Crystal Palace 0 v Newcastle 0 January 21st, 2023

Wiltshire Mags present:

Dafs, Browner and Veitchy

Report by Dafs

A first visit to this ground for me, not the most pleasant of views and not the most pleasant of games.

Myself and Browner set off East on the train without Veitchy (Meeting us in London later) with a bag of San Miggy / Miguels for company (he didn’t score sadly, but we’ll keep trying to prove it works ‘sometimes’), arriving in London early afternoon ready for the evening kick off. Getting to Selhurst Park from Paddington is a bit of a task so we went for safety and Uber’d our way to Thornton Heath to find a pub.

The Railway telegraph was the first stop, not that busy at all but nice to have a pint and watch the 3pm ko scores come in on the big screen.

We were asked to pose for a photo with a fan who had come over from Norway for the game and then, amazingly, out of nowhere, we managed to bag ourselves two semi-final 1st leg tickets at Southampton from a Geordie lady (now living down south) who was selling as her nephews now couldn’t go. Result for us!

Onto the next pub (The Prince George), rammed full of toon fans, where Veitchy joined us for a beer.

News started to spread that Bruno was in the starting line up for tonight, a miraculous recovery given the way his ankle went over last week at home to Fulham.

Once at the ground, getting a beer as always was a task, we made it though in enough time to join in the pre-match sing songs.

As for the game, another clean sheet I guess is a positive, but plenty of chances were missed by the Newcastle front unit, on another day we could have easily run out 2 or 3 nil winners. Having said that, with nothing to do all game, Nick Pope (in the middle of our goal!) pulled off an unbelievable save in the second half to deny Palace a goal. The undefeated run goes on.

With a race against time to fight our way back across to Paddington in time for our train west, it was good to catch up Sky Sports Pete Graves (or was it Keith Downie) on the tube. We think it’s the lucky yellow gloves that give it away that was in fact Pete. Hats off to Veitchy for knowing what tubes and trains to get us to Paddington and for driving us home once we were back at Chippenham station

A long old day, eventually arriving home around 11pm. Thoughts now turning to the semi final 1st leg just a few days away.