A Mist Opportunity

Carlisle United 3-1 Norwich City

The FA Cup provides two days of great footballing romance each season, first round day and third round day. In between there is the relative ugly sister - the second round. Typically this is where Norwich City's cup run would end. For the first time in almost half a century their name would be absent from the excitement of the third round draw.

The FA delayed the kick off until 5.15pm so they could screen the match live on their website making this an even later night than the previous Carlisle odyssey some seven weeks earlier. With broadband connections in Norfolk being about as reliable as an England player in a penalty shoot-out there was much scepticism as to whether this would be easy to watch for those City fans crowded round the monitors at home.

Even those of us not relying on a wobbly internet connection failed to see much. In the final five minutes before kick off a thick Cumbrian mist rolled in at such a rate we wondered whether the game would even start never mind be played to a finish. As it was the fog settled for taking the stand on the opposite side of the ground away from view, adding a sinister edge to proceedings rather than engulfing the ground completely. Given the floods which had devastated large areas of Cumbria a week earlier I suppose the weather was always going to have its say.

It turned out to an 'old-fashioned' Norwich away performance, by which I mean they were comfortably beaten. Until this season's Paul Lambert inspired resurgence, pack-of-card-style collapses away from home had been part of the canaries fabric.

They went 1-0 down here to a fabulous airborne backheel from Vincent Pericard, one of those where people always say 'if it had been scored by a Brazilian, they would never stop showing replays of it'.

Grant Holt equalised but a goal 15 seconds or so into the second half from Kevan Hurst and then Richard Keogh's header meant that Norwich's ball would not be in that funny dishwasher thing they now use for the FA Cup draw.