Glynis Wright has had extreme difficult keeping husband Simon's feet on the ground since Thursday evening's events at Edgar Street - his adrenalin levels being so high.
Let Glynis explain why:
So there you go, then. See, I told you: bang on the play-off door hard enough, and for long enough - and someone's sure to come and let you in! Leicester, home of the Walkers Stadium is where it's at, and baggy no returns on getting a seat in the Salt And Vinegar Flavour Stand. Halifax? Got to be Sweet And Sour for them, with the 'sour' bit belatedly hitting their collective tastebuds after the stipulated 90-minute period of normal time, hopefully.
Being a West Bromwich Albion supporter primarily, and watching last night's game along with my other half, whose support and love for The Bulls has been very much in evidence these last few months - well, when you've played the masochist and witnessed some truly-agonising Premiership death throes over the course of the entire season, then it's nigh-on a done deal you head down to Edgar Street as fast as conscience - or, failing that, a pretty fast car, will let you. Which is why the pair of us were seated in the main stand, along with Nick Brade, 'Talking Bill', plus sundry other Bulls fanatics, the other night. But whisper quietly any mention of the Bluenose brace sitting about three rows in front, will you? They, too, have been attending Bulls Conference fixtures because they find that sort of football infinitely more satisfying than the all-too frequent fear-ridden, relegation-haunted fare on offer at St. Andrews these days.
That's the 'why' and 'wherefores' done and dusted, then - so on with the show. Leaving the West Midlands about an hour earlier than we normally do for Bulls games - a wise move, it eventually transpired to be - we then spent the next hour and a half travelling through some newly-verdant countryside, finally experiencing the manifold joys of late spring, now well and truly upon us after a somewhat icy start chucking things back almost three weeks later than normal for the time of year. Leaves haven't so much started to appear upon branches and trunks along the course of that Worcester-Hereford run as exploded, and almost simultaneously, at that. Chuck into that pleasant pre-match pot the remarkable vocal range of Maddy Prior, heard in her Steeleye Span folk-rock incarnation, and you've got a lovely, pleasantly-sunlit, early evening run going for you.
Those rush-hour hold-ups we found on the Worcester ring road were but a temporary irritant, though; despite somewhat gloomy predictions the tailback would significantly arrest our flight, it just wasn't so. Result? We actually arrived at the ground with around an hour and a half left to kill prior to kick-off. All that, and with a couple - lucky, hopefully! - changes of pre-match routine put in place, too. One thing Hereford really has going for it is that massive car-park adjacent to the ground - and available either at a nominal charge, or, as per that night, buckshee. Should you manage to emerge triumphant at Leicester, you'll pleasantly discover Edgar Street to be one of the more well-provided-for League outfits in that respect, as far as itinerant motorists are concerned. A fairish number of Nationwide Third Division grounds, especially the newer ones, now require a yomping-session of considerable length from parking places before you get within sniffing-distance, even. So there.
But that's as may be: come Thursday night, our main priority lay in the shape of a handily-situated ice-cream van, parked just to the left-hand side of where the car-park narrows to become a small road passing through to the main drag running by the Cattle Market. 'Im Indoors assuaged his parched-throat symptoms courtesy of what's commonly known as a '99'.Me? I went for a disgusting combo - a 'heart attack special', some would describe it - of soft ice-cream, a strawberry flavoured scoop-full quietly nesting below, all in a cone, and complete with what was rapidly appearing to be the mandatory Cadbury's Flake garnish! Mind you, even that cornet-flogger had entered well and truly into the spirit of the evening's doings; every 5 minutes or so, his chimes played a 100-decibel 'vanilla-flavour remix' of the Match Of The Day signature tune, set ringing proudly forth from his bijou van every single time. Still, it was quite pleasant to be stood outside, in the gentle evening sunshine, and watching other people do the work, for a change, as per Nick Brade and Pete Povall, the former spotted bombing around selling raffle tickets, the latter flogging programmes as fast as his little legs would carry him; a fascinating sight, that, watching them pop in and out so many Edgar Street entrances and exits, and with such adrenaline-fuelled eagerness, too.
The very last time I saw such impassioned deeds of derring-do emanate from the hands of someone enthusiastically (some would argue, equally passionately, for the insertion of the prefix 'over' in front of my very last word before I suffered an acute attack of the 'brackets')? If you've watched the recent Nick Park Wallace And Gromit special, 'The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit' and all those veggie-crazy lop-ears doing similarly-driven multiple entries and exits in one go, you'll get the idea pretty quickly. Still, at least having something to flog punters pre-match would keep Nick's mind well and truly occupied, which was a damn sight more than could be said for that of my other half, whose nervousness-index had already ratcheted up by several notches even as I stood there quietly making serious inroads into the frozen cholesterol-fest I described in my preceding paragraph. Once inside, his general demeanour would come to greatly resemble a domestic boiler - one with the safety-valve well and truly bodged shut and on the point of detonation, that is!
