Do The Stanley - Again (FA Cup R2)

Hello everyone,

It's a while since I last posted. During that time for me, and I suspect many others, a certain amount of apathy has set set in. We are drifting along in lower mid-table, looking neither so awful we are likely to go down (famous last words!) nor like turning into anything like a team about to race up the table towards the play off spots. The players and the style of play are both lethargic and completely lacking in invention, speed and (on occasion) basic ball skills. We are unbeaten in quite a few, but have only won one league game in that time.

However we are still in two cups. The Johnson's Paint thingy and the FA Cup. Now I can't pretend to be that interested in the first one (which makes my actions at the box office a little later even more inexplicable...) - somehow it seems that a day out at Wembley would be good, anything else a bit nothing really. The romance of the FA Cup however, ah that's completely different. Giant killing, boggy pitches, small grounds packed to the rafters, cups made out of tin foil and cardboard. That's the dream, the reality being Oxford vs Accrington on a chilly Tuesday night in December. I thought twice about going, but whatever the standard of football, whatever the competition, watching Oxford is better than not watching Oxford.

So, a quick dash after work, and there I was in a suspiciously empty East Stand car park. It wasn't even that early. The East Stand car park is a good barometer of attendances. If there are still spaces an hour before kick off then it's not going to be a huge crowd. On this occasion there were still spaces fifteen minutes before the off. Hmm. I made my way to the very unbusy ticket office, and for some reason known only to my primitive hind brain, bought not only a ticket for the Accrington game but one for the JPT Southend tie as well. Blimey. Oh well.

Into the stadium to find out the team news. Dooooobs on the bench, Davis in for Capaldi. Craddock playing (thus scuppering all the 'Craddock to be sold in January, so we won't cup-tie him' theories). Just one change from Saturday. Yet again, Cox left on the bench. That mystifies me. Firstly the defense look better with Cox in front of them - he stops quite a lot of the shooting from outside the box that has plagued us this season. Secondly, he gets the ball and passes it - simply and accurately (or at least more accurately than some of his team mates). It's not spectacular, but it frees other players (notably Leven) to do what they are best at. Chapman/Leven in midfield is not a happy mix as far as I am concerned.

I was amused the find that the normal people I sit with (well relatively normal anyway :) ) were all there. Fellow addicts waiting for their football fix! Hardly anyone else was though - the crowd was 'sparse'. Never mind, we were sure of a great contest with a home tie against the Blades of Sheffield United as a reward as well as the £27,000 (is that right?) for winning the current tie. That's quite a few bottles of Budweiser (bit of free advertising for the sponsors - if they'd like to send me a few bottles to see me over Christmas that would be appreciated. Thanks).

We started out as we prefer, kicking towards the fence end. Since we kicked off as well, I presume that Accrington won the toss and let us do that. Bit odd.

Here are the highlights of the first half.

........

There we go. Stirring stuff. Actually I have forgotten to mention a couple of incidents. Firstly Chapman hurt his ankle, went off and was replaced by Cox. The other incident of note was the Accrington free kick routine. They had a free kick just outside our box. The ref blew his whistle, and four Accrington players pretended they were the Red Arrows, making dummy runs over the ball going off in all directions. The ball was then dinked to the right hand side of the penalty area, where a red attacker with coloured smoke billowing from his backside headed the ball out for a goal kick. Very funny! If it had worked it would have been brilliant - as it was, it looked ridiculous.

As for the rest of the 'action', well calling it 'poor' is a bit like calling the sea 'wet'. It doesn't go any way to describing the full extent of the awfulness on show. Two teams hoofing the ball in the air, usually to nobody, neither team able to pass the ball five yards. 22 individuals on the pitch, and if it hadn't been for the team strips you'd have been hard pressed to tell who was supposed to be on whose side. People around me (and myself if I am honest) have gone through the 'groaning' stage and have now gone straight into 'laughing' mode. Some of it was like a pantomine: players jumping for a header and missing the ball by a whole two yards, the ball being played back and forth between two teams who seemed to think it was about to explode, 'he's behind you' - the whole seasonal shebang. The 45 minutes crawled past, and the realisation that there was not only another half to go, but a possible half hour of extra time was more than bore thinking about.

The (very poor and inconsistent) ref brought the half to an end. Some people booed, a few so loud that they almost woke me up. I suppose I should mention the Accrington away support. According to RadOx, they'd sold four tickets and two of them were to someone in Wycombe. The players had given away 20 tickets as comps. In the end, there were about 40 of them in the away end. Rather than deride them for it, I'd prefer to say well done to those who made the effort. Three hours or so down and another three back. Mind you it did make us laugh when ten of them were singing about being an 'army'. More like a platoon, my neighbour rightly remarked. I didn't go to the tie at their place though, so let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Surely the second half couldn't be as bad? Well it started in exactly the same manner. As always, I haven't read other match reports before I write this rubbish, so the prevailing view may be that we came out 'fired up' for the second half. I don't think we did really. But we did gradually improve, not much but enough to look like being more likely to score than the opposition. That was mostly due to Rigg, who was at least prepared to try to go past a man rather than turn and pass it back. Shots were still few and far between though. Alfie was also coming more into the game as it went on. Don't let that fool you into thinking that we suddenly had width and were pinging in crosses. We weren't - and there was quite a lot of pottering sideways with the ball.

We did have a couple of shots however and on 65 minutes or so one was put out for a corner. Leven took it and Beano got up and somehow managed to avoid the crowd in the goalmouth to find the back of the net. Mild jubilation in the stand. I have my suspicions that it was as much to do with the reduction of the likelihood of extra time as anything else! Surely Accrington would now go for it? They had to score. Well, I thought that - their players had other ideas. We had managed to improve marginally, they hadn't. There was a lack of urgency from the men in red.

Another formation free kick from Stanley was poked over the bar (by quite a way) and then Clarke almost chucked the ball in his own net. In fact the Accy players thought it had gone in. From the East Stand I couldn't tell of course, but it was the nearest the opposition came to scoring all night. They were so inept that I couldn't see us being pegged back from a one goal lead (and with the leakiness of our defence that is a brave thought!), so when Peter Leven struck a lovely shot into the Stanley net with 10 minutes to go, that was it. Duberry came on for a few minutes at the end - his first act was to give a foul away. But to give credit where it's due, the central defence had looked fairly solid (admittedly against a powder-puff attack) anyway. Their distribution was awful, but defending had been pretty good. Nice to see the big man back though.

The ref brought proceedings to an end and it didn't take long to get out of the car park!

If I had to pick a man of the match it would probably be Rigg.

The win put a gloss on what was actually a terrible performance - certainly the first half was as bad a game of professional football as I have seen for a while. Mickey Lewis popped up on the radio to say that the pitch was a factor. Maybe so, but that doesn't stop players shooting and making an extra unneeded pass instead, does it? In fact I'd have thought exactly the opposite! We will have to be a whole lot better on Saturday against Fleetwood. What worries me is that our recent unbeaten-run-that-hasn't-actually-earned-many-league-points has been mostly against teams in the bottom half of the table. After Christmas we have more games against the better teams - and we all know what often happens to our league form when all the mince pies have been eaten and a few dodgy loanees have been brought into the team!

Anyway, enough doom and gloom - 'tis the season to be jolly after all! I hope you all have a great festive season, and I'll probably see many of the readers of this blog at a match or two. And me - I've got the JPT match against Southend to look forward to!