Confession time
I've given this a lot of thought recently and I can only deduce that the sudden inexplicable demise of Tuftyball and his collection of never say die overachievers is all down to me and my life choices. Hear me out...
When the first lockdown was announced, I'd been seeing a girl for 3 months or so. Living alone I invited her stay with me for the duration of Lockdown (naively we assumed it would only last for a couple of weeks and that it'd be a laugh). She agreed and low and behold two weeks turned into two months quickly turned into an endless nightmare for us all.
Anyway by the time Project Restart came along, it became apparent that she was not at all enthused by the idea of me watching every Blades game on the telly at home. In fact she made a point of refusing to watch the first game, popping into the living room every so often during that opening fixture against Villa to overtly express her support for our opponents. And we all know what happened that day... Hawkeye suffers a never before seen freakish failure that will never likely be repeated, denying us two points and the driving seat in the race for European qualification. She revelled in the Hawkeye calamity and took pride in the part she played.
The same happened for every one of our fixtures during the remainder of that season (except for the wins against Wolves, Spurs and Chelsea, oddly the only games when she wasn't in the house). This continued through the start of the new season, the worst start in PL history, until for many reasons I decided to end the relationship at the very start of this year. I moved her out the house and out of my life and the Blades saw an upturn in performances and results, the first win on the board and a run of form that if we were to continue might see us escape the drop. It coincided with a period of a few weeks where my ex was trying to rekindle the relationship. But as soon as it became clear to her that was never going to happen and she removed herself from my life completely, we suddenly reverted back to the woeful performances of the start of the season, Wilder departed and we fell with a bang back into the Championship. And despite the conventional wisdom indicating we would be a force to be reckoned with or at the very least improve on last season's displays, we have continued exactly where we left off (or arguably we've got worse!), much to everyone's dismay and surprise.
But you might rightly ask yourself why didn't results and performances improve further once all contact ceased between the two of us? Well I recall this exchange during that game against Villa...
Me: Stop supporting Villa and get behind the lads, you're jinxing them! This is the most goal non-goal in the history of football!
Her: I am jinxing them. I don't want them to win. And I've witch ancestry so can make them lose if I want
Me: Haha yeah whatever
Her: No it's true
I brushed if off at the time, but she is part Romani gypsy and according to her there were several in that community who practised witchcraft.
Now I'm not saying I believe in that stuff, but she certainly does and there's every chance she is putting a continuing hex on dem blades to spite me. In fact thinking back to before lockdown, we first met early December of 2019, right around when JL7 lost his mojo. We went steady a month later and our performances took a noticeable dip, scraping dull victories over the likes of West Ham, Palace, Bournemouth, Norwich and dropping points against poor sides.
In lieu of any reasonable explanation for the baffling hasty fall from grace, and all the unprecedented calamities that ensued (Hawkeye, JOC's perpetual injury, worst ever PL start, Brewster going a whole season without scoring, the Messiah disappearing out the back door like he said he never would, being a worse Championship side than we were in the Prem, Ronaldo Vieira's bizarre failed medical, and so on and so forth) I'm putting my witch of an ex forward as suspect numero uno. It makes more sense than anything else does!
