Coming up: Barnet

The drop

This game feels like a ship returning to shore. After a turbulent, but ultimately successful few weeks, we now head into a series of games against also-rans and makeweights. Barnet were promoted last year back from the Conference last year as champions but rather than storming the division, like Conference champions frequently do they’re the same old Barnet bumbling around at the wrong end of the table.
Rich pickings, then, not just this week, but for the next month. But, this brings its own pressure, of course, we should go into the next month confident of taking maximum points from every game. The pressure to be perfect is one problem, but also because we won’t win every game, the pressure not to capitulate through disappointment is always there.
It never goes, this pressure lark.

Old game of the day

So, when was the last time Michael Duberry and Edgar Davids face up to each other? Leeds United v Juventus in the Champions League? No. Oxford v Barnet in the Football League. I’m strangely in love with this fixture. Aside from the Duberry/Davids trivia, I was at Underhill when we forgot our kit, I once turned up there an hour and a half before kick-off because, for some reason, the game kicked off at 8.15. My favourite ever moment was when Davids, who up to that point had been running the game, got an Andy Whing reducer in the middle of the pitch after which Davids skulked around like a wounded animal and we went on to win.

Fittingly, this from 2010 may be one of the greatest videos ever produced.

From the blog

“It was the agricultural intervention of Andy Whing that indirectly gave us the win. You can have all the quality in the world, but the last thing you need when you’re running on a pair of 40 year old legs is to have them clattered into.”

Read on

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Oxblogger

Oxblogger is a blog about Oxford United.

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