RiseAgainst

Let's hope we take this confidence boost and use it wisely at the weekend. If we get beaten on Saturday, tonight won't count for much. If we win, tonight could prove to be the catalyst that re-ignites our season and makes us look a more appealing prospect to potential summer signings. How appropriate that the stadium DJ is currently playing "Living on a Prayer"...

People neg on Lukas Engel, but I really like him. He's a defensive Matt Crooks - often looks hopeless but there's a talent in there, and he has contributed a few goals and assists.

Play two strikers, score two goals.

Well...

This feels like the kind of performance players turn in a few days before the words "by mutual consent" emanate from a club's press office, when the squad has stopped playing for a doomed gaffer. Genuine question - have the players given up on Carrick?

Miner Willy would be a better right back.

Oh dear me. I won't say anything further at this stage.

Jones on the bench 😍

Kick-off at 7:45. Knock out probably about 15 minutes later when Norwich score their second.

The Championship is his level, for sure. But I suspect if he's still in post next season, the players won't respect him and neither will the fanbase. This only ends one way.

Numerous people have acknowledged the crippling impact of injuries on our squad this season, and the disruption that's caused. However, when people talk about playing our best XI, they're talking about leaving Dieng on the naughty step to play Glover. They're talking about playing Greenwood ahead of...well, anyone. They're talking about playing crap loan players in front of similarly crap players we own and are supposed to be improving so we can eventually make a profit on them. These are decisions made by the coaching staff, and they look plain wrong from many people's perspective. When

I sense a Celebrity Death Match coming up. Kieran Scott vs Steve Round, for the honour of being blamed for our next catastrophic loss in form with the usual "what was our DoF thinking with those awful signings" comments...

We really do have nothing to play for tonight, because the match is tomorrow 😉

We're moaning about Carrick on here, with some justification, but how is that charlatan Wilder still in a job at Sheffield United? According to the Telegraph, they're the first top-flight team to concede five or more goals in four consecutive home games.

If Jeremy Hunt is really generous tomorrow, he might cut taxes to the point where it balances out the hike in Boro season ticket price rises.

The PM might call a general election - we might get some money off NI announced in the Budget - but if you're hoping for a Boro win, I think we're all out of luck. It might as well be Friday the 13th and Carrick runs over a black cat on the way to the match for all the chance we have of winning.

It's human nature to be instinctively good at some things and inherently bad at others. I'm great in the kitchen and even better in the bedroom, but I'm terrible at DIY. Gibson is great at developing our club's facilities and even better at backing managers with money, but he's terrible at choosing who those managers should be. We've had more bad managers than good ones in the last 30 years. Unfortunately, choosing the manager isn't something Gibson seems willing to delegate, despite his patchy track record, even as he introduces a DoF and other supporting roles to spread the governance b

How excited are you for the game? About as excited as a dog going to the vets to have his knackers cut off. A vague sense of dread grows ever more acute as the number of sleeps til Wednesday diminishes. What would your team and formation be? Honestly, why even bother? I'd just pull 11 squad members' names out of a tombola, use a Random Positional Generator (TM, c in a circle) to assign them a place on the pitch, watch silently for 70 minutes with hands in pockets, and then take off our best player on the day. And then tell the supine local media we played well, even though an ey

He's not bonny, for sure. But if we get promoted, we could pay for him to have cosmetic surgery. For £100 million, we could have him looking more like Ryan Reynolds than Ryan Reynolds does (and less like Wade Wilson).

I've just created a poll to gauge everyone's thoughts.

I'm genuinely conflicted about this, so I thought I'd gauge the sentiment among the wider fanbase. The Stoke game feels like an end rather than a beginning, but I can't work out whether managerial and training ground tactics are letting us down week after week, or whether the players simply aren't good enough. Or maybe it's both, in which case perhaps we can't solve one problem without tackling the other? If you think we do need a new manager, please nominate an unattached manager who could realistically come in at this late stage of the season and mould our current squad into a competent

It alleviates the boredom, and it's not as if Boro are going to score...

Christ on a bike.

A WordPress blog is basically a series of connected webpages hosted by the WordPress platform, where you log in and then have a blank space to build whatever you want. It's one of several services WordPress offer - you can build an entire website with e-commerce facilities and suchlike - but the blog hosting service is ideal for people who aren't very tech savvy but want to put loads of information online quickly and simply. You could have a separate webpage for each rival club, each season, each Boro player, etc, all interconnected and linking to each other. Them Google makes a note of i

I'd like to think @Erimus74isn't affected by this, since he mostly uploads images from his vast collection of memorabilia. Personally, I wouldn't click on a link with an unfamiliar domain name or TLD, even posted on a site I trust, especially after my drive-by download malware incident a few months ago.