Duncan Barkes

And one of the things that always surprises us, talking amongst ourselves at Pompey Sound, is that almost everybody who offers a prediction offers a predictable prediction.

you can more easily predict the prediction that they're going to make than they can predict the outcome of the game.

And I got the impression from listening to what those two guys at the 72, and I sympathise with them, it's a difficult thing to have to do.

What I got the impression, and I may be completely wrong, of is that they are still smarting from the fact that neither of them, none of them, came close to the correct score against QPR.

How could you?

It was so unexpected, so unlikely.

It remains the unlikeliest scoreline in the history of modern statistics being analysed, kept and analysed by supercomputers, by AI.

It's the most surprising result.

Six years.

Just to remind, six touches in our area, six goals.

Never been done before.

Nothing like it.

So they couldn't have predicted it.

But that doesn't mean to say that they have to smart about how far out they were against QPR and take it out on Pompey by predicting that we're going to get steamrolled by...

Norwich, surely it would be much more interesting and possibly more realistic to say there's a chance that this game might not go according to the form book.

Norwich might be just a little bit, a little bit, not smug, but a little bit complacent.

It might be that eight out of the ten outfield players for Norwich will think to themselves, well, I'm not going mad here.

Somebody else can do the business.

I'll run around as though I care, but I'm already thinking about, I am thinking about the beach.

So we'll see.