Okay let’s get it out of the way now; CiTy nEvEr HaVe cRoWdS AnYwAy!!!
Yes, I know it’s very funny.
But in all seriousness, watching a game played at an empty stadium will be nothing short of depressing. Seeing games played without fans in the Champions League and the Serie A the other week was super strange, and honestly a little soul-crushing. Seeing our beloved City lads walk out in front of no fans at all is going to be pretty ordinary, to be honest.
In my opinion, the fact that this game is even going ahead right now is a bit ridiculous. At any moment we could have a player or coach testing positive for COVID-19 and that will shut the entire league down anyway. With our borders essentially closed (as well as New Zealand’s borders), it is going to make life for the Phoenix incredibly difficult and therefore robs us of any sense of fair competition. The league should be postponed. I understand why the FFA is pushing through, but it all seems a bit silly.
Nonetheless, the game is going ahead and therefore I should probably talk about it.
We’re coming up against the Mariners up in Gosford, and this one should be as straight forward as they come (which means it'll probably mean anything but).
The Mariners sit in dead-last place, 7 points adrift of the calamitous, disgraceful, terrible, awful, shitty, out-of-sorts tenth-placed Melbourne Victory (wow that felt good to type). They haven’t won a game since they knocked off the Victory way back in January (again very fun to type). They just look really awful. They don’t offer anything going forward and their defence is just as bad. Who’s their best player you ask? I couldn’t tell you. I genuinely couldn’t.
Could very well be Matt Simon.
They’re just such a nothing team, but they do have one thing on their side; as suggested by their shocking yellow shirts, they do make for a great banana peel fixture.
We’ve looked alright the last few weeks. After important wins over Brisbane and Perth, we looked absolutely sound. Things were feeling great and murmurs of a potentially positive end to the season started to take place quietly across Melbourne, but then the arse fell out of the world.
You see when we made the trip back in time to Perth, we clearly broke the golden rule of time travel: "Don’t mess anything up”. We must have done something to the time-space continuum by beating the Glory, and now the entire planet has been sucked back to the 1500s to the period of the bubonic plague.
We had our lowest-ever attendance at an A-League game when we took on the Wanderers last week as Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned everyone not to attend large gatherings of people because of the Black Death that City had unleashed upon us all.
We didn’t look much better on the pitch than we did in the stands. A converted penalty by Jamie Maclaren finally saw our number 9 back on the scoresheet and a miraculous goal-line clearance by Curtis Good was enough to save our blushes and earn us a share of the points. It was far from a polished performance by City and it has me feeling a lot more nervous than I should about this weekend’s game.
All in all, I do think we’ll get the win on Friday night. Logically we are the better team and should comfortably see off the lowly Mariners, but as 2020 has shown us all so far, logic means absolutely nothing on this planet anymore, does it?
Final Score Prediction: Mariners 1 - 2 City
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