April 8 – Wanderers Dream Over
EVERYONE loves an underdog story in the FA Cup and every year the grand old competition delivers in some form or other. Whether it’s Hereford and Newcastle United in 1972 or Barnsley disposing of Liverpool and Chelsea last year there is always at least one story for the BBC to latch on to and produce a patronising piece for Football Focus about.
A bit of VT of some old glory days (hopefully in black and white), followed by an interview with the 70-year-old groundsman who can remember the last time they played Manchester United when we still had ration books. Then back to the studio for mindless platitudes from Lawro about how “they’ll make it very difficult for the Premier League side”, and “the pitch will be a great leveller”, finishing on the time-honoured “the gate receipts will be invaluable for the club.”
And we all lap it up. But more often than not, the dream comes to a premature end. The plucky lower-leaguers can only go so far before the big boys spoil their fun.
And so it was today in 2001 when Wycombe Wanderers great Cup run was finally halted.
After beating Harrow Borough in the first round, Wanderers had disposed of Millwall, Grimsby, Wolves and manager Lawrie Sanchez’s former Cup-winning team WImbledon, to get to the quarter-finals. All except Harrow were higher-League scalps for the Second Division Chairboys.
Then they faced Premiership Leicester City at Filbert Street where they pulled off a remarkable 2-1 win thanks to Roy Essandoh – a striker the club signed through Ceefax when they had a forward crisis.
Their reward for seeing off Leicester was a match up with Liverpool in a semi-final at Villa Park. The tie was a gift for the media: Liverpool had been the opposition back in the 1988 final when Lawrie Sanchez had scored to win the Cup for Wimbledon in one of the greatest upsets of all time.
Having proved he was capable of an upset as a manager too, could he come back to haunt Liverpool again? Erm, no, but they pushed them all the way.
It took 78 minutes for Liverpool to finally score through Emile Heskey and Robbie Fowler added a second five minutes later. Two minutes from time Keith Ryan scored for Wanderers but they couldn’t find the equaliser and the dream was over.
Sanchez said: “We did the best we could and that’s all I could ever ask of them. I am pleased we got a goal and that it was Ryan who scored it.”
While his opposite number Gerard Houllier went down the predictable route of lavishing praise on the lower-League opponents for their spirit etc and so on. “We expected a battle and they got lots of bodies behind the ball. They made the game extremely difficult for us,” he said, while goalscorer Fowler joined in the patronise-fest: “To be fair, every one of their players performed magnificently. They made us fight until the final whistle,” he said.
Liverpool went on to beat Arsenal in the final thanks to two goals from Michael Owen, which helped them on their way to a fairly poor-man’s treble of League Cup, FA Cup and Uefa Cup.
That’s us for today folks, last year on this day we told you about this, and tomorrow we’ll tell you about something completely different, so don’t miss it.
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