The Diary

02 December 2007: Watford Look Over Their Shoulders As We Finish All Square With Colin's Mob.

?Football is a bloody cruel game, sometimes?.? How often have you heard that said about our lot? But in this instance, it?s not our lot I?m about to bang on about. Well, not in this opening paragraph. No, that particular phrase popped up in my head when I rang ?Im Indoors from our coach to tell him to come and collect we weary Palace returnees, as we were almost within sneezing distance of The Hawthorns by that time. He also had a little tale to tell about the side we?d been chasing, Watford, and their televised match versus Bristol City earlier this evening.

Apparently, after Watford managed to square things up with around three minutes of the match remaining, following the visitors? unsporting refusal to obey the set script, after compounding their rank bad manners by insisting upon scoring first, everyone at Vicarage Road thought the game would simply peter out into an unwritten tacit agreement to share the spoils. But it didn?t.

Remember what happened at Sunderland the second season we gained promotion? The game bloodless, with 90 minutes played, everyone involved expressing similar mental gratitude for an equitable distribution of the points, and making for the exits? Then young Lloyd Dyer deciding to ignore his gaffer?s instructions to play the ball into the corner-flag and run down the clock there, and go for the cross instead ? with Koumas on the other end of the pass turning that cross into a last-gasp winner for the Baggies, and effectively killing off whatever residual chance the Mackems still had of going up automatically themselves?

Well, precisely the same soul-destroying thing happened to The Hornets as happened to the Wearsiders ? but on this particular occasion, they were on the wrong end of it! In about the third minute of injury time, following closely the above scenario, the net shook for Bristol City ? and in Watford, the wailing and gnashing of teeth was heard long in the land. And on the radio. After the final whistle, poor Alan Green on the Five Live phone-in was just about swamped with grief-stricken and furious Vicarage Road regulars! No wonder my other half was still splitting his sides laughing.

But that was when we?d nearly finished our marathon homewards trek from South London: rewind the spool right back to this morning, when we were headed in precisely the opposite direction, and there was a completely different tale to tell. And mostly about a severely-constipated M25, too; I had been in the Land Of Nod for most of the outwards journey (so was The Fart, I strongly suspect!), deeply so, which meant that when I finally resurfaced, I was momentarily disorientated by the strange surroundings, but finally managed to bundle together just enough of my scattered wits to work out that I was ?Somewhere in South London?, as the old wartime BBC newsreaders might have put it.

But even with the orbital motorway going at half-cock because of yet more flaming roadworks, and a stop of some 40 minutes at the Oxford services, we?d still arrived at the ground with around 90 minutes to spare. Yet another good reason why I?m absolutely convinced that this particular fixture was devised by some obscure League official with a predominantly bitter and twisted outlook on life, for the journey to Selhurst Park is nothing but a continual test of intestinal fortitude. A bit like those painful, sometimes mutilating initiation ceremonies obscure African tribes lay on for their kids, once they?ve come of age, I suppose. I can just picture it now: ?Survive this test, my son, and the world will truly be your oyster?.?

And, as away trips go, sitting in a cramped position for nigh-on four hours there, three hours back, is about as comical as an intravenous injection of HIV virus. Talk about a Deep Vein Thrombosis Special. Personal relief when we first dived into the concrete-and-glass abomination they call Croydon, and collective relief when we?d all managed to emerge intact from the ordeal, with the Selhurst Park floodlights set firmly within our sights.

At least the weather was holding out well, considering the time of year. Blue skies, cotton-wool ball dabs of clouds, now showing their delicate little faces, and only the noise of numerous passenger aircraft taking off from nearby Gatwick serving as a sharp reminder that this was the 21st century and not some yokels? convention in days of yore.

One odd bit of news as we pulled up outside Selhurst Park ? and this, too, came from Radio Five Live. Scientists reckoned they?d recently found footprints belonging to the Yeti (aka The Abominable Snowman). Aha! So they?d seen Warnock arrive at the ground as well, had they?

