One Game at a Time
Oxford United (A) Valentine’s Day
St Valentine’s Day just can’t come round soon enough as the top of the Division gets just a little more fractious with the top clubs playing each other.
After last weekends narrow victory over Argyle, Wednesday set the tone by demanding a meeting with PGMOL newly appointed supremo (and Yorkshireman) Howard Webb. Ostensibly to improve the relationship between referees and club, the trigger for the demands for a catch up appeared to be that, somewhat controversially, the match officials had reached what Moore himself called, the right decision against Argyle the previous Saturday.
When George Byers rammed the ball past Callum Burton, the assistant referee, rather than run to the halfway line, the time-honoured method of signalling he was happy with the goal, stood his ground. Burton himself had immediately signalled he felt Smith was offside. The referee then consulted his linesman, and as Moore said, reached the correct decision of offside. During that period, the hair triggered big screen replay man had shown the incident. It is this availability of the visual evidence which has brought about the Wednesday unrest. They claim the officials, alerted by the fourth official, used this to make the decision. The officials say that was not the case.
Obviously Wednesday will be keen to clear this up, as they are also undergoing trial by fan footage after their game at Ipswich, where posted images show a clear elbow (or possibly two) from Johnson which led to the initial penalty, subsequently missed by Chaplin. Whether this will lead to post match action by the authorities in their scarcely concealed campaign to deny Wednesday their rightful title, time alone will tell.
Certainly Darren Moore, from his time at West Brom, was vocal when a player from the opposition was not expelled via VAR for elbowing one of his players, in a cup tie against Brighton when it was not available at the home ground for the replay. One would expect therefore any post-match action to be greeted with similar recognition of the justice being done.
In the meantime, Wednesday completed their longest run at the top of the league this season, seven whole days, and the dropping of two points to Ipswich having led two nil after half an hour or so allowed a resurgent Argyle to climb back over them following their deconstruction of their Dockyard rivals Pompous at Home Park.
Whilst Ipswich fans will probably be happy to have rescued a point from such a bad start, many will be looking at their run of form over the last nine games and thinking either things have gone a little Pete Tong, or they have just loaned one of their plethora of under 21’s to Welsh club LWDDWDLDD.
Certainly, the race for third is a lot more evenly contested after Bolton won their five thousandth League game, five nil at Posh, and the Derby unstoppable run, er, stopped, at Why Come. The six-game form team is now, remarkably, Shrewsbury Town, with six on the bounce. The Shrews have all the other top teams still to play and so will have a significant impact on the final table look.
Ipswich themselves will doubtless be planning a Sam Morsy booking on Tuesday night at Brizzle Rovers so he can serve his upcoming and inevitable two match suspension against Forest Green and MK Dons, with the Burton Albion game as back up. Then comes a tricky run of successive games against Bolton, Shrewsbury, Barnsley, Derby and Why Come, three of them away from home. With fellow midfield enforcer Lee Evans missing for a while and Luongo not fit enough for the midweek cup trip to Burnley or the Saturday 18, Towns centre midfield depth is looking a little creaky ahead of the key run in.
No such issues at a sold-out Home Park as the home fans enjoyed the new pre match ritual of line up bingo. Eight changes to the starting XI, two injury enforced from the trip to Hillsborough, left Argyle with a Hardie/Cosgrove strike force with both players in double figures, and three midfielders on the bench, Mumba, Matete and Azaz, that would by rights potentially feature in the League One team of the season, let alone a normal club XI. Also, on said bench were the recovering Mayor and Bolton, plus debutant keeper Parkes and Sam Waine.
When you consider that missing from the eighteen, apart from Cooper and Scarr, were Grant, Galloway, Earley, Tyriek Wright, Houghton, Ennis and the newly departed Yeovil loanee Law, plus Jephcott, one can only applaud the ambition of the club and the talent of its talent spotters.
With Mickel Miller making a home start, Argyle set about dismantling a stubborn Pompous side, fielding an ex-Spurs keeper Josh Oluwayemi, instead of former Argyle loanee and ex Arsenal stopper Matt Macey. In only his second League game, the young keeper had a torrid time, although his reflexes kept out several shots, but from one such Miller induced save, Cosgrove netted the rebound. When Azaz, on for Wright, coasted through to score his seventh goal of the season with yet another sublime finish, it looked game over. A snap Hackett finish from a corner briefly threatened the dreaded but all too frequent 2-2 scoreline this fixture so regularly provides. Cosgrove set up Hardie to score against Pompous as he so often does, racing away from the static Pack, whose berating of his young keeper was as illogical and unjustified, as his earlier decision to play Statues while Argyle attacked. The young stopper, who saved one Cosgrove drive and probably regretted that he had, given where he was struck, is able to represent either England or Nigeria, internationally. Looks like Nigeria might be favourite.
