Ainsley Maitland-Niles
To put it mildly Ipswich have had some rubbish on loan from various Premier League clubs in the past.
But Ainsley Maitland-Niles is in a different class.
He has all the skills and he has that added factor that so many youngsters don’t seem to possess – Keenness to get on with the game. And not in a selfish way!
For Ipswich’s first goal yesterday against Burnley, he brought the ball forward to the edge of the penalty area. Most players would have shot from distance, but he saw that Brett Pitman was free on his right and he was able to put the ball across goal for Freddie Sears to slot in.
But don’t take my word for the quality of his performance! These two paragraphs from the report in the East Anglian Daily Times describe his part in the two goals.
After Maitland-Niles’ pass into the channel, Pitman steered a low cross towards the back post and Sears only had to provide the slightest of touches inside the six yard box to help the ball on its way into the bottom corner.
One-nil became 2-0 five minutes later in the most simple of fashions; McGoldrick barely having to jump to head home Maitland-Niles’ corner from around eight yards out.
And this is Mick McCarthy’s view in an article on the BBC web site.
Read it all!
We’ve not seen a youngster of this class, wearing the blue of Ipswich since Kieron Dyer.
A Pantomime Horse At The Cricket
There are several reports of a pantomime horse being spotted at Edgbaston in the cricket yesterday.
Surprisingly, I can’t find a picture in the papers.
Are Adverts Pointless?
I’m just watching the Tour de France on ITV4, as I put together the next couple of IKEA cabinets for my kitchen.
The adverts are completely aimed at the wrong person.
1. There has been two different companies trying to sell me Funeral Insurance. Why would I want a funeral and anyway, I won’t be going or remember it. We should just post our bodies to the nearest hospital for dissection practice or a pet food factory to do something useful.
2. There are also adverts for Skoda cars. I don’t drive and have no interest in the sort of boring cars bought by plebs. Or in any car forv that matter unless it doesn’t pollute my walking space.
3. Santander Bank. Only idiots, bank with Head Offices in other countries. Remember Iceland and Scotland!
4. Petplan, Pets are for the lonely and conservative.
5. Loans. I don’t need to borrow money.
6. Car Insurance. See point 2.
7. Barbecues. I hate them!
When somebody invents a television that doesn’t show adverts or trailers in live television, I’ll buy one.
An Event In Krakov
As I walked back to the hotel after lunch, it appeared an event was about to take place in the main square.
My timing was wrong to wait, so I didn’t see any action.
I’ve Had A Colourful Life, But I’m Not Finished Yet!
These were Frankie Dettori‘s words today after he won the Derby today on Golden Horn.
Frankie rode for C and myself several times and he is very much a genuine what-you-see-is-what-you-get person, who is the life and soul of any group. But then most jockeys are like that and many have fought back from terrible problems, circumstances or injuries.
I do think that over the last few years, my experience of horse racing and its people has helped me pull through all my troubles.
On the other hand,. having paternal and maternal male lines of Jewish and Huguenot origin respectively and a grandmother born in London of a stubborn Devonian line, isn’t a disadvantage to survival.
My life may not have been colourful, but I’m certainly not finished yet!
It’s My Fault HaHa!
I just had to post this story from the BBC, about how an Ipswich fan punched a hole in his ceiling when Ipswich equalised against Norwich and the scorer; Paul Anderson offered to pay for it.
Can you imagine the fuss of a Liverpool or Chelsea player did this for a fan living in Leeds!
Match Forty-Seven – Ipswich 1 – Norwich 1
This was the first leg of the playoffs and it was a well-fought match.
A draw was probably a fair result and I think it could have have honesty gone either way.
Mick McCarthy said this about his team.
I would say it was a terrific, hard-fought football match. When two teams are competing for a big prize it will never be expansive football.
I thought it was a good game, for us we’d like to be in front but there’s no away goals that count.
I’ve always been proud of my team, and to go behind when we were on top and come back shows everything that my team’s about.
I do think that Mick’s method of motivating the team is a lesson to everybody.
I’ve just looked up the odds of the four teams left of winning the Championship on Betfair.
Middlesbrough – 11/8
Norwich – 9/4
Ipswich – 9/2
Brentford – 9/1
That is all pretty close to me without a warm favourite, although we’re probably get a Middlesbrough-Norwich final.
Match Forty-Six – Blackburn 3 – Ipswich 2
For the last match of the normal season, in some ways this was a bit of a disappointment, as Ipswich only needed a point to be certain of the play-offs.
But at least we got through as Reading surprisingly beat Derby. In the end the Ipswich fans were singing “Come on Reading”
Match Forty-Four – Wolverhampton 1 – Ipswich 1
It was an early start to catch the 08:43 Virgin to get me to Wolverhampton for this match’s 12:15 kick-off I travelled in First and got water, a banana and tea to sustain me on the journey. At least the trains now seem to carry a lot of fruit, which is surely acceptable to all.
Molineux stadium is not that far to walk from Wolverhampton station, as the Google Earth image shows.
Molineux And Wolverhampton Station
I’m sure there must be a quicker way that is known to regular visitors, especially for Away supporters, who are in the top-right or north-east corner of the stadium.