After a sort-of-half-hearted walk around the ground?s perimeter, we spotted that the turnstiles were already open, and went in. But not by normal means i.e. going to the away end, going through the turnstile, shoving your ticket under the nose of someone who would much rather be doing other things, but in a completely different way. Trust Tel to start nattering with them: before I knew what was happening, they?d decided that as I toted a walking-stick, gaining access with the common herd was not for me. Instead, they got the guy on the other side of the wall to open the big exit gate for the pair of us! Thus spake ?The Power Of The Stick?? Whatever next, I wonder? Using my little ash-plant to gain access to both Houses Of Parliament, then whacking Gordon Brown about the head with it?

Promotions may come, relegations may go, but the overall decrepitude that is Crystal Palace FC?s spiritual home goes on for ever. Every single time I travel there, I immediately enter into a state of depression that is truly disquieting to witness. As I said, it?s the surroundings, which really have seen better days. Beneath the away stand, it resembles a cross between the day room of a down-on-its uppers NHS psychiatric hospital and one of those back-street boozers where men are men, strangers are potential victims, and even the local coppers go round in pairs.

But while I was grabbing myself a pre-match Bovril, The Fart got talking to some old blokes of his acquaintance: no, he doesn?t know their names, just the fact they support the Baggies, which should be good enough for anyone, I suppose. They did have an interesting tale to tell regarding the eccentric Mr. Miller, the awful ref we had the other week, versus Sheffield Wednesday.

It just so happens that the younger of these two gentlemen has a gaffer whose job it is, among other things, to sort out transport between hotel and ground for match officials. And, as luck would have it, after the aforementioned game, in which the distinctly-flawed four of them were pretty lucky to escape with all their limbs after the injury-time refereeing shambles that led to the Wednesday goal, in they all got, and the vehicle sped away, unsurprisingly, at a rate of knots. Then, up spake Miller, to the lino responsible for flagging our strike offside, when it damned well wasn?t ? and guess what he said, children? ?I think you made a bit of a mistake, there???

? !!!!? No, I haven?t inadvertently leaned on the ?space? bar. That was precisely what came out of my mouth ? or didn?t - when the true significance of that remark finally hit home! Something tells me that when I heard this, I must have borne a somewhat uncanny resemblance to a bloody great goldfish out of its tank, and gasping for breath! Oh ? and there?s yet another tale from those two at the end of this piece. So don?t go peeking too soon, OK?

Well, at least that passed a few minutes in pleasant fashion, and I also gained some material for this piece, too, which is always a bonus. But now it was time to head on out to our seats, which were situated quite near the front. Given that the stewards had effectively knocked out the first four rows by means of strewing that funny looking orange netting over them, that left us sitting in the ?third row?. Not a bad spot, really, as annoyance from those wanting to stand up was kept to a minimum.

As is usually the case at away games, there were an awful lot of familiar faces to peruse around us, but in my case, seated at my right hand side was a gentleman I know very well ? but not by his surname, so I?ll just call him ?Howard?. He?s quite a lad, is my little mate. You can?t miss him: he has one of those faces that positively shriek ?once seen, never forgotten?.

Tall and slim, thinning fair hair, bespectacled, florid complexion ? and a wonderfully dry sense of humour as well, always handy if you happen to support the Baggies, of course, but in Howard?s case, doubly so, because he just happens to be a local councillor in the Kiddy area. Hence my clich??d opening remark to him, ??Of all the grounds in all the world, and you had to come to this one?.?

As we nattered about this and that, around us, our fellow supporters used the spare time to work up a head of steam, vocally speaking. Thus began the chant and counter-chant of ?SMETHWICK!? ?BRUMMIE!? ?SMETHWICK!? ?BRUMMIE!? etc. and repeat until everyone is thoroughly sick of the bloody thing. But not one eccentric seated a few rows back. His somewhat arcane (lone) contribution to the proceedings was: ?THE EAST STAND!.....THE EAST STAND!....?