Schuey’s abundance means he has a chance to freshen things up when we travel for our next fixture date, a Valentine’s Day meeting with old rival and all-around grump Karl Robinson and his Oxford side. They managed to arrest a three-match losing run with a draw at his alma mater MK Dons. That said one of the wins they had recently was their fog strewn triumph over close rivals for promotion Ipswich. The winner was scored by Cameron Brannagan who is currently driving the midfield alongside Bate who scored his first league goal at the Dons.
If there is little love lost between the clubs after Karl’s somewhat intemperate reaction to his last season Home Park defeat and subsequent Argyle celebrations, it is safe to say that right now there is a similar lack of affection between him and his clubs supporters.
A steady stream of KRexit posts on the main fan’s forum, possibly would have heralded a larger protest had the Tuesday night game not been dedicated to remembering the loss of U’s legend Joey Beauchamp, who sadly took his own life last year.
The anger is primarily directed against the somewhat scattergun transfer policy operated By Robinson which has left him with a squad that is light on numbers and unbalanced. Throw in injuries like those to Moore and Bodin and there is every chance that a solid Argyle performance could turn the atmosphere quite toxic for Robinson.
Obviously, the date is associated with the St Valentine’s Day massacre, when Al “Scarface” Capone effectively took out his rival Bugsy Moran’s lieutenants in a brutal massacre in a Chicago hotel. Capone, then to be imprisoned for tax offences, never reaped the reward of his actions, but the idea of massacres on this date have seeped into sporting legend.
Perhaps the biggest in football terms was an off-pitch massacre when the giants of Scottish football, Glasgow Rangers, were cast into administration in 2012 by owner Craig Whyte. Sent to the lower echelons of the Scottish League consequently, the club eventually fought their way back to the top level of Scottish football. With the various accusations being flung around at Manchester City one does wonder if they might have similar issues if found to have broken so many rules. Time will tell.
On the pitch, football wise it is probably Liverpool’s six nil Villa Park annihilation of Aston Villa in 2014 that best fits the headline writer’s idea of a massacre.
Elsewhere you will have to go back a long way to find events that would be worthy of the headline. Sugar Ray Robinson defeating Jake La Motta in 1951, their sixth meeting, in a fight that took place not far from the scene of the original massacre, and which was subject to not inconsiderable mob interest, with Robinson declining the offer to take a dive in a series of title fights against Raging Bull LaMotta. The fighters had joked they had met so many times, they could have been married, Robinson won five of the six fights and in the last, he battered laMotta, who, when the fight was stopped was only able to boast that Robinson had never put him on the canvas.
More recently, at the Bowie Racetrack in Maryland in 1975, a number of jockeys contrived to fix the final race on the days card, when the trifecta bet was in play. This bet, in which you had to pick three horses to finish first second or third in any order, was only available on the final race of the day. On this day the final order meant that a winning triple box ticket would pay out just under a thousand dollars. These pay-outs complicated the scam as it went over the nine-hundred-dollar limit at which an IRS form had to be filled out before collecting. What also didn’t help was the fact the brother of one of the jockeys involved, instead of spreading his bets around the various tellers, simply placed the same bet 38 times with one. Not remotely suspicious then. Or memorable!
In the end, after the authorities started to pick up the ticket holders that did come forward, some of whom were middlemen taking a cut for their role in collecting, one of the errant jockeys burnt the remaining tickets.
Race analysis showed that the horses, who barely changed order throughout the race, were clearly in a rigged contest. The main miscreants picked up lengthy bans, although the rider of the last horse was at pains to make it known in court he was just on a lousy horse. The track, now closed, became infamous for the race.
Just spare a thought for the punter who forgot to place his Sam Morsy suspension/Nathan Jones sacking double.
Argyle have not the greatest record at Oxford, although recently this has begun to improve of late, and our only previous visit in February to the Kassam was a Sonny Bradley inspired 1-0 win. That said we do also have our own 5-1 October massacre in the dark days of James Brent's early reign when a young Argyle side were soundly thrashed.
Assuming the ref decides he has had enough cards for the day, we can only hope that whichever of the squad gets the nod on the night from Schuey, the result will be one that the Green Army will love. Now what odds on a Morecambe away point?
