THEY often say the only thing guaranteed in life is death and taxes.

Humorous wags (by which I mean cheeky scamps, not players’ other halves) will often add England losing to Germany to that list.

Well here’s a fourth one for you – in life’s certainties, FC Clacton will always lose a penalty shoot-out.

That proved true again this week as we lost our second shoot-out of the season and our fifth from five since becoming FC Clacton, this time to Ipswich Wanderers in the League Cup.

Although Aaron Condon scored his penalty, following up from his goal in the game, Kevin Coyle skied his and Ben Parkin saw his kick saved.

Ipswich, with some would say Germanic precision and efficiency, scored their four to give a 4-1 shoot-out victory and at least spare two other Clacton players the agony of having to take a kick.

With that went our last chance of silverware for the season, out of all the cups and never realistically likely to challenge for the league title, given we were relegation favourites in some people’s books and that Norwich United are already miles clear and needing a Newcastle circa 1997 meltdown to lose it from here.

What is more frustrating is that in three cup competitions we’ve not been beaten over 90 minutes, but have ended up on the losing side every time thanks to one extra-time defeat and two shoot-out losses.

We’ve had some luck in a few league matches but the cup Gods have definitely been against us this year!

So the aim for the lads now is to push on in the league and finish as high as we can.

I’d already say that so far this season we’re the premier division’s surprise package and the aim now must be to keep improving and set our standards as high as we can.

That starts this weekend as we face another tough test when we travel to Hadleigh United... thankfully there’s no penalty shoot-out at the end of that one so we might be OK!

Come on you Seasiders!