I recall Warhurst hitting the post in the first half and Kelly making a couple of good saves in the 2nd half but top and bottom of what I was saying is that considering the team we had, they didn’t run away with the game. For all their superstars we made a game of it against them and narrowly lost by one goal. I think losing to, as u say, such a soft winning goal may have clouded my judgement a little at the time (it’s not a game I’ve ever watched ANY replays of since) knowing that we’d lost to it.
The only ‘luck’ they could have been said to have had was the timing of the first goal - from a freekick where we bizarrely decided not to set up a wall and the keeper was poorly positioned.
They had a team of very good players at the time, but they were players who struggled with pressure and as we saw in previous derbies they had a tendency to shrink into themselves if they didn’t score early against a team they were roundly expected to beat. Then if they conceded …
At Wembley though, all that pressure disappeared within minutes due to the freekick, and that enabled a totally different game to play out.
Maybe the second piece of ‘luck’ was the timing of our goal: that was another possible crumble moment, but with half-time immediately following, they were able to regroup and we had no time to build up any momentum off the back of scoring.
I don’t think they were unlucky not to win by more, because our keeper prevented that, and he’s part of the team(!). If you put the best striker up against the best keeper it’s an even match - even if the XG is clearly higher for one side.
The Geordie feller scored a good free-kick, then cancelled it out himself by playing a pensioner onside to poke in the slowest moving rolling ball that Wembley has ever seen for an equaliser.
Apart from that, Kelly matched everything they had as a team, until a poor bit of marking from a set-piece near the end of extra time.
They weren’t lucky to win.
We weren’t lucky to only lose by 1 goal aet.
I