When Sky Sports chose Hereford’s visit to Victoria Road to show live on TV, they were probably expecting a hard-fought match between two decent sides. A stop-start season had left the Daggers floundering in mid-table whilst Hereford were in second position and hunting for promotion. However, the Daggers had raised their game in several big matches, putting five past Shrewsbury and winning at Barnet and Stevenage.
It all started well enough – for just under fifteen minutes, Dagenham took the game to their visitors and could perhaps have taken the lead. It started to turn sour when Danny Shipp, who had incredibly been converted into a midfielder despite his goalscoring record, conceded a penalty and was given his marching orders. Despite the penalty being scored, we held out almost until half-time when two quick goals gave the Bulls a commanding lead at the break.
Trailing by three with only ten on the pitch is never a good position to be in with a whole half left to play. The Bulls managed one goal between minutes 46 and 70, but then the floodgates were well and truly opened. A further five goals in just 18 minutes left Garry Hill’s Daggers tenure in tatters – despite all he had delivered for the club he was disgracefully subjected to personal abuse by sections of the crowd. Five games later he was gone.
Wigan’s hammering last weekend actually took a rather different pattern. They went in at the interval trailing by just a single goal but conceded an embarassing eight in the second half. This included a five-goal haul in just 18 minutes (hmm, sounds familiar) shortly after half-time. You can only imagine sedatives were handed out with the oranges in Wigan’s dressing room!
Perhaps the Latics were fortunate that their mauling wasn’t shown live on TV in England, but there is no escape for any top-flight side these days with cameras capturing every moment. Their humiliation has been broadcast time and time again on various programmes. In our case, maybe we’d have avoided national coverage had Sky not screened the game live, but unfortunately for us every awful moment was seen by football fans throughout the country. Thanks Sky.
Our defeat was actually not a new record for the Conference – in March 1990 Runcorn won 9-0 at home to Enfield and later the same year Sutton United won 9-0 at Gateshead. More recently, in February of this year Rushden won 9-0 at Weymouth but the circumstances surrounding this were rather different. Weymouth’s financial problems had resulted in the players not being paid for around eight weeks and, when they refused to carry on any longer, the youth team were called upon to fulfil the fixture.
One very small consolation is that there are other teams to share the agony – Tim Cole made a superb goal-line block and Roberts made two very good saves to prevent the first Conference double-figure scoreline.
