Stoke 1 – 2 Palace

We weren’t at home after all, so I watched it at the Half Moon, which I have long thought was a scrubby dive of a place, but which is actually fine for watching football in, and does really good pizzas, and has a Monday night “2 pizzas and a bottle of wine for £20” deal. I shall return.

Anyway, it was a really good game, with some actual playmaking by both sides. There was a 20-minute period early in the second half where they hammered us relentlessly and it looked like they were going to score, but the luck didn’t run their way and they didn’t manage it until the 85th minute, by which time it was too late for them to claw anything else back. I don’t know who Sky’s Man of the Match was, but mine was our keeper Julián Speroni, who rescued us on various occasions when nobody else managed to get to the ball. I’ve just googled him to check how to spell his name, and it turns out he’s Argentinian. I always thought he was Yugoslavian, even though none of his name sounds Yugoslavian, and I’m not even sure there’s still a country called Yugoslavia. Then I wondered if I was confusing him with Gábor Király, but he’s Hungarian, so now I have no idea what I was thinking.

But we’re back in the playoff spots, and it looks like we’ll have another nail-biting end to the season, one way or another. Hurray!