Page 28 - All at Sea Fanzine Issue 68

28
Islumming it at the posh
HAVEN’T had any stability in my life had slalomed between three defenders
All At Sea Issue 68
since I was 16. This year I’ll turn 30
which means I’ll have spent nearly
before being tripped by Bond after taking a touch as he approached the six-yard box. The referee pointed to the spot and Jason Demetriou casually put the spot kick into the bottom left corner as the goalkeeper dived the wrong way. Seven minutes on the clock.
We had given ourselves a chance. Southend had only won two away games all season up to this point but the autological Brown Era was over. The fans knew it and most importantly the players knew it.
It’s easy to forget this but it really is the players that win you games. You can blame the managers or o cials all you want but when the whistle blows there are 22 men that kick a ball around and, generally, those that work hardest win. Today, that was Southend.
In the rst half Peterborough replied with a tame Jack Marriott header; a speculative Marcus Maddison shot from distance following good work down the right-hand side; a neat Andy Hughes finish was disallowed for o side following a glorious halfway line long ball from Maddison and Mark Oxley raced o his line to save from Marriott as he found Maddison’s weighted through ball. Both teams had chances but Southend went in to the break with the advantage.
Simon Cox seemed to temporarily forget the laws of the game as the second half began, dispossessing Maddison with a clearance-cum-tackle-cum-shot-cum-own
half my life either moving job or moving
house.
But in that time there has been a
constant. Time of day may vary and I might not know where I’ll charge my phone but Southend United have been one of the few set points around which my life has revolved. And despite a lack of routine elsewhere, match days have become formulaic: fried breakfast, beers, the game, beers, curry, beers, Match of the Day. It helps. It mitigates the result. Win, lose or draw you have something to look forward to. A safe port in a sea of storms.
And so to Peterborough then, where I have no routine anymore. Chris Powell was appointed nearly two weeks ago and I decided to travel from Taunton to see us beat Scunthorpe at Roots Hall on hearing the news. I travelled further, more than halfway across the country, this time; and there is no routine. I meet friends at the train station, the mood has shifted. No breakfast before, no curry afterwards. Football matches used to be about the day, this day is about the football match. A short crawl through town via The Charters (a brilliant pub in the hull of a moored barge serving numerous East Anglian ales) brought us to the ground.
Even before kick o , the Southend fans radiated atmosphere like the fallout from a nuclear bomb (but, like,
a GOOD fallout). Powell
remarked before the game that he presumed that the noise he’d heard was from the Posh faithful. Ultimately, they wouldn’t make a peep; Stephen McLaughlin’s surging run from the right into the penalty area saw to that. Cox’s through ball from the inside right channel found McLaughlin, who