I have never, and will never, understand, English football fans who treat the FA Cup with the kind of indifference befitting a benign mole or January: “Well you’re here now and you’re not causing an insufferable amount of trouble, but if you just pissed off, that would also be great."
To me, the FA Cup is the crux of the lower league football fan experience. I can understand if not condone why Champions League-bound clubs see going to Kidderminster away as an utterly lose-lose scenario, but it is essential that us lower-league stalwarts refuse to let the slippage of tradition - which has started with the scrapping of replays and a midweek 5th round - turn from a stealthy trickle to an unstoppable deluge.
Much as some teams fail - or simply refuse - to see how the erasure of your Burys and Derbys, or the introduction of B teams into the Football League Trophy, erode the foundations of a pyramid these teams balance atop of, the sidelining of the FA Cup - like the cancerous introduction of V** - blunts the stalagmite of hope that has been calcifying and growing in the hopeless hearts of football fans for centuries, finding expression and a playground in the early rounds of the FA Cup.
‘Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.’ I hope that’s true Andy, but for it to remain so, we have to fight for these hallowed January and February days when everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
It was a real follow-the-crowds day. We were only metres from the station when the groundswell of FA Cup footfall swept us up in its rapid current of red and blue possibility. Southampton had made the laudable decision to discount tickets to a tenner, so we were walking towards a stadium that, like the Ricoh, was ordered from a noughties Argos catalogue, and has all the zhuzh and character of a traffic warden, but does just about house 30 thousand plus people when the opportunity arises.
The paths of the commuting supporters converged into a trundling snake of good humour which, with zero pressure or rivalry polluting the fixture, gave rise to a kind of buoyant abandon that intermittently squeaked out in the shape of Cov’s broadening hymn sheet of chants. We passed a clutch of earnest-looking cardigan-wearing seed-munchers handing out the communist times or something else that announced our brief shoulder-brush with Southampton’s socialist utopia. Their dangling red-topped editions passed entirely unacknowledged apart from one belated and sensational heckle: “No one here votes mate!.” Said with a sensational depth of pride and “Duh, didn’t you know” vibes.
With our away end totally sold out, there was a good deal of double seating going on. Our neighbours for the afternoon had crammed about 10 lads into 5 seats. Heading towards this congestion, I’d found maybe my favourite - and by favourite, I mean most ridiculous - fan sticker in the urinal. The Nuneaton chapter of Coventry City sticker wielding bandits had plumped for ‘Beers, slags and party bags’ as their mantra. Clearly I can’t endorse that nomenclature, but in defence of the Nuneaton copywriter, “Beers, promiscuous individuals, and party bags” just has zero ring to it.
The lads behind us hadn’t managed to sneak any beers in, nor was there any romance afoot in this neutered pack of vacant-eyed adolescents - but their supply of one-dimensional party bags was Mary-Poppins-esque, and they were dishing it out with an altruistic vivacity that the Corbynites outside would have been proud of.
I’ve wasted an awful lot of time setting the party bag scene, and annoyingly an awful lot happened in the first half so I’d better take a stab at that. Robins' approach seemed to be a form of counter-attacking bus-parking, with minimal press on show, and Southampton invited to wander past the halfway line totally unchallenged.
Before I’d had time to work this out, chances were being carved out and squandered in plentiful supply. Eccles strode forward and bottom-cornered one to a keeper fingertip; Southampton’s niche short corner brought a great save from Moore; our leftwing cross almost produced a stunning own goal; O’Hare plated up a dish for Big Gok that he dallied too long over, and generally, in amongst the raucous bursts of song from the away end, the tie was firmly alight.
Then, in the 22nd minute, we ticked the box that I demand to be ticked during a fixture of this ilk: to score a single, meaningful goal.
Ben Sheaf - undergoing the kind of critical renaissance enjoyed by Michael Carrick once everyone suddenly decided he was the opposite of totally crap - played a delightfully simple one-two with Gok, that stood, ever so briefly, as a moment of exceptional beauty. The ability of something as basic as a straight, accurate pass to - at a stroke - nuke 5 defenders into irrelevance, suddenly makes football seem like the simplest and purest kind of human chess. Moments before, it (and the Southampton defence) was impenetrable and mystical; now, it is an inconsequentially simple problem that we have solved. I must have watched that pass about 20 times now, but that tiny bit of movement from Gok, combined with the mesmerised ball-watching from the Saints defender, carves a delightful gash through the heart of their rear guard. Sheaf returns the favour and leaves Gok in acres to sit down a keeper who I can’t help but think is just silly: that’s Willy Caballero.
