Sunday 31 August 2008

Fulham 3 - 2 Leicester City

It was a pleasant surprise when arriving to this game to see that Woy had sent out a full strength team to face Leicester, who were relegated from the Championship last season, although for the first hour it was hard to tell which team was in the top tier and which in the third.
At one point Stoor (who I think with his very first touch in a Fulham shirt managed to clear the Riverside stand and put the ball in the Thames) lunged in on the Foxes' left winger, causing the whole Hammersmith End to go 'ooooo'. Fortunatly the winger stayed on his feet, but the referee could easily have taken his cue from the home fans and awarded a penalty. I'd never heard anything like it before.
The only other thing that happened of note in the first half was Gera opening the scoring on the left. From the Hammersmith End it was hard to see how the ball had gone in, so we waited until the replay at half time to find out. It was still impossible to tell. It seemed like a combination of a weak shot, a slight deflection, an out of position goalkeeper and time slowing down to a crawl for no reason at all.
Still Leicester shot out of the traps second half and scored two quick-fire goals which rattled the whole Fulham team. They all appeared to lose composure and got even worse until Nevland came on for the increasingly disappointing Seol on the hour mark.
Jimmy Bullard had an awful game, constantly spraying passes nowhere, but that will all be glossed over considering he scored one of the better goals I've seen at the Cottage to equalise with five minutes left.
Ish and I were settling down for extra time, only for Danny Murphy to pop up with a deflected shot in injury time to push Fulham past the Foxes into the third round of the League Cup. A trip to Burnley awaits.
I was a bit sneaky with this match. Knowing the Hammersmith End would not be sold out, I purchased restricted view tickets at £13 with the intention of just sitting somewhere else when we got there. This saved a whole four pounds for both our tickets, but as we had to pay an additional £2 transaction fee and a further £1 just to be able to pick up the tickets at the ground (which is nonsense when you think they post them out to you for FREE) I think we are about even.
First half we enjoyed in the middle of the Hammy with all the singing (it was quite a good effort from both sets of fans to be fair) but for the second half we decided to retire to our actual season ticket seats to check out the game from there. Despite the whole of H8 and the front end of H7 being empty, amazingly there was a husband and wife sitting in our exact seats. Given the whole section to choose from, they chose to sit in our seats! They obviously can't be that bad then.

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