Long-Range Forecast

Charlton 2 Middlesbrough 1

Despite dropping the campaign to kick Lawro out of football, ruefully having to acknowledge that he isn't going to go just because most right-thinking football followers would like him to, I nevertheless find that I cannot ignore him. Looking at his simple, eager features peering out at me from the BBC Football site as each week nears its end, I try to suppress the inclination to find out how he thinks Charlton will get on, yet inevitably sooner or later give in to temptation. I do try to resist, though, and this past weekend I got through to Sunday before deciding to have a look.

Oddly enough, a few days earlier, I had been reading one of my favourite journalists, Simon Hoggart, on the topic of long-range weather forecasting. He pointed out that in the eastern United States, weather forecasters are regarded almost as gods, simply because their predictions are almost always accurate, whereas on this side of the Atlantic people like Michael Fish, who achieved fame by predicting a calm evening just a matter of hours before the biggest hurricane to hit England in living memory, are regarded as a joke.

Simon's point was that it is easy for forecasters on the U. S. eastern seaboard, as they have 2,500 miles of solid land mass to the west of them, and this makes for very stable weather patterns, whereas the British Isles have a similar amount of turbulent, changeable Atlantic Ocean, making any kind of prediction unreliable, and so-called long-range ones utterly useless.

With this at the back of my mind, imagine my astonishment when I read Lawro's prediction for the Charlton vs Middlesbrough league game for Sunday afternoon.

Lawro said he thought Charlton would win, and forecast a 2-0 margin as well, but he followed this with a most extraordinary prediction: that Charlton would lose the cup-tie against the same Middlesbrough team on 23 March and that 'Boro (not 'Brough, for some mysterious reason as I have said before) would go through to the semi finals.

I have reflected on this, and I can dimly see what Lawro was getting at: he thought that the Sunday game, so soon after their UEFA Cup tie against Roma, would be too much for them, but that they will be set fair to knock Charlton out of the FA Cup next week. Long-range or what? I wonder what Michael Fish's views on this might be.

The BBC website, as usual, reported the win as a stroke of good fortune, much as they had reported Charlton's 3-0 away win in Middlesbrough in August.

Middlesbrough dominated the first half down in SE7, which ended 0-0; Charlton in fact played much better in the second half, when all the goals were scored. Darren Bent's two goals were not as spectacularly beautiful as Mark Viduka's one goal, though. So hard luck 'Brough, and what terrible rules football has; it insists that the side scoring the most goals gets the points, and BBC commentators' hopes and expectations count for nothing. Maybe when the new charter comes through this will change. There is a reasonably unbiased report here, though.

Quiz matters, not that there have been all that many lately, soon.