Walsall blog: The big one

Tomorrow sees the Banks’s stage its biggest game of the season, probably the biggest game since the last day of 03/04 when Too Good To Go Down Rothrum thwarted our survival hopes, writes Saddlers blogger Mark Jones.

I know the fans are up for it and for the players it must be the one they’ve been looking forward to since the fixtures came out. Indeed for many of the younger lads it’ll be the most important game of their careers … and its quite a big game for Walsall too! (copyright Daz 2007)

The arrival of fallen ‘giants’ and all round badboys Leeds brings to mind two other pre-Christmas crackers of recent times. 

In 2003 we hosted West Ham, in the League for a change (as opposed to the numerous cup ties we’ve had against the Irons). A cracking match saw Jermaine Defoe sent off early for a reckless lunge on Ian Roper. Even though Alan Pardew knew us quite well and may have been still smarting from the Millennium Stadium defeat of 2001, I can’t quite imagine he’d have singled out Ropes as our danger man and marked him down for ‘special’ treatment. 

Anyway Jorge rescued a point with a second half header in front of the GA and the big Saddlers crowd went home happy. None of us at the time could really have foreseen the horrors of a new year slide down the table, a succession of insipid displays and the arrival of wasters like Peterson, Burley, Bradbury and Jermaine McSporran that Colin was about to inflict on us though. Bitter? … Me? … You bet.

My personal favourite though has to be the Stoke game of December 1998. Celebrating the birth of my second son (hi Liam) the day before, I made my way to Bescot for the game against the league leaders. I think it was the first time we had filled the stadium, which, eight years in, tells you a lot about how far we’d fallen in the early 90’s. 

Cold, wet and miserable just about sums up the weather (as well as the home town of our visitors) but under the lights it created classic English football conditions for the first big test of the Graydon era. 

As with most of the subsequent ones, we passed this test with ease. I can still replay the goal in my head now. A Pointon cross from the left, the Mighty Andy Rammell, braver than his marker as usual, connected with a classic diving header into the bottom corner. 1-0 to the Saddlers. 

From then on it was textbook Graydon, every player knew their job, we kept our shape, the back four took everything that was thrown at them and we worked and worked and worked. If it was a goal from the moment the ball left Points’ boot, then Stoke were doomed to suffer defeat from the moment it hit the back of the net. 

The rest of the season panned out like one of those football comic stories and the final day return match saw us already promoted. The hilarious descent of Brian Little’s Clayheads into mid table made things that extra notch sweeter, if that was possible. 

Oh yeah and our Liam just had to be given the middle name of Andrew in honour of his dad’s all time favourite player! 

Tomorrow we’ll be cheering on the Mighty Saddlers together. I’d settle for an incident packed draw, but if Tommy or Michael get on the end of a cross from Foxy on about 25 minutes then I’ll happily celebrate the irony.