I Shit 'Em

Having been over $2,200 down at one point, I staged something of a fightback, finishing $1,300 down for the month (excluding rakeback) after around 11k hands. I was reading some comments from a guy on twoplustwo, who was saying that we have a default response of when our play sucks to go “well, I was kind of tilted, and definitely not playing my A game, so that sort of doesn’t count”. And he’s right, and that mentality is of course bollocks – your lifetime results are not from only when you play your A game – they are from when you are playing your best and your worst.

I’ve been slowly getting bits of my life in order – I hate dealing with form filling and general admin, but have made some progress of late. Work remains up in the air – I don’t think I’m going to get fired, but you never know. I think we’re going to sell the flat in the new year and rent a small house down in Kent, with a view to buying somewhere after my employment situation becomes clearer and (hopefully) after house prices drop.

West Ham lost in lame fashion at home to Newcastle last weekend, beat Stoke in the Carling Cup in midweek to earn a quarter-final at home to Manchester United, and then went to Arsenal on Saturday. As I have probably made clear before, I fucking hate Arsenal – they are the lowest of the low. Every time I go there, I wonder if I am being too hard on them, but then I see them, and I realise that they are exactly the cunts that I thought they were.

I turned up at the Echodome to witness some laughable attempts to create at atmosphere. Our lot made a decent job of making some noise, the Arsenal fans largely sat in shiny new red and white scarves in silence. It is more like going to the cinema than a trip to football. I realised that there were 57,000 other people in the ground (every one of them a smug twat) on the 88th minute when West Ham’s resistance was broken by an Alex Song header. They probably just about deserved all three points, although I was very pleased with our performance.
Arsenal’s midfield saw a good performance from Nasri. Fabregas was off colour and spent most of his time convincing Mike Jones that football is a non-contact sport. Since the days of Elbows and Ljungberg, I have found this their most unappealing trait – they spend the entire game in the referee’s ear. Two years ago at our place it was so bad that Wiley might as well just have given Fabregas and Flamini the whistle, because they were effectively running the game.

In summary: not a bad game, we were maybe a little unlucky not to come away with a point. Fuck Arsenal, fuck Arsene Wenger, fuck your new stadium that might bring in the zillions but is no sort of football ground and fuck your lame, limp-wristed bunch of noveau football fans that probably love nipping off for a cappuccino at half-time.

We have played well enough at times but after ten games have just one win. We have Birmingham, West Brom and Blackpool coming up – we need to start winning games here. Six points is the minimum requirement.

Good luck at the tables.