Harrogate Town opinion: AFC Wimbledon punished for time-wasting, but Easter drama was not good for the heart

Football, eh? You can’t predict it and there’s really no point in trying.

Following a bank holiday weekend during which Harrogate Town conspired to lose two matches, before coming back from the dead in both, I’ve given up trying to analyse the remaining fixtures. What will be will be.

If you’d have sought my opinion 88 minutes into the visit of AFC Wimbledon on Good Friday, I’d have had good money on us sliding into the bottom two, such was the way we’d played against a team on a run of one win in 13 matches.

This was a game we desperately needed to get something from, yet the visitors were seemingly coasting to a two-goal victory. Even though the Dons had previously thrown away 28 points from winning positions this season, there didn’t seem to be any way back for Town.

This was despite an improvement in performance since Warren Burrell came on at right-back halfway through the second period, freeing up George Thomson to bolster the previously over-run and often by-passed midfield.

As the formation change pushed Town up the pitch and gradually back into the game, Wimbledon started to show why they’ve lost so many points from a winning position. Instead of going for the jugular and a third goal, they opted to employ the full range of time-wasting tactics.

Players staying down ‘injured’ when we showed signs of building up a head of steam, long delays at throw-ins and slow substitutions may have frustrated us in the stands, but these actions can also have a negative effect on the psychology of a team performing them. Even so, little did we realise the depth of the drama to come.

The referee had been fairly dire all afternoon. Being generous, you could say he kept play moving, but that was only because he seemed to be half a yard behind it most of the time and blind to obvious infringements, completely failing to punish Wimbledon’s blatant shirt-pulling antics.

He couldn’t have failed to see it, it was so obvious even from a distance, so you can only assume that he’s one of a growing brand of referees that seem to think it’s legal.

Whilst the visitors were taking all the time in the world, completely un-molested, over a throw-in in front of the main stand, he was alerted by his linesman to comments from the Town bench and came across to show assistant manager Paul Thirlwell the red card.

I’d just about given up on the match ever re-starting as the man in the middle waited for Simon Weaver’s number two to trudge slowly around the pitch and down the tunnel before giving the signal to proceed. No wonder the slow throw-ins were going unpunished, or so I thought.

When Kazeem Olaigbe finally danced his way through the middle and fed Luke Armstrong to halve the deficit in the 89th minute, we cheered as if it would be a consolation only.

As the six minutes of additional time ebbed away to a backdrop of visiting players taking an age to throw the ball back into play near the corner flag, the referee added on two extra. Our opponents couldn’t complain.

It was these additional two minutes that turned the game. Wimbledon broke through one-on-one with Mark Oxley and our stopper brilliantly spread himself to keep us in it. Town then went down the other end and won a last-gasp corner.

Oxley ran up for it, Matty Foulds swung the ball into a packed six-yard box, their keeper flapped at a punch and Sutton slammed the loose ball into the top corner amidst the chaos.

We celebrated as if we’d won promotion, the roar was off the scale, the corner flag went flying as Town players piled on the scorer in the corner and boss Weaver leapt up onto the barriers in front of us and screamed at the crowd.

The final whistle went as soon as the game re-started. Inadvertently, we’d profited from the sending off and the referee had finally punished the time-wasting properly.

It was a bittersweet moment. We’d drawn a match we really needed to win, in the most dramatic of circumstances, having been second-best for most of it. It partially made up for the loss of a two-goal lead to Crewe in identical circumstances a few weeks ago.

I say partially, because we’d have been one point better off winning that one and losing this one. I need to let it go.

The tension’s getting to me, so I couldn’t bear tuning into the match on Monday down at runaway league leaders Leyton Orient. I ducked out of B&M in Apperley Bridge at one point under the guise of checking on the dog in the car and discovered we were two goals down again.

Town were never going to come back from that down in East London so I decided to give the entire thing a wide berth, leaving the radio firmly switched off on the journey home.

Imagine my shock on switching it on when I arrived back in Harrogate to find the scores level.

Not wanting to be a bad luck charm, I promptly switched the radio off again for the final five minutes. At least I spared my heart. Football, eh?