To no great surprise, the game was goalless after ninety minutes and as extra time entered it's last three minutes Brighton were coping easily enough. What had been a long night threatened to get even longer as supporters contemplated a penalty shoot out, but then, completely out of the blue, Roger Johnson powered an excellent header from a corner into the Brighton net from around the penalty spot and City had won themselves a Second Round home tie with Leyton Orient.
Neither of our two headline grabbing striker signings were ready to play at QPR the following Saturday, but Dave Jones offered what was a glimpse into the future by dropping Warren Feeney and pairing Paul Parry with Steve MacLean up front. The change certainly paid off as City dominated from first minute to last in recording their first league win in eleven games. Steve MacLean netted what turned out to be his only goal in City colours by guiding in Roger Johnson's touch on from a corner in the twenty ninth minute to give us a half time lead and with Rangers showing some signs of fighting back after the break (Turnbull made a great save to turn Moore's effort on to the post), Parry killed the game off with a header from McPhail's cross following a lovely passing movement around the hour mark.
A midweek break for International fixtures which saw Joe Ledley play a part in Wales' fine 1-0 win in Bulgaria gave City more time to get Fowler and Hasselbaink fit for the following weekends home game with early season pace setters Coventry City - despite Hasselbaink scoring twice for the reserves in a game at Hereford, neither of them made it however.
Hardly surprisingly, City only made the one change with Gunter replacing the injured McNaughton as another good crowd of 16,407 turned up to see if City could record back to back wins for the first time in six months. In truth they really should have done - Coventry rode their luck throughout as they showed that their early position at the top of the table was a false one. City played some lovely stuff in the opening half an hour, but, once again, they had left their shooting boots at home. The problems that were afflicting us in home league games at the time were effectively highlighted around the twenty minute mark when Coventry were ripped apart by one move which featured around twenty passes that was as good as anything the team produced all season but MacLean's headed finish when it seemed easier to score flew straight at the keeper.
Recent home league matches had followed a similar pattern which saw the team make a fast start, miss chance after chance and then fall behind around the thirty minute mark to a sucker punch goal. This time it took thirty four minutes as Coventry got in down their left when City's offside trap broke down and McKenzie squared the ball across for Tabb to tap in from about five yards.
For most of the time after that, the game went true to normal Ninian Park form as the visitors encountered few problems in holding on to their lead, but in a truly madcap last five minutes, with substitutes Purse and Feeney prominent, the match could so easily have ended up 3-2 to City! First, Purse maybe should have done better with a headed chance from a corner and then, within a minute or so, he smashed the ball against the angle of his own post and crossbar as Coventry broke forward, next, Feeney was presented with an opportunity which saw him six yards out with an unguarded net to aim at and he almost hit the corner flag - it was real miss of the season stuff which I would have found hilarious if he had not been wearing a blue shirt! To be fair to him, Feeney did gain us a dubious penalty in the last minute, but Purse proceeded to smash the spot kick against the crossbar and, that was that, yet another 1-0 home defeat! Credit where it was due to Darren Purse for stepping up to take a crucial penalty in such a pressurised situation, but he had been pretty successful during his time with City by side footing them low either side of the keeper so you could only imagine that his decision to blast this one had something to do with a bit of bottle trouble.
It's hard to remember the last time I had felt so frustrated about a City defeat and a lot of that frustration was down to the fact that the two City players who the media couldn't stop talking about had still to kick a ball in first team action for us! Dave Jones had said that both Fowler and Hasselbaink would start in the midweek League Cup tie with Leyton Orient, but it was beginning to get to the I'll believe it when I see it stage!
However, it turned out that people like me were wrong to doubt our manager because both players were in from the start against opponents who had won their first three matches in League One and beaten QPR at Loftus Road to get to this stage of the League Cup competition. Orient were dangerous opponents then, but a shot count of 25-7 in City's favour tells you all you need to know about how the game panned out. Although both players predictably ran out of steam towards the end, the early signs were promising as far as the Fowler/Hasselbaink partnership was concerned with one first half lob from the former that left the excellent O's keeper Nelson flat footed before rebounding off the crossbar a real touch of class.
