[Lord Snooty]

Manchester United v Huddersfield Town
The Premier League
Boxing Day - 15:00 ko
at Old Trafford

Huddersfield Town travel to play Manchester United at Old Trafford on Wednesday afternoon, Boxing day of course. Then it's down to Craven Cottage to play Fulham in a Christmas away day double header. The fixture planners are really taking the piss this season! No home game over Christmas and not even a New Year's Day game as our fixture at home to Burnley has been moved to the Wednesday night.  

We go to Old Trafford, not on the crest of a slump, but slap bang in the middle of one. Five consecutive defeats leaves us rooted in the bottom 3, level on points with Saturday's opponents, ahead only on goal difference. We have an entire midfield out injured of course. Aaron Mooy, Danny Williams and Abdelhamid Sabiri are all long term absentees, whereas Jonathan Hogg was a surprise one on Saturday for the Southampton match. He has a knee injury, which manager David Wagner expects to be clear by Boxing Day. But really, what's the point in risking him at Old Trafford? Save him for the Cottage. We only have Philip Billing of the regular midfield available, as well as the inexperienced Juninho Bacuna. Why not drop Bacuna to the bench, load the attack with the likes of Steve Mounié, Laurent Depoitre, Elias Kachunga, Collin Quaner and Alex Pritchard in a 4-1-5 formation and just HOOOOOOF the bloody ball and not bother with the midfield?

Manchester United of course are under new management and won the first game under the leadership of interim manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær at Cardiff on Saturday 5-1. They too have a few injuries, but of course have a bit more in reserve than we do, so it shouldn't matter. Alexis Sanchez is definitely out, as is Romelu Lukaku for "personal reasons". Others in doubt, and why risk them against little Huddersfield, are Chris Smalling, Marcos Rojo and Scott McTominay.

United are odds on favourites to win this one, obviously. A quick check at the online bookies checker has most of them offering 14/1 for a Town victory. Well, Crystal Palace were 25/1 to win at Man City on Saturday! It's a funny old game. Don't write us off yet.

Before you read on, I'd just like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Here's the Huddersfield Choral Society for your pleasure. Press play and read on.

Tickets: It's a sell out!

A brief history of Manchester United: Formed in 1878 by workers of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway's Carriage and Wagon Department, based at Newton Heath. By 1892 they were in the Football League and in 1902 the name was changed to Manchester United after the Newton Heath club were wound up.

The new club won promotion from Division 2 in 1906 and then in 1908 they won their first First Division Champions title.They followed that by winning the first ever Charity Shield and then won their first FA Cup, beating Bristol City 1-0 in 1909. Another League title came in 1911, but then nothing for decades.

Their next trophy was the 1948 FA Cup, which they won beating Blackpool 4-2 in the Final. By this time, they had Matt Busby in as manager. They won three League titles in the 1950s and Busby's willingness to play the kids, the average age of the '56 title winning squad being just 22, earned them the nickname the Busby Babes. They became the first English team to play in the European Cup in 1957, getting as far as the semi finals. Then in 1958, on the way home from a quarter final tie against Red Star Belgrade, disaster struck on the runway of Munich-Riem Airport. 23 people lost their lives in the plane crash, including 8 of the Busby Babes.

Despite this, the team still made it to the FA Cup Final that year, but lost to Bolton Wanderers. They did win the Cup again in 1963 and more League titles in 1965 and 1967, which qualified them for the European Cup again. This time, in 1968, they became the first English club to win it. They beat Benfica 4-1 at Wembley Stadium after extra time, with two goals from Bobby Charlton and one each from George Best and Brian Kidd. This was the culmination of this particular era of the club's history as the following year, Busby retired.