When I went to the ground today, I felt it would be prudent to have an early lunchtime snack, so I walked up into the city centre to the Marks and Spencer, to see if they had any sandwiches. Just as at Middlesbrough, there were none available. I then walked down from the city centre to the ground.
Coming back, I asked the stewards and they said the best way was to walk through the buildings of the University and then climb up to the Inner Ring Road, which leads to the station.
It wasn’t that difficult a walk, but I do wonder if a better direct route could be signposted that possibly ran along the canal in the area. Wolverhampton does have signposts and liths, but like this one in the city centre, the football ground isn’t always indicated.
Where’s The Football Ground?
Hopefully next time, I go, the Midland Metro will be connected to Birmingham New Street station, so it may be easier to go to Molineux by Birmingham and the Metro, as this will mean only a downhill walk in Wolverhampton and I could et in the larger city first. Coming back, it would probably be easier to use today’s route, until they extend the Metro with a loop in Wolverhampton. The Wikipedia section contains this statement.
In July 2010, Centro Director General Geoff Inskip hinted that the scheme would be reworked by taking it to “places people need to go, such as the University”, and not taking passengers to the railway station and back “if they don’t actually need to go there”
Surely as the football ground is next to the University, Wolverhampton probably needs a full city centre loop, that serves the shops, railway and bus stations, the University and the football ground. This Google Earth image shows the Inner Ring Road, the northern part of the city centre, the football ground and the train station.
Wolverhampton Inner Ring Road
Note that the Inner Ring Road has a very wide central reservation, which must offer possibilities for running the Metro along the middle, serving the various stops by subway or footbridge. At the football ground there is already a subway and there is a bridge at the railway station, that could be upgraded to tram stops. This Google Earh image shows the bridges that connect the bus and railway stations.
Wolverhampton And Midland Metro
The big roundabout south of the bridges and the three limbs of the bus station is where the Metro enters Wolverhampton City Centre to terminate at Wolverhampton tram stop. Could not a branch turn north to serve the bus and train stations, Wolverhampton University and Molineux? In an ideal world, it would continue past the football ground to perhaps a Park and Ride site on the other side of the city. Or it could even go further round the Inner Ring Road and loop back into the City Centre to the existing terminus.
There is also talk as in this article in the Wolverhampton Express and Star, of using tram-trains to extend the Midland Metro from Wolverhampton to Walsall on an old rail line. But then the West Midlands has used and disused rail lines everywhere and if tram-trains work well connecting Sheffield and Rotherham, I would think it is likely that proposals could be put forward to extend the Metro.
The possibilities are endless and by 2020, engineers and civic planners will have come up with a scheme that is much better than any so far proposed.
The football today was a hard-fought draw and a that was probably a fair result.
The pictures show the ground, the match and the half-time entertainment.According to the report on the BBC web site, Mick McCarthy was forthright after the match.
We are always hard to beat and hard to play against. The first thing I said to the players in the dressing room after the game was what a belligerent, stubborn, hard working, tough, horrible bunch you have turned out to be and I love you and I am proud of you because you need all those qualities to be a good team. It is lovely to have.
I wouldn’t disagree with Mick’s superb motivational speech. You can imagine various military commanders saying something very similar.
The End Of The Don Valley Stadium
Sheffield’s Don Valley stadium was built for the World Student Games in 1991. It was never a real success and is now being demolished.
If there is a lesson from this story, it is to get the planning of what you do after the Games right. Manchester after the 2002 Commonweath Games rebuilt the stadium for Manchester City and the London 2012 Olympic stadium is going to be used by West Ham. Glasgow’s excellent 2014 Commonealth Games imaginatively built an Athletics Track inside Hampden Park. The Don Valley stadium didn’t seem to interest either or both of the city’s football clubs as a venue after the Games, so became a white elephant.
I do think a factor was that the stadium was designed in-house by Sheffield Council’s own architects. This policy was used extensively by British Rail and created some real monstrosities in the 1960s and 1970s.
By contrast the award-winning John Smith’s stadium in Huddersfield, which I visited in the afternoon and was built a few years later, was designed by specialist architects, as have most sports stadia around the world in recent years.
I do think too, that Sheffield missed a chance here of creating a prefabicated set of stands, in steel naturally, that would have fitted the standard athletics track. After the Games most could have been taken down leaving just enough for less-grand events. As the stadium is in a bowl, surely this could have been used to create an uncovered natural amphitheatre, where most people just sat on the grass. This has been used successfully at many horse racing venues in the UK and further afield, like Ascot, Goodwood and Epsom, where these areas have a totally different atmosphere.
In some ways it’s all rather sad and it has been probably a big waste of money, that could have been better spent. Athletics hasn’t drawn large crowds in the UK outside of the big set piece games and championships. The Alexander Stadium in Birmingham seems to be more than sufficient with a capacity of 12,700 for most other events, so the Don Valley stadium was probably a stadium too many for athletics. The nearest stadia at Gateshead, Manchester and the smaller track in Leeds, seem to have successfully negotiated multi-sport partnerships and appear to be on a much sounder footing, than the Don Valley Stadium ever was.
If they’d got the planning, re-use and design right, it might have been a very different story!
The Anonymous Widower 