At times it was impossible to figure out how Orient held out as City did everything but score, but another visiting keeper having a stormer in a game at Ninian Park had something to do with it as Nelson made save after save. Even the dismissal of the brain dead Sean Thornton for the visitors midway through the second half for two deliberate handball offences couldn't produce the goal City's dominance deserved and when Nelson made another tremendous save from Hasselbaink just as the game went into injury time it looked like, just as against Brighton, we were set for another thirty minutes. However, the visitors fell asleep from the resultant corner and McPhail played the ball short to Whittingham who netted with a low left foot shot from twenty yards. That goal won the game and we were into the stage of the completion where the big guns from the Premiership made their entry - that being the case then, an away draw at West Brom proved to be something of a disappointment.
City were next in action on 1 September at Norwich which meant that the transfer window had closed at midnight the night before. As mentioned before, there were no new players brought in - in fact it was a quiet period all round at Ninian Park, keeper David Forde had been loaned out to Luton a week earlier, but, other than that, there was nothing to report.
Anyway, given that a loan window for Football League clubs would be opening within a week or so which would run to the end of November, the impact of the full transfer window closing at the end of August is far less significant for clubs at our level than it is for Premiership sides and I would guess that the attitude of most fans was that we could always sign loan players in a few weeks if we needed to. The reality was different though - whilst virtually every other club in the Football League continued to loan players in and out, with the exception of the troubled goalkeeping position we had finished bringing in new players for the season!
As to why we had to soldier on for the next eight months or so with only the outfield players we already had, not for the first time, Peter Ridsdale put the blame for the lack of new players squarely at the door of Sam Hammam. Nearly everybody agreed that our former owner was involved in the shadowy Langston in some way - tracing who was behind the Cayman Island based Swiss corporation was proving next to impossible, but Mr Hammam's claims that he was merely their "representative" had a hollow ring to them.
That being the case, Langston/Hammam were blamed by the City hierarchy for bringing a law suit against them which they claimed meant that;-
1. Funds set aside for team strengthening were having to be diverted to pay the club's legal costs - Peter Ridsdale would later make the ludicrous claim that the club were spending £20,000 a day in legal fees and it took director Steve Borley to finally clarify on this board that what our Chairman had meant was that it was costing City as much as £20,000 a day.
2. With Mr Ridsdale talking about putting the club into administration if it lost in court, the City's bank had, understandably, decided to keep hold of club funds it was holding - City claimed that, as this included down payments to become members of the Premier Seating scheme at the new ground, we were talking about a seven figure sum here.
Whether you believed that money was as tight at the club as the board made out or not, it became clear as the months went on that City had, effectively, put all of their eggs in the one transfer basket with their policy of solely going for players who cost nothing in transfer fees but a lot in wages and, presumably, signing on fees. As things panned out, it seems to me that even our manager and chairman's most loyal supporters would have a really hard job arguing that this policy was a success - whatever was achieved during the season was largely on the back of players who were at the club before the summer of 2007.
Anyway, City headed to Carrow Road on the back of a decidedly mixed start to the season with those home defeats to Stoke and Coventry having put pressure on the team to pick up points on other team's grounds. They had managed this at QPR, but in the first forty five minutes at Norwich it looked like they would slip to yet another defeat on one of their biggest bogey grounds. City gave away an awful goal on twelve minutes - Gunter's back pass wasn't the best, but Ross Turnbull again showed his fallibility with the ball at his feet as his mishit clearance went straight to Lappin out on the left flank and, with City's keeper out of position, he hit a thirty yard shot into an unguarded net.
