I was chatting to my brother the day before I bought my tickets for the game. He lives in Burnley and is good friends with a neighbour who was offered a ticket for the Carlisle v Arsenal match.... THE DAY AFTER THE DRAW!!!!! This can probably only mean one thing. A CUFC club sponsor knew they would get tickets and so was handing them out. I would love to know which sponsor it was so that I could embarrass them severely. If they are going to give away tickets, they should do so to those employees who are fans. The main gripe many true fans have is over people who never go to a match, do not support CUFC in any way and end up going, depriving true fans (however infrequent a visitor to BP) of tickets, simply because they can't get to Brunton Park to queue up for tickets.
So, we come to the day of the game. Carlisle were 90 places below Arsenal in the structure, and it was always going to be a big mountain for Carlisle to climb. Following the game, only losing 1-0 to Arsenal was seen by nearly all CUFC fans as a moral victory, particularly as much was made in the media of the tackle by Prokas on Vieira.
On the day, from the stand, the Prokas tackle on Vieira looked bad, but it looked 50-50, and it seemed that Vieira jumped in as much as Prokas did. I watched the coverage of the tackle on TV after the game, and my belief was confirmed. Prokas was wrong to jump in the way he did, but when you watch Vieira, he was jumping in exactly the same. Had Prokas been there a fraction of a second earlier, it would have been Vieira's boot(s) on Prokas' shin. Let us not forget that Vieira had been guilty of this same offence on several occasions during his time with Arsenal. Many of us suspect that Arsenal were deliberately making the most of the Vieira/Prokas incident to cover up the fact that they struggled against opposition from the lower leagues.
Interestingly, little coverage was given to the tackle by Bergkamp, the punch by Cole, the dives by Vieira and Cole, and Bergkamp's elbowing. Bookings: CUFC 2-3 Arsenal, and the ref let them off lightly several times. The chant used to be "boring, boring Arsenal".
Richard Littlejohn, a media person often best ignored for his loathsome/ill-informed opinions, lambasted Carlisle United live on air during the game. I do wonder if he had actually seen any coverage at that point.
Finally, it was nice to see BP full on 3 sides again and some of those fans did come back to the next few games.
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