In 1974, ex Town and Man Utd star Denis Law, now playing for cross city rivals Manchester City, scored the goal that relegated United to Division 2. They came straight back up the following season and won another FA Cup Final in 1977, this time 2-1 against Liverpool. They followed this with another couple of FA Cups in 1983 and 1985.
Then in 1986, following the dismissal of manager Ron Atkinson, the board persuaded the Aberdeen manager to come south and replace him. His name was Alex Ferguson.

Ferguson was manager from 1986 to 2013 and in that time the club won one or two trophies. They won the Premier League a mere 13 times (becoming only the fourth club to win three in a row behind the earlier achievements of Huddersfield Town, Arsenal and Liverpool), the FA Cup 5 times, and the League Cup 3 times. In Europe, they won the Cup Winners Cup in 1991, Mark Hughes scoring a couple of goals in the Final against Barcelona. But the most famous night of the Fergie era came in 1999 at the Nou Camp when two spawny late goals from Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjær (more on him later) saw them beat Bayern Munich 2-1 to win the Champions League. They won it again in 2008, beating Chelsea on penalties in the final.

Since Sir Alex retired, they haven't been the same force but have still managed to win the FA Cup in 2016 and the League Cup in 2017, beating Southampton in the Final 3-2.

Head to Head



United lead in the overall head to head with 22 wins to Town's 11, with 15 draws.

BUT WE BEAT THEM LAST SEASON!

Before that though it was 1952 when we last beat them. That was at Leeds Road and it was a 3-2 win with a couple of goals from Jimmy Glazzard and a penalty from Vic Metcalfe. Our last win at Old Trafford, and our only ever league win there, was back in season 1930/31, but what a whopper this one was. We beat the buggers 6-0 with Gerry Kelly and Alex Jackson both getting a hat trick. This was the only time we've done the league double over the Red Devils as we pumped them in the rematch back at ours five days later. Only 3-0 this time with goals from Bob Kelly, Joe Robson and Levi Redfern. In between these two matches, we beat Liverpool as well. That's right, wins over Man Utd twice and Liverpool in the space of five days. Those were the days, my friend.

Our only other win there was a 3-0 FA Cup win in 1924 with goals this time from Town legends Charlie Wilson (2) and Clem Stephenson.

We have played them twice since that famous win last season, both ending in 2-0 defeats. Romelu Lukaku and Alexis Sanchez scoring in the return league fixture and then Lukaku bagging a double in the FA Cup.







So what's happening down Sir Alex Ferguson Way?  Managed nowadays by José Mourinho, a PE teacher who once worked as an interpreter for Bobby Robson. That's all I've got on this fella. He won some cups, called himself the Special One, but quite frankly I'm sick of the sight of Sky Sports and everybody else hanging off his every word, cos he really is just a boring old bastard.

Well, I never saw that coming when I wrote those words. I shall start again, seeing as the bugger got sacked last week. Managed now, and for the rest of the season, on loan from Norwegian club Molde FK, is Ole Gunnar Solskjær, the ex Cardiff City manager.
He spent 11 seasons at United as a player, after joining from Molde in 1996, scoring 126 goals for them in 366 appearances, most of which seemed at the time to have been as a sub. Don't have the stats for that but that's how I remember it.
He won 6 Premier League title medals as well as that Champions League from 1999. On retirement, he took up the job managing the Utd reserve team and then went home to Molde in 2010 to manage them. He did a good job there with an overall 55.2% winning rate, but then out of the blue in January 2014 he took over at Premier League Cardiff City and took them straight down. How fitting then that his first match in charge of Manchester United, following his appointment on December 19th, was away at Cardiff City.
He has no connection at all with Huddersfield Town. We were a lower league team when he played in England and I bet he doesn't even know where Huddersfield is. Well let's bloody well let him know!

Club Connections: 2nd Division Championship winning Town manager Ian Greaves played for United in the 1950s and the captain of that side, Jimmy Nicholson signed for Town from United in 1964 after making 58 appearances for them. He went on to play almost 300 games for us and is still our most capped international player, gaining 31 caps as a Town player for Northern Ireland, many of them as skipper.