Finally, out came both sides, to a profusion of red and blue flags of decent size, and all waved at the home end as if their very lives depended upon it. A very Continental touch, that. If you really wanted to, you could call it ?Italy-Lite?. And so to our team news, then. Mogga had stuck to the line-up that grabbed all the points at Home Park, earlier in the week, and with Shergar, Beattie, Pedro Pele, as the announcer put it (?Sounds like a Mexican bandit!? sniffed a distinctly disdainful Howard), Chappy and Luke Steele ? a genuine keeper on the bench for once ? HOORAY! ? all lurking in the shadows, awaiting the master?s call to arms.

It?s fair to say that of the two sides, it was Albion that seemed to come out of the blocks the quickest. During those opening minutes, the Palace midfield and defence moved as if bogged down in molten creosote: adopting the motto ?Make hay while the sun shines?, Albion took the game to them, and with a speed and cultured skill, both on and off the ball, that was truly wonderful to behold. Most Albion supporters of my vintage are a pretty cynical bunch, normally. They?ve seen players and managers come, go, get poached by bigger clubs, sod off abroad? you name it, we?ve witnessed it. But it?s been one hell of a long time since I last saw my Albion-supporting generation so enraptured by what the side was doing out there: that, and the silky skills of Teixeira, whose principal party-piece is not so much making a ball walk, talk and say its prayers, as engaging it in a lengthy philosophical discourse as well.

Result? All I could hear from those Baggie contemporaries arrayed around me during the first ten minutes or so were gasps of pure amazement. Yes, and sheer enjoyment, too, for isn?t that what football should be all about? We sure as hell have come a long way from the days of Alan Buckley.

Yes, those opening few minutes really were that good. And you know something? Forget about the dropping of the two points for a minute: what I saw today was the dim beginnings of something really awesome, out there. A living, breathing, kicking, passing, volleying, twisting, turning, marker-evading ? but always entertaining to watch - football machine, and my God, wasn?t it awesome to behold?

As I intimated before, Palace seemed completely overwhelmed at first ? and I wasn?t at all surprised, either. When you?ve had a ten-ton truck flatten you, defensively speaking, you are going to end up a teensy weensy bit shocked by the sheer scale of the onslaught.

Then, with but a few minutes on the clock, still, I heard someone behind me let rip with a torrent of well-chosen four letter words ? and, what?s more, the sound of said voice was very familiar, too. If nothing else, sheer curiosity prompted me to turn around and see for myself just who the mystery blasphemer and accuser-of-deviant-sexual-practices was.

I should have guessed: after a long period of ghastly disillusionment brought on by watching an endless series of truly awful Albion games orchestrated by several past gaffers in rapid succession, there he was, again. ?Temporary Leave of Absence? now well and truly over. Large as life, twice as bad, and those choice phrases making him still well-capable of producing amazingly huge blue clouds hanging around his head. Albion supporters world wide, I reintroduce you all to the one and only Fab Traccana!

All that Albion pressure had to tell, eventually ? and it did, in the 7th minute, but not the way I?d thought it had! It all started with an Albion corner, taken by Greening. A Palace lad then headed it back to Greening once more. Plop, right at his feet. Over went the ball again, right into the middle of the six-yard box, where the lad Hudson, busily trying to keep Cesar out of the equation, headed the ball ? totally in the wrong direction! To be truthful, I?d thought Cesar had done the dirty deed: it was only later I discovered that Palace had, in fact, been the architects of their own undoing.

Well, no sooner had the ball crossed the line, the whole stand dissolved into one almighty massed ?Boing?. And, what?s more, we?d thoroughly deserved to take the lead. At that stage of the game, Palace weren?t even at the races. For a few minutes after that, it was one-way traffic to the Palace goal, with Tex the man weaving that incredible magic spell for us. It was only sheer bad luck that prevented him getting onto the scoresheet himself, the attempt taking a few microscopic layers of paint off the woodwork as the ball flashed hard by.

And that must have been the moment when we started to switch off, I suppose. It?s one thing to dominate a game, but when you start showboating and taking unnecessary risks at the back, you?ll get punished every single time. And that?s precisely what happened: we conceded a free-kick (yes, I know, yet another set-piece!), and from it, our marking was truly shocking. You could have stuck a fully-laden juggernaut lorry in the space Palace?s Morrison had all to himself when he buried their equaliser. Annoying, that. It?s one thing to be outplayed, but another matter entirely when you concede through sheer criminal inattention, at the time when it matters most.

