A song for Wednesday.

Your jocks and you know you are! Your jocks and you know you are! Please repeat for at least 45mins

Newcastle Preview By: Mark Waters Date: 19/09/2000

It's almost here - Orient take on Newcastle at St James's Park, and test their skills aginst thei likes of Alan Shearer and Kieron Dyer (seen left for England v France this season) in the Worthington Cup. O-Net will be there of course, but first our match preview. (Photo-Shaun Botterill/Allsport)

Nobody around Brisbane Road is calling it the Worthless Cup at the moment. We had to earn this tie the hard way, but after the disappointment of drawing Grimsby at this stage last season (sorry Grimsby, no offence), surely we deserved a crack at a Premiership side.

Ironically, Newcastle play in the same black and white stripes as last season's opponents, but apart from the fact that they too start firm favourites to win the tie, that's the end of the similarities. A few seasons back, facing a top division side was just a matter of a better skill factor than the usual opposition, but satellite-TV money has made it now a different class of opponent altogether. Once, their centre-forward might have cost more than our entire team, now you can throw in the stadium, training pitch (if it hadn't been nicked), and probably most of the houses in Brisbane Road as well, and still have change from a Shearer. That's not to say that Newcastle are a one-man-band. In fact, if you look down the list of top Premiership goalscorers, the ex-England captain is notable for his absence. Only loanee Argie Daniel Cordone has gotten on the scoresheet more than once for the Magpies, and Mr Shearer's sole contribution came from the penalty spot.

Newcastle's early form has slipped a little in the last couple of weeks, mainly due to a lack of scoring power. Just like us really. However, at least our star striker is bagging the occasional goal, which is just as well because we'll need Super Carl firing on all cylinders to make any impression on a defence that has only conceded an average of a goal a game to the best strikers Murdoch's money can buy. We'll also need Deano and Mad Dog to play the game of their lives, Matt Lockwood to prove that he really is Premiership class, and Matty Joseph to show just how underrated he is, if the likes of Shearer, Carl Cort, Kieron Dyer and Kevin Gallacher are not to make this a very painful trip to the North-East.

Or we can look on the bright side. A couple of seasons back, Newcastle made the trip to Stevenage for a Cup-tie, and could only come away with a 1-1 draw. Even at home they only managed a 2-1 win. Quite honestly, we'd settle for a couple of results like that, and the first priority this week must be to make sure that we are still in the tie for the second leg - we don't want a reserve team sent down to Brisbane Road to finish the job. While Premiership clubs now routinely wipe the floor with those from the lower divisions, they do occasionally have off-days as the above results show, and if we can get back to Leyton with a draw or odd-goal defeat, who knows what can be achieved?

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2000