Near Wild Devon - Weekend Matchgoing

[RobM]

St Cuthberts 0 Musselburgh 3

First visit to a South of Scotland League ground for me. Fairly close South Challenge cup tie for much of the game but the Athletic were the more incisive, Friendly club happy to help me round my current mobility issues and onwards to a tie at Gala for the Burgh boys, good day all told.

[longeared]

Tiverton Town 1-3 Taunton Town

The Tiverton manager was wearing a suit which had me wondering if he was a thinker who was going to treat us to an examination of the finer points of possession football. As it was we instead got a huge amount of hoofball from both sides and a fair bit of needle - apparently a few of the players had been at Truro last season. Taunton took the lead from a penalty awarded about half a second before they scored, Tiverton equalised before half time then Taunton scored a header on the hour then the clincher in injury time.

Big crowd and a lively atmosphere, there was singing and both sides had drummers. Liked the ground, one you can tell has evolved over the years.

A Tiverton player went down injured though the ref played advantage, then one of his team mates volleyed the ball into his head. He could have been killed, like van Persie was.

[seand]

Tiverton Town 1-3 Taunton Town


A Tiverton player went down injured though the ref played advantage, then one of his team mates volleyed the ball into his head. He could have been killed, like van Persie was.

Good technique though, keeping his volley down enough to hit a prone players in the head. #tekkers

[wiblflibl]

With sixteen minutes played and Horsham leading 3-0 Mrs Flibl and I were starting to think our record of not having seen a home win in over a year might at last be over. Then at twenty four minutes played Mrs Flibl uttered the fateful words "it looks like we've got a defence at last". Seconds later a miss hit cross looped over the keeper and in at the far top corner.

HT Horsham FC 3-1 Haywards Heath Town

Second half and the illusion of a HFC defence disappears as HHT pull a second goal back and then equalise. But lo, a miracle! HFC retake the lead. Then concede a fourth on seventy five minutes. Yet more defensive chaos gifts HHT their fifth and winning goal in the ninetieth minute.

FT Horsham 4-5 Haywards Heath Town

The cheeseburger with onions was as good as ever.

[caja-dglh]

rather sad that the BB&F blog seems to have subsided. The "match reports" were always a great read. Could they find away onto OTF again?

[Ray de Galles]

Slough Town 1 Dulwich Hamlet 2

Conference South

My son had a cricket match rescheduled for this morning which slightly altered my plans, ruling out any 11:30 kick-off and meaning I had to choose a 3pm game closer to home which still allowed my to get to the speedway in Swindon this evening.

I went for Slough Town v Dulwich Hamlet as I knew a few people who would be there amongst the home and away supporters and hadn’t seen their relatively new ground yet. It’s one of the better examples of the increasingly common 4G-equipped, “council facility” style stadiums where almost everything is focussed on one main stand. They’ve managed to give it a proper football ground feel, even having a sort of beer garden in one corner.

There was a decent crowd of just over a thousand and an interesting contrast in styles between the home side’s pretty direct style of early long balls from the back and the more close passing play of the visitors. The latter didn’t really bear fruit until after an injury to a forward late in the first half necessitated a substitution which brought a more effective target man on in his place.

The Rebels opened the the scoring after another long boot downfield was expertly finished in the opening minute after half time. Hamlet’s keeper then kept them in the game for periods of the second half until an excellent cross was converted by their sub just before the hour and his presence disturbed the home defence enough to create a winner for another forward in the 86th minutes.

Hard to tell how the two sides are going to do having both been promoted via the play-offs last season, this result leaves them both with two wins out of seven and in the bottom third of the table.

[Gangster Octopus]

If I'm organised, I might make it to Kingsbury on Monday for Hendon-Harrow Borough.

I wasn't, so a football-free bank-holiday weekend...

[Third rate Leszno]

Yes, I was on the committee for two or three years. The club folded at the end of 2016/17, but during 17/18 the pitch was used by MK Dons U18 and, from about March onwards, by Loughton Manor -- another MK club who also played in the Spartan South Midlands League Division 2 and who were having ground and clubhouse problems of their own.

