Final Whistle

After 80 odd minutes of drudgery the other night (who would have thought it on Channel 5 after 9 o’clock – where were the warts and two headed babies?), Aalborg, the footballing dictionary table toppers (well, discounting 1fc Koln and others who start with a number anyway), managed to bury a shot in the bottom left hand corner of Shay Given’s goal. It was, as they say, on like Donkey Kong.

There was an air of inevitability about the goal which came after City had defended resolutely in an otherwise entirely uninspiring tie from both sides – the goal seeming inevitable as the game seemed to mirror the recent Spurs second team away performance in the same competition a few weeks ago.

Once Aalborg had scored, we just knew extra time was on the cards and, sure enough, on 90 minutes a ball turned goal-wards following a corner struck Evans on the hand and the penalty was fairly hammered into the roof of the net – 2-0 to the home side.

Extra time saw a return to what came before Luton Shelton had fired into the corner of the net on 86 minutes. Still, we got to enjoy 4 and a half minutes of footballing excitement, and an additional few minutes of Colin Murray’s wonderful thoughts on the match: my word he’s a busy man, I even saw him make an appearance on Countdown the other night (I was channel flicking, honest, Gov, and saw Jeff Stelling – for a while I thought “hey, must be some footie”, but then letters and numbers started coming out, and awful puns were fired all over the place, and I knew I’d made a terrible mistake… oh, and I was sick from work, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have been home at silly o’clock in the afternoon… at some point, its time to stop digging, I would imagine).

Anyway, the joy of the penalty shootout was doubled when I discovered that you can bet on penalties live on Bet365 – you literally say things like “Aalborg will miss the next penalty” (I got 9/4 in case you were wondering… twice!) – so that’s £14 made for my troubles. Unfortunately, I then threw it away betting on two snails crawling up the drainpipe later that same evening, but at least the second event was slightly more enjoyable than the first 85 minutes of the City match.

City’s new Arab owners must be wondering if, in terms of entertainment received for pounds spent, this isn’t the worst ROI since the White Star Line launched a ship named Titanic.