Pavel Pogrebnyak vs Roman Pavlyuchenko

Managing: Newcastle (Toon Army! Toon Army!)
Date: 9th May, 2009
Progress: 6th in Prem with three games to go. Plus FA Cup final still to come.

So… the big game against Tottenham didn’t go well.

I spent the first half taunting Spurs’ big Russian striker Roman Pavlyuchenko, and may possibly have referred to him as Pavel Pogrebnyak-lite. The Pav and The Pog are both 6′2″, blonde, Russian and hard to spell. They’d also both scored exactly 21 goals for the season heading into this game. But only one of them wears black and white stripes on weekends.

My precious Pogrebnyak had bagged that in 11 games fewer than Pav, had four more assists than Pav, and had cost £9.25m less. Even better, he was two years younger.

But the lesson here is that you should never taunt a Russian.

Because Pavlyuchenko scored the only goal of the game with a very neat finish, while Pogrebnyak had header after head saved and even missed an open goal that Alan Hutton served up to him on a plate.

My boys put up a good fight at White Hart Lane (except Oba Martins, who just wandered round like a mental patient again) but the equalizer just wouldn’t go in. Maybe my laptop could hear me taunting Pavlyuchenko and wanted to dole out some instant bad karma? I’ll play with the microphone off from now on.

So Spurs leapfrog me and into fifth and I my Toon Army drop to sixth. That Champions League spot looks a little more out of reach.

Taking the positives, I’m in sixth place with three games to go – vs Blackburn (home), Liverpool (away), West Brom (home). Plus an FA Cup Final vs Man City. So there’s some silverware plus possible European qualification still to play for.

I’ve been working on a way to show you some video of my goals. Since my boys didn’t score, I figured I’d try it out with Pavlyuchenko’s goal for Spurs.

Some tech details (and remember all this business is new to me) – Both of these vids were recorded using the free version of Fraps. Those files are too big to upload directly to DailyMotion, so I had to compress them first.

Video#1 was compressed using VirtualDub and an XVid MPeg4 Codec. I don’t really know what either of those things are or what those words mean, but that’s what I used:

Video#2 was compressed using good old Windows Movie Maker, which is a lot less complicated than VirtualDub or XVid MPeg4 Codec, but talks to you like you’re a small child.

Random tangent rant here, but why can’t someone find a happy medium between incomprehensible techno-talk like codecs and patronizing “we’ll do that for you because you can’t be trusted” Microsoft talk? /rant.

Anyway, let me know which one looks better and I’ll stick with that from now on.

Big thanks to Brian from Run of Play for great advice about videos. Sadly, I fear my efforts will fall someway short of his recent Pro Vercelli Autumn Almanac video, which will probably be showing in competition at Sundance next month (click that link, if only to see the insane goal around the 1:50 mark).

Category: FM09