Authored By Max
First of all, I am NOT a pisshead, but watching Barnet and consuming too much alcohol just seem to happen to always coincide and for yesterday's London derby, it was no exception.
You know you're in for a bit of a silly day when by twenty past eight in the morning you've had a home made double vodka red bull. It's always going to be a bad one from there.
Anyway, bloody Sky, early kick off. The game started at 12:15pm due to Sky Sports choosing Dagenham v Barnet as their live game. It meant a very early start compared to usual, although that said, we met at 9am for a 3pm kick off over in Brentford two weeks ago, so for us, it was nothing out of the ordinary as about 10 of us met in the Railway Bell pub in New Barnet for a fry up and a pint, nice and early.
Lovely stuff in the Wetherspoons then and we got on the train to Kings Cross at 9:47am to make our way over to East London.
It took a fair while to get to Dagenham, we had to change trains a few times and had to wait an age at Whitechapel for our connection to Dagenham East on the District Line. Still, we got there, about an hour or before kick off. I went and stuck my accumulator on in the Ladbrokes near the tube (didn't win anything, AGAIN) and headed off to the game.
Victoria Road isn't the best ground in the world, but they do have a nice clubhouse and the Daggers fans in there are always a fairly hospitable bunch. Plenty of familiar faces from Barnet there, the away following came to 526, which isn't the worst, given it was on the box.
Got into the ground right on kick off. £10 (concession price, obviously, no way was I even going to think about £15 adults) to stand on what is a pretty shoddy open terrace, behind the goal. Our fans had a crack at making some noise, but it's not the easiest when there's no roof for the acoustics.
Barnet didn't start too brightly and against stronger opposition may well have found themselves behind early on. However, on about the half hour mark, we were and inevitabley, who should score, but ex-Barnet man Ben Strevens. The defending by Yakubu was comical and Harrison was far too hesitant in coming out off his line. Don't get me wrong, Harrison and Yakubu are two of our better players and have been at Barnet ages, but both I'm sure would hold their hands up and accept, that was just bad. An easy goal for Strevens as he just poked it under Harrison and into the bottom corner. I wasn't too impressed that he chose to celebrate near our fans, he didn't 'dedicate it' to us sort of thing, but he did give our lot a bit of a cheeky grin. Giving he was at Barnet for eight years, we looked after him when he had a life threatening blood dis-order and gave him his chance in football by signing him from Wingate & Finchely, I think had he celebrated anymore than he did, we'd have been in our rights to give him a hard time.
Dagenham scoring proved to be a bit of a blessing really, as this certainly saw Barnet come to life a bit, with Jason Puncheon starting to get more involved in the final third. Tony Roberts was twice called into action from Barnet efforts and right on the stroke of half time, it proved third time lucky, 1-1. In typical fashion, I missed the goal as I'd gone to get a drink, meaning having attended all our games so far, I've seen ONE goal. My luck is brilliant eh? I've seen it on the TV since though and what a fine goal it was. A clever one two on a free kick and it was teed up for Anthony Thomas to rifle home from outside the area, past the outstretched Roberts and firmly in the bottom corner. Too firmly! The ball went through the threadbare nets, way to make yourself look as tinpot on TV as possible, Daggers. This led to a rather confused cheer from our fans, no one seemed sure if it had gone in or not, but it did and it was a good strike, a fine way for Anthony Thomas to open his account for Barnet since his summer arrival.
Half time then and Barnet had been really strong in the last fifteen of the first and if we carried on, looked almost certain winners. The game being on Sky of course meant that there were the pundits there, Peter Beagrie and Warren Barton were both pitchside at half time, right next to the Barnet support. Well, what do you think happened next? To be fair, we weren't out of order and didn't give them any stick, nor did we do my idea and sing "Setanta! Setanta!" we just gave it a simple, but very loud "BEE ARMY!" several times, until we were told by a policeman to stop. Quite amusing, I rang my Dad after and he said he'd heard us loud and clear and that the pundits had tried to speak as loud as possible to drown it out. Achievement. Wahey.
