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Tottenham Hotspur 4 Cardiff 0 FA Cup 3rd Round replay January 17th 2007 |
» Match reports |
"oh dear..." A hefty 33 quid ticket, a dire City performance and an hour of being prodded in the back by aggressive cops. Yep, welcome to another City away game.  Meeting up with the 1927 Club at the Magpie pub, New Street, by Liverpool Street. Despite the proliferation of besuited types, there was some excellent real ale to be had.  On the train with the 27-ers.  A warm welcome from the local riot police.  Although I hadn't gone to this game expecting a positive result - with our current form you'd have to be on some pretty strong mind bending drugs for that - but I did expect City to put up a fight. Instead, a truly lacklustre Cardiff team hoofed the ball around aimlessly, gave away possession and generally embarrassed themselves as they were outclassed by a Tottenham team who barely broke into a sweat.  Sure, we looked a bit lively in the first 15 minutes or so, but City's forwards proved woefully short of ideas whenever they strayed near Tottenham's goal area. In the midfield, sloppy passing gifted Spurs time and time again, and Chopra's chopper seemed to be running on a broken rotor. Come half time we were 3-0 down and with the performance we'd put in, even Dai Whist the Optimist wouldn't be expecting a second half fightback. 
 Still, the City crowd were in fine voice throughout, with the stadium resonating to a near-perpetual cycle of Men Of Harlech (imagine how much more impressive that would be if we knew the words - or at least had some words to the thing). To be fair, City put up more of a fight in the second half but with our continuing allergy to goals, it was only Spurs hitting the net again, leaving us thoroughly crushed 4-0.    
    
 Full time. Feel the pain!   The result was bad enough, but the treatment afterwards was even worse. I'm not sure if the Met were expecting a mob of rioters unleashed from the depths of the Rhondda, but they sure had a turnout to take them on - we were told that there were around 700 police at the game - that's 500 more than at a regular game and 400 more than a London derby! Now, I'm aware that there are more than a handful of City fans who like nothing more than breaking things and hitting people, but the turn out of fully kitted out riot police seemed disproportionate. Instead of keeping us behind in the stands, they decided to shunt us outside and then keep us hemmed in for 30 minutes while we were constantly being reminded by loud hailer that we were being filmed.  A few police assisted pushes and shoves came our way before we were slowly marched a mile or so around the estates of Tottenham, heading for the Cardiff coaches. Despite asking nicely and offering proof of our London addresses, the plod refused to let us go to the station - just a few hundred yards away - so we endured another 30 minutes of being prodded by visor-clad coppers as the station disappeared from view. When we'd eventually been shepherded to the coaches in some God forsaken north London council estate, we were finally allowed to leave for the station, but without the promised escort. It wasn't much fun having to walk through an 'enemy' estate late at night, but we were lucky and didn't encounter any trouble. Thanks for the concern coppers. 
For 20-odd minutes we've matched them in every department, but then we've gone to sleep and get caught on the break.
We've had a three or four-minute mad spell where we've been our own worst enemies by giving the ball away. The second half was probably about damage limitation, but we've not really tested their goalkeeper Dave Jones, Cardiff manager. 
Match stats Tottenham: Robinson, Chimbonda, Gardner, Dawson, Assou-Ekotto, Malbranque (Ghaly 65), Huddlestone, Zokora (Tainio 75), Lennon, Berbatov (Defoe 70), Keane. Subs Not Used: Cerny, Young-Pyo Lee. Cardiff: Alexander, Gilbert, Purse, Loovens, McNaughton, Flood (Cooper 56), McPhail, Scimeca, Ledley, Chopra (Ferretti 75), Thompson. Subs Not Used:: Forde, Johnson, Campbell. Attendance: 27,641 » Cardiff 0 Tottenham Hotspur 0, January 7th 2007 » BBC report <Back to match reports index <Back to homepage |
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