Chelsea 1 Charlton 1
As far as Charlton are concerned, the answer to that is a home tie to Leyton Orient, away conquerors of Premiership Fulham, in the Fourth Round of the FA Cup next weekend.
However that is not the reason for the above title, really. It is actually meant to reflect on the increasing tendency for people to predict things. In my job, teaching English as a foreign language, one of the elements is reading, in that the students are required to read a text of some sort, in a book designed to suit the level of the class they are in. There is then a task of some nature. In the old days when I began, these were almost always multiple-choice questions: a statement about the passage would be started and four possible endings offered, and the student had to choose the one which reflected the truth of what he or she had just been reading.
Then a variation was introduced, especially at lower levels, in the shape of the 'True or False' question. Here there would be a single statement about the text, and students had to say if it was in keeping with what the text stated, or not.
Then in the late eighties, there was a spate of rather bad textbooks: these would still have reading material, but the writers couldn't be bothered to think up questions, so there wouldn't be any. Instead, there was prediction.
As most EFL books were (and still are, I think) mainly written by socially-aware Brits of left-wing leanings living in North Oxford, or Islington (and occasionally Brighton), my bemused, upper middle-class, capital-city dwelling, and let's not deny it, rich, kids would find themselves confronted with a text on the difficulties of elderly people living in high-rise flats, for example, and also be required to predict the content of what they were going to read.
Not surprisingly, they couldn't do this, but I didn't worry unduly; after all, they could just read the thing. But Nemesis was waiting for me on this particular day, on the next page. Instead of some simple true/false options, or a set of nice multiple-choices to keep them thinking for a quarter of an hour or so, was the instruction "Now tell your fellow-students if the text contained what you thought it would", or something along those lines. There might also have been a supplementary question like "are there any high-rise flats in your country?" [
not as such, ed.], but nothing more. I had set 35 minutes aside for this reading and OK, I should have turned the page before the class started, but I had never encountered reading texts without questions before.
An EFL [English as a Foreign Language] guru of my acquaintance explained that "it's all about prediction nowadays". Needless to say, like most EFL fads, it proved to be little worse than useless, and was eventually dropped; but it still recurs in other areas of life, for instance, in Britain over Christmas, looking at television, I was astonished at how many minutes per hour are taken up with the TV equivalent of being beaten about the head as we were relentlessly bombarded with details of forthcoming programmes.
And now you can't read people's views about football without them putting in a prediction or two. The absurd Lawro I am always complaining about, as you know; but my fellow bloggers Frankie Valley and Wyn Grant are also getting in on the act. Frankie
compared Charlton to the unfortunate whale which was ultimately to die in London over the weekend, wondering if the poor bemused thing (i.e. Charlton Athletic) would happily return from West London to a life of happiness further down the Thames in SE7, and then added that he thought the score would be 5-1. He had accurately predicted the winning score against Birmingham, so there was cause for concern.
Mr Grant thought 2-0, though he was inclined to hope, at least, for something better.
Lawro had the grace to make a polite reference to Charlton's recent improvement, but still felt that Chelsea would win by two goals, and no one else thought much of our chances, either.
I have to say that though the result was unexpected, it was not all that surprising; statistically Chelsea had to drop a home point sometime, and Charlton had drawn 1-1 there in October, anyway, before winning the League Cup tie on penalties, so who better to take the first league points of the season at Stamford Bridge?
My own attitude was resignation to a probable defeat, and yet I was also aware of returning optimism, and in the end all was well. Definitely a point gained rather than two dropped, I would say. And a nice bonus in that new signing Marcus Bent (friend but no relation of Darren) scored the goal. Alan Curbishley's face (above) says it all, really.
Quiz news (not that there is much of it) in a day or two.