Well, I suppose we were due a slice of bad luck, but it’s still hard to take when four of your five accumulator teams have already won and the final selection are ahead in the fourth minute of injury time only for Jon Walters of Ipswich to pop up with an equaliser and deny us a 7/1+ payout. The fact that I know he has to put up with Roy Keane at training every day is some sort of comfort to me, but he still has much to answer for as I look to build up my battle funds for the World Cup. By the way, if anybody knows where I can get a dartboard sized picture of Jon Walters, please let me know.

I’d like to take this opportunity to heartily congratulate Newcastle for their straightforward win at Plymouth on Monday night, not because it clinched the Championship title for them, but because it rounded off yet another winning accumulator for us following Reading and Leyton Orient’s convincing wins at the weekend. I should also point out that if you had placed a tenner on each of the three matches for which I suggested backing “no goalscorer” last week, you would have received a further return of £95, so it was a lucrative weekend all round. I’m going for a bigger one this week as it has been very difficult to narrow down the selections from a number of likely looking sides on this weekend’s coupon, but first, let’s have a look at the next batch of Premier League fixtures:

I suppose many people will see last weekend as the time that much of the excitement and intrigue was removed from the major end of season battles. Man.United’s failure to win at Blackburn put Chelsea firmly in the driving seat for the title, the results at West Ham and Hull look to have confirmed that the current bottom three will remain the bottom three, the two automatic promotion spots from the Championship have already been decided, and Chelsea will surely regain the FA Cup now that their customary whipping boys in Portsmouth have been confirmed as their opposition on May 15. I’m not sure I share in all the “fairytale” nonsense we are having to put up with over Portsmouth’s FA Cup semi-final win over Spurs as they are a club who seem to have reaped many rewards from purposely living way beyond their means without suffering the sort of consequences that any normal business or even a club in a lower division would, as Luton fans will testify having seen their club hounded down through the divisions and even

Last weekend’s suggested treble turned into a nice Easter bonus for those of you who backed it, and we were indebted to the much-travelled Ritchie Foran, whose last minute winner for Inverness Caledonian Thistle brought home the bacon. I’ve selected another potentially lucrative set of matches for you for this coming weekend, but in the meantime, I have been left with just six Premier League fixtures to preview due to the FA Cup semi-finals, but amongst them are a couple of intriguing battles at the bottom of the table which should make for a fascinating Saturday afternoon’s entertainment:

What a statement of intent from the top two in the Premier League last Saturday. Having found it relatively difficult to impose themselves on their opponents early on in their matches, once they got their noses in front, they absolutely took Bolton and Aston Villa to the cleaners and demonstrated that they are fully focussed on not only regaining the title, but also on proving that they are capable of devastating the opposition even without their illustrious top scorers in the side. Surely history can’t repeat itself and leave Arsenal with another title challenge fading away after a further late equaliser at St.Andrew’s?