HEAVY DISCIPLINE

Millwall 2 Luton 1, The New Den - 4/3/2006

This was a caricature of recent Luton performances.  When we want to we’re just like watching Brazil, but with the finishing touch of Peter Thompson rather than Pele.  As surreal and ridiculous as the Robbie Fowler story was we’d stroll this division with him.  We look solid enough at the back, but we’re regressing to the Luton of a few seasons ago, with individual errors and late goals stunting an otherwise miserly defensive.

After an embarrassingly poor first half it wasn’t as though the second half could have been worse, so, as Coyne punted the ball in from six yards after the Millwall defence had a brief volleyball session, it looked for all the jellied eels in the world we were going to win easily.  But I’m sick of singing “we’re gonna score in a minute” consistently throughout each away game and ending up choking on my own assumption.  Our dominance was mainly due to the continual ineptitude of the Millwall defence, who persistently had the nerve to present us with chance after wasted chance; presumably in the knowledge our front line looks increasingly deadly from 2 yards but not from 3. 

Millwall were shit.  End of story.  But there’s a certain panache in scoring your second chance in the last minute to win 2-1 that we could well do with.  It doesn’t matter how foreign the basic concepts of passing and moving are with a knack like that.  Can’t fault the passion of their fans aswell.  They’re born fighting down here, so why stop for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon? There was a near riot when Tuttle subbed off their only footballer, Colin Cameron, after an hour.  It warms the heart to see a people so committed, though whether it’s towards the football or violence and intimidation I’ll never know.

And finally, I understand being herded slowly like mindless sheep through a corridor of concrete and steel barriers isn’t going to inspire any empathy towards humanity, but even I was astonished by the whole police=bad attitude coming from very our swine element. There’s still a mindless element in every club, perhaps even in every one of ourselves, that despite any notion of basic human values still reads the Football Factory as gospel, and thinks having a push and shove with police down South is more A Result than anything on the pitch.  So what if some of us are living proof in Darwinism- far more ape than homosapien- can’t we just pretend we’re human for a few hours?  Actually, maybe a few gracefully arching truncheons could knock some common sense into their ugly reared head.  Anyway, save it for the Watford, lads, where any amount of hooliganism can be masked with the morally forgiving label ‘local pride at stake’.

A nice day out.

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