This is one of our two new signings who made the cut today and got straight onto the pitch for their debuts – Andy Reid who joined us last week from Nottingham Forest. The other of course, is Mido, who popped away two goals in our 3-1 defeat of Pompey.

Both players showed us why they’d been bought – Mido was superb and Andy Reid set up a goal too so we were ‘well chuffed’ by the time of the final whistle. It’s pretty amazing that we now have a squad with enough depth to make the players fight for their places – I can’t remember that happening in many a long year.

We were debating what to wear before leaving home – I don’t think either of us had appreciated the depth of the cold. By the time we got home, I was frozen to the marrow and I never really feel the cold. It was a bit of a shock to the system to be honest.

The cold, dull and miserable weather did nothing for the number of photo opportunities, hence the graininess of this pic (and its lack of sharpness) – my little G3 struggles on iso 200 (even though it goes to 400 – the quality is so terrible over 200 it’s hardly worth the effort of setting it at 400) and I couldn’t get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action properly, even with a relatively wide aperture. I’m looking forward to some better weather soon so I can get a half-decent shot.

Still, this does show the action well and I’ve had a quick butchers at the Spurs site this morning and some of the shots on there are not much better than this so I feel a bit less gloomy about posting it (and they were taken with hugely expensive dslrs with enormous lenses with red stripes on them and beige bits).

Apparently Mido is a huge hero in his home country of Egypt – Sarah says that his wedding was televised and 8,000,000 Egyptians watched it. Wow – that makes him something of a superstar……let’s hope he’s a superstar for us. On this performance, it looks like he will be.

So, however cold and dreary we got a win and hopefully rekindled our team spirit enough to make sure we see off the Baggies next weekend in the Cup.


We'd been out on our Christmas Jolly and I'd had an incident on a train this time last year