Not That Creepy - Weekend matchgoing

[Gangster Octopus]

Wembley score a lovely worked goal to make it 2-0.

[Gangster Octopus]

Fabulous ball out to the right, a good cross: 3-0.

[Gangster Octopus]

Daft penalty for Wembley.

[Gangster Octopus]

Scored. 4-0.

[Snake Plissken]

I hate picking on individual players which means I have a huge pentup torrent of abuse that should really be aimed at Jeff Hendrick.

[Snake Plissken]

I genuinely would rather play with 10 men. There would be no difference.

[Arturo]

Bolton got their 0-0 and fair play to them. Norwich had no idea how to break them down apart from endlessly passing from side to side. It was dismal stuff.

[Corieltauvian]

Leicester 1-1 Stoke

I’d rather just forget the whole thing.

[Gangster Octopus]

Finished 4-0.

Rotherham beat the vile Donny with two injury time goals. Wealdstone muller Billericay to get into the Trophy semi-finals. And I see Wembley score four.

It doesn't get much better than this!

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Kells 30, Army 4. Very one sided, Kells scored early and dominated, and should really have kept a clean sheet. On the way back to the club house after I heard one Army player bemoaning to another that they were below strength as some players hadn't been made available for the game, and what did 'they' expect to happen?

[Snake Plissken]

Copy and pasted from elsewhere.
---

Back from the t'Turf. Southampton are comfortably the worst side to visit all season and offered absolutely nothing up front all game. The only reason they got a draw was because in the last minute, referee Bobby Madeley turned into N'Golo Kante and broke up a Burnley attack in the centre circle. The ball broke loose to the Saints, who went forward, crossed it, Madeley ignored Kevin Long being dragged to the ground and the shot was fired home. Saints completely, utterly, did not deserve that. With that, and McCarthy not getting called for a clear handball outside the area, Burnley screwed over by the reffing again.

Now, you may be thinking I'm going to go off on one of my almost patented rants about the standard of officiating and how it seems to exist to fuck Burnley over but...

Did the ref cost the Clarets their first win in 11 games? Well,technicallyyes. But I'm not going to rant and rave about it, because where Southampton didn't deserve that equaliser, Burnley absolutely, definitely did. They played like a bag of spanners. Part of Burnleys comeback against City was because Gudmundsson and Lennon swapped back to their natural wings, having played on the "wrong" side for the match. Here, they spent 90 mins playing on the wrong side, nullifying their threat. Sam Vokes, scorer of goals in the last three games against Saints, was on the bench. Jeff Hendrick was allegedly on the pitch and as I tweeted during half time, to call him lightweight would be insult to party balloons.

Pellegrino threw three attacking players in to try and get something, anything from the game. It wasn't working. But Dyche did nothing to counter. He could have substituted Hendrick for N'Koudou, and given us some counter attacking pace. Or Hendrick for Vokes or Chris Wood and gone 4-4-2 against a very wobbly defence. Or Hendrick for Dean Marney, shore up the midfield for 4-5-1.

Dychecould have done any of these things. It might not have improved mattersbut it absolutely would not have made it worse. We were bad, yet 1-0 up against a terrible side and there on merit. However, Dyche made no tactical changes, no substitutions and in the dressing room he and the players can curse bad luck all he likes, at some point they have to look in the mirror and say they could have done a thousand things to win 2-0 or more, and did none of them. Except Hendrick, because if he looked in a mirror his reflection would still be completely fucking invisible. The boos at full time were not just for the officials, and the post game mood places blame as much on the manager as the ref. It takes a lot for us to have a go at our manager, but he screwed this one up.

Should we have dropped two points because the ref couldn't get out of the way? No. But we were bloody well asking for it for the whole 90 minutes.

[Merlin the happy pig]

Royston was frozen off, so ended up watching Wingate & Finchley 0-0 Dulwich Hamlet. A bit of a midfield battle, but not a bad match. Main stand is quite interesting.

[Uros Predic]

Rotherham beat the vile Donny with two injury time goals.

Vile Donny?

Holmesdale 1-0 Gravesham Borough

One of the assistant referees asked me why on earth I was watching this game, which does more than any words from me could to sum up the quality of the match. Big pitch, massively underused - neither side kept the ball for three consecutive passes and instead everyone present on pitch and in dugout instead put all their energy into questioning and heckling every single decision the referee made, to the point of tedium.

