On Edge

One of the penalties inherent in supporting the greatest football team in the world is that part of that greatness involves said team never doing anything easily. This has been demonstrated time and again this season and, of course, was always going to be a feature of our visit to the noisy neighbours.

I wasn't at all sure I was going to get to see any of the game as we on our way back to the Hall from Melaka at the appointed time, yesterday evening. In fact, I thought the game would be over by the time we got back. So it was with some little delight that I realised I was in time for the second half and we were already two up. And how that delight threatened to blossom further when Young netted again after RVP had hit the post! But as soon as the ref disallowed a perfectly good goal, the sense that it wasn't going to be that easy inevitably blossomed, confirmed doomily just moments later by City's first goal.

About five minutes later I was eerily reminded of the events of the last game(s) of last season when my Mio television service decided not to provide further service - despite the extortionate amount I have to pay for it. All I could do was turn to Sky News, on my Starhub service which doesn't freeze, but hasn't got the rights to the football, to get very sporadic updates to let me know we were still 2 - 1 up to the point that I couldn't take the pressure anymore and switched to the Malay channel so the Missus could watch something and I could pretend I really didn't care all that much about the result.

Once I judged it was all over I toddled off to the computer to check the final score, only to discover that soccernet.com was so bombarded by traffic at that point that the page took forever to load. Once I was able to view the result the sense of relief was powerful, along with the sensation that I had probably gained a fair number of additional grey hairs as a result of the experience of (not) watching the game.

Even viewing the replay today put me on edge, the final conclusive goal seeming quite unlikely given the run of play at that late stage of the game. Football, bloody hell, eh, as a wise manager once summed it all up.