NEWPORT AGAINST PEP!
Shop boy Willmott sets up City clash
NEWPORT COUNTY 2 MIDDLESBROUGH 0
TRY this for Cup romance. Joe Day punched the air in celebration before sprinting for the tunnel after receiving word that his wife had gone into labour with twins during the match.
It says plenty about how well Newport played that they wouldn’t have missed their goalkeeper if he hadn’t turned up at all.
It was a battering, a domination, a game so one-sided in favour of the 14th-placed club in League Two that they faced one meaningful shot all evening and threw a storm back in the other direction.
An upset? Yes. But there was not a whiff of luck about it, no smashand-grab element to the way they beat one of the best sides in the Championship to set up a home tie with Manchester City.
That fifth-round pairing is a nice narrative in its own right. But then this is a club of stories, from Day and almost every position forward. Robbie Willmott, scorer of their opener and creator of the second for Paddy Amond, was stacking shelves in Tesco less than two years ago.
At 28, Willmott is the journeyman who briefly wound up in a supermarket via Cambridge Regional College, Ebbsfleet and Bishop’s Stortford. Then there’s Amond — he scored the winner against Leicester in the fourth round after almost being lost to football a few years back. And then there’s their substitute, David Pipe, who has served prison time.
And Day. And the manager Michael Flynn, who grew up a stone’s through from Tony Pulis across the river from Rodney Parade in Pill. Now his team have thrown the fifth-ranked club in the Championship out of the Cup.
The run, factoring in the TV money for the City tie, will be worth £1.2m to a club that has grown out of bankruptcy and still hasn’t repaired a room destroyed by a tumble dryer fire two seasons ago. There’s beauty in that. And more so when you consider they have only one win in their last nine in the league and most recently got slaughtered by Grimsby. ‘They are a group of players that I want to strangle and I want to kiss, they are that bad and that good,’ said Flynn. ‘Here I thought we were superb. These players never cease to amaze me. ‘Now we have City. We have had Mauricio Pochettino here for the Tottenham game last season, Claude Puel — they are all fantastic managers —but City is the creme de la creme. Pep
Guardiola is a master, somebody I idolise. It’s funny, recently I should have gone to a kids’ party but I decided to watch Manchester City and Arsenal instead. I wish I never had, because they were absolutely breathtaking.’
He can afford to joke, and not just because of the finances achieved by this team of cast- offs. As Pulis acknowledged, his side were outclassed in all departments. They faced 12 shots in the first half and were lucky to avoid conceding a penalty when Adam Clayton clearly handled in the area before Willmott struck at the start of the second half. Willmott then took the corner from which Amond nailed the second.
Pulis said: ‘Take nothing away from Newport — they were much better than us all over the pitch. We never coped. They deserve all the credit.’