Anyway, the restart and we did pretty much pick up where we left off, all over them. It stayed this way all second half too. It became quite clear that D&R were now willing to play for a draw, bit embarrasing when you consider they were at home against Barnet. But it proved frustrating, as even when we did break them down, we didn't make much count. Roberts made one fairly good save, though seemingly made it look better for the Sky cameras and we had an effort cleared off the line. Despite winning a tonne of corners and being totally in control, we didn't capitalise and it ended a rather frustrating 1-1 draw, despite being away from home, definitely two points lost, Daggers really were there for the taking. As usual when we play Dagenham and Roberts is in goal at our end, he got an absolute shed load of flak from our support. He don't half give it back though! To my mate who gave him a particularly hard time, he turned round and said "Outside after, you're going to fucking get it!" before coming over and shaking my said friend's hand, though my mate decided it'd be funny to pull him towards him and call him a prick. Quite funny though. All in good spirit anyway really, after going "YES!" at full time to our fans (what was to celebrate Tony, a 1-1 draw at home to Barnet, erm...?) Roberts applauded the away end and he got a decent reception back. He's got a hell of a big mouth on him though, but he's not bad in goal, to be fair.
Coming out the ground we were hurried out by a Police officer who said myself and my already mentioned mate were "very lucky not to be nicked" for swearing and stuff. Why just us two? If they were going to nick everyone who swore at the game yesterday, I hope they had plenty of handcuffs in the vans outside.
We stuck about in Dagenham's social club for a fair while and bumped into my new favourite player, Neal Bishop, he's just quality, so there. Nice enough bloke too from our brief encounter. Another top bloke though is Dagenham's Glen Southam. I can't remember how we got chatting to him, or really what he said, but we did for ages and he was a nice guy, even admitting he's not much of a fan of the direct football that his side play. We spoke to old Barnet manager John Still (now Daggers) too and well, he was ok, I thanked him for good times at Barnet, but reminded him "shame it went a bit sour at the end" which I think wasn't exactly unfair, just pointing out the truth! Got John Still to take a picture of me and my mate with Glen Southam, which I thought was quite funny anyway, "Oi John, can we have a photo? You know Glen better than us, can you take a picture?" He did it though, so fair play, but his face when we asked was quite funny.
So there you go really. After staying in that clubhouse for a fair while we made our way into London to watch England play Israel.
This was a farce. There was a group of six of us together originally, but two of us stayed on in Dagenham for about an hour longer. We got the tube to Holborn and thought we were going to have no troubles finding the others. Wrong. Fair to say we made the best of a bad situation, though. Sort of. We spent the next few hours searching for them, whilst off our faces. It was bad, walking down the Strand with cans, checking nearly every pub and having no success. I'm not sure how we got there, but next thing we were in Trafalgar Square. At this point my mate thought he'd go for a paddle in the fountains. Which seemed a lot funnier being that drunk. Shortly after this we were asked to leave the square, due to it being a no drinking zone. We continued to wander aimlessly, tourists everywhere, some of their facial expressions when they looked at us were quite brilliant. My friend managed to scare two very attractive Dutch birds during this spell too. Walking up to them:
"Alright, where you from?"
"Holland"
Then he said something I can't write on the internet, before moving onto football.. "So do you like Dutch football, some great players"
Both of them said "No"
But we were adamant, I chipped in too. "Bergkamp? Overmars? Seedorf?...Marco Van Basten, no?"
"No" again, then they looked at us, looked at each other and walked off. Poor girls.
I'm not really sure what happened over the next few hours, or where we found the boys in the end, but we did. We ended up all going to Walkabout, getting further smashed, dancing with a load of American birds Pick of the bunch - EH, then all getting split up and losing each other. I ended up on the tube home on my own, dancing to my music on my earphones. Much to the amusement of many of my fellow passengers. Although it did prove a conversation starter with these two middle aged birds.
Didn't get home particularly late, but when you've been on it since 8am, midnight feels it. I was a state and my head the next morning did not feel nice. Funny day, though.
|