The Grand Poo 2
Isak 60, Munoz 82
Nottingham Forest 2
Ndoye 24, Gibbs-White 70 (pen)

NO EXCUSES

At some point, my brain stopped working. It had to, because it couldn't cope with stuff it neither expected nor understood.

Things didn't start well. My brain didn't understand how Glasner could pick a midfield of McAtee and Schlager. It was like building a wall out of meringue, wasn't it? And Ndoye, for God's sake. My brain didn't understand, but at least it knew what to expect. Annihilation. It prepared itself for Annihilation, and whistled "I told you so" to the tune of Handel's Dead March.

When the game started, Annihilation didn't arrive. In fact, expected reality began to shift into a dimension which made no sense at all, which was worrying. McAtee, that moth's wing of a footballer, was spraying the ball around like a card sharp dealing off the bottom. The midfield wasn't getting overrun. Forest were making Liverpool look like a squadron of poorly maintained diggers. And there was the hopeless DanDoye finishing a neat move in splendid fashion to put Forest ahead.

None of this was supposed to happen, not after the miserable display against Leed, and the miserable display against Leed. The only way my brain could process this was by telling me that this was a conspiracy to prove how stupid I was. Or it wasn't really happening at all.

My brain settled on the "not really happening" option. It was the only way to explain things like Aina making the wing-back thing work, Jesus giving the Poo defence the heebie-jeebies, the VAR cancelling a Poo goal, the whine of the Poo supporters like the wind in the telephone lines, some ginger bloke running around the pitch unconvincingly, MacAllister being so laughably Argentinian, Neco Williams making himself undroppable and, hopefully, unsellable. Of all the things which didn't happen, the most thrilling was the realisation that Forest were far, far better than their hosts.

It couldn't last, of course. Reality kicked back in, and the brain switched channels. There was McAtee folding like a wet cardboard box, allowing a cross to be made for Etiquette to score, proving that I was right after all about everything, and being comfortably certain that the Poo would go on to win the game.

Then the useless Delap took a smart throw in to Williams whose charge into the box was halted by Allison's trip and MGW scored the penalty. That, I think, was the point at which my brain admitted that everything I'd said about the system, the players, the manager, was bollocks. The brain just gave up. I didn't care about the rest of the match. The strange ginger rug scored an equaliser which Sels might have reached if it hadn't clipped Murillo's toe, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that Forest were the better side, and I, along with many others, had been proved to be a little bit stupid.

You may start to hear trains thundering in the distance, but that's because your brain isn't working properly.