Damn...
By Martin Blanc
What's to say? Footballers are people too, they must be feeling way worse
than any of us right now. They did the hard work, made it look the most
noble of professions:
-What do you do?
-I work in Defence.
-Military?
-Kind of.
Messrs Chamberlain, Williams, Gibbs and Page can hold their heads high,
and - grudgingly - Robinson can stand next to them like the raw new recruit
he sort of looked (the altitude sickness past the halfway line gave him
away).
And to labour in what was so nearly not in vain...it was humbling to watch,
in so many ways. Those Gooners are not "even worse than Chelsea", boys and
girls, which made our performance even better. We sent out ten of our best
eleven (who's to say that we have an eleventh, apart from the
rumoured-to-be-dead Gifton...?) and they did us very proud. Apart from
Foley, and the less said about him, the quicker we can look forward to
Leeds.
We out-defended the soundest of English defences (and one of the dirtiest,
it looked from our corner flag). Of course we didn't trouble theirs nearly
as much as they did ours, but see the previous paragraph...though when we
ventured upfield, our fluency on the way was just as promising as last week
- Wooter and Smart's ball control and mutual understanding seemed on-going,
and Micah Hyde kept things in order like an obsessive compulsive. But
Kennedy was again disappointing, Robinson uncharacteristically wayward, and
the other front guy, the invisible one - he just waited, and waited, and
occasionally got the ball only to be bundled off it forthwith. So next
Sunday we have to get Wooter in the middle and Miller out wide. Though
Wooter was just about everywhere for the second week running, Lord love
him.
And thus we whiled away the minutes, fending off this or that barrage,
savouring this or that hilarious miss, and edging our way towards the
belief that the first of those single points, that could, if they ever
start to accrue, add up to a significant portion of our salvation this
season, would soon be ours. When a beany geezer with one name and two
incredible legs pops up at the goalline and flicks it, really, like a
Subbuteo jab, into the net. Our net. Our unbreachable last line of defence.
Damn (think that's the strongest Ian will allow...).
Yeah, sure, we weren't that surprised. I mean, it was a damn sight more
likely than us nicking it. But...but. If only. Etc., etc., etc. Ask the
players.
