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In mid-January I’d started a temporary job at a bookshop in Kings Cross and the owners Vic and Denise kindly asked me to come over to stay the night at their house in Surrey and watch the game on TV. Vic’s son, who was a Chelsea fan, watched the match with us and he was very gracious despite us equalizing eight minutes from time. The replay on the 18th March was one of the best remembered games in the latter days of Roker Park. Dennis Wise had equalised Davenport’s goal with five minutes to go but Armstrong scored with that class header from a corner from the right in the eighty-eighth minute to give us a 2-1 win and put us into the semi-finals. I again listened to bulletins about the game in my bedsit with a combination of Radio 5 and Capital Radio supplying the updates.
I was back in Sunderland at the beginning of April as I was a witness in a murder trial at Teesside Crown Court and the semi against Norwich at Hillsborough on Saturday 5th April brought me some much-needed relief from thinking about that. We were still in Barclays League Division Two and of course everyone was looking back to 1973 when we’d beaten Leeds while still in Division Two and hoping it could happen again. I have to say that I wasn’t as excited as I’d been back in 1973 as I didn’t think anything could ever top that but I was still raring to get to the Final. A Scottish mate of mine whose second team was Norwich as he’d been to uni there had written to me, “You’ll never beat the Canaries.”
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