Before them came a young lad called Denis Law. Signed by Bill Shankly from Aberdeen in 1956, he played 81 times for us before a big money move to Manchester City, much of the £55,000 being spent on a new set of floodlights at Leeds Road. That was a British record transfer fee but was doubled a couple of years later when City sold him to Torino. He didn't stay long in Italy and then came back to Manchester to sign for United and went on to score 237 goals in 404 appearances, making him their third highest all time goalscorer behind Wayne Rooney and Bobby Charlton.
He did come back to Huddersfield many years later when he and rugby league legend Alex Murphy were the two celebrities doing the ceremonial sod cutting for the start of construction of our beautiful new stadium.

The Lawman

In the 1970s we signed another couple of Town legends from Old Trafford. Alan Gowling scored four goals in one game for Utd against Southampton and was signed as the replacement for Frank Worthington in 1972. Unfortunately, despite being top scorer in all of his seasons at Leeds Road, he couldn't help us from being relegated a couple more times into the 4th division and was subsequently sold to Newcastle.

Alan Gowling

The other 70s legend was Arnold Sidebottom. He signed from Utd in 1975 and played 61 times for Town in the dark days. His time at Town wasn't the most memorable of his career, his main claim to fame was as a cricketer. He played for Yorkshire and played one Test match for England, against the Aussies at Trent Bridge in 1985. His son, celebrity Town fan Ryan Sidebottom, had a more successful cricketing career, but never turned out in the famous bright blue and white shirt.

Arnold Sidebottom

Another Town legend from the United academy was Ben Thornley. He came to us on loan in 1996, a member of the famous Fergie Fledglings youth set up that mostly went on to win the Premier league despite being told they "wouldn't win anything with kids". On his Town home debut, two of his youth team buddies came to watch him and sat in front of us. They were David Beckham and Gary Neville and got moved on when the blokes who's reserved seats they'd sat in turned up. They weren't impressed with the "don't you know who that was you just kicked out?". Bloody idiots can't read "reserved".  
Anyway, Ben was Mr Inconsistency himself. Brilliant one minute, utter garbage the next. Now working as a taxi driver in Oldham (maybe, don't believe everything you read online).

Ooooh Ben Thornley

Recent form: Town are 19th in the Premier League with 10 points, United are 6th with 29 points.

Last 6 matches:

Southampton 2-2 Man Utd (Lukaku, Herrera)
Man Utd 2-2 Arsenal (Martial, Lingard)
Man Utd 4-1 Fulham (Young, Mata, Lukaku, Rashford)
Valencia 2-1 Man Utd (CL) (Rashford)
Liverpool 3-1 Man Utd (Lingard)
Cardiff 1-5 Man Utd (Rashford, Herrera, Martial, Lingard 2, 1 pen)

Wolves 0-2 Town (Mooy 2)
Town 1-2 Brighton (Zanka)
Bournemouth 2-1 Town (Kongolo)
Arsenal 1-0 Town
Town 0-1 Newcastle
Town 1-3 Southampton (Billing)


Manchester United's line up at Cardiff:
1 De Gea
18 Young
2 Lindelöf
4 Jones
23 Shaw
21 Herrera
31 Matic
6 Pogba
14 Lingard
10 Rashford
11 Martial

Substitutes:
3 Bailly
8 Mata
15 Pereira
17 Fred
20 Dalot
22 Romero
27 Fellaini



Town's recent Boxing Day results:
2017: Town 1-1 Stoke City (Ince)
2016: Town 2-1 Nottingham Forest (Palmer, Mancienne og)
2015: Town 3-1 Preston North End (Huws 2, Wells)
2014: Rotherham Utd 2-2 Town (Vaughan, Coady)
2013: Town 1-1 Derby County (Paterson)
2012: Town 1-1 Blackpool (Gerrard)
2011: Town 1-0 Chesterfield (Rhodes)
2010: Town 0-1 Hartlepool Utd
2009: Town 1-0 Milton Keynes Dons (Pilkington)
2008: Carlisle 3-0 Town

Seven Boxing Day games unbeaten then since losing at home to Hartlepool. Ten years ago we lost at Carlisle. Nice to see our Christmas opponents are gradually getting bigger and better. Who would believe that a decade after that long trip up to Brunton Park, we would be lining up at Old Trafford to play Manchester United for the Boxing Day special?

