YOU ARE KIDDING ME
Penny bought Harriers a ticket to dreamland... Hammers tore it up
ALEX PENNY took to Twitter on Friday to tell his 1,775 followers about the magic of the FA Cup.
The Kidderminster Harriers defender might be tempted to press the delete button now.
Penny was just 140 seconds away from adding his own fairytale chapter to the cup chronicles of glory and derring-do but then the famous old competition delivered an agonising reminder that for every triumph there are also tears.
Harriers, a team trying to escape from the sixth-tier of the English game, led Premier League West Ham from the 19th-minute after Penny had gleefully swept them ahead.
Led Zeppelin legend Robert Plant was one of 5,327 souls crammed into Aggborough.
Penny’s strike had him leaping around with all the glee of a teenager in the moshpit at Knebworth.
Kiddy, it seemed, were ascending the Stairway To Heaven – especially when the tie reached injury-time beyond 90 minutes with the Hammers still in hell.
But then Declan Rice came up with an equaliser good enough to illustrate why manager David Moyes reckons even £100million wouldn’t be enough to make West Ham sell.
Rice started and finished the move to take the game into extratime, beating heroic keeper Luke Simpson with a bludgeoned finish that threatened to tear through the netting.
Thirty minutes later, fate conspired against the underdogs again. This time decisively.
The injury-time board had just lit up again when Jarrod
Bowen bundled home Aaron
Cresswell’s cross.
Moyes couldn’t bring himself to celebrate either West Ham goal. He knew
Russell Penn’s underdogs deserved better.
At least
Kidderminster have the consolation of a £500,000 windfall that will enable them to fix the floodlights.
And once the hurt subsides they can get on with the business of winning promotion back to the National League.
Moyes, who opted to keep Michail Antonio in London after the striker had returned from international duty in Jamaica, also started with Rice, Tomas Soucek, Cresswell and Pablo Fornals on the bench.
It took him until half-time to make the necessary changes.
But the Hammers boss would have suspected after about five minutes that it was going to be a tough afternoon.
Kidderminster got on the front foot immediately, winning every loose ball and playing with an energy that the visitors struggled to match.
Sam Austin and Ashley Hemmings forced Alphonse Areola into early saves.
And, after Andriy Yarmolenko had been hustled out of possession, it needed a very timely intervention by Issa Diop to prevent Amari Morgan-Smith’s cross giving Hemmings a
tap-in.
Then, in the 19th minute, the stuff of dreams.
Omari Sterling’s free-kick from the left tempted Areola from his line, but the keeper didn’t lay a mitt on the ball and when it bounced down off Diop’s head, it sat up perfectly for Penny to steer home a volley.
The Harriers hero’s backstory is perfect cup material.
A journeyman full-back whose career highlights have been brief spells with Peterborough and Hamilton Academicals, he even
joined Jamie Vardy’s talent academy.
Moyes already had painful memories of
Aggborough. He was in the Preston team knocked out of the FA Cup by Kiddy 28 years ago, when a side of parttimers reached the fifth round before falling to West Ham.
Rice and centre-back Craig Dawson were sent on at the break. Cresswell, Soucek and Fornals followed.
But Simpson was inspired. One brilliant save to deny Yarmolenko was followed by a brave block from Matt Preston to deflect away Bowen’s follow-up.
Simpson excelled again to thwart Said Benrahma before West Ham’s desperation prompted Yarmolenko into trying to win a penalty with an outrageous dive.
It should have earned him a booking. Instead, it was left to the Hammers fans behind the goal to mete out punishment by issuing a few East End insults Yarmolenko wouldn’t have failed to understand.
But then came the twist in the tale. Twice.