What's happened over the summer is that Loughton Manor have made the move to the Recreation Ground permanent, in so doing changing their name to New Bradwell St Peter. The general consensus locally is that this is a good thing, as it means the ground is being used for the purpose for which it was intended (there are not that many facilities with floodlights and a stand in MK, so we need to make the most of what we've got) and a long-standing club name is revived. The guys involved in running Loughton Manor and now NBSP seem like good people and their organisational skills look decent enough, so there's reason to believe the club is in pretty safe hands.

Thanks for the update, Furtho.

[Uros Predic]

Arundel 1-7 Herne Bay

Sadly this was as one-sided as the score suggests with Herne Bay 3-0 up inside the opening quarter of an hour. The hosts stuck rigidly to their game plan of trying to play the ball out from the back from start to finish, which would've been admirable had they been any good at it. Instead - in the second half in particular - they barely got out of their own half.

Oddly at the same time the match was being played, the space behind the far goal was being used as the finish for some sort of South Coast Ultra Marathon, with banners, tents, timing systems and big inflatables; right up to the pitch-side hoardings. And so the Herne Bay fans behind that goal in the first half found themselves spread either side of a giant inflatable finish line marker. This, along with it being Arundel's annual town festival weekend, meant the match was played to a background noise made up of the whir of generators powering the various paraphernalia behind the goal, coupled with the drone of acts on the nearby waterfront stage performing X-Factor-audition-versions of songs you might've previously liked, and a bloke on a tannoy trying to corral dragon boats.

Still, Arundel is a picturesque place to watch football, although more so in the winter I imagine, when you can see the castle over the road through the trees.

Oh and it has a commemorative wheelie bin.

[Bored Of Education]

Sounds like how Dulwich Hamlet played against us. They were all over us in the first half which was the worst 45 minutes I have seen us play this season. However, after half-time, we dominated and beat them but they still put up a pretty good fight. I think that their results so far and league position aren't a true representation of them but they had better start winning soon.

As it goes, yesterday's game against bottom-of-the-table Weston Super Mud was similar. After a prediction by me that we should get 10 points out of 4 games and - obviously due to this - a loss on Saturday, I was well prepared for a loss today. Weston looked like they were going to throw caution to the wind and have a go at us and this proved a fairly successful tactic which almost produced a goal when a shot hit the post then rebounded out to ex-Roman Jamie Lucas who managed to head wide from three yards out when it was literally harder, indeed miraculous, to miss. After, it seems, another half-time bollocking, City came out much better in the second half and immediately won a penalty. However, after a run of successfully converted spot kicks recently, we reverted back to our usual habit of having them saved. Unfortunately, it was the Sean Rigg, who was the successful penalty taker up until then, who had his shot saved. We were still making hard work of actually getting a goal despite playing well. However, Rigg then headed in a well-crossed ball - it was one of those beautiful headed goals that belies the idea that shots are the best goals. After that, WSM's heads went down even though they had a reasonable effort on goal in the minutes after our opener; we definitely needed to get another and it was an odd one. Rigg shot what appeared to be a scuffed weak effort which still went in. What I hadn't seen was that it came off the hand of just-signed local boy (and son of a a mate of mine and drummer in a couple of pick-up bands I have had) Joe Raynes. I had said a minute before that he was due a goal - having missed with a pretty good shot off his weaker left foot in the first half - but I doubt he will have one like this. He and the whole of the City team were pissing themselves laughing when the goal was announced as his but the WSM lot were, as you can imagine, apoplectic. Indeed, the goalie had an odd moment when, after a couple of minutes of complaining, he just sat down in the penalty area, seemingly having had enough. The physio came over to give his leg a cursory rub but I think the goalkeeper was genuinely frustrated at the injustice he had just experienced. After that, the match petered out nice and safely and we have now got two games against lower placed Hungerford Town and East Thurrock - that we will probably make similarly heavy weather of - and then difficult games against Oxford City away and Welling at home before an exceptionally hard October with only one home game in four which is against Billericay.

We are having an odd season. The football is, at times, some of the best I have seen by a City side but we are finding it hard to win with it. We have lost playing very well against Dartford and Torquay; won away playing terribly against Hampton & Richmond and lost, in a similar fashion, away to Chelmsford and won playing very good football against Dulwich and WSM but only after pretty ordinary first halves. The only really convincing win was a 3-0 win against Gloucester City. As it goes, I have got a meeting with the manager this week which involves longer-term issues than this season but it will be interesting to see if he talks about the somewhat erratic games we have had.