by Richard O. Smith
In many ways the away game at Fisher served to illustrate both the problems, and the season as a whole, that Boston were currently experiencing; a combination of bad luck, bad finishing and bad team selection (McClaughlin sub?), topped off by conceding a last minute headed goal of some notoriety.
Extra novelty value was given to this Docklands staged match by the appearance of Fisher's newest signing George Rocadas, a current Portuguese international no less. Perhaps he ran out of the tunnel expecting to be welcomed by 60,000 ticker-tape throwing, hysterical fans as he ran out into the stadium of light, and he was probably-more than somewhat disappointed, if not livid, at the surroundings Alison had brought Mm to - Sporting Lisbon, his previous club, this most certainly wasn’t.
As regular readers will know, visits to Fisher's Docklands home are looked forward to with the same anticipation usually reserved for anticipating visits to the dentist. Though at least this year there has been a (slight) improvement in the floodlights (to the tune of £10,000). Yeah, this is deep in the heart of prime yuppie territory, and as one of our crew pointed out, it must be the only football ground boasting an advertising hoarding for a French restaurant.
And there were a few, a few, yuppie types interspersed in the spartan crowd a suited man, completed with equally suited female companion, who was actually walking around proudly displaying his portable phone, How I desperately wanted Boston to score, so that I could ring him up from behind: the opposite end goal: "Brrr, brr… er…hello ?" "1-0! 1-0! 1-0!” But it never looked like being 1-0 to Boston.
Mr and Mrs Good Luck certainly weren't answering their door to Boston United that night, no matter how long they knocked - a crossbar hit, a post shaven, a goal-line clearance, two saves of fluked brilliance, and a perfectly good goal disallowed for offside because the linesman, as linesmen are often prone to do, was watching only the ball and failed to notice that the final through ball came off a Fisher player.
At least professional cigar smoker Malcolm Allison - smoking like a power station in the dug-out - seemed to be enjoying his press attention he obviously still commands. Two days later a full page article appeared in the "Today" newspaper covering the game, and showed pictorial evidence of Allison's pre-match routine where he joins hands with all the Fisher players in a circle, and everybody chants "we will win". Indeed.
For newcomers to these
pages, or the rest of the world's press, you may not know that Fishers
previous manager was jailed for his part in a multi million pound drugs
smuggling operation. Thus, when the Fisher programmes failed to arrive
until the start of the second-half, this provided a case for speculation.
Actually the programme was littered with factual inaccuracies, and is
the only programme I have seen totally devoid of a results, fixtures,
statistics or manager's column. But why were the programmes so late in
arriving at the ground? They had probably just arrived in a package from
Columbia, the airport ringing the club to inform them of their arrival:
"can you collect your package from Columbia quickly please - it's
sending the dogs crazy.'
Considering that the two sides went into this game in bottom, and bottom-but-one,
position, we were not burstingly confident of seeing a classic - which
was just as well as our 0-1 defeat was a dire affair.