COYG!!
Oxford United (A) Valentine’s Day
St Valentine’s Day just can’t come round soon enough as the top of the Division gets just a little more fractious with the top clubs playing each other.
After last weekends narrow victory over Argyle, Wednesday set the tone by demanding a meeting with PGMOL newly appointed supremo (and Yorkshireman) Howard Webb. Ostensibly to improve the relationship between referees and club, the trigger for the demands for a catch up appeared to be that, somewhat controversially, the match officials had reached what Moore himself called, the right decision against Argyle the previous Saturday.
When George Byers rammed the ball past Callum Burton, the assistant referee, rather than run to the halfway line, the time-honoured method of signalling he was happy with the goal, stood his ground. Burton himself had immediately signalled he felt Smith was offside. The referee then consulted his linesman, and as Moore said, reached the correct decision of offside. During that period, the hair triggered big screen replay man had shown the incident. It is this availability of the visual evidence which has brought about the Wednesday unrest. They claim the officials, alerted by the fourth official, used this to make the decision. The officials say that was not the case.
Obviously Wednesday will be keen to clear this up, as they are also undergoing trial by fan footage after their game at Ipswich, where posted images show a clear elbow (or possibly two) from Johnson which led to the initial penalty, subsequently missed by Chaplin. Whether this will lead to post match action by the authorities in their scarcely concealed campaign to deny Wednesday their rightful title, time alone will tell.
Certainly Darren Moore, from his time at West Brom, was vocal when a player from the opposition was not expelled via VAR for elbowing one of his players, in a cup tie against Brighton when it was not available at the home ground for the replay. One would expect therefore any post-match action to be greeted with similar recognition of the justice being done.
In the meantime, Wednesday completed their longest run at the top of the league this season, seven whole days, and the dropping of two points to Ipswich having led two nil after half an hour or so allowed a resurgent Argyle to climb back over them following their deconstruction of their Dockyard rivals Pompous at Home Park.
Whilst Ipswich fans will probably be happy to have rescued a point from such a bad start, many will be looking at their run of form over the last nine games and thinking either things have gone a little Pete Tong, or they have just loaned one of their plethora of under 21’s to Welsh club LWDDWDLDD.
Certainly, the race for third is a lot more evenly contested after Bolton won their five thousandth League game, five nil at Posh, and the Derby unstoppable run, er, stopped, at Why Come. The six-game form team is now, remarkably, Shrewsbury Town, with six on the bounce. The Shrews have all the other top teams still to play and so will have a significant impact on the final table look.
Ipswich themselves will doubtless be planning a Sam Morsy booking on Tuesday night at Brizzle Rovers so he can serve his upcoming and inevitable two match suspension against Forest Green and MK Dons, with the Burton Albion game as back up. Then comes a tricky run of successive games against Bolton, Shrewsbury, Barnsley, Derby and Why Come, three of them away from home. With fellow midfield enforcer Lee Evans missing for a while and Luongo not fit enough for the midweek cup trip to Burnley or the Saturday 18, Towns centre midfield depth is looking a little creaky ahead of the key run in.
No such issues at a sold-out Home Park as the home fans enjoyed the new pre match ritual of line up bingo. Eight changes to the starting XI, two injury enforced from the trip to Hillsborough, left Argyle with a Hardie/Cosgrove strike force with both players in double figures, and three midfielders on the bench, Mumba, Matete and Azaz, that would by rights potentially feature in the League One team of the season, let alone a normal club XI. Also, on said bench were the recovering Mayor and Bolton, plus debutant keeper Parkes and Sam Waine.
When you consider that missing from the eighteen, apart from Cooper and Scarr, were Grant, Galloway, Earley, Tyriek Wright, Houghton, Ennis and the newly departed Yeovil loanee Law, plus Jephcott, one can only applaud the ambition of the club and the talent of its talent spotters.
With Mickel Miller making a home start, Argyle set about dismantling a stubborn Pompous side, fielding an ex-Spurs keeper Josh Oluwayemi, instead of former Argyle loanee and ex Arsenal stopper Matt Macey. In only his second League game, the young keeper had a torrid time, although his reflexes kept out several shots, but from one such Miller induced save, Cosgrove netted the rebound. When Azaz, on for Wright, coasted through to score his seventh goal of the season with yet another sublime finish, it looked game over. A snap Hackett finish from a corner briefly threatened the dreaded but all too frequent 2-2 scoreline this fixture so regularly provides. Cosgrove set up Hardie to score against Pompous as he so often does, racing away from the static Pack, whose berating of his young keeper was as illogical and unjustified, as his earlier decision to play Statues while Argyle attacked. The young stopper, who saved one Cosgrove drive and probably regretted that he had, given where he was struck, is able to represent either England or Nigeria, internationally. Looks like Nigeria might be favourite.
