Schadenfreude

The midweek football matches that haven't been called off because of the weather are kicking off round about now. I hope Boston's match was postponed in good time before the poor Carlisle players had to trek all the way down there - we've had a history of waiting till the last minute to call a game off in the past.

Anyway, at the moment I'm not as enthralled by Boston's hypothetical chance of making the playoffs as I am by the significantly more possible chance of Everton getting relegated. I do feel a bit guilty about hoping a team will fail so spectacularly, though. Admittedly it's normal to hope that one particular team will win any given game (very few people go to a football game hoping for a draw), and this does naturally extend to hoping that the other team will lose, but there seems something rather more malicious about desiring Everton to lose a sufficient number of games that they end up somewhere in the bottom three places of the league table at the end of the season.

On the other hand, three teams do have to finish in those positions every year, and thus drop down to the level below for the next year, and I think it's very much in the spirit of cheering for the underdog if I hope that the lesser teams manage to avoid the drop at the expense of Everton, a normally very successful team currently in their 52nd consecutive year in the top flight. So it's entirely reasonable of me to be wishing for them to follow up their two consecutive 4-0 thrashings with another heavy loss to Liverpool tonight.

They're currently 16th out of 20, coming up to the half-way point of the season, and with Sunderland dead last by a mile and seeming to have no hope at all of survival, and Birmingham also struggling so much that you wouldn't want to bet against them being relegated, we need Portsmouth and West Brom to rally sufficiently to drop Everton down to 18th. It could happen tonight, if they both win (unlikely, since they've both got difficult games), and it would certainly cheer me up unreasonably if it did. Of course, Everton's game on Saturday is against Sunderland, who ANYONE can beat, so they'd have to be even more terrible than they currently are to stay in the bottom three into the new year. Fingers crossed, though.

I've had a very lazy day today. Did a very little bit of memory training this morning, but not the several hours I was planning to put in while I'm off work with nothing better to do. I keep finding good reasons not to - along the lines of "Hey, Virgin Radio are playing their top 500 songs all this week, I'll have to listen to that..."

I think part of it is dietary. I'm no expert on what you should and shouldn't eat, but I'm pretty sure that stuffing yourself all day with leftover Christmas chocolate, biscuits and cake (home made cake, and delicious it is too) isn't good for you. Likewise, having no exercise whatsoever for the last week or so possibly contributes to my general lethargy. Never mind, I'll snap out of it tomorrow, do lots of healthy things, eat vegetables, run a marathon or two, that kind of thing. Or I might do the same again and sit around all day reading and listening to the radio. It's the holidays!