Holmesdale is on the outskirts of Bromley, and their set-up is remarkable rustic for a ground inside the M25; including a very precarious looking homemade grandstand; horses watching on behind one goal; two men digging a hole behind the other. They also boasted and incredible array of corner ground clutter including a wheelbarrow filled with old Quality Street tins and copies of The Sun, and the remnants of a pool table.

[RobM]

Mighty Burgh 3-0 local derby win against Haddington. Loads of points clear now.

Anti-repression gig in Edinburgh after which doesn't seem to have yet ended repression.

[Aitch]

3 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Novel time for a kick-off but this is the Dutch third division (fourth tier) and it's league leaders SV Spakenburg against mid-table Harkemase Boys. Both sides get off to a lively start with lots of hopeful balls punted up-field. The Boys settle down quicker and there are some good moves up both wings and two or three lively shots well-saved by Leon ter Wielen in Spakenburg's goal. Spakenburg counter chiefly down the right wing, with wingback Giovanni Gravenbeek causing problems. Most of them cut out by the excellent Kellian van der Kaap in central defence to keep the scores level, but just before half time he breathes just too heavily on a passing Spakenburg attacker and the ref awards a free kick inches outside the box. Van der Kaap gets an undeserved yellow and the Harkemase trainer gets a red card for casting doubt on the ref's ability. The free kick is skyed about 50 feet over the crossbar. 0-0 at half time and Spakenburg's trainer, John de Wolf (for it is he), works wonders in the dressing room. Spakenburg take the lead five minutes after the break, a neat goal well worked from the left wing, put away at the second attempt. The second follows ten minutes later, this time a header but again from the left wing, and the third comes with 20 minutes to spare. Both sides play out the remaining time. Second place Almere City lose to third place Quick Boys, so Spakenburg consolidate their lead. De Wolf has been given one challenge for this season: get promoted as Champions or get sacked. So far so good. Cycling back from Spakenburg I got a puncture five miles from home. It's going dark, it's well below freezing and the wind is slicing me apart. Only one thing to do. Wait 30 minutes before the wife comes in the car to pick me up.

Utrecht against Twente this afternoon.

[Third rate Leszno]

Marine 1-3 Mickleover Sports

Mickleover much the better side in what turned out to be an action-packed afternoon. The Akinfenwa-esque figure of Pablo Mills (below, centre) commanded the defence against a rather disjointed Marine attack.



The disparity in physicality between the sides was even more obvious when Marine winger da Silva, all of 5'7", was stood next to the Sports left sided defender, who the programme reckoned was 6'6" (below, left)



Having cruised into a 2-0 HT lead, things went briefly off the rails for Mickleover when their player manager John McGrath was red carded for two fouls in quick succession. Here he traipses off while some local teenagers call him a bell end.



Soon after that, Marine had a penalty well saved by the Mickleover keeper, who was beginning to time waste and generally raise the hackles of the locals behind his goal. A bit of multi-player scuffling soon followed which saw his shirt ripped right across and down the front. The ref wasn't impressed with his new low cut blouse look and we had a farcical 7 minute wait whilst Clinton Morrison ran round to the dressing room, couldn't find a replacement jersey and offered up a training top instead. The ref eventually let him wear that, provided he pulled a high viz bib over top of it. Very fetching.



Mickleover then scored a third from the promising-looking Andy Dales, before a Marine sub curled in the best goal of the game as a consolation. With 9 minutes of added time and Marine in no shape to get back into it, I left before the end, probably missing a memorable cacophony of abuse raining down on the keeper as he left the field.