FOLLOWED BY.........

Fulham v Huddersfield Town
The Premier League
Saturday 29th December - 15:00 ko
at Craven Cottage

Tickets: Town have an increased allocation of 2,721 tickets, which are priced £30 - Adults, £25 - Over-65s, £25 – Under-21s, £20 - Under-18s. Not a sell out, so get down there for this crucial match. You know you want to.

A brief history of Fulham FC: Formed in 1879, they didn't become members of the Football League until 1907, by which time they had already moved into their current home ground, Craven Cottage. The stadium, situated next to the River Thames, became their home in 1896 and the actual Craven Cottage has a history going back over 300 years when it used to be a royal hunting lodge.
Those early FL days were spent mainly in the 2nd division, but they became original members of Division 3 South when the FL was expanded in 1928. They won their first title in 1932, winning Div 3S, with the momentum of a winning team almost taking them straight up again, only to finish 3rd in the days when only two teams were promoted.
They had to wait until 1949 for their First Division debut after winning the Division 2 title. And it wasn't a long stay, only three seasons before relegation. Back up again in 1959, staying a bit longer before being demoted again in 1968. Then they became a yoyo team between the bottom three divisions, although in the 1970s they did become something of a glamour club, attracting star names to the Cottage such as George Best, Rodney Marsh, Bobby Moore and Alan Mullery. With Moore and Mullery, they reached the FA Cup Final of 1975, where they lost 2-0 to West Ham.
In the 90s, Fulham dropped to their lowest position at the foot of the 4th tier. This was when the club was bought out by businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed. He put Ray Wilkins in charge of team affairs, with Kevin Keegan alongside him. Wilkins left soon after, leaving Keegan in charge and he led the team to promotion, before being tempted away to manage England. Paul Bracewell and then Jean Tigana took over and in the blink of an eye, Fulham had been promoted from the depths of the 4th division to the Premier League, finishing the 2001-02 season in 13th position.
They became an established Premier League team until they were relegated in 2014, by which time al-Fayed had left the club and in 2010 they had had a dabble with Europe, reaching the final of the Europa League, losing to Atletico Madrid 2-1 after extra time.
Last season, after being out of the picture for most of the season, they qualified for the Play Offs and won promotion back to the Premier League. They beat Derby County 2-1 on aggregate in the semis, after a 0-1 defeat at Pride Park they won 2-0 at the Cottage with goals from Ryan Sessegnon and Denis Odoi. Then at Wembley they beat Aston Villa 1-0 with a first half goal from Tom Cairney.

Head to Head



Town lead in the overall head to head with 26 wins to Fulham's 25, with 16 draws.

The first meeting of the two clubs was back in our first Football League season when we lost at their place on Boxing Day 1910.
Craven Cottage is another of those grounds where we haven't won for many a year. The last one was way back in 1993 when a Iwan Roberts goal gave us a 1-0 win.
Even further back, we beat Fulham 3-0 at Leeds Road in the FA Cup en route to what to still our last venture as far as the quarter finals. Goals that day were from Les Chapman and a couple from Jimmy Lawson.

We did famously get pumped by them twice in our promotion to the Premier season. Walloped 0-5 down at the Cottage, we also got beat 1-4 back at ours. We had however already qualified for the Play Offs at that stage and were really just easing off the gas, so to speak.

This season, we registered our first league win of the campaign against the Cottagers. It was a 1-0 win when Christopher Schindler scored a header, only for it to eventually being given as a Timothy Fosu-Mensah own goal.