Although there were still a good 40 minutes left to go before the 'off', my other half's agonies were so intense, so obvious, it would have constituted an act of severe mental cruelty to have made him wait any longer. In we went, then - same turnstile as per usual, but with a slightly-differing routine, in this case me taking charge of the tickets, hubby following behind, along with the half-eaten bit of my ice-cream cone in his hot and sticky little hand. All done with a view towards greatly increasing the 'luck factor', so my other half assured me as I proffered the tickets and went through, but belated clapping of eyes on my remaining bit of cornet quickly (and incontrovertibly) revealed the missing factor to be not so much one of 'luck' but of 'lick'! Guilty as charged, M'Lud? Too bloody right.
As anticipated, our usual main stand seats had been saved for us by Nick Brade and his little pensioner 'harem'; a wise precaution, that, as lots of casuals were already buzzing around, then making free with whatever vacant bits of stand still stood, if you get my drift. Once in-situ, and bathed in the warm afterglow of the sun's dying rays, still, the wonderful atmosphere of the occasion could now be given deserved full rein. A packed Meadow End to our right, a tumultuous sea of black and white, predictably enough, and via a mixture of horns and good old fashioned vocals, making enough noise to wake the poor mediaeval-deceased sods interred in the cathedral grounds. Must have really racked off all those ancient clerics, that; come on, would you be pleased to have your post-mortem slumbers completely shattered by noisy football supporters, after having made it abundantly clear to the Almighty you didn't want to be woken before Judgment Day?
A further glance around the ground revealed also a goodly number of Morecambe followers, equally noisy and impassioned, as well they might be, considering the length of the journey they had to make to witness last night's capers. A midweek game, needing a midday start, practically, with the length of the journey eating well into the 'couple of hundred miles' bits on the old odometer? Too right - and fair play to the visitors, they'd brought with them around five or six hundred accomplished noise-merchants, too. Makes a change from picking cockles for a living, I suppose.
Only the right hand side of the Blackfriars Road bit remaining sealed off, for safety reasons - well, that's my understanding of the situation - there was very little spare space to be had anywhere in those moments immediately prior to kick-off, not to mention any sort of aural respite whatsoever from both sets of 'glee clubs'. Hereford's redoubled in intensity, in that tension-heavy run-up to the start, the prime reason being the ritual parading of a pretty hefty lump of T-bone steak around the playing area. A fairly docile specimen to all outward appearances, it must be said: either the bovine in question was pretty used to human company, or vets had earlier dosed the beast with enough veterinary tranquillisers to take out a significant proportion of the Dean and Chapter residing in the nearby cathedral. One thing for sure, though; this game was already predestined to finish with not so much a whimper, as one almighty bang, and that of megaton proportions, too.
And, as both sets of combatants emerged, amidst an atmosphere so electric, you could have sold it straight back to the National Grid, plenty more scope for further abrasion of near-shredded tonsils. By now, my other half's pre-match nerves were in complete and utter rags; eyeballs long-since shrunk to naught but a maniacal pinpoint, and his resultant 'thousand-yard stare' stare making some with children in tow very nervous indeed. But on with the show, and the home side kicking off towards their adulatory Meadow End throngs, for once - and of the two sides, they were the very first to show, and with heaps of twiddly bits tacked on for good measure, too.
Around the five-minute mark, and after some cautious sounding-out of the visitors' defensive capacity, The Bulls charged straight for goal, and right from a corner, too, the resultant Purdie (Mkandawire-ed) header woefully policed by the visitors, proof positive of the old saying that Nature truly does abhor a vacuum. Well, there was certainly one hell of a big vacuum at the heart of their defence, wasn't there - and something positively Herefordian required to seal it? Too bloody right. Predictably, our main-stand position went absolutely ballistic, as it might, given the astonishingly-short period of time taken to go out and grab that early strike.
A real shame all those exuberant Herefordian jollifications only lasted a total of 120 seconds, though. Within just two frantic, breathless minutes of the restart, the visitors claimed, and got, their penalty. Looking at things from a neutral's viewpoint, I really don't think anyone connected with the home side could have argued the toss unduly; Jeannin's tackle wasn't exactly of the best, now, was it? Any road up, suddenly, it was even-stevens once more, and The Bulls desperately grasping for a 'Plan B' of some sort.
