Fumes after penalty call crushes Boro’s dream

THIS was one FA Cup miracle too far for Stevenage but for a giddy few minutes it did appear as though the conquerors of Aston Villa might claim another scalp. When Jamie Reid burst through to cancel out Jacob Brown’s early goal for Stoke, against the run of play, there was a sense that the League Two underdogs could cause more mischief. Alas, it was not to be for Steve Evans and his doughty team. The celebrations among the 3,300 travelling Stevenage fans had barely died down, the smoke bomb they chucked on to the pitch barely burned out, when Josh Laurent restored the home side’s lead. The Stoke captain’s screamer was followed by a Lewis Baker penalty which left Evans tailing referee David Webb down the tunnel. Evans claimed Webb watched a big-screen replay of Jonathan Tomkinson’s challenge on Brown to concede the penalty and then admitted to Stevenage players that he had got the call wrong. ‘It’s never a penalty, it’s a great challenge,’ said Evans. ‘He is then watching the replay as we kick-off and running about telling my players he has got it wrong. How does that motivate my players to come back? Somebody needs to explain that. The referee has effectively killed the cup tie.’ Stoke manager Alex Neil said: ‘At 1-1, we did start thinking about what happened at Villa in the last round. We had done more than enough to win the game comfortably, but Josh Laurent settled us down again.’ Stoke should have been out of sight long before Reid’s leveller, with Stevenage goalkeeper Taye Ashby-Hammond, on loan from Fulham, helping his side stay in touch. The cup run offers Stoke some respite from the drudgery of lower-half existence in the Championship, but Stevenage will return to the job of chasing promotion to League One. They made the worst possible start, with Brown afforded an embarrassing amount of time and space to slam home after Ben Wilmot nodded on Bersant Celina’s third-minute corner. After Ashby-Hammond made crucial saves to deny Celina and Ireland’s Will Smallbone and Max Clark cleared Wilmot’s header off the line, Reid skipped around the goalkeeper from Jake Taylor’s flick-on to draw Stevenage level. But Laurent stepped in from the right to pick out the top corner from 30 yards just three minutes later and when Baker thumped in from 12 yards, that was that.