30 January 2012

ONE HULL OF A DRAW

There’s something rather satisfying in winning a game that doesn’t feel important. That was how we felt after the match against Newcastle on Saturday as we retired in the North Stand Atrium Social Club lounge. All we could think about on Saturday morning was the rematch of El Crapico at Selhurst on Tuesday. And it was that perceived lack of interest that meant the Footballing Gods gave us the FA Cup victory – even if strictly speaking you could argue we didn’t have a shot on goal. But the cup tie had different connotations for some of us here at the Albion’s favourite (and only) fanzine…

Two weeks ago we received an email here at TSLR Towers from a contributor with reference to booking our train tickets in advance of the Hull match in February. The email trail went something along the lines of this:

TSLRite: Have you booked Hull train tickets yet?
TSLR: No
TSLRite: Trains are only £27
TSLR: We need to wait for payday from our proper jobs and then we’ll book
TSLRite: I’ll book it for you and you can pay me back
TSLR: Brilliant, thanks

Upon receiving the booking confirmation, we forwarded the details of those trains to the rest of the extended TSLR family. Someone responded that the Hull City away game is set to fall on the same day as the FA Cup Fifth Round. No worries, we thought, Newcastle should see us off quite easily and there’s a chance Crawley will beat Hull. Obviously the best case scenario at the time was that Hull would beat the Sussex pretenders and we would beat Newcastle with the draw unknowingly pitting us away to Hull in the cup, on the same day we were supposed to head to Yorkshire in the league.

When kick off finally arrived at Falmer, we began to take the Newcastle game seriously (well, the hatred of Pardew had come to the fore). As kick off approached, news filtered through that Creepy Crawley had done the unthinkable and dispatched Hull from the FA Cup meaning the trip to Humberside was back on. Now all we needed was Newcastle to do the business and £27 would not be wasted. But Pardew (incidentally, if you type his surname into a predictive text, the outcome is a word we’re trying to avoid at the Albion right now) and his Newcastle side could not step up to the challenge through their wasting of chances, being pretty damn quiet in the away end and allowing Bocka (that’s what Gus calls Buckley anyway) to run the length of the pitch before sort of scoring. The trip to Hull was off. We’ll just have to go to Anfield instead. Luckily, there are cheap tickets available here.

The best news: it means Alan Pardew hasn’t beaten the Albion for years - maybe as far back as when he played for the worse half of El Crapico. It's justified however - it's simply making amends for that disallowed Gary Hart goal at theirs in injury time back in the early 2000s.

The worst news, we’ll be travelling to Hull on a Tuesday night.

1 comment:

Wimb said...

well there was this...

http://www.royals.org/matdoc/301102.html

but as a Reading fan any defeat of a Pardew team is welcome. Your boys deserved it at the weekend, here's hoping you can make it a bit further.