Diary of a Sky Sports Football Reporter

It’s always interesting to watch a team battle against relegation, invariably they’re more exciting games than those involving sides looking for promotion. And after traveling to a couple of relegation-threatened clubs in a matter of a few days, I saw two very different matches and two contrasting results.

On Saturday, I witnessed League Two strugglers Barnet pull off a 2-1 victory over Crewe, who’d won their previous outing 8-1 and also took the reverse fixture 7-0. Four days later, it was Scunthorpe’s turn at trying to avoid the drop. But their hopes of staying in the Championship suffered a huge blow as they crashed to a 2-0 defeat to in-form Reading. With both managers taking charge of their teams for just the third time, perhaps the most striking difference was what happened to them afterwards – Barnet boss Martin Allen was offered the Notts County job, while Scunthorpe’s Alan Knill was offered words of consolation from a Sky Sports post-match interviewer, ie me! I bet that capped a great day for him!!!