I'm really looking forward to the day, every part of it except the match. I imagine I'll be back drinking on Portland Street by the 60 minute mark. Incidentally, 60 Minute Mark is the nickname of one of the Tropical Palms regulars.
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Fingers crossed, eh?Comment
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Lincoln City 5 - 0 Bristol Rovers
Dunno when this is going to end, I was certain that it would be today. Highest league attendance this year because kids got in cheap. Ben House out, so Makama started, with Draper on the bench. Other than that, was the same line up as Tuesday. Wonderful to see a set piece routine work, tho not sure how much of a routine it is with the corner taker putting his hands up, and a centre half putting his hands up in the middle, but it worked. Not long after City were cut apart and Jensen made a smart save. Minutes later, a lovely cross from Sorensen was headed in from close range by Joe Taylor. Five minutes after that, Taylor nodded in his second after Makama's shot was smartly saved onto the bar.
Three up after 23 minutes, Rovers made two changes. They created a couple more good chances that Jensen did well to save, once after Sean Roughan clumsily passed the ball straight to one of their players, and on stroke of half time Erhahon got himself booked for kicking the ball away. At the time I thought it was for a deliberate handball. Regardless, it was silly and avoidable.
Second half, and once again City started strongly. Another probing run from Sorensen led to him feeding Taylor who dinked it over the keeper for his hat-trick (he does like a dink). If Luton don't stay up, I suspect Taylor will be important to them, and if they do keep up, no doubt he'll be on loan in the championship ( hopefully to us, haha).
Rovers got themselves a penalty with 20 minutes to go. A tackle from behind took the ball, but may have taken the player as well just inside the box. The resulting kick was blazed well wide, the taker going down as if he'd slipped on the surface, but looking back, I don't think he did at all. Not long after, Erhahon got his marching orders for a second yellow. A late tackle, and very stupid. I don't remember him as petulant. He was lucky to stay on the other week against Stevenage after getting his first yellow for dissent, and I hope he can knock this shit off, cos he is a very good player. We don't have a like for like replacement, so I guess either Teddy Bishop or Jack Burroughs will step up against Orient.
In the end, it mattered not as Reeco Hackett took advantage of weak Rovers defending to get the fifth with 10 minutes left. A flattering score based on the xG, but the last 3 games have seen City concede plenty of good chances whilst taking their own. It will still take something special to get the last play off place, but the belief is there.
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A decent game, no cards and played in a good spirit. It finished 4-2 to Fisher with the Hollands and Blair fans I watched it with saying Fisher were the best side they've seen this season.Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post
The first half was relatively even but Fisher slowly got on top, the second half could have got embarrassing with Fisher first to every ball and dominating the midfield.
When a game is gone, it was 4-1 with 20 minutes to go, and you've got a midweek game why do you not empty your bench and rest players?Comment
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Armadale Thistle vs Ormiston Primrose
There’s bugger-all in Armadale. Don’t take my word for it – head to your luxury master-bedroom, stroll over to your bedside table, and pick up from it your well-thumbed Lothians volume of Pevsner’s Buildings of Scotland. Browse through the reams of content and you’ll find 22 pages on Linlithgow, 15 pages on Haddington, and even three pages on East Linton (a place so insignificant locals boast that their village briefly appeared in TV drivel-fest Outlander). Pevsner’s Lothians was written by Colin McWilliams, and is a dream for the building-obsessed football-fan, providing detail on any church, house, and farm in the area that has the merest hint of architectural worth, while refraining from whinging about that offside decision in 1977 against Whitehill Welfare.
In his sizeable tome, McWilliams gives the whole of Armadale nine lines. The entrance hall in Gilmerton House gets more space than Armadale, and a couple of Armadale’s nine lines are just explaining that the West Lothian town grew in the 19th Century. Only four locations get a mention, with the first being a lamp post. The entire entry has less than five sentences, one of which is “Precious little to notice”. McWilliams may as well have said that said Armadale is the architectural equivalent of the Livingston FC defence.
