QPR away - match report

At last, an away trip attended by a number of us. Which is impressive given the last few collective efforts, until you remember that 3 of us live within half an hour of the Westfield Shopping Centre Memorial Ground.

Last season we witnessed a last minute winner by Kevin Kyle, an event so unlikely now as to be on a par with Tony Blair being caught in a meange a trois with Gordon Brown and Dennis Healy. This season we were optimistic given a 2 match winning streak against the Owls and the Kiddies.

We met at the Bush, which was an unusual occurence for most of the party, to watch the snow. SBJim had failed to find a pub showing the Villa West Brom match on Sky, but had found a pub with a window with a view of a pub showing the game. It was almost as good as being there. But without the good bits. After rumours of pitch inspections, frozen pitches and postponements, we found ourselves on Row G, Upper Stand, Lofty Road.

Team news was not really a surprise, given how few fit players we had available. The Gunner had torn himself away from Facebook for long enough to play at right back, leaving In the afternoon continuing to deputise in the heart of defence. And boy, did we need a solid, heroic and responsible performance from our Rock at the back, one of only two available centre backs.

He was undoubtedly rock-like for the first half hour in temperatures more suited to penguins, before getting himself spectacularly sent off for a high challenge worthy of a straight red card. The Gunner moved across to deputise in the middle, pausing only momentarily to update his status to reflect the change. This left Melts in the mouth, and the Superhobbit to patrol the right flank, possibly the shortest double act since Snow White recruited Bashful and Sleazy to join her five existing bodyguards. A good atmosphere in the away end though, nice and noisy.

Back to the game. We got to half time without incident, and went downstairs to check out the executive facilities worthy of a club owned by three Billionaires. Mittal, Mad Bernie and Flavio seemed to have forgotten the away fans though, and we had a gaze around some breezeblocks and queues for ten minutes instead.

Well, we huffed and puffed for a while at the start of the second half, as QPR failed to make any impression on the ten man Sky blues. Then, a freekick 30 yards out, on the right hand side at the far end. We knew what was coming, the whole team knew what was coming, quite a few of the fans started calling for the Fox to shoot, Gunner's facebook friends received a notification of what was coming, but thankfully Cerny the goalkeeper obviously knows little English. The Cunning Fox popped another freekick in from 30 yards, and we had the lead with over 20 minutes to go.

We hung on, the Superhoops missed a couple of good chances and resorted to humping long balls up to Dexter Longstop in the blind hope that someone would make a mistake and let them in for an undeserved equaliser. 87 minutes gone, and the ball comes down with snow on it. Gunner, momentarily distracted by accepting another 120 friend requests, gets in a tangle with Tina (who now has a nickname) and Vivienne fails to clear, leaving Dexter free to murder a dodgy goal. Disaster.

We hang on for a point, and curse our bad luck. Would we have walked away with all three points in the days before social networking? We will never know.

After the game, SBJ fled back to Coventry for a mini-school reunion. The reunion being small, not the school. I can vouch for the size of the school, though it does seem smaller now than it did twenty years ago. The rest of us went for a warming pint, and started to plan the logistics for our trip to Torquay.

Torquay, if ever there was the starting ingredient in a recipe for disaster, this is a good candidate. Blackpool at home first, but I can't get back for that, so someone else will need to write some prose about our 2-1 win.