[Bored Of Education]

Oddly ended up walking across Bath with the wife to see - for numerous reasons - only the second half of the city's second club Larkhall's match against Cirencester. Plain Ham is in a beautiful location at the edge of town with lovely views across Wiltshire. Both teams play two divisions below Bath City but the quality of football, refereeing and, indeed, pitch seems much lower yesterday. The only other time I have seen Larkhall, they played very well and kept a very strong Hereford side to 2-2. Yesterday wasn't so good. To be fair to both teams, they didn't have much chance of playing passing football along the ground with the rutted turf but they kept on trying passes and moves that just weren't coming off. When we got there, it was already 2-1 to the Larks so we were worried that that was all the goals (well, I was; Mrs Bored was just happy to be sitting down). However, the Larks scored a header after 10 minutes of the second half and I thought it may be a rout. Cirencester though made the most of two appalling goalkeeping howlers to draw level at 3-3 which is where it stayed. Shame as the keeper was good and apparently made some great saves in the first half. As always, it is nice to be so close that you can hear the player's and manager's comments and both teams were impressively sweary. I hate to have a go at refs especially at this level but the guy here let everything go. There was a bit of play acting, to be fair, but he then decided it would be better to ignore everything. From WFD's and Third Rate Les Bleaus photos, I am assuming that everyone had that low sum yesterday which made it a toss-up between standing in the warm sun and not being able to see or having a good view and freezing. Anyway, always nice to visit a lovely club and ground that feels like an away trip even thought it is only on the other side of Bath. The walk back to the pub through allotments and fields was novel as well.

[shadsworth cloud]

Accrington 1 Cambridge 0.
It was not a great game, the pitch was a bit dead and there was a vile cold wind blowing across. The ref was rather inept which made things worse and he booked 2 players for dissent when they were totally justified in telling him he was so poor.
But a home win, coupled with nearly all our rivals dropping points made for a happy post-match.
At Accrington now, they have Happy Hour after the match where all drinks are £2 and if the home team win they are £1 for an hour. So when the final whistle goes on the match, 50% of people cheer and applaud the team off and the other 50% head for the bar.
Great atmosphere in the bar. Who would have known that cheap beer could be so popular?

[Logan Mountstuart]

Aitch, you know Nijkerk are better than Spakenburg don't you? Agree with you about the wind. Bitter.

[Southport Zeb]

Second match of the afternoon for me was Stockton Town v Windsor in the quarter finals of the FA Vase. Not a particularly exciting ground - it's an artificial pitch round the back of a school with a couple of AtCost stands next to it. There was a crowd of about 1200 present, which meant there was not a lot of room.

Windsor, who I think appear in the kits thread due to their miscoloured union flag style strip, had a few chances early on, but as soon as Stockton took the lead it seemed unlikely that they would get back into it. The home side got a second goal just before half time and that was that.

I've seen three of the four Vase semi finalists during their runs this season (all except Marske) and I think Stockton were the least impressive. They are certainly the least travelled, having had one away trip in seven rounds, which was a 70 mile round trip to Whickham.

[NickSTFU]

Ah, that's where John McGrath ended up.

Useless bellend.

[Big Boobs and FIRE!]

As yesterday I managed to turn up a day early for the rugby in Coventry, and it was a mad dash back to Normanton for a small part of a not very exciting game, and today was an absolute dicking by Bradford of whatever South Wales Scorpions are called this week, I can't be bothered to do a report.

Instead I've gor round to writing one up from the weekend before christmas, where I had no work on so spent some time getting our analysts to work out which place name is mentioned most times in the top nine levels of British football. I was intrigued to find that Biggleswade had more mentions than either London, Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds. So it was off to explore the previously unknown hot bed of football.

Biggleswade United v Biggleswade, Hertford Town v Maldon & Tiptree. Thermal convection in British rail designed train cabs. Mysterious perimeter cables. Psychotic tricycle riding. The challenge to name three places in Bedfordshire. Epicentre of the UK muesli industry. Midfield tussles through the medium of the final days of the class 315 EMU. Lots of missed goals. All through a collection of blurred photos taken into direct sunlight.

[NickSTFU]

You should have just tugged that wire....

[Merlin the happy pig]

Jupiler Pro League. RSC Anderlecht 5-3 Royal Excel Mouscron. Mouscron came to defend, which they did rather unsuccessfully for an hour after which they were 4-0 down, admittedly helped by a very soft penalty for Anderlecht just before half-time. At that point Mouscron decided to make a game of it and pulled 3 goals back before Anderlecht scored with the last kick of the game after the Mouscron 'keeper made a poor attempt at a headed clearance.

[Cal Alamein]

I am currently on the prototype refurbished Pacer, listening to a human statue arguing with a call centre about home contents insurance premiums.



Life sure is a rich tapestry.

Having seen dozens of these folk in our European travels, that image and your transcription made my day.