But we didn?t quite heed that wake-up call: just seconds later, Palace nearly repeated the dose, via a Scowcroft header, this time, after Barnett was beaten to the ball. But it?s when we turn to the account of what happened come the 28th minute, realisation dawns that we could have quite easily taken the lead again. This time, Bednar was the offender ? and the strange thing was that before letting fly, he?d already done all the hard work, and only had their keeper to beat!

But what work! One, two, Palace defenders in their box, twisted like so many pretzels and totally bamboozled, to whit. That left our lad one-on-one with the keeper. Had he kept his head and simply tapped it in, Warnock would have been reduced to hair-tearing exercises. But the ball whacked against the sodding crossbar instead! Mind you, that particular complaint must have been catching: not too long after that, it was Teixeira?s turn to indulge in an exercise in pure frustration. That one sailed over the bar, with minimal damage done to either woodwork or keeper.

As the half progressed towards its finish, gradual realisation dawned that Palace were now employing different methods to contain us. Now, they were behaving like a typical Warnock side: in everyone?s faces constantly, almost; not allowing our people any time at all to settle on the ball, not averse to a little bit of sly rough stuff, too, mostly conducted on the blind side of the referee. Mind you, with Rennie, just about EVERY side?s a ?blind side? for him, so no change there, then!

Time and time again, we were ceding far too cheaply possession to the opposition: as you can well imagine, things did get somewhat hairy at the back for a time. All that to some irritating (and insulting) musical verse from their followers behind the goals, now getting a little too far above their normal station ? so what did we do? Remind them that ?We?re the team that sent you down?.?, that?s what! No, it didn?t exactly go down well with their following. Can?t think why for a moment, me!

Come the break, though, we didn?t have to wait long to realise that Changes Were Afoot. Beattie, who had been warming up with the other subs on the pitch, was recalled, and disappeared into the innards of the stand. Someone was going to be pulled out, but who? Tex, maybe? He had been, without any shadow of a doubt, singled out for special treatment by Warnock?s thug tendency late on in the half ? at the time, the thought briefly crossed my mind whether or not the Palace manager had specifically told his troops to take him out, at all costs - and maybe Mogga didn?t want to risk him getting clobbered really badly. To lose him would certainly constitute a significant body blow to our hopes of getting out of the Championship.

The answer to the mystery wasn?t long in coming, though. Yes, Beattie was on the pitch, but it was Brunt, not Tex, that made room for the Scots striker. As for Palace, they seemed intent on carrying on in similar vein to the first half. They began to pile on the pressure, and it wasn?t too long before our goalmouth began to resemble one of those wonderful scenes in Dad?s Army when Lance Corporal Jones decides to tell everyone ?DON?T PANIC!?, while impersonating a headless chicken himself.

How the hell we survived that particular bombardment, I do not know. And while all that was going on, Uriah Rennie, who had refereed the proceedings in a reasonable, fairly sensible manner, now chose this particular moment to revert to the Rennie we all know and love ? and it could have proven costly for us, too, when he totally ignored a Palace offence on one of our defenders, and waved ?play on? instead, to the complete mystification of everyone. Then pulled one of our players, advancing on goal, ball at feet, back ? to take a free-kick that was in our favour anyway! Cue for Fab, sitting just a few rows behind, to really get into his blue-streaked, explosive stride! His obscene imprecations started off in a very low-key way, at first, but as Rennie?s overall mishandling of this part of the game further deteriorated, so did the Mach Two delivery of Fab?s choicer cuss-words increase!

