Girl Writes About Football Again

I've not blogged about football for a long time. Admittedly this is probably something of a relief to most of you, but the truth is that, after several years languishing at the bottom of the football league, with the genuine prospect of dropping out of it altogether a constant threat, I've lost the ability to try and make such posts funny. To a non-City fan there probably are endless areas for potential humour: when Ian Holloway resigned recently, a friend of mine suggested we might like to employ him, since we hadn't had a new manager in over three weeks. Instead though we hung on to one Phil Parkinson, of whom another friend and Hull fan (thus in a position to comment on his appointment) remarked "Don't worry, maybe he does well for teams whose names start with the first three letters of the alphabet. Except Charlton."

For the first few weeks, the various negative sentiments expressed in newspaper articles and social networking fansites seemed well-founded: Parkinson favours dull football. The team that very nearly beat Leeds in their Carling Cup draw (we were winning for a while) and came out with 2 goals and several more attempts to show for it, followed up with a huge 4-2 defeat against Barnet, slunk back into defensive play only after his appointment, with a run of draws and losses against a series of mediocre teams, and only a smattering of goals to show for them. This culminated in a loss against Hereford - one of the lowest-scoring teams in the division for several years - not as the result of a fluke, or a mistake, or a bad referee decision (which, to be fair, can go some way to explain Macclesfield), but conceding not one but two goals and scoring not a single one ourselves. On top of this, our top scorer from last season - David Syers - was out with an injury and not due back for a couple of months.

And then, yesteray, we went to Swindon. I wasn't expecting a lot to come out of this. I was prepared for the long, despondent train journey home in gloomy silence, while my husband told me it was "only a game", the slating of James "He Used To Work At The Co-op" Hanson on the Facebook group afterwards, no matter how much effort he'd put in. I last saw Swindon play against Fulham, at Craven Cottage, in the FA Cup, on a freezing cold December day when every other London game was postponed due to frozen pitches. Although they lost as expected, it was by no means a foregone conclusion. They were not bad, and I'm constantly surprised that they're in League 2.

The atmosphere was as expected: an amusing smattering of casual racism in the form of ice-cream jokes ("I'LL HAVE TWO 99s WITH A FLAKE!") directed at histrionic Swindon manager Paolo Di Canio, accompanied by choruses of "Fuck off Di Canio / Fuck off Di Canio" to a popular opera tune I can't remember the name of, on account of being far too common for that sort of thing (they didn't get any further than that, having presumably had difficulty in finding a rhyme for "Di Canio".) The rest of our crowd amused themselves making "wanker" gestures at the opposing fans, who responded in kind, whilst security staff looked on with a sort of grim resignation.

The performance, though, I'm happy to say, was not as expected. In short: City. Were. Brilliant. If ever defensive play were needed, it was against a team like this: Swindon had 3 shots on target (beautifully saved by Duke - I feel bad now for having so little faith in him) and 8 off target. The match stats don't do justice to those 94 minutes at all - 33% possession doesn't sound impressive, and a measley 2 attempts at goal sounds positively rubbish. But we were down to 10 men less than half way through the second half, with Davies questionably dismissed for a foul that, from where we were sitting and, reading the reviews, from where everyone else was sitting too, didn't look too bad. This I think skewed the stats, and we abandoned the attacking play I'd been so pleased to see early in the first half and herorically defended our goal against an increasingly desperate Swindon onslaught. The lovely James Hanson was left up front all on his own and must have been exhausted by the end of it all; Luke O'Brien replaced the injured Threlfall, and Luke Oliver brought the benefit of height (he's 6ft 7!) to the side to pull off some crucial headers, getting the ball safely out of the way on several occasions. When the inevitable 4 minutes of extra time were annouced (it's ALWAYS 4 minutes!) even the most vociferous, neanderthal of the away fans held their breath, fully expecting a last-minute defeat. Hands were clasped seemingly in prayer (mine included - I have no reason to believe God doesn't like football). When the final whistle blew, you'd think from the cheers we'd won 6-0.

So the train journey home was celebratory. We got an all-important point and edged our way ahead of our nearest rivals, a single win away from moving a place or two up the table and further away from relegation, and I got to natter to a very nice chap on the Facebook page later - me, the token girl, as usual, with 5 blokes "liking" my comments on the day's match (the gist of which were just "we were proper good") probably purely because of this. OK, so I still haven't managed to make this a funny post, but it is, at least, a very happy one.