Southend (2005)
2003 saw us go to Cardiff as the underdog, but in 2005, we were on the cusp of the automatic promotion hunt. After beating Scunthorpe 2-0 on Sky TV, I thought we might do it, but instead, the play-offs waited. Macclesfield were brushed aside, and standing between us and the third tier were Steve Tilson’s Southend. For me, Steve Tilson features in more games that hurt than Argentina.
This one hurts most of all, because had we been promoted, I genuinely feel the team could have stayed together, and we’d have gone again. The 2005/06 League One was weak, Forest aside, it was our peers, Huddersfield, Scunthorpe and the like, teams we’d played before. Southend won the division, and yet they huffed and puffed against us.
Yeo scored, but it was ruled offside, which was tight. Southend claimed a penalty late on that they didn’t get, perhaps a let-off, before extra time. The changes killed us: Yeo, Taylor Fletcher and Francis Green had run themselves into the ground, but their replacements were Lee Beevers, Derek Asamoah and Matt Bloomer. Our attacking threat went, and Bloomer’s clearance was smashed home by Freddie Eastwood to give them a 1-0 lead, doubled late on as we chased.
Yeo, Taylor-Fletcher, Gain, Butcher, Futcher and Sandwith all left. While the same Southend team went up again, we were ripped apart, and in truth, despite having another year, the Keith Alexander era felt like it ended here, on a sweltering day in Cardiff. This was a different pain: I expected us to go up. It was a failure right on the cusp of greatness, the end of an era, a grand reset that, despite a few little highs, would lead to relegation six seasons later.
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