There’s one building that you should visit in Armadale, even if McWilliams was far too fascinated by the “cusped and crocketed ogee canopies” at Collegiate Church in Dunglass to give it more than a few words. In the town centre, a five minute walk from Armadale Thistle’s Volunteer Park, is an early 20th century building with a dramatic, three stage tower at the front, neatly placed to get in the way of locals on their regular amble from Coaia’s Sweetshop to Queen’s Nails and Spa. The bottom stage of the tower has arches for pedestrians, the middle stage has clock faces, and the top stage has a belfry.
As you’ll notice if you can make out the brown signage on the brown ashlar blocks, the building is The Goth, a surprisingly common name for a pub in Scotland. I’ve drunk in similarly-named pubs before, having had the blessing in disguise of being unable to remember a minute of many Berwick games in Cowdenbeath due to having over-indulged in The New Goth. Close to Central Park, cheap beer, and sufficiently dark that you didn’t have to see anyone from Fife (or them to see anyone from Berwick). Being as inquisitive as most Scottish football fans, I never thought about the name of the pub, beyond assuming West Fifers had rightly maintained a long-running passion for Siouxsie Sioux.
Assuming that because a pub has the word Goth in the title means it is linked to Goth music is as idiotic as assuming that Oakland’s baseball team has achieved a reasonable level of sporting competence because they are called the Athletics. Instead, Goth pubs take their name from the Gothenburg Public House system, an approach to controlling alcohol consumption started in the Swedish town of Malmo. OK, Gothenburg.
The Gothenburg Public House system developed in the mid 19th Century, reckoning that the best way to stop crazy Swedes getting hideously drunk and doing stupid things (fighting, petty crime, signing for Aberdeen FC) was to set up pubs that regulated alcohol consumption. Goths were designed to put people off drinking, with spirits limited, no credit lines, and no gambling. You could drink but not enjoy it – a stereotypically Scottish approach. Goths were run as cooperatives, with most of the profits going to shareholders and some hived off into worthy causes.
Given Scotland’s issues with alcohol, it isn’t surprising that the country has historically had a substantial temperance movement. Dundee is the only place in the UK to have elected someone standing on a temperance ticket, Neddy Scrymgeour defeating Winston Churchill there in 1922. Scrymgeour was standing for the Scottish Prohibition Party, the most oxymoronically named political group until the recent formation of the Football Supporters Rationality Party. The strength of the Scottish temperance movement meant Goths took off in Scotland in a way they didn’t elsewhere in the UK.
Armadale was originally less keen on temperance than other Scottish towns. Malcolm Mallace led the campaign to build a Goth in Armadale, campaigning hard for funds to buy the bakery he wanted to turn into a Gothenburg Public House. Mallace struggled to raise enough to cover the rent, let alone buy the premises, Armadale folk presumably refusing to spend their money curtailing drinking when they could spend it on super-sized bottles of Frosty Jacks. Mallace had to grovel to a local coal oligarch to get his cash. The Goth opened, locals got to drink beer in a deliberately off-putting environment, and within a short time sufficient money had been raised to give local nurses some new uniforms. Armadale’s Goth is one of the few in Scotland that continues to run on the original Goth principles.
The Gothenburg approach was a well-meaning attempt to Scylla-and-Charibdis between the extremes of unlicensed bevvying and outright abolition. Goths were perhaps not the most logical solution to Scots getting wasted – as early as 1901 Joseph Rowntree visited Kelty and questioned whether the best way to cut drinking in the town was by building a Goth pub rather than, errr, just not building a new pub at all.
It seems strange to encourage people to stop drinking by setting up a pub where you couldn’t buy certain drinks, but unappetising, watered-down versions of a superior product often attract support. Why else would hundreds of people forego Premier League football, to instead watch a football match involving Armadale Thistle and Ormiston Primrose?
Armadale vs Ormiston was decent value – plugging into my spreadsheet the standard metrics (cost, entertainment, quality, importance, atmosphere, obesity of away team left-back) gave a score out of 10 of 7.536. Not superlative, but well into the 37th percentile of all games I’ve seen in West Lothian on a Friday night. Ormiston belied my impression of them from earlier in the season of talentless cloggers barely worth an appearance for Everton by leading 2-1 before sportingly letting Armadale score twice late on to win 3-2.
