Des back in res
FRANK KEATING
On the face of it, Manchester United at Liverpool is the irresistible FA Cup tie of the weekend, with needle all the sharper for the rancorous matches the two clubs have played of late. But don’t bank on it, for the contest could be muted this time as each club knows it has far bigger fish to fry next week when the European Champions’ League resumes intensely serious business. In that, Liverpool are defending champions, of course, while United are in fierce need of continental money-spinning progress not only to decorate their season but to relieve some debts of their American owners. Two other British sides in Europe, Arsenal and Rangers, benefit by having no domestic diversions left.
For home consumption, the FA Cup’s fifth round inspires a betting man to demand decent odds for an appetising treble — that three fizzy non-Premiership upstarts (Preston North End, Brentford and Stoke City) beat respectively the flat and distract ed Middlesbrough, Charlton Athletic and Birmingham City. Meanwhile, out-of-sight Premiership strutters, Chelsea, host game and spirited midgets, Colchester United, who can surely do no more than cheerfully fine-tune the Londoners’ prep for Barcelona next week in what could be the most engrossing match of the whole winter.
For little Colchester the jackpot they will bank at Stamford Bridge is nothing less than they deserve. Their dinky ground (never mentioned this week without the prefix ‘homely’) can hold only 6,000, easily the lowest capacity in Division One; the local council, which owns it, has been messing the club around for years. It is 35 years since Colchester football last made national headlines. I know because I was there. In the early 1970s, the Guardian paid a measly £6 to cover a Saturday match and the knack was to fix up to knock off a separate report under a different name for a rival. Thus for a decade or so I doubled as Desmond Marsh (pa’s confirmation name, ma’s maiden name) of the Sunday Telegraph, which paid a princely 11 guineas, threw in a rail warrant and, more often than not, garlanded every lamppost from station to arena with the celeb portrait-poster DESMOND MARSH IS HERE. My regular beat was East Anglia and the Liverpool Street line (10.30 buffet-car special in which, I have to admit, the whole whack £17 11s was, there and back, usually blown if a hic of hobnobbing hacks had the same assignment). In the fifth round, on St Valentine’s eve 1971, Colchester of the Fourth Division beat the country’s topmost top-dogs, haughty Leeds United, by an astonishing 3–2. The grimfaced luminaries of Leeds, like Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and John Giles, had to fight their way through the jubilant pitch invaders in their parkas — and so did we, to knock on doors in nearby houses to ask to use their telephones to spread the improbable news all over.
Last week, in remembrance of that glorious day and as overture to this latest Cup tie at Chelsea, I was honestly quite overcome to see long-dead Desmond Marsh quoted on that David and Goliath St Valentine’s massacre. Shouldn’t have been, really: a couple of seasons ago I was at Norwich City’s Carrow Road ground for the first time in almost 20 years — and a local in the ‘homely’ tea room greeted me with the warmest familiarity, ‘’Allo, Des boy, you ’aven’t covered us for a bit, ’ave you?’ Ah, dear young Des. I still miss him, too.
Previous page
