What a lovely feeling when the rest of the Premier League is playing and we get some respite for a weekend. I am not sure if it's the players or the fans who will be more grateful of the rest but I think it will probably be the fans! Although I do wonder what some of the usually moaning fans will be finding to moan about! I am sure they will find something. Not only have we got a nice break from being on tenterhooks all weekend until the final whistle blows but we have dodged the Derby bullet! What an absolute win! Feels like a three pointer!
Joking aside I really can't say I ever enjoy the Derby game. Funnily enough last season I was awarded a ticket in the People's Club lounge for the Derby game for a project I had undertaken at work. At the time it did feel slightly more like a punishment than a reward especially as the four of us who had received the reward were two blues and two reds! We actually had a really good day and thank god it was a draw so nobody had any bragging rights for the journey home. Don't get me wrong I would have happily taken a Derby at Wembley, but sadly that wasn't to be so I will take no Derby at all as the alternative.
Looking at our upcoming fixtures I am actually slightly nervous about our next game! I always think we look upon the bottom part of the table and being such a nice side gift teams either a point or most of the time three. Take last season for example. We drew with relegated Hull City FC 1-1 in December then just under a month later we go to the KC stadium and get beat 2-0! It's like we felt the one point just wasn't enough to help them so we gave them three more.
Of the other 14 defeats we encountered last season three of them came from teams teetering on the edge of relegation, you could say our three points saved them, well obviously it didn't but we can think it did. Aston Villa and Sunderland were both three points from the drop zone at the end of the season and both beat us successively in May 2015. Sunderland's local rivals Newcastle also snuck three points from the blues in December 2014 and ended up four points off a visit to the Championship.
We saw it the season before with an out of form Sunderland who turned up to Goodison Park on a particularly dreary Boxing Day and managed to walk away with a gift wrapped three points bows and all! With Aston Villa's current form the fixture on St David's Day does not fill me with any positivity. I am sure most of my usual readers will know I am normally the positive Evertonian but it feels a little bit like history repeating itself.
As I write this however, there has been some particularly positive news for the blues with the takeover by Farhad Moshiri. Maybe this could put some positivity into the team after the long break and we don't gift a team three points who are definitely in need!
