My Carling Cup Day 2011 Blues v Arsenal

This isn’t going to be a match report, I am expecting Bazza to do a View From the South for that. No, I want to share my day with you.

My son and I left Devon at about 08.00 and headed up to “the smoke!” (Well to Aylesbury actually!). Aylesburyblue, (Mike), lives there. As we were driving up, Jordan told me he’d had a dream that we would win 2-1 with a winner in the last minute!

We drove to the station and caught the train in. Blues fans started appearing from all directions, and the atmosphere started building.

Walking up towards Wembley was amazing, (although wet – it was chucking it down!)

Here is a picture of Mike, Me and Jordan.

I’d received a call from Paul from the Birminghammail.net site to see if we can do an interview before the game. We made our way to the Bobby Moore statue and did the interview of what we thought might happen. (See later on in the blog), so we did that. We were supposed to meet people, but as it was raining heavily – we decided to go in.

I had all my weapons removed, (x3 plastic bottles and a tin of blue hair spray!), and we headed to our seats. We were right above the screen in the Blues end – a fantastic view.

We met some friends, fellow J&S people!

The atmosphere was incredible. I haven’t heard anything like it for ages. The way we started the game helped. It was just one wall of noise, especially in the first half. When we went 1-0 through Zigic, it was amazing. I said to Russ well even if we lose I’ll be happy! When Arsenal drew level, I realised I was lying!

The 2nd half seemed to last for ages – then all of a sudden, someone pressed the pause key for time. It was like a scene out of the Matrix. It seemed to take hours for the ball to be put in by Martins. The ball was in, there was a delay – surely the ref was going to blow for offside, handball, obstruction – or the fact that we’d had the neck to score… but no, it was in and 7 minutes later the whistle went and we’d won!

The players had given 100%, the manager had got the tactics spot on and his subs perfect! Brilliant. The biggest cheer of the presentations, was Alex holding the trophy. He deserved it too. He’s received a lot of stick this season, but he is fast approaching being our most successful manager of all time!

I did have a little think, that it was a shame that Gil wasn’t around to see it. I’m sure the great man would have LOVED yesterday.

Just an amazing experience. We soaked up the atmosphere before heading down to be interviewed by the mail again. As we were heading down, Russ suddenly said KEV, WE’RE IN EUROPE!!

As we walked down the steps, the noise was deafening. We met up a few friends too. It was good to see Andy and Mayor from SHA forum.

As we were walking towards the interview, my mobile started going mad. I received loads of text messages from friends, including one from a Liverpool fan who won £180 with us. Then my wife rang, she doesn’t like football – but even she was pleased and said she’d seen us score the winner. My youngest son also said he was delighted, because he’d seen us win the World Cup! (Bless him!) In a way, we did. It’s opened a new world to us – Europe, but also we are now a team that has actually won something!

Anyway, we did our interview and headed home, with Jordan and I finally getting home at 01.00 – tired but very happy!