by Paul Williams

Bear with me, here’s a hypothetical scenario.

Imagine you’ve inherited a country mansion and you have enough of a private income to employ a gardener.

But, for the past two years, you’ve been undecided about whether to keep the ancestral home or move back to the city. So you’ve been giving the aforementioned gardener a few quid in the spring to buy a few plants to keep the borders looking cheerful. He doesn’t do a particularly good job, but the garden is fairly tidy and there are a few strong, young shoots coming through in the nurseries.

Now, however, you’ve decided to stay. The rich cousin who wanted to take over the estate turned out not to have any money after all and you don’t want to hand over your inheritance to some un-named corporation so it can be turned into flats.

So now you ask your gardener for a shopping list of what he needs to restore the grounds to former glories. He gets most of what he wants but, when you open the bedroom curtains at the start of summer, the garden looks more miserable than ever. Visitors have stopped coming through the gates and those of the new shoots that have been moved from the nurseries are being kept in the shade by old plants which have done blossoming.

Your gardener makes the excuses that some of the flowers he went out and bought arrived with blackspot, which has spread, and even some of those plants that are established have died back. You’ve come to the conclusion that your employee probably isn’t that good at what he does but is the type that will always have an excuse – would you be justified in giving him his cards?

A home game against Ipswich brings back nightmares about Connor Wickham, Gary Woods and ‘The Experiment’.

It’s unlikely that the Championship table-toppers will be unduly concerned about a cup match against a side that’s only outside the League 1 relegation places at present because there are a lot of poor teams in the third tier. Mick McCarthy even played the kids against Stevenage in the first round so maybe he’ll also take pity on injury-stricken Rovers, who are also likely to give some youngsters a chance so wearier legs can be rested.

Given the disdain with which the Capital One Cup is treated in the early stages  – it’s hard to believe that the final of this competition actually attracts a capacity crowd to Wembley.