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Next Game: Banbury Away On Friday March 29th Kick-Off 3.00pm

Saturday, February 26, 2011

The Kassam Stadium

This afternoon was the first time many Hereford United supporters have visited the Kassam Stadium, the home of Oxford United.

One of the first things that is noticed is just how far out of Oxford it is. For those of us approaching Oxford on the A40, it another five or so miles but is well signposted.

And when you get there, other than the Oxford Science Park, there appears to be little but the stadium, a pub with a marquee (The Priory?), a club house, a fast food restaurant or two and a lot of parking. Not much atmosphere.

There's only three sides to the stadium. Perhaps Maxwell's money ran out. There again supposedly he had grand ideas that Oxford would be in the Premiership one day and a final end might be added.

Because of the time taken to park, some Hereford United fans only arrived inside the stadium with minutes to spare and it did seem that maybe there were not enough catering staff on duty. They had run out of steak pies and only had some Wright's pies - the same ones with the out of date labels sold at Bury earlier this season.

The stadium itself looks quite impressive but the away end did seem some way from the pitch. And although the pitch looked quite green it was slippy in places.

To their credit Oxford had designated the game as Military Day.

And at half time some military personnel tried their luck in a penalty shoot-out.


As for the game itself, suffice it to say that the Bulls were lucky to come away with a 2-0 victory.


After the game stewards and police were out in numbers to prevent trouble from so called Oxford supporters especially close to where Hereford supporters coaches were parked.

But the biggest problem for those of us who had driven to the stadium was getting from there. Luckily BBC Hereford and Worcester could be picked up on 738AM and perhaps for the first time ever in an opponents car park we were able to listen to the last hour of Trevor Owen's sports programme which had interviews from Stuart Fleetwood and Jamie Pitman plus loads of texts from happy Bulls fans.