Football fans are obsessed with disrespect. When an established European powerhouse like Brighton rocks up to play dross like Burnley, Luton, or Man United, media hacks will search out any unguarded comment that can be interpreted as implying Brighton reckon the match might not be their toughest of the season. Supporters work themselves up around whether appropriate respect was or was not shown, further headlines result, then the story disappears, replaced by the next world-shattering piece of football punditry. None of it means anything.
The crowd at Volunteer Park was sizeable, with my estimate based on years of watching people watch people kick balls was that it was either 379 or 483. Eavesdropping the conversation of the two pensioners next to me in new Armadale bobble hats suggested this was due to groundhoppers on their annual trip back in time to Scotland. The suggestion people turned up merely to tick a new ground is ridiculous disrespect, which refuses to acknowledge that Armadale Thistle naturally attracts hundreds of fans from obscure places such as Wellingborough, Kings Lynn, and London. Expect headlines on the Armadale Disrespect in the West Lothian Courier for the next seven weeks.
The sundry members of Armadale’s distant supporters clubs will have been delighted both to see their beloved club maintain a promotion push and to see the fantastic Armadale ultras. You haven’t experienced football culture until you’ve heard twenty twelve year-olds singing that they are going to shag your women and drink your beer. For a few minutes at the start of the game, a young fan sheepishly waved a large NATO flag in Thistle’s blue and white, a reference to the administrative error that meant local rivals Bathgate spent part of the 1960’s in the Warsaw Pact. Armadale may not be big on architecture, but they are big on geopolitics.Comment
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My old uni is that. Always one of my great regrets that I never went to watch any sport in the town while I was there, particularly the rugby – they always seemed to have hoardes of fans out and about on match nights, so I imagine it was a good laugh down there. I didn't have any friends who liked rugby then though and not much more than a passing interest in it myself, only becoming more of a proper fan when living in Edinburgh with Irish and Kiwi mates a few years later.Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View PostComment
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If I could write, I'd write a book about the 10 shittiest games of football I've been to.
I would write about Motherwell 0 Airdrieonians 0 and the horrendous racist, homophobic and xenophobic abuse that Justin Fashanu received. I would write about how comically bad Gus Caesar was at defending.
I would write about England 1 Germany 0 during Euro 2000 and how I was bored to death of long diagonal balls from Beckham to Shearer to nod down to no one. I would write how Paul Scholes was a shinning beacon of hope in a sea of English shite.
I would also include Shrewsbury Town 1 Carlisle United 0.
I knew it was going to be shit when Carlisle took to the field in a change shirt that looked like something a bunch of lads would wear on a shit stag weekend in Rhyl. Carlisle's first half performance suggested that they had been on the piss in Rhyl.
Carlisle's holding midfielder (33, someone named Neal) looked like a centre-back playing out of position. A touch of an elephant, the turning circle of a super tanker, and struggling to pass wind. He had sturdy thighs, but he made our midfield of floppy haired, socks half down the shins, show ponies look technically brilliant.
As both sides huffed and puffed, misplaced passes, miss-controlled the ball and generally showed levels of incompetence unseen since Fawlty Towers, Dan Udoh scored on 40 minutes.
Floppy haired show pony in chief, Tom Bayliss played in Udoh, who took about 4, maybe 5 touches to get the ball under control, before turning and beating Harry Lewis at his near post. Lewis is the Grandson of Salop's legendary 'keeper, Ken Mulhearn. I imagined Ken turning in his grave,
The ineptitude continued just before half-time when Carlisle missed a one-on-one.
In the second half, Carlisle improved, but they couldn't get any worse without being laughed out of the ground. Shrewsbury became frantic.
The introduction of local lad Jack Price (ex-Wolves and Colorado Rapids) for the last 15 odd minutes calmed us down and he showed more quality, guile and technique than the entire other shower of shite on show had for the previous 70 odd minutes.
