Tales of Two Magpies

Championship related activity has been on the increase over the past week and although friendlies are as sure fire a way of divining what the season won’t bring as anything, two results at the weekend nevertheless stood out. First came, multi-million spending Nottingham Forest’s 2-1 tumble to their Trentside neighbours County. Although Tricky Trees’ fans will remind us (yawn) that Derby are the real enemy, the presence of a large contingent of red shirted hordes in the away end might suggest otherwise. Of course the whole affair was presided over by a bespectacled gentleman from Scandinavia, unless the whole unlikely scenario is actually the work of Derek Williams?

A hundred and fifty miles or so south and the suspicion that a Hollywood scriptwriter is choreographing Newcastle’s current fortunes was further confirmed by an alarming 6-1 reverse at Leyton Orient. O’s manager Geraint Williams was generous enough to describe it as a freak result, but following a brawl at Huddersfield, the other Magpies are lurching from one catastrophe to the next. I still wouldn’t be surprised to see them promoted next May though.

Rob Langham

Rob Langham (pen name: Lanterne Rouge) 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 47 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 Football Attic, 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.