I like to think I celebrate goals with unbridled delight. The lads behind me really showed me how it’s done, instantly catapulting one of their number horizontally, like a sniffed-up harpoon, three rows forward. The many Cov fans in the home end probably had to decide whether the 22nd minute was too early to show their true colours - really hope they went for it too. The harpoon made his way back through the melee, apologising to a small child that had become airborne road kill on his flight path to the pitch.
Were we now looking at Mark Robins’ dream managerial situation? Soaking up pressure against superior opposition with no pressure to attack but all the capacity to expose them on the break. In my biased eye, it was a situation tailor-made for a certain Jodi Jones, but Robins didn’t agree.
Southampton continued to be ponderous. We continued to roll out some sensational first-touch football. Ian Maatsen burrowed deeper into my affections with a strike that would have rivalled Jordan Shipley’s outrageous penalty box strike at the Ricoh had it not risen inches over the crossbar. The tricksy Chelsea loanee was again in the right place for a byline pullback but his effort snuck wide of the post.
Wandering in at halftime, Robins can’t have dreamt of a more perfect situation. Game plan being executed to perfection and Southampton appearing reasonably sanguine about an FA Cup exit.
The second half got quite boring, and the home end ultras weren’t bothered about stirring their charges. The saints, with Ward-Prowse at quarterback, controlled possession, slide-ruling horizontal passes in front of our defensive ranks. The effect was table-football-like: rows and rows of shirts squaring up and shuffling along, giving as little as possible away.
It was too hard to be too angry when the non-Adam Armstrong in their ranks took a step inside and dispatched an absolute gunshot into the far top corner with the outside of his right boot. He celebrated with the kind of placidity that suggests scoring worldies like this is almost a bit humdrum for the likes of him.
This prompted us to bring on our experienced stager, for an episode of the Martin Waghorn show that he will do well to tape over this evening with literally anything else.
Upon sighting old Waggers, the Southampton players exchanged their football kits for black tie, and started delivering silver-service chances to the old workhorse - (just realised he’s younger than me…) A mishit back-pass was the first creak of the open door, but Waghorn executed it with all the aplomb of a man with one goal in 7 months - scarcely requiring silly Willy to move his jazz hands.
Moments later the introduced Jordan Shipley provided a cross that Waggy dispatched twice without being able to reclaim the lead. His hulking figure scrapes across the turf like a shipwreck being dragged to shore; perhaps the anvil-like weight of underachievement is contributing to this glacial feel. Starting to smell a bit gluey over in Waghorn-Ville.
More things happened, mostly featuring extended periods of Southampton possession, but we kept them at bay without ever looking too nervous. Jodi Jones entered the fray, and we rolled into extra time.
Predictably, Southampton’s fans found some energy once they were no longer crashing out. The walls of red silence had been replaced by a suffocating clench of fans intent on singing Oh When The Saints, on repeat. This brought us down a peg or two.
Their winner came 8 minutes from the second full time. One of their innumerable forays down the left, which had so far been mercilessly suffocated by our fiendishly well-drilled backline, now came through, Water-Peters jinking and turning and sending a slightly deflected shot spinning beyond Moore’s left hand. Delight for the 20 odd thousand Southampton day-trippers. Resounding silence in the away end, promptly replaced by the Sky Blue Song. It was no disaster - just a shame.
But that wasn’t the end.
Waghorn scraps his way to possession on the halfway line, exchanges neat passes with Gok wan, and then beelines for goal. He finds the marauding Gok once again, who nutmegs one of the many pursuing defenders and gets a very saveable effort off from outside the box. No shame in that. Waggers, on the other hand, is then presented with a penalty spot sitter with the keeper almost on his arse. His effort is unforgivably weak - cannoning straight off a foot that Willy didn’t even need to move. Todd Kane then hits this rebound goalwards, but before the keeper can (inevitably save it) the wildly offside Waghorn tickles it into the net.
Cue the human torpedo flying through the air and massacring a horde of nearby children before you can so much as cluck: “VAR”. In fact, he was so offside that there was no need for VAR. I can honestly say not a single molecule of me celebrated or even contemplated thinking we’d equalised. I focused my energy on our inexplicable failure to score in the 5 seconds before the gigantic offsides occurred. The same can't be said for the lad who burst onto the playing field and started flicking the bird at their goalkeeper and the home fans. Good one mate.
Ah well. No children were seriously injured and no one can say they were shortchanged for an absolute club banger of a cup tie. When we look good, we look very good. There were some very long boring passages in the game when we sat there waiting for Southampton to beat us, but that comes with the lower league away side territory.
I was proud of us, proud of Mark Robins, and proud to be in such close proximity to some of the countries finest “beer, slags and party bags” sommeliers.
Reading is next up for me.