By the time he?d yelled himself into a state of near-collapse ? ?ONCE AN A**HOLE, ALWAYS AN A**HOLE, RENNIE! YOU?LL NEVER F**KIN? CHANGE, WILL YOU?.....? ? I simply had to turn around, and behold Fab in total wonderment! It?s a mighty awesome vocal talent that lad keeps under a bushel, I?ll have you know! It?s not that often you find all those delicate little bones inside your eardrums instantly dislodged by pure lung-power, now, is it? Fab, I can only stand in total amazement at your considerable prowess in this sphere, hence my cry of ?Well done!? when you finally paused for breath.

Somehow, with some considerable assistance from Dean Kiely, who stopped everything in sight, fortunately, we managed to weather the Palace-inspired storm ? and, as the final whistle began to loom large, we made a belated attempt to take the game to Palace again. Beattie should have done better with the chance he was presented with, and Gera, who was both strangely quiet, and a good yard or two slower than is normal for him today, might have done well with a header, had the ball intended for his napper not been slightly deviated from its course by a Palace defender. And yet again, Beattie had a chance to get off the mark, but couldn?t quite reach the ball scuddering, tantalisingly so, just out of reach in the box. But with eight to go, or thereabouts, had Shergar found Bednar, and not attempted to reach Beattie in the box, we might just have hit them with a very late whammy indeed. But it wasn?t to be, sadly.

Still, as we made ready to hit the street after the final whistle, the mass of supporter-opinion did concur that maybe the draw was a fair result, when you took everything into account. And as we shuffled slowly forward, I even managed to congratulate Fab for the vocal commentary and criticism previously documented ? even if they were all liberally tinged with blue!

?Oh well,? he commented, ?It was a fair enough result. I?m not worried, though. I reckon we?re going to win a trophy this year. I can see the blue and white ribbons on it now!?.?

Nothing from me, for a moment, then an afterthought?. ?Can I quote you on that, Fab??

?Yeah, I don?t mind?.? Yep, there you had it, a lad that wasn?t afraid to put his reputation on the line for the Baggies. Then, Fab indicated his mate, ?He?s been goin? up thirty or forty years now, an? he?s never seen us win anything?.?

Me, pointing to The Fart, following close behind: ?That?s nothing! This one here used to take Florence Nightingale to Albion games, and he?s never seen us win a league championship either?..?

And so, it was back to the (very happy with the draw) coach. Nicely in time to hear that hubby?s other mob, Hereford United, had reached the Third Round pot by knocking out League One Hartlepool at Edgar Street. Are you thinking what I?m thinking? Much later still, somewhere in the region of Banbury, on those few occasions when Alan Green could be sufficiently motivated to turn his gaze away from Arsenal-Villa, we heard firstly that The Hornets had been stung by Bristol City.

Scenes of great rejoicing on the coach, but not for long. Groans galore, when we got wind of the fact they?d got it back. Minute later, Alan Green ?Let?s go back to Watford, where there?s been a late goal ? er, no we won?t because Villa are attacking?.? Never mind the sainted Colin, with whom we?d just crossed swords ? here was a truly born-to-the-job Onanist! But go to Vicarage Road we did, at last.

Groans from The Fart, who, being the Jeremiah he is, thought the home side had nicked it at the death after all. Wrong! Au contraire, in fact. City had, and not long after that, the final whistle had drawn a curtain over the evening?s proceedings. As I said earlier ? what with Watford losing three on the bounce, and everything, things weren?t going at all well for them. But the whoops of sheer joy on that coach, come the time when we realised they?d blown it, were like music to our weary ears!

And Finally?.. As promised, here?s the other little gem from The Fart?s two little mates. Apparently, last season, both of them decided to travel up to the Hull game, but by car, rather than go by coach. When they got there, they made their way to the ground, parked up, hung by the turnstiles, waiting for them to open ? but as time went on, there was a distinct lack of paying customers to be seen. Maybe they were a little too early, perhaps? So, they waited, and waited ? and waited?..

Then, in one of those sudden flashes of insight you sometimes get when thinking about something completely different, the horrid truth finally dawned. What they?d done, in fact, was go to Hull?s old Boothferry Crescent home! The new premises were several miles away, and right in the middle of the city! One of my first nominations for ?Seriously Geographically-Embarrassed Supporters Of The Season?, perchance?

 - Glynis Wright

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