Schuey’s abundance means he has a chance to freshen things up when we travel for our next fixture date, a Valentine’s Day meeting with old rival and all-around grump Karl Robinson and his Oxford side. They managed to arrest a three-match losing run with a draw at his alma mater MK Dons. That said one of the wins they had recently was their fog strewn triumph over close rivals for promotion Ipswich. The winner was scored by Cameron Brannagan who is currently driving the midfield alongside Bate who scored his first league goal at the Dons.
If there is little love lost between the clubs after Karl’s somewhat intemperate reaction to his last season Home Park defeat and subsequent Argyle celebrations, it is safe to say that right now there is a similar lack of affection between him and his clubs supporters.
A steady stream of KRexit posts on the main fan’s forum, possibly would have heralded a larger protest had the Tuesday night game not been dedicated to remembering the loss of U’s legend Joey Beauchamp, who sadly took his own life last year.
The anger is primarily directed against the somewhat scattergun transfer policy operated By Robinson which has left him with a squad that is light on numbers and unbalanced. Throw in injuries like those to Moore and Bodin and there is every chance that a solid Argyle performance could turn the atmosphere quite toxic for Robinson.
Obviously, the date is associated with the St Valentine’s Day massacre, when Al “Scarface” Capone effectively took out his rival Bugsy Moran’s lieutenants in a brutal massacre in a Chicago hotel. Capone, then to be imprisoned for tax offences, never reaped the reward of his actions, but the idea of massacres on this date have seeped into sporting legend.
Perhaps the biggest in football terms was an off-pitch massacre when the giants of Scottish football, Glasgow Rangers, were cast into administration in 2012 by owner Craig Whyte. Sent to the lower echelons of the Scottish League consequently, the club eventually fought their way back to the top level of Scottish football. With the various accusations being flung around at Manchester City one does wonder if they might have similar issues if found to have broken so many rules. Time will tell.
On the pitch, football wise it is probably Liverpool’s six nil Villa Park annihilation of Aston Villa in 2014 that best fits the headline writer’s idea of a massacre.
Elsewhere you will have to go back a long way to find events that would be worthy of the headline. Sugar Ray Robinson defeating Jake La Motta in 1951, their sixth meeting, in a fight that took place not far from the scene of the original massacre, and which was subject to not inconsiderable mob interest, with Robinson declining the offer to take a dive in a series of title fights against Raging Bull LaMotta. The fighters had joked they had met so many times, they could have been married, Robinson won five of the six fights and in the last, he battered laMotta, who, when the fight was stopped was only able to boast that Robinson had never put him on the canvas.
More recently, at the Bowie Racetrack in Maryland in 1975, a number of jockeys contrived to fix the final race on the days card, when the trifecta bet was in play. This bet, in which you had to pick three horses to finish first second or third in any order, was only available on the final race of the day. On this day the final order meant that a winning triple box ticket would pay out just under a thousand dollars. These pay-outs complicated the scam as it went over the nine-hundred-dollar limit at which an IRS form had to be filled out before collecting. What also didn’t help was the fact the brother of one of the jockeys involved, instead of spreading his bets around the various tellers, simply placed the same bet 38 times with one. Not remotely suspicious then. Or memorable!
In the end, after the authorities started to pick up the ticket holders that did come forward, some of whom were middlemen taking a cut for their role in collecting, one of the errant jockeys burnt the remaining tickets.
Race analysis showed that the horses, who barely changed order throughout the race, were clearly in a rigged contest. The main miscreants picked up lengthy bans, although the rider of the last horse was at pains to make it known in court he was just on a lousy horse. The track, now closed, became infamous for the race.
Just spare a thought for the punter who forgot to place his Sam Morsy suspension/Nathan Jones sacking double.
Argyle have not the greatest record at Oxford, although recently this has begun to improve of late, and our only previous visit in February to the Kassam was a Sonny Bradley inspired 1-0 win. That said we do also have our own 5-1 October massacre in the dark days of James Brent's early reign when a young Argyle side were soundly thrashed.
Assuming the ref decides he has had enough cards for the day, we can only hope that whichever of the squad gets the nod on the night from Schuey, the result will be one that the Green Army will love. Now what odds on a Morecambe away point?
COYG!!