So what's happening down at the Cottage? Managed nowadays by Claudio Ranieri, whose greatest achievement to date was managing the Rest Of The World team in the Soccer Aid charity match.
Born in Rome in 1951, he played as a defender in the 70s for Roma before spending the majority of his playing days at Catanzaro. His entire playing career was spent in Italy.
He managed five Italian clubs before he ventured into Spain to manage Valencia and then Atlético Madrid. Ranieri resigned from there before they were relegated and in the year 2000 he signed on as manager of Chelsea. They made it to the FA Cup Final and the Champions League and he got nicknamed "The Tinkerman" for his squad rotation policy, but then in 2003 he had the distinction of being the first manager sacked by Roman Abramovic, on the day that Town beat Mansfield in the Play Off Final, thus stealing our thunder. Selfish Twat!
He had more big time jobs back in Spain, Italy and France and then the Greek national team, before coming back to England and managing Leicester City, where he did alright, I suppose.
He took over the job at Craven Cottage on the 14th of November this year, shortly after Slaviša Jokanović got the boot for losing at our place.

Club Connections:

Malcolm McDonald: was born in Fulham in 1950 and after a career as a superstar centre forward for Newcastle, Arsenal and England returned to his birthplace to manage the local football team in 1980. He won promotion to the 2nd division with them and almost took them up to the first division. After being seen as certainties to go up for most of the season, a slump at the end saw them fall at the final hurdle, controversially losing at Derby when the match was cut short following a pitch invasion. McDonald tried in vain to get the match replayed and he was replaced by Ray Harford as manager during the following season.
His time at Town was one of the worst periods in the club's history. He was here for less than a season, but in that time we lost 10-1 at Man City and were relegated having conceded 100 league goals in the season and finished 19 points adrift of safety. It was later revealed that he was an alcoholic, which was brought on by the pain suffered by the knee injury which had earlier caused him to cut short his playing career. He is widely regarded as the worst Town manager of all time.



Dale Tempest: played for Fulham during the McDonald era of the early 80s scoring 6 goals in 34 matches. He was signed for Town by Mick Buxton in 1984 and went on to score 27 goals in 65 matches for us, being the leading scorer in 84/85.
After us, he went to Gillingham and Colchester before disappearing out to the far east. He moved to Hong Kong in 1989 and became something of a superstar out there, playing for South China and becoming the leading league scorer for 5 seasons in a row. He was granted Hong Kong citizenship and even represented the country at international level.
Nowadays he is back in England and works for Sky Bet.



Lee Clark: in contrast to McDonald, he was the best Town manager of all time. Well, in his own mind anyway.
Appointed in 2008 as the first manager appointed by new chairman Dean Hoyle following the sacking of Stan Ternent, he got us to a reasonable 9th. His first full season saw him win three Manager fo the Month awards and the team reached the Play Offs, eventually losing to Millwall.
It was Play Offs again the season after, with a memorable semi final victory over Bournemouth, followed by a less than memorable defeat at Old Trafford against Peterborough.
That defeat didn't count as a regular league match though and in the next season our run of unbeaten league matches was extended to an amazing 43, a Football League record, which some fans think was irrelevant due to the Peterborough defeat and the fact that it didn't actually lead to promotion. But nonetheless it's still an FL record whether the cynics like it or not. One of those cynics would appear to have been Mr Hoyle though and Clark was sacked and replaced by Simon Grayson not long after.
In his playing career he was one of the few players to have played for both Newcastle and Sunderland. His Sunderland career came to an abrupt end though. While on a night out with friends in London, he stopped to pose for photos with a group of Newcastle supporters, who put a t-shirt on him bearing the phrase "Mackem Bastards". He claimed he knew nothing about what was on the shirt, but it ended up with him being transferred to Fulham.
Unfortunately for us, his time at the Cottage coincided with the meltdown of the Steve Bruce era at Town and his man of the match performance in our end of season 0-3 defeat down there in May 2000 saw us miss out on the Play Offs after being in the top 6 since October. The following season, Town got relegated and Clark played a major role in Fulham's promotion to the Premier League.



