Christmas/New Years Football

Firstly let me start by saying that I will not be uploading photo's of Boxing Day's record crowd of 11,065 as like a prat I forgot my camera. Shame really as the game was so boring I could have happily spent most of it snapping away rather than shouting at Eddie 'shoot? what is shoot?' Anaclet and the numerous mortally wounded Woking players rolling around hoping to run the clock down. In the end despite 6 minutes injury time and a giant flag (!)the U's just couldn't find a way past a resolute (and time wasting) Woking side and the game finished a disappointing 0-0, fortunately Dagenham were held at home by Grays so the 2 point cushion at the top of the table remained intact.Four days later Oxford entertained Crawley for our second Christmas home game and once again this one was hugely frustrating. The East Stand was in surprisingly good voice early on but Oxford were lethargic and looked largely uninterested, failing to put any real pressure on the Crawley keeper. On the stroke of half time (4 minutes into what was meant to be 2 minutes added time...) thing got even worse as Tony Scully rounded Billy Turley and finished from a tight angle to give the Essex team a 1-0 half time lead. Oh Dear. The second half saw a much more attacking Oxford side with Yemi once again the stand out player and with 11 minutes to go Rob Duffy equalised to spare our blushes but not as it turned out our top spot. Only a few minutes before Duffy's goal news filtered through that the Daggers had gone 1-0 up and they held that lead to go top of the Conference on goal difference to cap of a week that has been pretty depressing for us.An interesting New Year's resolution for the men in Yellow could have been to stop the rot and go to Exeter and get back to winning ways. However the amount of injuries picked up from the Crawley game meant the travelling squad resembled something akin to post-Bubonic plague Europe. When only fit striker Steve Basham limped off early on it clearly wasn't going to be our day (again), and despite playing with a new found vigour the U's went down 2-1 with ex Plymouth player Rufus Brevitt scoring an own goal much to the amusement of the home fans.Aside from Oxford I only managed to get to one other game which was Banbury v Wealdstone. Banbury won 3-1 in what was their first home league win since August 19th!! I had also hoped to go along to the New Year's day game against Halesowen but left it having got back from an all night do in Birmingham only a few hours earlier I gave it a miss...







Raving in Birmingham...