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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Saturday Football Match plus Incidents

On Saturday afternoon I went to Elland Road, to watch Leeds United FC vs Ipswich Town FC.
Leeds United scored first and then with a few minutes left of the 90 minutes Ipswich scored an equalizer, this with scores from elsewhere made Leeds effectively relegated.
Then their was a couple of pitch invasions by a couple of people from the Leeds crowd. With at least 5 minutes of allowed additional time at the end of the match with the matter of 1 minute left their was a mass (over 1,000 people) on to the pitch from the Leeds crowd. A photo gallery of the match are available on the BBC web site, video footage from people's mobiles is available on YouTube WARNING: This external site may contain offensive language and/or content.

The referee waited 30 minutes for the people to be removed from the pitch before playing the rest of the game, all 45 seconds of it. The match officials and Ipswich Town players where brave to come back on to the pitch in that atmosphere.

This is not what the game is about and is back to games from a number of years ago.

You can understand the genuine Leeds Fans emotions as within 6 years they have gone from a champions league semi final to effectively the 3rd tier of English football (subject to a massive 10 goal difference between two matches on the last day of the season).

The FA are going to be investigating these incidents at the match and the Ipswich Town chairman praised the Ipswich Town Fans for their calmness despite extreme provocation.

I also heard that their was fighting between the Leeds fans who did and did not go on to the pitch and also that some Ipswich Town fans got hurt while waiting for their coaches. I did not see any of this as we decided not to stay after the Leeds crowd on the pitch who where infront of the town supporters and where starting to throw things.

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