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In what’s becoming a busy little period of fixtures, Hereford FC host Hemel Hempstead Town at Edgar Street on Tuesday evening. Extra time or penalties will decide this FA Cup tie if it’s still deadlocked after 90 minutes.
There’s still a lingering feeling in terms of Hereford’s defensive frailty that if this is 0-2 after ten minutes courtesy of two preventable goals at the Meadow End you wouldn’t be that surprised. You’d be irritated, you might even find yourself going to Radfords 20 minutes early, but you wouldn’t be surprised.
Focus and shape, particularly defensively, should be key considerations in the early stages of the game. If in doubt, boot it out of the ground. If it’s still 0-0 after half an hour the hosts should be able to grow into it and start to dominate, rather than having to play catch-up again. If it's 2-0 the right way after half an hour all the better; what a refreshing change that would be.
The threat mentioned in the preview here for Saturday’s game from young centre forward Millar Matthews-Lewis was realised as he grabbed the late equaliser that took this tie to a replay. He’s now on five goals for the season, and will hopefully still be on five goals for the season at 9:45pm on Tuesday.
Lawson Dath will be out for this one with a troublesome groin, and Gus Mafuta is still on the long-term absence list, although perhaps not for much longer. For the third consecutive game, Montel Gibson gets to put his feet up as he’s cup-tied. He’ll presumably be very, very up for it at Leamington on Saturday when he’ll finally be able to play, with four of the last five Hereford games being in the FA Cup.
Michael Parker’s initial one-month loan from West Brom has now expired, but encouragingly he’s keen to come back to the club to continue that loan spell when fit, although that could be November time as he may need a scan.
That keenness can be seen as a testament to the coaching and mentoring of Paul Caddis and Adam Rooney, and also to the togetherness of the dressing room generally in terms of being something he wants to be a part of.
Sam Osborne continues to grow agreeably into his season-long loan with Hereford, and will presumably start here as he did on Saturday. It would be nice to see him get his first goal at Edgar Street for the club after a couple away from home.
Any fouls conceded by Hemel within about 40 yards of the goal are currently more-or-less guaranteed to result in Omari Sterling James scoring from the resulting free kick, a threat the Tudors are all too aware of, which will hopefully cause them some uncertainty in terms of a hesitancy in making defensive challenges, which the Bulls could profit from.
Hemel manager Lee Allinson is the son of Ian Allinson, who played in the FA Cup for Arsenal against Hereford United in 1985 when the Bulls could have won in a 1-1 draw at Edgar Street on a frozen pitch, before a non-frozen pitch at Highbury in the replay saw the home side 4-0 up before a good proportion of the away fans had even arrived on delayed ‘football special’ trains. Luckily the game ended 5-4 to Hereford and we all went home happy – OK, not quite.
Allinson Junior has described his club’s trip up to Hereford in front of what is likely to be a crowd some way short of the 15,777 present for that Arsenal game as being like going “into the lion’s den”. Home fans will have to do their bit to make it feel like 15,777, although it seems that everyone will be shoehorned into two sides of the ground to save money on stewarding.
A 2,000 gate would make that nice and cosy, and with the 30 or so Hemel fans accommodated in the Merton Stand it’s all a bit half-and-half scarf vibe rather than Belgrade or Glasgow derby hell-fest, let alone lion’s den, but it makes sense financially. If the 30 or so Hemel fans storm Addisons in the spirit of Serbo-Scottish anarcho-chaos, eyebrows will be raised, not so much in disapproval as utter surprise.
The journey from a southeastern dormitory town to somewhere more soulful is an unusually long one for Hemel, culturally, spiritually and geographically. Hereford is, after all, northern England according to the football pyramid (I bet it doesn’t feel like it to Paul Caddis on his three-hour commute to work from northern England). Therefore they’ll hopefully spend the first ten minutes of the game recovering from bus legs rather than racing into a two-goal lead, although early bus legs didn’t stop Kings Lynn. Or Chorley. Or Bedford. Maybe they all took private jets to Shobdon.
The Bulls are now six unbeaten as they approach what looks on paper to be quite an unpleasant October.
The winners here scoop up the £5k+ prize money and have a home tie against Yeovil to look forward to in the next round, the final round before Leagues 1 and 2 join the fun. For Hereford, that’s not too far off as ‘juicy’ a draw at this stage of the competition as supporters could have hoped for.
COYW