ROVERS FANZ VIEW COLUMN
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What a difference a week makes. Clinging on to a survival spot above the relegation zone on goal difference before the holiday, we knew that the Easter weekend would spell out the end to our season. And as we all know, Good Friday was soon followed by Super Saturday and Marvellous Monday. I personally felt we had a chance of points against a stuttering Cambridge side at home, and Andy Rammell turned the quiet confidence into realisation with his first goals for the club. Using all his years of experience, he first lobbed a route-one clearance home before timing his run to perfection to turn in his second. Vitas Astafjevs made it 3-0 - a scoreline not seen since Nathan Ellington's purple patch more than a year ago, but with the visitors converting a last gasp penalty, the simple fact of the matter is that without Rammell we would not have won the match. It was exactly the same story at the Kassam Stadium on Monday. The game was so one-sided that the 3,000 of us, taking up nearly the whole side of the ground, must have been wondering when Oxford were going to score, not if. They were a typical Ian Atkins side, full of six-footers trying to get on the end of incessant aerial play and blessed with a petulance that saw them contest every decision the referee made, even appealing for throw-ins that were so obviously Rovers' ball. It is no wonder that the pitch is so superb - the home side never use the turf. It really was a struggle for much of the first half and only the heroics of Scott Howie and Ijah Anderson kept us in the game. Eventually, Oxford appeared to run out of puff, and at least it gave us five minutes of breathing time before the interval. The second half started exactly the same as the first, with Rovers pinned back against the wall. The hosts' quickest player Manny Omoyimni was brought on early and stuck out on the wing up against Anderson, which was strange because if he were anywhere else along the forward line he would have caused chaos with his pace. So when Adam Barrett headed across for Rammell to crash the ball into the roof of the net, it was the most unlikely lead since Rovers won at Pride Park. Miraculously, we held out for victory and three mammoth points, with Ray Graydon again employing his 'sit on the lead' tactic of reverting to a 4-5-1 system for the second time over Easter - a leap of faith if ever I saw one. Maybe we were destined to win there, in much the same vein as our dirty habit of losing by one up at Wrexham, for Oxford haven't beaten us at home in over a decade. But yet again it was only a win because Andy Rammell stuck the ball in the back of the net for us. Without these three crucial goals, the smiling faces and weightless shoulders would still be grimacing and hunched. At last we can say we have made an improvement this season, as Graydon's world-beaters have amassed more points than last year's team, which incidentally cobbled together 45 by the campaign's climax. We have a long way to go before we match the 81 won by Ian Holloway's 'nearly' squad in 1999-2000, or indeed the record 93 points by our legendary 1990 Championship winners, make no mistake. Just because we won a couple of games while the sun was shining doesn't mean we will take the Division by storm next season; it simply tells us that we are hopefully getting near the end of this long dark tunnel. Until the arithmetic tells us we are safe, then we should not 'celebrate' prematurely, not that our lowly league position should be a reason for rejoicing. Three points this weekend against Darlington will be enough, regardless of events elsewhere.
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