Scott Malone: always played well against us, particularly in those two matches in our promotion season. He scored the equalising goal for them when they beat us 4-1 at the JSS. So he was the obvious choice to go for when David Wagner decided he needed another left back in the squad. Unfortunately his 22 appearances for us last season were, let's say, unspectacular, and he was shipped back to the Championship with Derby County in the summer, where, to be fair, he's doing alright again. Before Fulham, he had been at Cardiff and before that in the lower leagues with Millwall, Southend, Burton and Bournemouth, where again, he scored against us.




Recent form: Town are 19th and Fulham are 20th and we both have 10 points. This will be last on Match of the Day, you can bet on that!

Last 6 matches:

Fulham 3-2 Southampton (Mitrovic 2, Schürrle)
Chelsea 2-0 Fulham
Fulham 1-1 Leicester (Kamara)
Man Utd 4-1 Fulham (Kamara pen)
Fulham 0-2 West Ham
Newcastle 0-0 Fulham

Before we play them, they have another home fixture, against Wolves on Boxing Day.


Fulham's line up at Newcastle:
25 Rico
4 Odoi
26 Mawson
13 Ream
22 Christie
5 Chambers
24 Seri
23 Bryan
10 Cairney
9 Mitrovic
14 Schürrle

Substitutes:
1 Bettinelli
6 McDonald
8 Johansen
11 Ayité
19 Vietto
20 Le Marchand
47 Kamara

[theo_luddite]

Another reet riveting read from His Lordship.    

Due to family commitments, added to a lack of public transport, I'm giving the Boxing Day match a miss for the first time that I can recall since, oooooh??? failing to buy a ticket for Rotherham apparently. Over the years I guess we've somehow managed to snag more than our fair share of home games on Boxing Day so we were probably due an away match.

Never mind, I'm ticking off Craven Cottage on Saturday and Cardiff next month to make up for it.

Up until about a week ago, I reckoned we'd a good chance of a point at Old Trafford, as long as Old Sourpuss was still around spreading his peculiar version of discontent around the club, but after seeing what they did to Cardiff, let's hope some post turkey complacency sets in, otherwise we're gonna be the next helping of Christmas stuffing.

[Lord Snooty]

Well that's another one out. Mickey Tayrian out with a broken foot.

---

Oh bollox! He's at Arsenal now.

[theo_luddite]

The Bent Stick Chuckers finally show some common sense.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/sport/fo...-1-9507790

[Lord Snooty]

Bit daft really sending somebody all the way from Australia just for that. If we were making it up, we would've pretended he was injured at the end of the month, not when he would miss the entire Christmas period.
Stoopid crims!

[ritchiebaby]

I'd like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and take plenty of the falling down juice - with luck, you'll not notice Boxing Day!

[Lord Snooty]

So Fulham have drawn with Wolves. We are now bottom of the league.

[Lord Snooty]

Sounds like the same old story again. Played well, shudda scored more. Didn't. Got beat by someone who cost more than our entire squad.

[Lord Snooty]

Just watching the highlights.
Billing got slated for shooting and not passing to Depoitre......who was stood offside.
Kongolo should've scored. Bad miss.

---

Mbenza looked good.

---

De Gea pulls off a worldie of a save from Depoitre then within the blink of an eye £90m worth of Pogba finishes off clinically.

---

And then having seen that, we give him 5 yards of space to have another go.

---

Our goal was well worked. Zanka knew Mounie would win the ball so knew where to go. This is why Mounie should be first choice for the important games. He wins every header. I love big Lolo, but he's not good enough for what we need, I'm afraid.

[WakeyTerrier]

If you don’t take your chances you don’t win games.