DAY TO REMEMBER FOR COUNTY FANS
IT was the kind of moment that great memories, tall tales and lifelong club allegiances are born from. Newport County fans climbed lampposts, stood on traffic cones, leaned out of windows and perched on scaffolding – anything to catch a glimpse of the club’s once-in-a-lifetime home FA Cup clash with Spurs.
A temporarily extended Rodney Parade was packed with 9,836 fans for the historic encounter as the League Two minnows took on, and frustrated, the vaunted attack of their top flight opponents.
Some fans had camped outside the club overnight to make sure they got tickets for the historic occasion.
Jason Bond told the South Wales Argus he had parked up his van outside Rodney Parade to make sure he was in prime position – but that other fans started arriving at 4am.
Jason, of Lliswerry, whose son Charlie is 13, said: “My son adores County so I did it more for him than me.
“We went to the Leeds game. It was brilliant and he loved it. When he watched the Leeds match and County won, him and his friends were crying their eyes out.”
Older fans brought back their own childhood memories of County’s 1959 clash with Tottenham in the Cup.
The two clubs have not met since 1960, when County faced a 4-0 drubbing from their London rivals in another FA Cup fixture, and it was the first time in the history of their five meetings that Newport stopped Spurs winning.
Such was the history that the fans in Rodney Parade were starting to dare to dream it might be rewritten as the clock ticked down beyond 80 minutes with the Black and Amber side 1-0 to the good.
In the end, it was not to be thanks to unmarked Harry Kane’s late equaliser but the return fixture at Wembley that County have earned themselves will be a chance for a new set of memories to be made.
The BBC’s Dafydd Pritchard wrote that a victory against Premier League opponents 72 places above them “would have represented arguably the greatest result in Newport’s history”.
However missing out on that won’t stop Exiles fans enjoying themselves all the way to Wembley.