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The replacement of his internet service (despite our best efforts to keep him cut off from the outside world) means the full return of Preview Percy. Here’s his look at Saturday’s trip to Tottenham...

Next up we take our injections and journey up to the London Borough of Harringay (motto “even worse than Croydon”) where we will be hosted by Tottenham, whose press department hates people referring to them in that manner. Kick-off at the Toilet Bowl on Saturday is at 3pm – hurrah.




There are engineering works on the mainline into Liverpool Street with buses replacing stuff east of Shenfield. Check before you leave, etc.

So Tottenham then. Oh woe is them. Their last six games have gone LLWDDL. The one win in that sequence came in a 1-0 win in the Crap Borough Derby down at Palace. The two subsequent draws came at Brentford (0-0) and at home to Sunderland (1-1).

Then the weekend before the Cup break they went down 3-2 at Bournemouth to Semenyo’s stoppage-time winner acting as a parting gift to the Bournemouth faithful.. All of that has left them in 14th place with 27 points from 21 games.

The Bournemouth game was hilarious for reasons other than the result of course, with manager Thomas Frank being spotted sipping his cup of instant from an Arsenal mug. “I didn’t realise” claimed the hapless boss. “Still it could be worse – it could have been a Tottenham mug” he continued. I expect.

You may notice that we now have new broadband here, Sky having been about as useful as a copy of the Laws Of The Game at PGMOL HQ. This means that Daisy has now the wherewithal to research on new signings.




She was rather grateful therefore to discover that there have been only two new arrivals so far this window. 19 year-old Mason Melia has been signed with an eye on the future, the main point of interest being that the £1.6m signing from St Pat’s is the nephew of sometime Hammer Clive Clarke.

The main signing so far this window has been Connor Gallagher whose sale from Chelsea to Ateletico Madrid owed as much to the financial shenanigans required to keep Chelsea on the right side of the regulations, as it did to football reasons. The £35m fee paid by Tottenham for Gallagher was exactly the same as that received from Palace for Brennan Johnson. Funny that.

Their absentees this weekend will include Betancour (thigh), Maddison (knee), Kudus (thigh), and Richarlison who, strangely, has a real hamstring issue, rather than the fake ones he seems to pick up on the pitch every week. Meanwhile Kuluvesky will miss out with a knee problem, whilst Saar will be otherwise engaged at the African Cuppasoup.

And so to the wild and wacky world of association football. Funniest result of the week was Crystal Palace’s defeat to Macclesfield. You’d have thought that a team like Palace might have thrived in the surroundings of Macclesfield’s better facilities but it seems that their Cup hopes were dependent on getting a home draw then bringing the Silkmen down to their level.

Elsewhere we saw the publication of a document so inaccurate, so self-serving and so dishonest that one might have thought that Donald Trump had written it. I refer to the Premier League’s Key Match Incident (KMI) panel.




Now on the face of it, an admission that there has been a 30% increase in VAR errors this season this season might be welcomed as a breath of fresh air honesty in the disaster area that is English refereeing. However, on closer inspection that figure seems to have been plucked out of the air. Handily they list all the incidents they think that PGMOL got wrong this season.

My first thought was to turn to see their comments on the infamous Chalobah challenge on Newcastle’s Gordon. You know, the one where PGMOL’s defence of the abomination of a decision was that Chalobah had simply been “shielding the ball out of play”. I looked in vain. Apparently the decision was 99% correct. I didn’t bother to search for the Wolves match in which four penalty decisions were wrong. If they were going to lie about Chalobah there seemed little point.

And so to us. Well a win’s a win, one supposes. QPR spent the first half with eleven men behind the ball clearly looking for extra time and penalties. Mavropanos’s injury – strangely but predictably not given as a penalty – looked nasty and one wishes him well.

After the lengthy delay we saw Summerville finish one of the few penetrative moves of the half to give us the lead. The lead prompted – inevitably – QPR to come out of their collective shell and the equaliser was not entirely unexpected. Whereupon they retreated back into their collective shell and we looked more likely to end the tie before extra time.

The same trend continued into the additional 30 minutes and Taty, who had earlier been on the end of some splendid goalkeeping and defending, opened his account with a decent header after some fine work from Summerville, whose MOTM award was a no-brainer. Job done.




Well the main story of this week has been the speculation surrounding the departure of Lucas Paqueta who is apparently angling for a return to Brazil with Flamengo. When the news broke on TV, the assorted talking heads seemed to be as one with the opinion that the player’s continued presence at the Olympic would be paramount to our survival. Which I thought was overstating the importance of the player by a bunch of people who haven’t watched him much this year.

To be honest, Paqueta hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory this season, his main contribution coming from the penalty spot in a season increasingly blighted by PGMOL’s determination not to give us any unless they really have to.

I do understand that the disgusting attempts by the FA to end the player’s career will have taken a heavy toll on the player’s mental health and the fact is that he really hasn’t been the same since the FA took two years to try to connect him to a non-existent betting ring.

Flamengo are rumoured to be willing to up their £26m or so bid though the latest news seems to be that we might request a loan-back deal. If that is the dealbreaker its rumoured to be I’d step back take the money, central defenders being more of a priority. He’s given the ball away a helluva lot this season and we already have players who can do that

Paqueta is a doubt for this weekend with a back injury that may or may not be connected to his impending departure or non departure, though wouldn’t it be splendid if he were fit enough to roll back the years and bow out with a MOTM up at the toilet bowl? I’d be surprised to see Mavropanos though, however much the manager has been talking up his chances of appearing.




Fernandes is the other doubt having been recovering from an unspecified knock over the past few days. The other definite absentee – apart from Lukasz Fabianski who appears to have re-signed for us purely in order to fill a space in the physio room – is Diouf who has got through to the Cuppasoup Final with Senegal against Morocco.

So to the prediction, then. We have lost to some rubbish this season. Ok the Wolves disaster owed much to the contribution of PGMOL but even so. They are in turmoil at the moment with their manager pointing out that they are at least better off than last season’s 17th, something described by their supporters as displaying a lack of ambition.

Frank will be hoping that their habit of raising their game against us will be sufficient to keep him in a job. I’m not sure that will happen though, as our frailties at the back may preclude us from winning.

So, with all that in mind, the £2.50 I was going to spend on buying a Tottenham mug to give to Mickey Mouse, will instead go on a 2-2 draw on this occasion if that’s ok with you Mr Winstone.

Enjoy the game!




When last we met at The Toilet Bowl: Lost 4-1 (Premier League September 2024)
1-0 up through Kudus we shipped an equaliser before t he interval – the shot hitting keeper and both posts en route. Three second half goals of similar streakiness ended the game as a contest before Kudus got fed up with being kicked from pillar to post and dished out some revenge, putting both Van Der Ven and Saar into deep comas which lasted just until the red card was somewhat belatedly.

Referee: Jarred Gillet
Another substandard official. The main reason we keep getting them is because PGMOL don’t have any other sort.

Danger Man: Connor Gallagher
Will want to hit the ground running in a World Cup year.

Percy and Daisy’s Amazing Tottenham Fact Of The Week Type Thing
Science fiction tells us that, even in the deep, deep future, this weekend’s opponents will be considered as a byword for uselessness. In an episode of Red Dwarf, Holly the computer refers to some stupid theory as “A load of Tottenham, a right steaming pile of Hotspur”. Some things will never change.

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