Feeling a bit thaw

I had expected to see my 100th game of the season before Christmas, but the weather has been so bad in the last month that I only reached that figure on Saturday. There was a grim spell of nine days without a game, which of course included a weekend, before ‘The Barber’ was able to attend an FA Cup Third Round replay between Queens Park Rangers and Sheffield United at Loftus Road last Tuesday.

It was only a tenner in the Ellerslie Road Stand and there was plenty of room on a bitterly cold evening. I noticed the corner flag nearest to me bending in the wind, so the ‘wind chill factor’ may well have taken the temperature below zero. But the last quarter of the game was very entertaining, the score going from 0-1 to 1-3 in Sheffield United’s favour in about five minutes.

Rangers got another goal two minutes from the end of the 90 for 2-3 and twice came very close to levelling in the five minutes of added time. An extra half-hour, and maybe penalties too, would have had me looking up the word ‘hypothermia’ in the dictionary.

Waiting for a tube at Shepherd’s Bush Meerkat (sorry, Market) was probably my coldest experience since that England game with Cameroon at Wembley in the ‘90s. That’s when it went down to -12C and I think it was only standing in the ‘Gents’ with dozens of other chaps and all the steam rising that kept me alive.

A colleague pointed out that Rangers hadn’t won an FA Cup match for nine years, i.e. not since a 2-1 Third Round replay victory over Luton Town in January 2001. But it’s not the worst winless run in The Cup – Rochdale, for example, didn’t win for 18 years.

The snow had more or less disappeared by Friday, so I was quietly confident of seeing something on Saturday. It was disconcerting to have my first five choices called off in the morning, but the lady at Bromley confirmed that their Conference South fixture with Maidenhead United was definitely going ahead and that was good enough for me.

Staff and volunteers had cleared the snow from the pitch – it was piled up at the touchlines, looking a bit black and dirty – and a crowd of 399 saw a game that had a 0-0 feel about it until Maidenhead’s No.9 scored with a left-foot thunderbolt after 76 minutes. Within five minutes Bromley had equalised and then immediately gone behind again.

My intention on the last two Saturdays has been to watch a game in the AFA Senior Cup’s Fourth Round, but I’ve been thwarted so far. Old Meadonians v Norsemen was off on the 9th – in fact all eight ties were – and Broomfield v Polytechnic ‘fell victim to the weather’ on the 16th . I’ll try again on Saturday, as I’m determined to see a tie in every round.