It's because of him and the odd flash of class from Aiden O'Brien that this game isn't the worst I've had the pleasure of watching.
That remains Motherwell v Airdrieonians.
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Hey! I did my masters there so that makes us fellow alumni. Now if only we had a cool secret handshakeOriginally posted by Jobi1 View Post
The chanting was dumb though because United just rent rhe USW sports park. There's no actual connection between the uni and the club AFAIKComment
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Cymru 21 Italia 24
Six Nations
Stadiwm y Mileniwm
A new, if entirely predictable, low.
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Wolverhampton Wanderers 2-3 Coventry City FA Cup Quarter Final
I really don't know how to describe yesterday. I put most of my hungover thoughts in the 'Wolves v Cov' thread, but now said hangover has subsided and I can now reflect.
Firstly a moan. If that's the premier league then you can shove it. Goalkeepers faking injuries so that a manager has a tactical break, the incessant diving and blasted VAR. It took nearly five minutes for our first goal to be given.
A shout out to Haji Wright and Ellis Simms. We spent about ten million on these strikers, which is unheard of for us. It's taken them a good while to get going but they have both found form and have quietened the doubters (me included).
I had no expectations and just wanted id to avoid a hammering. I honestly thought you could have given Jose Sa the man of the match with all of the saves he pulled off. We had our chances before and I thought we blew it at times but we kept going. Mark Robins has installed the 'fight to the game is won' spirit in the team. We never give up til the final whistle.
One last thing. Ten years ago yesterday we played Port Vale in league one. Crowd was 1627 at Sixfields. I cannot believe the transformation that Robins and his staff (including Dennis Lawrence who is leaving and got a good reception) has done to this club. Sisu are now gone, never to return. 25k plus gates are the norm at the CBS which feels finally like home now. We have a seminar Wembley to look forward to. Play up Sky Blues.
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HC Ocelari Trinec 2 Banes Motor Ceske Budejovice 0 (Czech ice-hockey play-off QF)
The two coaches described this as a typical first in series play-off game, but it's the first one I've ever seen where neither side has a single power-play. One man from each was sent to the sin-bin, but it was for fighting each other, they served their time simultaneously, and there was no reduction in numbers of players on the rink.
It was largely a cagey affair, yet it kept you interested. Trinec periodically turned up the intensity and put the visitors under spells of pressure, while Budejovice caused the odd problem on quick counter-attacks.
The crucial first goal arrived with 12 minutes left, and was what I'd think of as a text-book ice-hockey strike. Veteran Martin Ruzicka played a pass across the rink and Richard Nedomlel slammed a precision shot inside the net-minder's near post. Daniel Vozenilek also played his role to perfection, positioning himself so as to ensure the net-minder was unsighted till it was too late. It was Nedomlel's first goal for the club.
With 15 seconds to play, there was a pile-up on the Trinec line involving almost every player on the rink (Budejovice had six skaters by this stage). The puck somehow emerged from underneath all the bodies, and Trinec got possession of it. Vozenilek moved it forward to Andrej Nestrasil, who tapped it into the net. There was a long video review to sit through, as the refs tried to determine whether the puck had at any point crossed the line in the scramble at the other end, or whether a Trinec player had used underhand means to clear it. Eventually they were satisfied and the remaining 4.5 seconds were played out.
The two teams will be back on the same rink tomorrow to continue the series. I rather wish I could be there too. Attendance : 5,400Comment
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Wimbledon 0-2 Newport County
League Two
Attendance: 8,307
My first trip to the new Plough Lane turned out to get bit of a curse on Wimbledon. On the pitch, they were undone by Newport, really. A goal after ten minutes of each half won the game for Newport, who looked pretty comfortable running the clock down for forty minutes.
Wimbledon started really brightly, but the first goal really seemed to knock the stuffing out of them. They hit the crossbar not long after the second Newport goal. Perhaps if that had dropped a few inches lower that last half hour would have felt a little more tense. As it stood, though, people were starting to leave a bit early to beat the traffic and the final whistle was greeted with something of a resigned shrug.
