Day 2a Of The 30 Day Football Challenge – My Least Favourite Non-Town Games

Again, these are split into 5 Town and 5 Non-Town. I’ve (also again) tried to stick with games I saw ‘live’, either in person, or on the telly-ma-vision, so the friendly Il Grande Torino played against Benfica doesn’t feature, although that game was disastrous for obvious reasons.

Bury 1 – 1 Oxford Utd – 21st Mar 2006– Least Favourite For ‘Matchday Experience’.

No surprise this is in here; anyone who was there would attest how bad it was. Ice-cold February night, £18 to get in (to Bury!), and absolutely no football played at all except for a 3 minute spell during which Bury scored a penalty and Oxford, as if offended by the two teams appearing at different levels of appalling, equalised immediately, before both reverted to doing absolutely nothing for the remainder of the game. It was meant to be the return of Jim Smith to Oxford (which was one of the reasons I was there) but that wasn’t announced until the following day, which meant the already tenuous reason for being there was rendered moot. Utterly, utterly awful, and a fine example of why, sometimes, lower league football fails.

England 0 – 0 Algeria – 18th Jun 2010 – Least Favourite For ‘Football Going Bad’

Its Saturday evening. It’s the World Cup. Its England’s best chance for a generation. Its against one of the worst teams in the tournament. So, Algeria set out to frustrate England, but barely have to do anything worthy of the name, as England put in a performance so insipid that they not only get booed off the field, but a bird landing on a goal-post was the highlight of the game. International football is only exciting if people set out to make it exciting – that’s not in Fabio Capello’s nature, and against a team who were trying to remain compact, instead of watching the tide wash over a beach, it was more like watching two stagnant pools rippling next to each other.

Arsenal 2 – 3 Tottenham H – 20th Nov 2010 – Least Favourite For ‘Teams Who Stopped Trying To Win The Game’

This game was exciting. Arsenal led 2-0 at half time, but Spurs gradually reeled them in and could have nicked it late on. That’s a fair assessment of the 90 minutes. However, Arsenal could, and probably, should have led five or six nil at half time had they not stopped playing when they’d got two, as if they’d declared – I vividly remember Marouane Chamakh receiving the ball in the Spurs’ area a few minutes before half-time, controlling it, and then just giving it to the Spurs defence as if he couldn’t be bothered to actually do anything with it. I was annoyed by this. So it was good to see Spurs start coming back in – but then when they’d got their goals, they stopped trying to get more; running the ball into the corners, wasting time, and generally negating their good work. I was livid at this. Its started my mental campaign of ‘all teams trying to win every game by as higher score as they can’.

Italy 0 – 0p Brazil – July 17th 1994 – Least Favourite For ‘Fallen Heroes’

I love Roberto Baggio. I make no bones about that. I could watch him play football for hours on end, and have done. Never have I seen anyone play the game quite like he did. 1994 was his finest hour. Even after being removed against Ireland, and largely being injured throughout the tournament, he was good enough to guide Italy to the final, wherein, really, the football stopped. It was, again, an appalling game of football – both teams were shot from the demands of the tournament and neither looked like winning it. Then the inevitable penalties made their heroes and villains and I was on the wrong side. Franco Baresi – a hero; disaster. Roberto Baggio – the hero; disaster. So we ended where we started – the biggest star on the field missing a penalty. Gutted.

Wycombe 3 – 0 Gillingham – 8th May 2010 – Least Favourite For ‘Depressing People That I Like’

I’m not a Gillingham fan, despite geography, and I haven’t yet connected with them the way I did Norwich – but that’s by the by. Last season for the Gills wasn’t a particularly good one; there was highs (they beat a lot of big teams…. Huddersfield, Southampton…) but far more lows (they lost to some minnows…. Huddersfield, Southampton….) so it all came down to the last game of the season, a visit to already relegated Wycombe, having won no games away from home all season. As such, the defeat wasn’t a surprise, but such a capitulation was pretty crushing, and, in football terms, it took the Gillingham fans a pretty long time to get over it – maybe until Christmas time this season. Truly depressing stuff it was, though it didn’t help that Town lost at Exeter at the same time to make the inevitable inevitable.