It’s been a quiet year on the blog but this is the first post of an updated iteration. Welcome to the renamed CDB Sport, which will incorporate mainly football but also occasional articles on cricket, and will publish weekly every Friday here on www.georgeankers.com.
“But George,” I hear you cry, “today is a Monday!”
Yes. Yes it is.
Now, to business. I haven’t had a great deal of opportunity to watch live football over the last few months but I did get to watch the final day of the Premier League season, specifically Manchester United 4 – 2 Blackpool, a game that perfectly summed up why we all wanted Blackpool to pull off the impossible and stay up. Facing a team that was far stronger than some of the pre-match reports would have had you believe, the Tangerines gave it everything – they were unlucky not to score in the first minute when Keith Southern scuffed a great chance across the far post – and kept going even after United pulled off a lethal counterattack (a brilliant finish from Park Ji-Sung, one of the best unsung heroes in the league). Charlie Adam was in excellent form, scything through the defence frequently and scoring a perfectly-pitched free kick to give Blackpool hope just before half-time. The indications seem to be that he will be heading to Liverpool this summer, but if you ask me, he’s exactly the sort of player that would fit very well into the United midfield.
When Gary Taylor-Fletcher finished an incredible move to give them the lead shortly after the break, everything had lined up perfectly for Ian Holloway’s side to get away with it, but from then on, United slowly but surely began to monopolise the ball, and you could see that things were about to see-saw the other day. Blackpool’s leaky defence (74 goals conceded prior to the last day) was never likely to stand up to such continued pressure from a team who were hardly going through the motions as some had expected. The heartbreak was that it was Ian Evatt, so immense in leading the resistance from the back all season, who lamely deflected the ball into this own net to tip the balance for good.
This particular match may not have worked out in Blackpool’s favour but it’s this sort of thriller that encapsulates why we’ve loved seeing them in the Premier League – Holloway’s refusal to play the odds and set his team up to frustrate and defend has resulted in the most genuinely exciting team in the league, going forward in swashbuckling style whatever the match situation and aiming to score one more than the opposition. The recent 4-3 game against Bolton was possibly the best of the whole season.
Of course now the side will be ripped apart by transfer raids this summer, with the likes of Adam, the excellent Matthew Gilks, Evatt, David Vaughan, Neal Eardley and so on all set to move on, but at least all along the board has budgeted for relegation. Blackpool will not suffer financially for this relegation, but their financial model is still small even by Championship standards – being among the favourites to come back up next year is hardly a given, and will depend on Holloway’s ability to cobble together another ragtag side on a low budget. He’s done it once, though – I think we all hope he’ll do it again.
This Friday in the first of the weekly updates I’ll be discussing the upcoming Champions League final and possibly some of the other ramifications of the end of the Premier League season. See you then.
Posted by George Ankers 
