From an Armchair somewhere in the Black Country

Glynis Wright followed last night's game from her armchair.

"REFFIN' 'ELL, HEREFORD - THAT WAS CHUFFIN' AWFUL DEFENDING.." There you have it - the mating-call of the Lesser-Spotted Bulls aficionado, as heard when I was trying to crimp off a particularly smelly one in our upstairs toilet, just after the start of the Sky live game between the cider-slurpers and - erm - the other lot of cider-slurpers! Yep, this was what Sky were billing as the "M5 Derby", between Exeter City and - well - you should have guessed by now. Why the hell Murdoch's mob chose to give the game that totally-misleading title is completely beyond me; with the aid of a handy road-map even a half-baked moron with distinct Dingle tendencies would have seen that Edgar street, the visitors' base, is nowhere near a motorway junction of any description, never mind the bloody M5. Twenty, miles, or thereabouts, is it?

Anyway, by the time I'd sorted my errant bowels, from the various strangled noises emanating from our living-room, it was clear that all was not well with The Bulls, hence all that unparliamentary language from 'Im Indoors at the very start of this piece. "Can I take it that Sir's other football team have conceded, then?" said I as I resumed my seat once more; from the strangled half-snarl, half-very rude word my other half uttered as the words left my lips, I took it to mean that was indeed the case.

Not that I was paying very much attention to what was happening on the screen, mind. Most of the time I was preoccupied in sewing my beloved's pair of jeans - well, the pockets, at any rate. Assessing the damage before I finally started, the disaster area was huge; it was going to need major surgery to make 'Im Indoors's strides fit for human habitation once more. It was while I was patching up the left pocket that The Bulls got their equaliser; up he leaped, in a complete frenzy, loudly singing the praises of a lad called Ipoua, of whom I've spoken before.

You might remember that he's from some former French African colony or other, plays like a bag of spanners for 99 per cent of the time - then, completely without warning comes that precious one per cent that's truly wonderful, makes you go "Wow!" even, and so it was tonight. Until his equaliser, he'd spent most of the game trying to make hopelessly-spectacular pass after pass, invariably losing the thing to the opposition every time, much to a Certain Person's fury - then, in a momentary flash of pure brilliance, which involved leaving several Exeter defenders for dead, he'd scored, and from about ten yards out - and believe you me, that strike, real quality stuff it was, wouldn't have looked at all out of place in the Premiership.

So far, so good, considering Exeter were very much Hereford's bogey side - a bit like Middlesbrough with us, if you like. But The Bulls now scented a major Conference scalp in prospect, one that would do their own play-off aspirations absolutely no harm at all. With around six or seven minutes to go before the break, Hereford got one more, yet another neat and clinical finish from The Bulls - and that's when the real fun started. What happened after that was this; naturally, after taking the lead, all the other Bulls mobbed the scorer, a lad who goes by the name of Jeannin. (Both he and Ipoua are French speakers, by the way; how many times do you see that in a Conference side?) But there was another dark little secret lurking in the lad's footballing wardrobe; not so long ago, he was an Exeter player, who'd only left them after some sort of hoo-ha with their board over a new contract.

Anyway, Hereford said 'thank you very much - we'll have him!' of course, and that goal of his was very much the end-result. 'Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord' - or something. Eventually, the human celebratory pyramid disentangled itself, at which point, up ran the referee, and in the direction of Ipoua. At first, we thought there would be a yellow-card for, maybe, celebrating too enthusiastically, but no - the ref whipped out a straight red instead! Great cries of "Doo wot?" from the player himself, naturally enough, the Hereford bench, and their away followers, no doubt, and more or less the same thing from the Sky commentator. Not to mention this column, dividing its time between making depreciatory remarks about the gentleman in question and trying to direct soothing noises towards my clearly-distressed other half. Naturally, Sky got the footage replayed to try to elicit the truth, and then we saw it. Ipoua, whilst whooping it up with his fellow French speaker, was clearly pointing with his index-finger to the name emblazoned on the back of the scorer's shirt! And that, ladies and gents, was it!

In no way could that be misconstrued as being 'obscene' - how many times have we seen players at our level do precisely the same thing, if not more, I wonder? - but a 'red' it was, in the addled mind of the muddled man in the middle. We did hear confirmation later that the sending-off had, indeed, been for 'making an obscene gesture'. Blimey, if that's one Conference whistler's definition of the offence, should he ever make it to the Football League - which, on the back of this almighty clanger, I severely doubt - I'd guarantee that come the halfway point of the season, he'd be finishing an awful number of games a la Sheffield United circa April 2002: prematurely.

Fair play, though, to Graham Turner's mob, who could have quite easily collapsed into a self-recriminatory heap of jelly after that setback, but didn't. In a fraught second half played with the visitors down to ten men, and Exeter determined to salvage at least something from the wreckage, they defended in a highly-disciplined manner, kept both their shape and their heads well, and bar a couple of alarums and excursions in their box, where, at times, it looked very much as though it would have been far easier for the home club to pot the black rather than miss, they came right through it all to emerge the eventual winners.

I strongly suspect the sheer injustice of that dismissal badly stung something hidden deep within their sensitive little Herefordian souls, you know, the net result being they collectively vowed they'd well and truly sort out the Devon lot, if only for the principle of the thing, and, both by hanging on like grim death and crossing their fingers for luck, that's precisely what they did! Mind you, I bet that referee's ears must have burned after the final whistle; if Graham Turner doesn't appeal that red card next week, then he's even more of a Dingle than even I would give him credit for.

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