A Grand Day Out

It's been a little while since I posted so there is likely to be a flood of posts now!
Back on Friday the 6th January it seemed like half of Oldham had decamped to Anfield, hoping to witness an FA Cup shock, or at least have a few beers and hope we didn't get thrashed. Liverpool vs Oldham Athletic, a fixture so mouth-watering to Latics fans that many of us queued for 5 hours in torrential rain and a small hurricane to get tickets. The banter kept us going throughout the morning and early afternoon. At one point I turned to my mates laughing and cried "what are we doing here?". It certainly seemed ridiculous. As someone who had been to Anfield twice in our Premiership days, I don't remember these kind of queues. Neither did the ticket office it seems, two staff were on to cope with selling nearly 3000 tickets, the club are simply not used to this kind of demand. Rumours circulated at various points that there were only 200 tickets left, cue anxious looks down the queue trying to assess whether we were going to miss out. It was all bollocks as it turned out. After 5 hours of queueing I could quite easily understand why 2 fans had been treated for pneumonia! As we limped away from the ticket office, walking was an arduous trial. 5 hours of shuffling along had taken it's toll, we felt like we'd been on an expedition with Scott.

We are half way down, still with 2 hours to go!

The atmosphere before the game in the Anfield Road end was immense. We had plenty of time to wet our whistles after stopping for a couple of pints at The Arkles. I have to say there was not one hint of trouble from the Liverpool fans, there was plenty of singing in the pub but no hint of animosity. As you can see from the photos, our 'restricted view' seats were right on the front row. I was more than happy with this, and even happier when Robbie Simpson smashed in a 25 yarder to give us the lead. Could we hold on? My mates optimistic words of "I told you, we're gonna win" had barely left his throat when Bellamys' fortunate deflection levelled the scores. One dodgy penalty later and we were staring down the barrel. I knew deep down that there was no way back, but 5-1 was ridiculous! 

We're gonna win this!

We didn't know why the game had been held up for what seemed like 15 minutes. When I heard some of our fans singing 'You're just a town full of racists' I did wonder if we'd turned on each other! As it turned out Tom Adeyemi had been subjected to some taunting by a small number of idiots in the Liverpool end and he was unsurprisingly unhappy. you've probably read all about this. I believe that had this been any other club then the matter would not have received nearly as much attention, but the media always love a follow-up story and this was manna for those hacks looking to add to the Suarez situation. It was disappointing for us, firstly, because most right-minded people realise there is no place in the game for racism or any other prejudice, and secondly, because we'd actually played really well, and this incident had taken some of the attention away from the performance. We even had a couple of half chances to make it 2-2 and could conceivably been 2 or 3 up before we scored, Kuqi firing a particularly decent opportunity into the side netting. 

It was great to be involved in a big game again. Perennial Premiership mainstays tend to take these games for granted. We knew that realistically it would be a long time before we went anywhere like Anfield again, and we were determined to enjoy it. Of course, there was still the prospect of appearing at Wembley in the JPT final. Oh, hang on....