To be absolutely fair, had this happened on each of the previous two occasions the Bulls had come so tantalisingly close to a play-off final appearance, it would have without question marked the beginning of the end, by slow decline - but there's now a real chunk of steeliness and grit about your side these days that simply wasn't there before. Yes, the Bulls would undoubtedly recover from the early setback; the question now being asked by most of their followers was 'when'? Just six minutes elapsed before we were able to celebrate so joyously again: that Andy Williams goal, when it came, was an absolute cracker, the lad corkscrewing frantically around a brace of cockle-lovin' defenders before finally letting fly from some way out. Straight into the roof of the net it went, and straight onto the scoresheet went the surname of its 19 year-old scorer.
Wonderful stuff, and made even more delightful by sneaking a playful peek at both Nick and 'Talking Bill' dancing a somewhat-improvised jig in the seats in front, a most interesting form of activity from an anatomical point of view, as Nick's long-suffering mum was sitting slap-bang in between the pair of 'em at the time! As for Morecambe, their troops looked somewhat demoralised by what had happened, but not for long, mind. As the half progressed, with The Bulls failing to capitalise as well as they might have from various scoring opportunities that arose from time to time, Morecambe, no mean performers themselves, it has to be said, got stronger by the minute. Mistakes, daft ones, began to creep into the Bulls' overall play at the back, and there were heart-stopping moments towards the dying portion of that half I genuinely thought the visitors the more likely of the two to equalise again.
Despite Morecambe's inexorable turning up of the wick, the Bulls still went in at half-time the leaders, but only on a wing and a prayer, I would say. What was urgently needed in their camp was much greater focus, with especial reference towards all matters defensive. No doubt - erm - 'strong words' concerning their overall lack of rearguard solidity had been exchanged at half-time, but they clearly hadn't heeded the warnings, of which there were several more to come during the opening minutes of that second helping. More Bull-ish narrow defensive squeaks, and it suddenly became abundantly clear that Morecambe's definitive 'golden chance' to regain parity once more could only be a matter of time. Within about eight minutes of the restart gone, their persistence finally paid off, pulling things back again after a half-clearance was seized upon by the grateful visitors, the profoundly-thankful Twiss grabbing the bonus-ball on the edge of the box, then giving the Hereford custodian no chance whatsoever with the shot.
2-2, then, and with the change in score (not to mention a possible sea-change in ultimate play-off destiny well and truly on the cards), things began to assume a much more fraught quality for the home side. An attempt that ended up with the crossbar no doubt needing a lick or three of paint apart - is that a ground maintenance task Graham Turner still performs, by the way? - for most of the remainder of the half, Hereford were kept busy trying to prevent Morecambe shattering Herefordian hearts courtesy a late, late smash-and-grab show. The passage of time had resulted in some vital personnel changes, though, and timely ones, too, moves that really helped plug what nasty-looking gaps remained. Jeannin exited the battlefield with some 75 per cent of the game over, as did Stansfield, their respective replacements being Pitman and Fleetwood. Long faces among the 'regulars' as the subbings were effected, mind; clearly, this wasn't in the script, and naught but sorrow predicted to come of it. Oh, dear.
Just seven minutes from time, though, Turner again decided to go for broke by chucking the lad Ipoua into the fray. The main thing to remember about the cider-slurpers' secret weapon, though, was this: his various playing whims being about as capricious as those of the good Lord himself, absolutely no-one, Tucka Trewick and Turner included, could ever be properly certain of what they'd get by way of return. Star-spangly brilliant one week, an absolute carthorse the next, not really the first player you'd want out there trying to stop a game rapidly descending into its own self-inflicted morass of mire, was he? But, on the other hand, if his own colleagues couldn't be one hundred per cent sure what he'd do at any given moment, how the hell were the opposition supposed to know?
One hell of a gamble, it was, to be sure - but over the course of those last few fraught minutes of normal time, a subbing that increasingly looked inspired. That night, Ipoua had assumed his 'genius' persona for once, running hard for promisingly-loose balls, and by dint of sheer bulk, unselfishly holding the ball up well for others better-placed to run on to, as well. A very timely move, that change, and one as equally effective as that of Morecambe's McLachlan, for a little blonde sod of a lad, Perkins, who was to prove such a thorough nuisance for the remainder of the game. Much too good for the Conference, that one - so why hadn't any of the Lancashire big boys grabbed him already for a signature on the dotted, I wondered. And before I could, to any real depth, that is, the full-time whistle intervened.
Into the brief break prior to resuming normal activities, then, before 15 minutes of added torture each way chucked in for good measure, and providing a chance for those surrounding us to well and truly get their breath back once more. Such was their height of tension, there were very good grounds indeed for suspecting some had completely abandoned their basic breathing reflexes for the duration. Clearly, all vestige of normal respiratory activity having long since disappeared, all they were running on was whatever remaining stocks of life-giving oxygen still resided in their sorely put-upon bodies. And that was just the spectators; precisely how those players out there managed to complete the remainder of that game, I didn't like to think.
