Another free Saturday and another proposed game postponed for Walsall got blogger Mark Jones about his five favourites Saddlers call-offs of all time.

So, all being well, we should play Norwich next Tuesday. I mean, if it suits Paul Lambert that is.

Saturday’s potential clash was the latest cancellation for the Saddlers, the sixth since Christmas, so thanks a lot Brentford.

Of course it could just be that the big boys are running scared, with substantial evidence pointing to Lambert not fancying added to Leeds going to the extreme of winning at Manchester United just to avoid playing the mighty Saddlers.

Seriously though, I felt sorry for all the Norwich supporters who travelled in their numbers only to be thwarted by the late cancellation.

Even though some whinged about it like they were the only fans it had ever happened to, I mean people without a single constructive thought or coherent argument using message boards to do nothing but moan, fancy that?

Butm them apart, anyone who’s travelled away on a regular basis would have sympathy for the plight of the East Anglians, we’ve all been there.

So, with that in mind, here are my top five Walsall postponements of all-time: -

Exeter

It’s Saturday about 2:30pm, Chris Nicholls’ boys are doing their best to end five years of misery in the league dungeon. It’s raining but no worse than you’ve seen hundreds of times, you’ve negotiated the M5 and made it to the pub behind the away end, run by former striker Tony Kellow I think.

Then someone comes in and tells us the match is off. At least it was a Saturday, and pubs don’t have to have pitch inspections. On a Tuesday night two months later we won the re-match 3-1.

Two months after we were up. Happy days.

Watford

You know something’s amiss when, on the approach to the ground, you see lots of people walking in the opposite direction and the floodlights are switched off.

I’d skived off college with some feeble excuse or other to go to this rained-off Tuesday nighter back in 1989. If my memory also serves me correctly I used the exact same excuse to go to the rearranged fixture, which was a 5-0 defeat that confirmed the relegation that we’d all pretty much known was inevitable since the previous Autumn. Not so happy days.

Cambridge

Another midweek game called off just as we arrived, where extra loyalty points were awarded because this was what would now be called a ‘round of 32’ game in what was then called the Freight Rover Trophy.

Also, this was the John Beck-era upwardly mobile Cambridge and Kenny Hibbitt-era frankly awful Walsall, so we had little chance of winning against the anti-Football mob.

I went to the game when it was played a couple of weeks later. We lost. Still we’d count that as an extended run in the competition these days.

Hartlepool

I’ll admit it, I never actually went to this one, but I know people who did. Victoria Park on the unforgiving North Sea Coast on a Tuesday night in January 1991 is not exactly anybody’s idea of fun.

Especially as we were truly awful at the time. In the early 1970′s the Dutch gave the world Total Football, in the early 1990′s the Saddlers had our own version – Total Rubbish.

Those that did venture North East that night had actually paid to get in and were watching the teams warm-up when the ref called it off. How galling is that?

Just to really rub it in,our youth team, fresh from a fine bit of Dingle-bashing in the previous round, played Liverpool in the FA Youth Cup at Anfield that night. A game I could have been persuaded to go to, if only my fellow travellers hadn’t gone to Hartlepool.

Some of those very mates who went to that Division Four fixture, only for it to be called off at the last minute, but then went to the re-match, don’t go any more.

They’re disillusioned with the way the club is going. So they don’t go any more. You hear that Jeff? Roy? Do you care? You should do.

Gillingham

‘I can’t do it Stubbsy, it’s a nothing midweek game, I hate going to Gillingham, I can’t finish work early’ were just some of the excuses I gave to the legendary travel managing director Frank Stubbs who was desperately trying to talk me in to going to a game I really had no interest in.

‘You work in Stone Cross right? I’ll make you last pick up at quarter to four, then we can get to Junction 7 and we’ll be there in time for a couple of beers, easy’ was the last desperate gambit that somehow was the clincher.

Everything was going so well until we got on the Dartford Bridge, by this time the fog was that thick you couldn’t actually tell you were on a bridge. Naturally the game was called off just as we reached Priestfield, but at least we got a bit longer in the bar.

So long in fact that I got home at about two in the morning, approximately one hour later than if I’d been to the game. I’ve never been to Gillingham on a Tuesday since, I suspect it may be some time before I do again.

That night there were 12 of us in total on the minibus and I strongly suspect that Frank had needed 12 to break even. It’s still my favourite postponement ever though.

Predictably the fixture backlog has prompted the usual ill-thought out calls for a Winter Break from people who haven’t bothered to see that there’s no pattern to the time of year when games go, as two of the above mentioned even happened in March.

Late call offs have happened before, they’ll happen again, deal with it.

Even more predictably have been the stories about how much the Norwich and Charlton postponements have cost the club. I can just see our manager Chris Hutchings now, lined up ready to pounce in the January window with all those piles of cash that’d been made available, now so cruelly snatched away.

How will we cope?