Jaywalking

Just a quick note to wish Jay Bothroyd good luck for tonight. In a survey of potential Three Lions men in the Football League undertaken in August, we described the ex-Perugia man’s chances as a reverie at best, but firmer support from Adam Bate of GhostGoal, in a guest missive for The Seventy Two coupled with the paucity of available alternatives has seen the jaywalk become a sprint across the dual carriageways of the A406.

The analysis of Pope and Swift is less kind, incandescent even – and certainly, when Rooney, Zamora, Bent and others are back to fitness, Don Howe’s nemesis may well find himself discarded. It’s also hard to disagree that Fabio “Algeria” Capello’s presumed absence from the Cardiff City stadium leaves him very short of being able to make a proper judgement.

But as Steven Gabb points out on Mirko Bolesan, the list of those who may have thwarted Bothroyd can only be described, in the words of the late Terry-Thomas, as an absolute shower. Our new Tory overlords might enjoy the possibility of the double barrelled Gary Taylor-Fletcher or Sylvan Ebanks-Blake making their bow, but I for one am rooting for Jay. In case you are not, remember that Phil Thompson isn’t.

Rob Langham

Rob Langham is co-founder of the defiantly non-partisan football league blog, The Two Unfortunates, a website that occasionally strays into covering issues of wider importance. He's 48 and lives in Oxford while retaining his boyhood support of Reading FC. He tweets as @twounfortunates and has written for a number of websites and publications including The Inside Left, When Saturday Comes, In Bed with Maradona, Futbolgrad and The Blizzard as well as being nominated for the Football Supporters' Federation Blogger of the Year Award in 2013.