Let’s start with Plymouth Argyle and their first game in anger at Home Park this season. Plymouth beat Wycombe by 2 – 1 in the first round of the league cup. Plymouth found themselves 2 – 0 up at half time in a flurry of activity scoring twice in four minutes before the half time break. Martin Bullock was the unfortunate Wycombe player that deflected Reuben Reid’s shot-cum-cross into the back of his own net. That rattled the visitors and Plymouth piled on the pressure, Sylvan Ebanks-Blake rattled the crossbar before Lee Hodges got the perfect headed touch on Scott Laird’s corner kick to defeat the Wycombe keeper again. Plymouth outclassed Wycombe for most of the game, but the The Chairboys gave as good as they got even grabbing a late consolation goal. A good performance from the League 2 outfit, but ultimately the quality difference between Championship and League 2 was the undoing of the Buckinghamshire based side! So another decent performance from the Pilgrims, still work needed in defensive area, we really shouldn’t be conceding goals to teams two divisions lower than us, but two wins out of two games is a good start, hopefully Argyle can carry that form into Saturday’s match at Home Park against Ipswich, it won’t be an easy 3 points from Ipswich, Argyle have to fight for the win; Ipswich are no pushovers!
Liverpool won their first leg champions league quaifying tie with Toulouse by a single goal courtesy by new signing Andriy Voronin just before the half time break with a spectacular turn and shoot effort on goal from a Peter Crouch headed cross into the box. It wasn’t exactly a classic game from either team, Liverpool were clearly in control of proceedings and barely needed to step up into second gear and have that vital away goal for their trip back to Fortress Anfield! I expect it to rain goals at Anfield in two weeks time as I really can’t see Toulouse posing a threat in Liverpool, that should mean comfortable progress into the next round of the Champions League, next match for Liverpool is on Sunday at Anfield against the old enemy Chelsea, hopefully Liverpool’s star signings will shine on the day!
In the cricket, England somehow managed to save the third test batting out the final day with Kevin Pietersen top scoring with 101 runs, hitting 18 fours before being caught by Karthik. Ian Bell almost steered England home on the way to knocking up 67 runs before falling victim to Khan, it was left to Matt Prior and Ryan Sidebottom to see out the remaining overs of the day. I’m surprised by India’s decision not to make England follow on after the English didn’t make it to the 465 runs required to avoid the follow on. Ultimately it was that decision that cost the Indian’s the test, but it doesn’t matter anyway as India took the series 0 – 1 after their win last week at Trent Bridge after England being denied the win at Lords by the typical British summer. So a test series to forget for the English, let’s hope for better luck in the one day International series, but I am not pinning any hopes on that!
Finally a little about my own insignificant life, as of next Wednesday I will be working Alternation at Voodoo once again officially after dwindling numbers over the past few weeks since I stepped back from running the night. Now the night will be free entry and I will be paid by Voodoo for my services, but instead of doing the night on my own, I am splitting the money with Steve as we always have a laugh working together, which is still a guaranteed 25 quid each minus promotion costs. With the students coming back at the end of August I think that Voodoo Alternation could be very popular indeed. It’s just a matter of some targeted marketing getting the student crowd in, we all know how student’s like a free night out, although it’s not really free when they spend a bucket load of their student loans on booze! I am thinking of getting a cheap printer to print out some posters for around Voodoo and in town. And get some flyers printed to put around Voodoo on gig nights, basically saturate the whole scene, so everyone knows about the night! Obviously that doesn’t mean that they’ll come, but if one in every three people that read the flyer comes to the night, I would class that as a success, I’ll have my fingers crossed on that one!