But otherwise, I had a really enjoyable day. From Wimbledon station I went briefly Womble-spotting on the common - no joy - and then down to the All-England Club - essentially closed and locked up, but with people still hanging around it - before walking down Gap Road to the ground. Jesus Christ, there's some money up there, and I say that as a dyed in wool southerner. It was all open top sports cars, wholly inappropriate SUVs and artisan this, that and the other. It's been a long time since I've had cause to think, "So this is how the other half live".
And I know I'm about the fifty-thousandth person to say this, but what a set up. It's obviously home. They've retained a lot of that atmosphere that used to buzz around Kingsmeadow before matches when they played there, just on a larger, better organised scale.
It feels like home from the moment that you clap eyes on it, and the ground itself, tucked away between all these flats with their sharp angles and brown brickwork, looks terrific. I was there bright and early and with a press pass, so I got to have a good nose around first. Many thanks to the DCI for sorting out the pass, when I went to look at tickets on Friday evening they were sold out.
I had lot more to say on this (with a pile of photos), for those who care about such things:
https://unexpecteddelirium.substack....-of-the-tracksComment
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Hurst Green 1-2 Whitehaven
West Lancs League Premier Division
The right hand giveth and the left hand taketh away. A late change to the girl's plans on Saturday meant some quick research to find my closest unvisited ground that was backed up by a Tweet from the club to confirm the game was definitely on.
Hurst Green is an attractive village of old stone cottages in the Ribble Valley which largely owes its existence to the grade 1 listed Stonyhurst Hall, built in 1592 and which in 1794 became a Jesuit college. The college grounds are dominated by rugby pitches and hobbits (I can only assume that's the reason for the Tolkein Trail which I didn't have time to explore and which, had I had the time, I would have lacked the inclination) but just within it's perimeter, squeezed in behind a cemetery is the home of Hurst Green FC, founded in 1916 when there was presumably nothing much else going on the world to occupy the young men of the village.
With unbroken views across the valley towards Pendle Hill it's cracking spot to watch football and a very welcoming one too: "We're friendly folk here," declared the old boy who struck up a conversation with me in the clubhouse at half time ("I see Burnley are winning," his opening gambit, delivered with a faint air of disbelief) and to be fair he wasn't the first to have proffered an unsolicited hello.
This generosity of spirit even extended to the playing field where a woefully underhit back pass allowed the visitors' young no.9 to give them a half time lead. The home side, in black and white, got a deserved equaliser with a header from a corner mid way through the second half only for 'aven to grab the winner with a near identical header from a dead ball situation of their own. The celebrations at the final whistle from the six women of a certain age who made up over half the travelling support suggested the return leg of their five hour round trip might well have been a boisterous one.
My own trip having been an unexpected bonus it came as no surprise that my plans for tomorrow would therefore be dashed. Apparently Mrs H being offered a ticket to see A Taste Of Honey at the Royal Exchange trumps mid-table Midland League football. That's me done for the week then.
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I keep meaning to walk up Pendle again.Comment
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Witch! Burn him!Comment
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I was wondering if that was a different view of it on your pics. It's definitely felt like the seasons finally changed this weekend. We were up on the moors above Todmorden yesterday and there were people swimming in Gaddings Dam.Originally posted by Snake Plissken View PostComment
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Yeah, it sits between Burnley and Clitheroe. The drive over the Nick O’Pendle through Sabden is a lovely one in the summer.Comment
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I've neither driven it nor been up Pendle Hill but we were talking about needing new ideas for walks yesterday so I think I've just got us one.Comment
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Plymouth Argyle 0-1 Preston North EndOriginally posted by Greenlander View Post
Division 2
Att: 16,646 (Away: 1068)
Well that was fucking awful.
That's now four consecutive home defeats, no goals and the second time in those when we haven't even managed a shot on target. So Ryan Lowe did get a bit of stick but half way through the second half as we lumped aimless balls towards Whittaker and Hardie, the chants of 'Ian Foster - your football is shit' and 'Ian Foster - get out of our club' were ringing from both the Lyndhurst and the Devonport. It was toxic and it was horrible, if only Hardie's first touch had been surer after only 10 seconds or Bundu had put his free header on target just before half time or Randell and Whittaker had been more accurate things would have been different, but they didn't and here we are.
