Terrace Talk: Cups offer suitable reward for winter drudgery

The Red Army are on proper full-scale excited manoeuvres week, via massed visits to Blackburn, St Etienne, and Wembley, with the scent of silverware in spring nostrils.

A classic cup invasion, a novel Euroaway, and a final; suitable reward for some of the winter drudgery we’ve endured.

Certainly, tickets were surprisingly hard to come by for yesterday’s trip down memory lane to the land that time forgot, which one might take to be a sign of swelling enthusiasm in the fanbase, given that we had a huge allocation.