The week unwrapped

Ever the innovators, Oxford fans invented a new kind of result after the 2-1 win over Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday. After securing our fourth away win in the Championship in over a quarter of a century, it was deemed by some fans to be not a good enough win. Not only do we need to score more goals than the opposition nowadays, we seem to need to do it while balancing a ball on our nose and playing the mouth organ.

To cleanse ourselves from the awful experience of winning, the club held a fun day this week with the players having an open training session at the stadium. Afterwards there was a chaotic game of kids v players. Siriki Dembele revelled in the opportunity to dribble aimlessly into a crowd of players before losing possession. Elsewhere, Louis Sibley and Tyler Goodrham held a Q&A including the question ‘What’s it like to be a professional footballer’. The duo answered, ‘No idea these days, we can ask our friends who are real footballers, if you like’.

Lionfacts

No one likes them and they don’t care. Self-ascribed, weirdo loners Millwall are coming to the Kassam on Saturday and they’re flying.

After four wins in a row they find themselves in third place, two points off the automatic promotion places. Should we be worried? I’m not so sure, the streak appears to be a confluence of coincidences; a lack of injuries, a system which is working and a few players finding their form together. It doesn’t seem to be the realisation of a long term strategy or a large investment in a talented squad, in every other respect, they’re the same old ordinary Millwall who just happen to be enjoying an extraordinary run of results.

The truth is, many Millwall fans are waiting for the fall to happen. They don’t like it, but they don’t care, presumably. Turning four wins in a row into five is always likely to be a challenge, so a tiny wedge of complacency, lost focus or form could easily result in the whole house of cards collapsing around their ears.

Football friend | James Henry

Sometimes players don’t fit with the manager who sign them, James Constable was signed by Darren Patterson, Danny Hylton by Gary Waddock. In 2017 Michael Appleton, exhausted from modernising Oxford United, decided to take himself out of the spotlight by joining Craig Shakespeare as assistant manager at Premier League Leicester City. In his place was the enigmatic, and somewhat odd, Spaniard Pep Clotet. The appointment felt like a step up in sophistication, after all, the name Pep is halfway to Pep Guardiola.

Two weeks after Clotet’s appointment, with the squad at their summer training camp in Spain, the club teased an obscured photo of a new signing. The Oxford United hive mind scoured the internet comparing the player’s tattoos with archive pictures, concluding that the new man was James Henry.

For Henry, it looked like a practical move; he was from Reading and had just become a father. Playing for Oxford would allow him to settle. As a 16 year-old, Chelsea wanted to sign him and in 2007 the Daily Mail predicted he would play in the 2014 World Cup for England. But, despite his technical quality, he lacked the physicality to play consistently in the top level. 

He spent four years at Millwall before getting promoted to the Championship with Wolves in  2014. Three years later, when Wolves were taken over by ambitious Chinese investors, Henry was released.

Pep Clotet only lasted until January 2018, with Oxford limping along due to his rigid technical football and charisma free personality. A month later Sumrith “Tiger” Thanakarnjanasuth bought the club after protracted negotiations, paving the way for the appointment of Karl Robinson as manager.

Robinson was a hyperactive motormouth who endeared and endured in equal measures, but on the pitch – financed by Tiger – he built an entertaining team of attacking flair. Henry, as calm and cultured as Robinson was chaotic, pulled the strings.

In 2019, Matt Taylor joined from Bristol City giving Henry a partner with the same cultured footballing brain. They had an almost telepathic understanding which fired Oxford up the division. 

As Covid dominated the news headlines, Oxford went on a five game winning run in which Henry scored three times. It was Henry’s form that took us into the play-off spots before the League was shut down. 

The rest is a matter of Oxford folklore; we beat Portsmouth in the play-offs and faced Wycombe at a deserted Wembley Stadium. After conceding early and then equalising through Mark Sykes, we started to take control of the game. In a flash, Henry found himself free with just the keeper to beat. Rather than shoot, he tried to thread the ball to the back post towards Matt Taylor, but his cross was intercepted to safety. The refrain, Why didn’t he shoot? will echo through Oxford for the rest of time. Perhaps because he’d successfully made that pass so many times before.

2020/21, behind closed doors, saw another failed play-off campaign. In 2021/22 with crowds back, the season started brightly and we looked good for the play-offs, maybe more. Then before a home game against Wigan, Henry collapsed in a heap during the warm up and hobbled off. Oxford’s promotion hopes wilted away and Henry was never the same player again.

He was a bit part player through 2023/24, playing some important cameos throughout as we finally squeezed into the Championship. He was released at the end of the season and signed for Conference side Aldershot, where he’s currently first team coach.

From the archive | Millwall 3 Oxford United 3 (1996)

Aficionados of our 1996 promotion will remember with great fondness the home kit, which has inspired this season’s shirt. They will also remember the AC Milan away shirt which has been re-imaged several times since. In fact, that ‘classic away shirt’ wasn’t our away shirt at all. We wore it once and then for no obvious reason. 

No, in 1996 football was part of the cultural zeitgeist, Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis made football merchandise cool. Kit manufacturers were quick to turn shirts into fashion garments. England’s 1996 blue away kit was specifically designed to be worn with jeans while Oxford’s in-house operation, Manor Leisure, turned to all-grey (or silver, depending on how you look at it). 

While it might have looked OK in the pub, it wasn’t so great on the pitch. We only won once while wearing it and that was in the EFL Trophy. Its finest hour was probably in the FA Cup Third Round against Millwall.

Millwall were, like today, a solid Championship side, but with big ambitions. Before the game they paraded their new Russian signings Sergei Yuran and Alex Kulkov. We were resolutely mid-table in Division 3 having capitulated the year before and struggled to find any form.

Far from being intimidated by the New Den, Oxford started positively, after eleven minutes Paul Moody’s outrageous scissor-kick back heel released Mark Angel on the left who looped a long cross to the back post where Stuart Massey nodded in from a yard out. 

Five minutes into the second half, Millwall finally hit back, Alex Rae heading in while unmarked. Far from capitulating, Paul Moody slammed in David Rush’s flick-on for 2-1. Chris Malkin’s equaliser seven minutes minutes later made it 2-2 before Alex Rae’s acrobatic overhead kick seemed to seal the tie for the home side with five minutes to go.

As the game reached injury time, Oxford won a corner on the right. Bobby Ford, an ethereal presence in a side of alpha personalities swung in the cross. The ball arc’ed into the six yard box, but the Millwall keeper was impeded by one of his own players. The ball continued its flight, landing in the back of the net direct from the corner for 3-3.

We would go on to win the replay at The Manor setting up a famous fourth round tie with Nottingham Forest and a last minute Stuart Massey goal. A few weeks earlier, the Forest tie was postponed due to the weather giving Denis Smith an opportunity to work on a playing system which ultimately changed the direction of the season. It was enough to ignite our form and propel us to promotion.

Want more?

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The latest Oxblogger Podcast is out, where we tackle the trickiest of subjects; the definitive team of the 1990s.  

And, if you’ve really got this far and aren’t aware, this season marks the 40^th anniversary of Oxford United’s first season in the top flight, The Glory Years is out now the remarkable in-depth story of our rise through the divisions during the 1980s.