The feel good vibe around Argyle has well and truly fucked off up the A38 and we're only going one way. I don't know what happens next.
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Dagenham & Redbridge 4-1 Maidenhead United
National League
Att: 1400ish (about 100 away)
Odd one this, a scoreline that in some ways was slightly flattering and in some ways wasn’t. Daggers were on top for much of the first half without scoring, something of a habit in recent fixtures, and had seemingly allowed Maidenhead to get into the match before scoring two quick goals, both coming from full backs marauding up the pitch and getting crosses in. The first was scored by Harry Phipps, centre-midfield turned centre-half turned, in the face of an injury crisis and Freddie Sears being paid off for being hopeless, centre-forward, so the full Warhurst, showing great awareness to get in front of his defender and smashing home.
My pre-match nerves had been eased by this, but came back with a vengeance in the second half. Maidenhead had hit the bar early on, and then Daggers seemed to lose their way after getting rattled by a serious of odd refereeing decisions. Collectively the officials had been making weird decisions from the off - if we’re laughing at throw-ins and corners that are being awarded in Dagenham’s favour, it’s probably not a good sign - but when Dion Pareira seemed to be penalised for his shirt interfering with a defender’s hand, heads seemed to go on and off the pitch; the free-kick taker managed to slip and punted the ball miles wide, but shortly after that David Longe-King fell over the ball to gift a goal back and the fear had very much set in.
Earlier in the season this would have led to a complete meltdown, but the team seem to have developed a bit more resolve of late and steadied themselves, played sensibly, didn’t give up any particularly glaring chances and then put a bit of gloss on the result with a couple of late goals. The first came from a nonsense penalty for a handball I can’t imagine any of the officials actually saw, and then the fourth… well, that was quite the series of events.
First Harvey Kedwell was knocked flying and we howled for a penalty, not noticing that Lewis Page had snuck up behind him and was slamming in a well-earned first goal for the club. No sooner had we realised that a goal had been scored then attention turned to the back of the stand behind the goal, where a lone Maidenhead supporter had snapped and scrambled across the netting, seemingly with the intent of taking on all of the Dagenham support on the other side of the stand. (Well, I say lone, someone did follow him at first, perhaps to point out that this maybe wasn’t a good idea, but then thought better of it and ran back again.) A lone Dagenham supporter came to meet him and then the realisation seemed to dawn that, as the stewards were still huffing and puffing their way up the stairs and weren’t going to separate them for a while, they were going to have to have a fight. And by ‘fight’ I mean ‘take up a stance like two people who’ve never heard the word “punch” let alone ever thrown one, then flail at each other uselessly, making zero contact and looking like idiots’. I know we’re supposed to tut and disapprove, and if there’d been even a hint of violence involved I would be hanging my head, but all we could do when confronted with this useless spectacle was laugh. We laughed, and waved our hands at each other in imitation of surely the most inept fight in human history, and laughed and laughed again.
A good three points in the end, Daggers into the top half… and yet, with several of the other teams in the morass winning against play-off contenders, still only six points out of the relegation places. Stupid league.Comment
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K Sports 1 Larkfield and New Hythe 4
SCEFL Division 1
Att: 82
My last two encounters with Premier League football, with all the poor decisions, cowardly officials and miserable defeats, depressed me so much that I was relieved to get back to a bit of good old 10th tier entertainment. I had been to the Cobdown Stadium before but to see K Sports' tenants Greenways, so I suppose I could count this as half a tick. And it was a local derby. L&NH are from only 3 miles away on the opposite side of the M20 and the majority of the 82 people in attendance appeared to be supporting them. They are in a play-off position, having recently beaten runaway leaders Whyteleafe, so their comfortable win was not really a surprise.
