Carlisle United 0 Harrogate Town 1: Do you have an unbeaten run that needs to come to an end? Are you winning games just too often? Are things going disturbingly well? What you need, and fast, is some Harrogate Town.
Just one serving of these yellow-shirted men from an affluent Yorkshire spa town and the reassuring taste of frustration and defeat will return. Screw the cap back on and put them back in the cupboard until the next time you need a day of woe.
Seriously. Why always Harrogate? Why fourth-bottom Harrogate who are winless in five, against third-placed Carlisle who can’t stop winning?
A recap of United’s recurring demons against Simon Weaver’s team: abandonment, postponement, defeat, draw, defeat, defeat, defeat, postponement, draw, defeat. Bad weather, failed floodlights, flawed performances, the passing of a monarch…
Now this. Paul Simpson professes not to believe in the idea of bogey teams. It’s very hard, though, to shake that term when Harrogate invade United’s orbit.
Latest exhibit: the 82nd-minute mistake from someone whose experience and reliability has largely been iron-strong in this promotion challenge. Harrogate can be kryptonite even to a player of Paul Huntington’s consistency and years.
The next defeat was always going to come, the next check to United’s formidable march in League Two was down the road somewhere. The best thing, in the circumstances, is simply to be glad the word Harrogate will not be on Carlisle’s agenda for their remaining 17 games.
Let them bother someone else, for heaven’s sake. Carlisle are still third – a fact that deserves underlining when putting this loss into perspective – but now have a week’s worth of frustration to chew before the season’s heaviest spell of travelling begins at Wimbledon next weekend.
Yes, it just had to be Harrogate – no shots on target, umpteen corners conceded, lots of territory given away – yet there were, in fairness, reasons behind their survival and victory that go beyond curses and hexes.
Simpson was realistic enough to pinpoint them after the game, complimenting Weaver’s defence and accepting United were without enough imagination when trying to unpick them.
Carlisle, it should be made clear, did not play as though complacent in the face of one of the division’s strugglers. They went at Harrogate, tried, launched things in. The longer it went on, though, the more you recognised this was going to be one that would need settling with one moment, one break.
Six thousand fans cursed and howled when they realised it was the visitors who were going to get it. As the ball left Huntington’s foot and bobbled towards Carlisle’s goal, there was briefly a moment when you thought – hoped – it might not be going in.
That wishful thinking was punctured when United’s net billowed. Huntington is long enough in the tooth to deal with the should-haves and if-onlys of such a mishap, as well as the mental pain. He will cope with any hangover.
As must the rest of the team who, at the other end, were also imperfect this time – not in an error-strewn sense, but just short in the business of finding a way against stubborn, deep, organised opposition, whose recent recruitment of experienced defenders like Tom Eastman and Anthony O’Connor appeared to reduce their own mistake count.
That will help Harrogate in their safety battle. It also reminds Carlisle of the need to be at their brightest. The first half entailed the patience also required against Barrow four days earlier, but without the blitz that followed.
They started apace, with shots from Kristian Dennis and Owen Moxon in the first 21 seconds, and one from Morgan Feeney a few minutes later. Harrogate then started playing thoughtfully, players popping into pockets and working the ball with reasonable intent, without great devil.
One right-sided move ended with Alex Pattison wasting some Jack Muldoon service. From there, Carlisle sharpened up and applied pressure, including a wave of corners which, from Moxon, did not examine Weaver’s side quite enough, and other surges, the best of which saw John-Kymani Gordon bring down a Jack Armer lob in the box, only for Matty Foulds to move in with an excellent challenge.
That summed up United’s nearly status, and Harrogate’s defiance. Jordan Gibson went close, Moxon almost served Gordon again, Dennis glanced a corner over, then, downfield, Tomas Holy watched a testing Foulds free-kick skim the post.
If Carlisle felt they’d escaped there, the second half disputed it by the end. First, there was more effort without conclusion from United – a long-range shot from Gordon, many more deliveries from Moxon and Gibson, shots from Moxon, set-pieces from Moxon…
The Blues were not without persistence though perhaps lacked a little variety. Simpson sought it through the introduction of Joe Garner, and then Omari Patrick, and Carlisle continued to press and pester without ever getting the full measure of Eastman and O’Connor in the Harrogate centre.
On it rumbled, under greyer clouds. As rain teemed across Brunton Park, the sky then fell in as Huntington declined to head clear and, as Luke Armstrong pressed, tried to clip the ball back to Holy, instead steering it past the goalkeeper: another Harrogate moment against Carlisle in a long and wincing series of Harrogate moments.
“I knew it wasn't going to be easy – and not because it's Harrogate, and not because of what's gone on over the last however many hundred years,” said Simpson afterwards. All the same: a hundred years without them would do the Blues just fine.
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