Four seconds for the last four: 49ers and Jimmy G in a play-off smell test

I keep pointing to Leeds United's stressful relationship with play-offs as a guide to how post-season is going in Santa Clara, California, the near-enough home of our near-enough owners' other club, San Francisco 49ers. The one crucial difference is that the Nine Guys keep winning and that's not been the Peacocks' experience.

There has been quite a turnaround in California. Just a couple of months ago that big bowl in the sun, Levi's Stadium, was rolling into the record books with one of the worst statistical home records of any gridiron team ever. The 49ers couldn't ever win there, except against the Los Angeles Rams, and fans and pundits were done. The 49ers had drafted a new quarterback, cool young Trey Lance, to replace boring old Jimmy Garoppolo, but head coach Kyle Shanahan kept backing his loser, and General Manager John Lynch kept backing him, and so far as many were concerned the whole lot, from Jed York in the CEO suite on down, could walk out into the Santa Clara desert and not come back. Or go run Leeds, much the same. That all changed as last minute heroics took the Niners into the post-season wildcard play-off match, and more of the same got them through that into last weekend's divisional play-off with top seeds Green Bay Packers.

After years of hearing the club's name and thinking, maybe Green Bay is just a generic place they've made up for the football team because I've never heard of anything else from there, today I have looked at Wikipedia and can confirm it is a real place. Green Bay is in Wisconsin up in the north-east near Canada, named by French settlers who originally called it La Baie des Puants, or the Bay of Stinking Waters, later shortened to Green Bay because that was the colour of those same honking pools. It's the county seat of Brown County and I'm not going to look up why that is so named.