Team News, Form and Prediction as Oxford United Welcome PeterboroughThe changes required for the Peterborough United team to tackle Oxford United in a Carabao Cup tie
The light drizzle glances off the skin, freshening the air of this new dawn. The Championship, that beguiling, gyrating chanteuse on the hazy horizon of our dreams is finally coming into a sharp focus.
Its manifest? Norwich, the city Steve Coogan chose to accentuate the parochialism of Alan Partridge. A city so cocooned in its own Englishness nobody has ever seen the need to build a motorway to get to it. It’s like going to an exotic strip club and finding yourself stuffing tenners into the thong of, well, Delia Smith.
The Championship represents something of a hinterland. Cesar Menotti, the chain smoking manager of Argentina’s 1978 World Cup winning squad talked of left and right-wing football. A staunch socialist serving under a right-wing dictatorship, Menotti viewed right-wing football as a constant struggle, justifying victory via any means, fair or foul. Left-wing football was more collegiate with a sense of community bound by unspoken rules of fair-play.
Where League One is the last trading post of football’s Corinthian spirit, The Championship feels like the foothills towards the ultra-right-wing of the Premier League, which loads the dice to its advantage. The casual ramshackle of the lower leagues gives way in the Championship, there’s a dress code; we’ve had to invest in better floodlights, goal line technology and camera positions to accommodate our Sky overlords. We are considered minnows and yet we are owned by billionaires, and we perceive Norwich as failures because of their inability to maintain their Premier League status. We’re at the foothills of a different place.
And still, here we are. I remember the imposter syndrome of our previous promotions – arriving back in the Football League in 2010, the sense of being mesmerised by the sophistication of Rochdale, then in 2016 an eternal struggle against Chesterfield. Would we be similarly bewitched by the second tier?
On both previous occasions there was an anxiety, that we had to acclimatise fast so not to throw away what we’d worked for. Now, we seem to be above that plimsole line, to drop down again wouldn’t be a disaster. We can enjoy being in the pain cave, at least up to the point where it’s no longer fun and we start pointing fingers.
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