ANOTHER interesting week in football comes to a close.

With fingers firmly clasped around their own wallets and purses, the Government have been grilling the powerful people in football in an effort to extract from them an improved funding proposal to help save the pyramid.

Yet again we hear that one of the counter arguments centres on not wanting to help profligate football clubs.

Well, the simple answer is to help them to a lesser degree, because surely they must know by now which clubs haven’t got the faintest idea what a “budget” is.

And then we come to the U’s who unfortunately deliver their own budget performance in the FA Cup, but very nicely follow it up with a stellar display against Southend in the “dead rubber” cup.

It was painful last Saturday, there is no denying that fact. Marine FC barely put a foot wrong in terms of their tactics, football and of course, penalty taking.

They simply did not make a mistake all game, whilst the U’s tally of simple errors mounted up rather embarrassingly.

One or two of the U’s players looked out of sorts and whilst at the time I was very upset that we played badly, with hindsight was I guilty of not giving them a degree of understanding and sympathy given the pressures that we are all under during this pandemic and current lockdown?

On paper, the U’s should have won, but games are played by human beings, not robots, whose minds might drift understandably elsewhere.

I know on occasions mine has other priorities whilst I am at work. I am not looking for excuses, because our football wasn’t great in many areas, but I think some players are due a bit of slack in the current climate.

It was a costly off day for the U’s in terms of FA Cup income but it is behind us now. After a good team meeting and a wadge of training they re-focused and took apart struggling Southend.

If only us fans could have been there in person, what a night that would have been.

As Steve Ball has said, give Jevani Brown service and he will deliver, and boy can he deliver in style?

It was a very front foot performance and just shows what attacking power we do have when we choose to utilise it.

Really pleased that Poku capped a fine game with a goal, and good to see one of the new strikers get in on the act too.

The gaffer has a good number of team selection headaches to contend with over the next few games I think.

Tuesday was probably the perfect riposte to an off Saturday, and let’s hope that the players can maintain those levels against Leyton Orient this afternoon.

Kick off times are changing left, right and centre these days, but I am pretty sure it’s still 3pm so hope you can tune in.

The three points are important to keep us around the higher fringes and will take us nicely into a couple of potentially tough “aways” against Mansfield and Exeter.

Thanks for all of your support as always and I hope that you are all keeping safe and secure.

Cross your fingers for a warmingly positive U’s win today and I am sure it will happen. Up the U’s!