If you included the pre season game against FC Twente, this was only the third goal Ross Turnbull had conceded in seven matches. He hadn't been at fault with the first two goals he had let in either, but, despite this, there was something about him that wasn't convincing, the defence seemed uneasy with him and you felt it was more down to luck than judgment that we were conceding so few goals - the goalkeeping problems which were to dog us for much of the season were just starting.
City must have been poor in that first half because Dave Jones took the very unusual step for him of making changes at half time - Chris Gunter had struggled and was replaced by Darcy Blake, while Joe Ledley (who the radio commentators at the game had identified as our best player in the first forty five minutes!) made way for Paul Parry. Dave Jones' critics often have a go at him for his use of substitutes (to be honest, you can usually set your watch by his changes!), but he deserved credit here for acting in such a decisive manner. That said, it was his third substitution (Whittingham for the very ineffective Fowler on sixty minutes) that had the biggest say in the transformation that occurred in the game.
Whittingham had only been on for four minutes when he bundled home an equaliser from Parry's cross and it was from his corner that Roger Johnson headed home what proved to be the winner twenty minutes later. After the match Dave Jones was honest enough to admit that his side had been lucky to win, but no one at City was complaining at a first win at Carrow Road for thirty six years (it was only our second win there ever) and, significantly, for the first time since Dave Jones' first home game in charge over two years earlier, the team had come back to win a league game in which they had conceded the first goal.
A fortnights break for International fixtures which saw Joe Ledley feature in Wales' 2-0 home defeat by Germany in which they were given something of a footballing lesson and then play a leading role in a magnificent 5-2 win in Slovakia threatened to break up any momentum City had gained from a run of three wins in four games as they returned to action in a televised game at Plymouth.
If Ledley's substitution at Norwich seemed a strange one, his demotion to the bench at Home Park looked baffling given his International display in the week. Robbie Fowler (who had looked well short of fitness in a 5-1 reserve team defeat against Bristol City that I had watched a few days earlier) was another one to lose his place in the starting eleven while the fit again Steve Thompson also figured amongst the substitutes. On the other hand, Chris Gunter retained his place in the team - in the weeks that followed Dave Jones justified his handling of our young full back by citing the way he had improved after he left him out to regroup after his horror show at Norwich, but this was just not true and I was not the only City fan who thought Gunter was our best player on the night at Home Park.
Gunter's treatment by his manger during the first few months of the season became something of a talking point especially when his level of performance was compared to Tony Capaldi who was having a difficult time settling at his new club. Predictably, Capaldi was given a rough ride by the supporters of his former club at Plymouth and it certainly appeared to unsettle him as he endured an uneasy ninety minutes. Capaldi wasn't the only player to struggle mind as a home side that relied a lot on power and pace harried a City team lacking the injured Loovens and Purse out of their more measured approach for the first seventy minutes.
Plymouth deserved their lead given them after half an hour when Sylvain Ebanks-Blake reacted quickest to a half cleared free kick and when he scored again early in the second half the game appeared beyond City. Plymouth's second goal had come when Ross Turnbull had knocked out a well struck Buzsaky shot right into Ebanks-Blake's path and opinions were divided as to whether our keeper had blundered again - I was amongst those who thought he had.
At first, the introduction of Fowler for Whittingham, who had failed to take the opportunity his impressive showing at Norwich had given him, appeared to make no difference but, Gavin Rae pulled one back on 71 minutes when he tapped in from close range for his first City goal and, from then on, Plymouth seemed to run out of steam as City took almost complete control. Steve Thompson was brought on for Gunter with seven minutes left and the target man became City's hero with two minutes to go when he squeezed in a shot from a narrow angle to give City a point that they deserved given their superiority in the closing stages.
I don't know what it is about Plymouth Argyle that gets Thommo going, but five of the fifteen league goals he has scored in his two and a half seasons with us have come in five appearances against them! More importantly though, City had kept their unbeaten start away from home going and, for the second successive match offered signs that the trend of Dave Jones' first two seasons that had seen the opposition nearly always win if they scored the first goal may not extend into a third year.
TBC