Beef Bagel

Got to hand it to Southend. They were good. They really were. The bastards made us sit and freeze for two and half hours on a school night. They took the whole damn South Stand and made the Park Lane hardcore sit in the away end. The strangest part was only realising this ten minutes or so into the game. I couldn’t figure out way that stand looks so strange and then it hit me, it was just that. It wasn’t a stand at all. The fans in it were sitting down. Only then did I work out that they were the Shrimpers lot when they started with their Championship chants; strange songs with stranger accents and praising players you’ve simply never heard of and probably never will, all except Freddy Eastwood that is.

Now Freddy’s famous for two things: one, for being the man who toppled United with his 30 yard free kick and two, for being a member of the Romany community. Eastwood is a genuine pikie. He lives in a caravan and just in case he’d forgotten, we made sure to let him know.

‘Pikie! Fuckin’ pikie! Go back to your fuckin’ caravan!’

Any guesses who might have been screaming that one for 90 minutes plus extra time across my ears? The Junior Harpy’s cold seems to have got better. Unfortunately, I seem to have caught it. My throat was wrapped up warm with my voice rendered out of action but probably not the worst occasion for this to be so. With the visiting fans separating our two loudest areas it was hard to get the songs going. That and the fact there wasn’t a hell of a lot to sing about. We didn’t play badly. We played ok, considering the line up we had. With only 1.5 first choice midfielders available, we relied on The Man Mountain, Malbranque (groin), Tainio and useless Danny Murphy to make it all happen. MJ continued his policy of taking the Carling Cup seriously by playing Mido, Good Old Calum and Stalteri to bolster our already weakened side into one that did very much resemble the second string unit of the earlier rounds but as I say, they played ok.

Big Bad Tom continued his way towards status of fan favourite with a good display. Predictably, his every touch was greeted by ‘Shooooooot!’ from the crowd, which indeed he did on more than one occasion, one of which looked like a goal bound bullet until blocked by the Southend defence.

Steeeeed was possibly our best player on the night. Most of the moves seemed to start and unfortunately, finish with him and he even put in one or two top notch tackles. He’s not made himself part of the first pick midfield just yet but with ever rotating injuries and suspensions, he looks like a man we’ll be calling on. A transfer well made it seems.
Danny Murphy continued to look like the waste of space that he must surely be by now. Enjoy that shirt while you’ve got it, Danny. It may be worth getting the lads in the dressing room to sign it. I’m sure it’ll come as a welcome relief from using ebay to sell more than just pairs of his wife’s soiled undeys.

What’s worrying was that when Edgar D took the field to replace the injured Tainio and yes, we’re probably another man down in central midfield, we got a pretty good glimpse of why the Dutchman hasn’t been seen of late. Now, it may just be that he’s way off match fitness but when a man whose game is to be right up to pace putting his foot in is getting dispossessed in midfield, it doesn’t look very good. Not up to speed or just not up to standard any more?
But as I said, had we lost, it wouldn’t because we’d done a lot wrong. Southend did more than just dig in. Their back four performed so well that every time we made runs into their box, you just knew it was them that would come away with the ball. They played well throughout their ranks. Their midfield took nearly as much of the ball as we did and although their attacks were not of Premiership quality, they certainly made us work. The League 1 side showed it was not fluke they’d made it this far in the competition. They were far better than Dinamo Bucharest and far bolder than Charlton too. Despite our quality, it was one of those games that could have gone either way but with our first semi-final for 5 or 6 years on the horizon and sniff of Cardiff in sight, I’m just glad it went ours.

Next up over “the busy xmas period” it’s a journey to that small club from Scotland, which isn’t going to be an easy one. They’re coming back into form, having made a poor start to the season and the scary part is that just when everyone had begun to write the man off, the once Tottenham rumoured striker, Obefemi Martins, has begun to find the net. If you caught the highlights of Newcastle’s efforts in the Cup on the same night as ours, you’d be hard pressed not to consider them a cause for concern. We’ve been on the end of some shockers up there, including a 4-0 in recent history and a 7-1 not too long before that but we did record a win there last time around. The Bagel’s going for a 2-2 draw. Let’s hope MJ’s going for a win.

There’s been little news on the ‘will they wont they’ sagas of Robbie Keane and Curtis Davies today but it seems attempts are being made to find a replacement, should we fail to sign the latter. There’s a 27 year old Ukrainian defender by the name of Andriy Nesmachniy, who plays for Dynamo Kyiv. Here’s his head…

…straining a little too hard on that trapped wind. That borsht can wreak havoc with your system.

The 6′, 11.5 stone player is supposed to be going to Blackburn but according to reports, well, report, we’re due to highjack the move. Some member of the board will be donning their sunglasses and fake beard and turning the plane around to land at Stansted airport, if indeed the pilot can land anywhere on our fog covered island. Should we get the man, he will at least take to the current weather like a duck to water or a penguin to ice as is currently the case.

Everything I read about him just says ‘defender’ but I’m seeing a lot of No.2 on his various shirts and The Bagel here is willing to wager this man’s a right back. You don’t get many central defenders at just six feet tall.

Is he any good? Probably not; well good for Blackburn but a stop gap for us. I do have a little footage of him scoring a goal against Arsenal though…

…Arsenal Kyiv, that is.

Now all of this was reported in the Daily Mail, so the likelihood of it being more than a pissed up agent spouting anything to a slavering pig of toss rag journalist (nothing against journalists, just the Mail) just to keep the free lunch flowing is rather slim. So don’t go losing any sleep over a purchase like this that we clearly don’t need. Just some welcome hot air in this freezing climate.

Fingers crossed for the draw, have a good weekend and make sure you’d do everything that I would do and whole lot more. Show xmas who’s boss.

Driving home for bagels.

The Bagel.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 10:12 am and is filed under Match Reports, Transfer News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.