What a Night! Cardiff Reach Play Off Final!

Wow! What a night that was…

I don’t think I have experienced more highs and lows, a sense of massive disappointment only to be replaced by that of hope and overwhelming elation all in the space of two and a half hours.

I am of course talking about the Football League Championship play-offs.

The second-tier competition which is more lucrative than even the Champions League and worth an estimated £90 million to the winner

I’m not going to make this a boring post about how the play-offs work but my team, Cardiff City beat Leicester City on penalties to reach the play-off final held at the famous Wembley Stadium where they will face Blackpool.

The winner earns a lucrative promotion to the Premier League and can rub shoulders with the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal.

Last night, I didn’t think we’d make it as Cardiff managed to throw away a 2-0 aggregate lead and were losing 3-2 with time running out.

I was even planning some sort of sombre blog post about why supporting a “nearly team” such as Cardiff is a lot like trying to make it in online business (I’ll save that one for the future!)

But, we found a third goal to level the score and with no further goals after extra time, only a penalty shoot-out would decide who would go to Wembley.

They scored. We scored.

They scored. We scored.

They scored. We scored.

The standard of penalty taking under such immense pressure was outstanding until Leicester took their fourth penalty.

Their player, some guy called Yann Kermorgant who I had never heard of before, tried to be too clever and gave the Cardiff goalkeeper an easy save.

We scored our fourth penalty and Cardiff keeper David Marshall saved superbly from Leicester’s final effort from the spot to seal a 4-3 victory in the shoot-out.

Delirium ensued and was followed by a half-hearted pitch invasion which seems to be flavour of the month around football gounds this May and topped off with a couple of streakers.

In all and I know it’s a cliche, it was a match that had everything – ups, downs, hope, fear, anxiety, jubilation and of course… penalties:

I know the video is poor but the penalties were taken at the opposite end of the field to where I stood.

I just hope the forthcoming iPhone 4G has a zoom feature. Either that, or I’ll have to invest in a Flip or something similar.

Any suggestions, put them in the comments below!