They had the game wrapped up by half-time. Their pacy right winger created the first, scored the second after a solo dribble and the number 8 scored the third with the best goal of the evening. They added a fourth early in the second half but K Sports deserve praise for the way they kept going and were rewarded with a last minute consolation. It was a decent game where both teams tried to get the ball down and play. No VAR, no time-wasting, no writhing around on the floor and no arguing with a referee who could be proud of his performance.
And a pint of Madri and a chilli con carne in the clubhouse before the game also went down very well.
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Biggleswade Town 2 Biggleswade 0
Southern League Division One Central
Att: 199 and 7 (SEVEN) splendid dogs (a new record), one of which coveted my spicy bratwurst.
To deepest Bedfordshire! I'd last been near here at an owl sanctuary many years ago and before which I lived for about eight years with a large cheese plant called Mr Biggleswade.
For a market town of 22,000 inhabitants, to have three football clubs is bold. Town (the Waders) were formed in 1874, being originally plain Biggleswade before becoming Biggleswade & District until settling on Town after the Second World War. Biggleswade FC are of a much more recent vintage, formed in 2016 as a spin off of Town's under-18 side so that competitive opportunities in senior football would be opened up for the players. From the Youth League they were accepted at Step 6 in the Spartan South Midlands Division One and until recently also shared Town's ground, although they have now decamped to nearby Bedford Town's New Eyrie. A somewhat unusual state of affairs of a father and son team and quite a crowded local footballing landscape.
The home team have pootled around the United Counties, Eastern Counties and South Midlands leagues over the years and are eleven times winners of the highly prestigious Bedfordshire Senior Cup, one behind Dunstable Town and one ahead of plucky minnows Luton Town.
Langford Road was opened for the start of the 2008/09 season, the club having previously played at Fairfield Road next to Biggleswade United's ground (and United are still there and somehat surprisingly have Spanish football expert Guillem Balagué as Chairman). As ever, I contemplated sacking off the game and having a curry and four large Cobras instead, but my pointless quest got the better of me and I walked under the A1 to the ground. The noise isn't too bad and the setting is otherwise rural, with a green and white seated main stand, a small low covered standing area opposite and one between a goal and the corner flag. I wonder if the ground is visible from the motorway. Perhaps just the floodlights due to trees.
This rescheduled fixture was second versus thirteenth and I was expecting to be royally entertained for my ten pounds. The game was delayed by fifteen minutes as a linesman pulled his hamstring in the warm-up and a replacement was sourced.
The first half was disappointingly niggly and fragmented. Just as I was discussing that it would be a 1-0 game with the St Ives fan next to me, Biggleswade took the lead with a six-yard volley by Harry Draper from a perfect cross out wide on the right.
Perhaps he game is best summed up by the following exchange on approximately 75 minutes:
Fan: 'How long left, lino?'
Replacement linesman: 'Too long'.
On 76 minutes there was a second Waders' goal to seal the result (Harry again) and on 83 minutes a home penalty was saved by the keeper diving low to his left. And so it remained, the highlight of the evening being the multiple flavours of dog spectators in attendance.
Last edited by The Mighty Trin; 20-03-2024, 12:13.Comment
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Parkgate 0-4 Shirebrook Town
Northern Counties East League Division One
Fourth v first on a mild evening brought an huge crowd to Roundwood, the size of it was such I had to stand somewhere not my usual spot so here's a different photo for you all. Shirebrook scored while I was still staking out a place and that set a marker for the evening. They were good, their number 10 Nat Watson ran the show with an ability to pick a pass and find space, they were good at switching play, they picked up loose balls and could break at speed (what I believe tactic weirdos call a "transition") and were able to both cause and take advantage of Gate's errors. They were three up at half time which seemed an effective way of mitigating Gate's habit of coming on strong second half and were able to see the game out from there. Gate still have a lot of games in hand but a point from two tough home games this week with Wakefield away coming up on Saturday means that the safety net is looking a bit frayed all of a sudden. Don't. Fucking. Blow. It. Not least because I don't fancy having to play these again in the play offs.
(Edit; crowd given as 315, Parkgate's biggest home league attendance for at least twenty years and quite possibly ever. Plus at least one dog)
Last edited by longeared; 19-03-2024, 23:53.Comment
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