Loughborough Speaks

Oasis

Half the World Away

Before ppl start I did borrow heavily from the tabs before and just made a few changes
As usual for an away match at Port Vale, the Loughborough_red battle bus (me and my dad in a ford mondeo that we swapped for my dad’s usual car of a peugeot 306 at my step mother’s place of employment on the way up the A50 at Castle Donnington) arrived in Burslem approximately 2 and 1/4 hours befor kick off in order to allay my Dad’s fears that we might be late due to it being a bugger to find. As I had gotten home from school and pretty much set off straight away without having chance to eat, we headed into town in order to have a meal somewhere, to which we stumbled upon an Indian restaurant just down the road called Zaffra’s (or something similar). The customer service was second to none with the waiter being more miserable than Morrisey on the set of eastenders (but then he lives in Stoke, so who can blame him really), but the food wasn’t bad and relatively cheap n all, so it set us up nicely for kick off.

We took a slow stroll towards the ground and went through the turnstiles around 45 mins before kick off, just as the players were coming out to warm up. We hadn’t seen the last couple of games because against Carlisle I was attending a university open day down in Exeter and I I couldn’t attend the Tranmere game due to a mixture of work and an allergy to scousers, so i was intrested to see who would be playing and where. I was very surprised to hear over the tannoy (which was barely audible at this point as we were in the process of asking the natives about the joys of fornicating with one’s mother at the time) that Nicky Southall had been left on the bench, which seemed to me to be an odd move.

Before I had even sat down we were 1-0 down.
Great strike from Constantine, who looked impressive all night, who got away from wes (not hard to do sometimes) smashed a shot against the post for it to bounce off into the path of husband’s who had an empty net. We were taking bets around me as to the time of the goal. i was 2 seconds out with a guess of 15 seconds.

From then untill we scored was the worst that i have seen us in a long time, even worse than Oldham, best illustrated by Wes tryingto pass the ball sideways to smith, and putting it out for a corner.

The goal though when it did come completely changed the game, a great corner from Commons and from what i could see from at the other end of the ground Breckin took it very well. After that it was all us, as we pounded threre goal. agogo was excellent at times in the second half, holding up the ball brilliantly and commons was always dangerous. great performance from him. Right at the end he hit the bar, which was very unlucky. We also had one of the line from breckin, one deflected wide and a few good saves from our ex keeper mark goodland (who for some reason had goodlad on his back.)

You did get the feeling that it wasn’t to be our night, and alas I was proved right when the final whistle went, greeted by sighs of relief from the potteries faithful, and a sharp tug of the shoulder from my dad to say that we were going. No time to clap the lads off for what had been an admirable performance on the whole.

After finding ourselves running to the car (to beat the traffic apparently) we were soon on the way home with radio 5 ringing in our ears with match reports from around europe. When they had finished, there was reaction to Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour party conference. Rather than listen the self congratulatory tripe about how privatisation was the way foward and featherweight justification for the war in Iraq, I raided my step mother’s CD collection in the hope of finding my Joy Division album that i had left in there on the way down to exeter byt allas, the best i could come up with was the eurythmics. It has to be said though, Annie lennox’s stunning voice can be a great tonic for what on the face of it was a dissapointing result.

We arrived home at 10:52 (I am developing my Dad’s OCD for timing journeys and being there in good time) and I switched on newsnight in bed to watch a Labour MP get very stuffy and high and mighty with a reporter who was handing out wrist bands to follow potential leadership candidates. It sent me to sleep with a smile on my face, in the knowledge I’d had a great, minus the slightly dissapointing result, night out.

that was until 4:30 when next doors car alam woke me up. barstewards!