The following article appeared in the programme for Racing Club Warwick v Ford Sports Daventry on 22nd August 2006.
So what did you get up to during those long summer months since Racing Club last kicked a ball in anger? Here’s my football diary of the Summer:
Saturday 6th May – FA Vase Final, St Andrews, Birmingham
This was the first time that I’d attended the annual showpiece for clubs at our level. Hillingdon Borough of the Spartan South Midlands Premier Division were up against Nantwich Town of the North West Counties League Division One (both Step 5, same as Warwick). Now St Andrews is not one of the most inspiring venues it has to be said. As club grounds go it’s distinctly Championship as opposed to Premiership but perhaps the Board of the Blues are to be forgiven as they have been focussing on a move to a brand new super-stadium-cum-casino-paradise of late all, it seems, to no avail. The pitch looked very poor given that it was a supporting Premiership fare until recently. The attendance was paltry. Actually it was the worst ever for an FA Vase Final. Only 3,286 bothered to show up and I would say that the majority were from Nantwich. It left me wondering how many supporters Racing Club would take if they ever reached the final of a national competition. Would we manage more than a thousand do you think? This season’s Vase Final is expected to be played at the new Wembley (assuming it’s finished!). We can only hope that being at the new Wembley will have a beneficial effect on the attendance since 3,286 were absolutely lost in St Andrews and the new Wembley has a capacity that is more than three times that of St Andrews!
Nantwich Town won the game 3-1 and generally controlled it from start to finish. We were supporting Nantwich since they came from the Racing Club half of the Vase draw i.e. it would have been Racing Club playing Hillingdon if we hadn’t crashed out in that Third Round Replay against Ashville. In addition Nantwich had accounted for three Midland Alliance sides en route to the Final, namely Boldmere, Chasetown and Quorn plus Ashville’s eventual conquerors Buxton. The game was remarkable for Nantwich’s third goal scored by Andy Kinsey who promptly ran to the his own supporters, whipped off his shirt and threw it into the crowd before being mobbed by team-mates. When the ensuing melee finally subsided, the shirtless Kinsey was lying by the side of the pitch with a dislocated shoulder! He took no further part in the game and never did get his shirt back. Now I’m all for allowing players to celebrate their goals properly and if they want to show us their naked torso then why not, but throwing your shirt into the fans during the match? Stupid! I’m sure he felt like a right plonker going up to collect the Vase and his winners medal a few minutes later nattily dressed in a pink medical blanket. Still, I’m not going to be too stuffy about it. I’d settle for the entire Racing first team going up to collect the Vase at Wembley dressed in blankets of various pastel shades next May! Come on boys – you know you want it (the Vase that is)!
Saturday 13th May – FA Cup Final, The Millenium Stadium, Cardiff
Joy of joys I managed to snaffle myself an invite to the FA Cup Final courtesy of Accenture, one of our key suppliers where I work. Now before one or two of you start grumbling about “loyal fans” not getting the priority for tickets that they deserve, I’d like to make the case for another type of real fan. How many people in the stadium on Cup Final day had attended a tie in the Extra Preliminary Round last August? How many fans had attended 68 matches during the course of the season? A different type of loyalty perhaps – to the game itself – but loyalty nonetheless.
En route to Cardiff I remarked to my travelling companion that there hadn’t been a “classic” final since the Sky Blues triumphed 3-2 over Spurs at Wembley in 1987 (which I also attended, sadly at the time as a Spurs season ticket holder). The statisticians will tell you that FA Cup Finals over the last fifteen years have always included at least one of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or Manchester United and it is surely no coincidence that the match is therefore treated as “just another important game” by the so-called big clubs. With Liverpool and West Ham United contesting the 2006 Final we were overdue a classic and the sides proceeded to deliver precisely that in what was surely the last FA Cup Final to be played outside of Wembley for the next 70 years or so unless the builders of the new Stadium manage to overrun their construction schedule by miles.
Ever the supporter of the underdog I was quietly hoping that the Hammers would prevail. After half an hour a genuine cockney knees-up was in full swing as the East-enders went 2-0 up courtesy of Carragher and Reina making mistakes at the back. Djibril Cisse scored a world-class volley minutes later to take the Reds in 1-2 down at half-time. Game on! Cometh the hour, cometh the man so they say and certainly it was a case of cometh Stevie Gerrard in this particular Final. Gerrard equalised early into the second period with a quality strike from the edge of the area. Surely now there could only be one winner? If so then nobody had informed the scriptwriters as Paul Konchesky fired in a cross that beat Reina at the far post for yet another fortuitous Hammer-strike. Three West Ham goals each with a strong whiff of luck about them! And so it seemed that the Cup was bound for the Boleyn Ground for the first time in over a quarter of a century. With 90 minutes on the clock up popped Gerrard for his second with another masterful strike from the edge of box. 3-3 and my first dose of extra time and penalties since Racing Club’s FA Vase replay against Ashville last December. West Ham had obviously attended the Ben Mackey school of penalty taking as three out of four of their pens were fluffed and the Cup belonged to Liverpool. But what a match - the long awaited classic!
Stay tuned for the next instalment of my summer of soccer in our next home programme!
Keep the faith!
Comments
Post a Comment