Stress and Pie...

GAME 19: FOREST 0 CAERDYDD 2

We've never had much time for Warlock, (interestingly, a warlock is a male practitioner of evil magic, as distinguished from a wizard or sorcerer, whose magic may be benign. The most commonly accepted etymology derives warlock from the Old English wǣrloga meaning "oathbreaker" or "deceiver"), so we'll make this short.

We do love defensive football, like what the Italians used to do, but Warlock does not deliver defensive football. We think the technical term for what he delivers is pooball. From beginning to end, his Caerdydd team were concerned with the business of intimidatiing, frustrating, and reducing the game to a grisly, lowest common denominator struggle in which talent, vision and ball skills were throttled at birth. The fact that Forest let him get away with it shows that they have a long way to go, but it doesn't excuse Caerdydd's approach to the game.

And Forest were not entirely to blame for letting them get away with it. The referee did little to stop Caerdydd's timewasting, which was just plain embarrassing, refused to award Forest a penalty when the ball clearly struck the hand of Manga (which, interestingly, is a comic style read by people of all ages in Japan. The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action-adventure, business and commerce, comedy, detective, historical drama, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, sexuality, pronography, sports and games, and suspense, among others), completely missed the foul on Walker which would have stopped Caerdydd's first goal in its tracks, and generally behaved like somebody who would rather wet his pants in public than incur Warlock's wrath.

So how could Forest have done better, apart from hiring a proper referee? Well, they could have scored, for a start. Dowell, Murphy (twice), Walker and Carayol could easily have scored on a good day with the wind in the right direction, but they didn't. Caerdydd captain Morrison (who, interestingly, does not own the fourth largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom, headquartered in Bradford) could not even manage an own goal. Caerdydd did score from a very limited number of efforts, with a short range header from Hoilett and a goal from Ward so spectacular he will never ever come close to matching it again.

We were going to criticise Forest for their slow play, but they did have a few moments of swift interplay; overall, however, we imagine playing against a Warlock side must be like wading through a river of jam full of piranhas, so we'll let them off that one.

This is all sour grapes, of course. It's bound to be, when Warlock's pooball leaves such a nasty taste in your mouth.

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