In the end, Millwall’s feisty clash with West Ham United was exactly what it should have been: A great advertisement for Championship football. There was a sneaky suspicion that the media hype and live TV coverage by ITV was in place with the expectation of the game being marred or even overshadowed by unpleasantness – which in the end failed to materialise and two historic sides simply renewed their age old rivalry and battled it out on the pitch.
Perfect.
“Thrilling” was how Sky Sports summed it up afterwards- and for the neutral it probably was. Millwall’s fast, aggressive start was badly refereed, true – but we’d have been justly proud if our own players had come out of the starting blocks in that manner. However bad the start, Nuno’s men deserve credit for a fightback that wouldn’t have been possible under previous managers.
After dredging up all the unpleasantness from yesteryear, there seemed almost a sense of disappointment from some mainstream news outlets that they had ‘only’ six arrests to blazon across their headlines this morning. As the Guardian puts it perfectly:
“…Watched by an outrage-ready media multiverse, something unexpected happened at the Den. A really good football match broke out.
Piroe was one of many West Ham players who didn’t turn up as West Ham were bullied for the first 60 minutes
Not wild or violent. No shameful scenes that nobody (trans: everybody) wants to see. Not in the stands or the streets at least: the only really sour note was an allegation of spitting against West Ham’s Taty Castellanos, which will now presumably be investigated.
Otherwise this was a thrilling, high-quality 2-2 draw between Millwall and West Ham, a game where for the full 90 minutes nothing outside the Den’s rattly corrugated stands seemed to exist..”
No ugly scenes to embarrass or humiliate two historic clubs and no wild, derogatory labels to be applied to football fans sounds good to me.
And for all the disappointment at the way in which our West Ham team played the first sixty minutes, they did good to rescue a point and remain second in the Championship table with a three week hiatus starting now.
We’d certainly have settled for that ahead of the season kicking off in August.
Agreed that 2nd in the Table is not bad – and if Fulham manage a draw with Man U then Spurs will be bottom going into the break