Neil Marshall column: The longest night of my life

Sitting in a hotel room in Southend following the game on Twitter and with my dad on the phone during the penalty shoot-out wasn’t how I envisaged our big Lancashire Cup semi-final going.

I’ve recently changed jobs and was supposed to go down to this particular contract on Wednesday.

That would have been fine, but I got an email on Thursday night saying that we were now going to head down on Tuesday morning.

I just thought, oh my God, and I tried everything I could to change it but it’s just one of those things.

I had to just sit in the hotel and cross my fingers that the lads would get the job done.

I had every faith they would do it but sitting there reading about the goals going in absolutely shredded my nerves, especially when I saw it going to 3-2 and then 3-3.

It doesn’t matter how we progressed though, it was a cup semi-final and all about just getting to the Macron Stadium to face Chorley.

The new job doesn’t require me to work away that much, it just so happened that it clashed with the semi-final.

One thing’s for certain, I won’t be working on the day of the final and it will be an honour to lead out Lancaster City on the night.

In fact, I should probably just take a day’s holiday to make sure.