• Hit the auto-update button for the latest posts
• Send your thoughts to simon.burnton@guardian.co.uk
• And tweet Simon, if that's your thing
The teams are in! And they look like this:
West Ham: Green, Demel, Tomkins, Reid, Taylor, O'Neil, Noble, Nolan, Collison, Cole, Vaz Te. Subs: Henderson, McCartney, Maynard, Faubert, Lansbury.
Cardiff: Marshall, McNaughton, Hudson, Turner, Taylor, Lawrence, Gunnarsson, Whittingham, McPhail, Mason, Miller. Subs: Heaton, Kiss, Cowie, Earnshaw, Blake.
Referee: Mike Dean.
Pre-match chatter: If this is the last game of Cardiff's season, it'll look a lot like the first: 276 days ago I was at Upton Park to watch them kick off their campaign with a 1-0 win – their first win in 15 visits to the Boleyn Ground dating back to 1950 – and now they're back with a 2-0 first-leg deficit to overhaul. No other team in the history of the second-tier play-offs has overturned a two-goal deficit to make the final, and no team has lost at home and made it through.
Sam Allardyce might be casting his mind back to 1996, when his Blackpool side finished third in the league to qualify for the third-tier play-offs (not so much an achievement as a crushing disappointment, as it was this year: with seven games to go Blackpool were first, nine points clear of third place, but thereafter they won one, drew two and lost four). Their opponents, Bradford, had finished sixth, only qualifying for the play-offs on the final day of the season. In the first game Blackpool won 2-0 at Valley Parade. So far, so similar to West Ham's experience this year.
Bradford won the second leg 3-0, after extra time. The story goes that Blackpool announced ticket and travel arrangements for the final before kick-off, had already paid the deposit for the coaches, while in his column in the match programme Allardyce wrote that his boys were "playing for places at Wembley". His opposite number, Chris Kamara, ripped it out and pinned it to the dressing-room wall – team talk done.
"In the end it could have been four or five. I'm chuffed to bits. This is the best night of my career," said Kamara. "Everything was stacked against us but we knew we would win it. We've made Wembley and done it in style."
"Afterwards scores of Blackpool fans gathered outside the ground to bay for the head of manager Sam Allardyce," reported the Independent. And they weren't to be denied – although it was Blackpool's highest league finish for 20 years, Allardyce was gone within days. The chairman, Owen Oyston, had recently started a six-year jail term for rape, but engineered the sacking from his cell at Walton prison. "Blackpool hasn't broken me," said Allardyce. "I want to get back into football."
He's older and wiser now, of course. It couldn't happen again. Could it? Read More
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.
