to her Mother, ‘Didn't girls do that sort of thing when you were young?’. Well yes, of course they did but some of them took liberties and turned it into a holiday, in somewhere nice like Margate, for sixteen years, enjoying the patio from the wrong side.

I take Doggo for a ball session on the park and then I get the bus over to the match. Daughter has arranged a lift home from her party, so L will be coming over to join me after all.

According to Sky, Derby have had the lowest number of shots in the Premier League at 99. Now 99 sounds bloody good to me, I certainly can't remember more than a dozen or so. Where do they get these stats from? They must be confusing us hacking the ball out of play for a shot.

In the match, Derby play very defensively but it works well and they look a much better side. Chelsea are a total bore, plenty of passing it around but they don’t really press us. They seem to be waiting for us to make a mistake. Which we duly do after only eighteen minutes and give them the lead. All their England ‘stars’ get booed every time they touch the ball, as apparently is the case all over the country today but they don’t look bothered. If they felt any guilt over Wednesday night they would at least look miserable, they don’t. A lot of the crowd have probably turned up to see Frank Lampard, they needn’t have bothered, he didn’t, just like he didn’t for England.

Second half and Billy must have induced some oomph into the lads because we certainly have more shots than Chelsea. Then Kenny Miller takes a Dean Leacock pass on his chest and coolly lobs the Chelsea keeper only for a linesman's flag to wrongly flag him offside. Then soon after Shevchenko clatters into Giles Barnes from behind, a certain yellow card but the referee waves play on and Lampard, suddenly realising there’s a game on, strides away with the ball and hits the post with a shot, only for Wright-Phillips to tuck home the rebound. Daylight robbery. As Barnes limps off, the referee, seemingly racked with guilt, gives Derby a succession of decisions in their favour but the wrong cannot be righted. Not even when in injury time, Essien who had only been on the pitch for fifteen minutes is dismissed for elbowing Miller in the face. Nice.

I meet L off the bus and we go to the Flowerpot. Not such a good beer selection tonight, L tries a Cider that although 6% isn't that pleasant. We rescue the evening by discovering that if we mix the 4.3% Stout with the 10% Thomas Sykes ale we get a cracking beer, and a dark one at that.

We get the Red Arrow home again; it was early of course and pop for a curry at Savera, which is rather good.