The start of the 'bonus bit', then, and with most supporters in our neck of the woods opining gloomily that the whole bloody thing would go to penalties, and with predictably-depressing results, too. Enter into the equation, then, a certain Guy Ipoua; with just three or so minutes of extra time having elapsed, he then neatly evaded the unwelcome attentions of two of Morecambe's finest defenders before unleashing an absolute corker past the frantically-outstretched arms of the unfortunately-named Drench. A slight pause for brain to properly register what had come to pass - then celebratory pandemonium ad lib in the main stand, one mass Herefordian love-in, if you like, with lots more of the same to be found in a jubilantly-undulating Meadow End, now totally-awash with various harlequin-shaped black and white patterns.
And, come the resumption of normal play, you could see a certain determination not to let things slip away this time writ very large indeed. Sure, Morecambe tried to weave and jink their collective way back into contention, but the home side's newly-resilient rearguard wasn't having any of it. Time and time again, all their predatory efforts came to naught; in fact, in between such moments, the Bulls still had time to mount incursions of their own into enemy territory, one such effort leaving the Hereford player concerned (Fleetwood-ed) with only the keeper to beat - but having done all the hard work, the poor sod couldn't find within himself sufficient energy resources to properly finish what he'd started. In fact, that entire second period of extra time was mostly characterised by the sight of numerous cramp-wracked Bulls players collapsing in heaps, so much so, they were having to mainly rely on the efforts of their own team-mates, not those of their much-put-upon physio, for eventual succour.
But even that was soon to pass; no sooner had the final whistle called a halt to the night's proceedings, then tired legs instantaneously began to find more efficient means of propulsion, if only to dodge the rapidly rising number of (mostly juvenile) well-wishers running onto the pitch in order to capture a flavour of the action for themselves! Some, clearly lacking even that as a result of their own 120 minute's worth of unrelenting effort, simply let the vagaries of fate run as they wished, those players doing so last seen being triumphantly 'chaired' around the vicinity of the Blackfriars Road end goalmouth by a posse of ardent 'admirers'!
Frantic appeals to 'get off the pitch' from the chap on the PA system, of course, but by that stage of the proceedings, you might as well have directed that particular request into the deepest voids of outer space - or, failing that, in the general direction of the full moon, now well and truly rising, and situated just a quarter of a million miles away from all Edgar Street festivities. No atmosphere up there, no indigenous inhabitants, even? Don't you believe it, you lot: everyone knows The Clangers live up there - er - don't they?
Fair play to the visitors, though; having seen some home supporters mass below in numbers sufficient to have a good old Schadenfreudian gloat at their Lancastrian opposite-numbers - or, if malevolently-inclined, poised to do much, much more, some of it not necessarily conducive towards maintaining the good name of their club - their main response was something in the manner of: "Let's all have a disco?." Had the roles been different, had there been an Albion interest in the proceedings, I'm not altogether sure my emotions would have maintained similarly-mature blood levels in the face of such overt provocation, however unintentionally-aimed at the time.
Eventually, after a period of some 15 minutes or so - and with not a little vocal 'encouragement' on the part of those seat-bound supporters eagerly desirous of celebration in true 'legal' style provided - the pitch was finally cleared of extraneous Bull-lovin' bodies, and the 'official' jollifications finally given the green light to proceed, which they did, and in heaps, too, a fair few of the players all-too rapidly ending up minus kit, to the point of complete embarrassment and/or indecent exposure, in a couple of cases! As for my other half, rapidly-rising blood adrenalin levels had long-since supervened, thereby ensuring he'd become a real basket-case by then! Did our vehicle's sole means of propulsion from that car-park afterwards consist of pure emotion sent soaring to previously-unknown stratospheric heights by an unashamedly-jubilant other half, I wonder? Well, either that, or he'd spent an unseemly amount of surreptitious free time ingesting something with real mood-altering powers! Either way, the end result was the same.
So there you have it - Hereford United, bound for the play-off finals, at long last. Whatever you do, chaps and chapesses, don't bother trying to grow your nails: they'll be well-shredded afore that happy-clappy day is through! A Saturday journey to Leicester's Walkers Stadium now beckons, your tryst with Halifax being the sole arbiter of whether or not you get to hit the big-time. Looking down from my neutral's lofty viewpoint once more, I genuinely hope so. After a season spent closely watching your masterly efforts to leave the gravitational pull of the Conference, your entertaining style of play has repeatedly given me moments of pure pleasure in no small measure, and in complete and refreshing contrast to the constant media hype and cant surrounding The Premiership, as well. It's no more than your lot truly deserve after three seasons of complete heartbreak, after all said and done. A belated Football League return for The Bulls? Bring it on I say.
Text at top (next game etc)
Next Game: Home Against Buxton On Tuesday February 25th Kick Off 7.45pm