Monthly Archives: July 2013

Football Played On Paper

15 Monday Jul 2013

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Saturday 13th July 2013 ko 15.00

Pre-Season Friendly

ERITH TOWN 1 (Quartey 21)

THURROCK 3 (Griffin 25 Grimaldi 67 Perkins 90)

Att 62

Entry £5

Programme None

Played at Badgers Sports & Social Club, Eltham (Cray Valley Paper Mills FC)

If my first game had a tough of the agricultural about it, then the second was definitely suburban! A quick blast along the A20 changed the locale completely, although there’s no lack of open spaces, the Civil Service Sports Ground is the other side of the road after all.

Its been a few years since I saw Erith at their home ground, The Erith Stadium. It’s not ideal, being first and foremost an athletics stadium, so the uncovered seats were a long way from the action, and the necessity to have a players tunnel made ground grading difficult. The seats did get covered, but nevertheless the club decided to move and groundshare at Cray Valley for this coming season. Continue reading →

Progress

15 Monday Jul 2013

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Saturday 13th July 2013 ko 13.00 (approx’ !)

Pre-Season Friendly

SUTTON ATHLETIC 1 (Desanges 84)

V.C.D. ATHLETIC 3 (Duckworth 4 Ramsamy 35 Greaves 45p)

Att 47

Entry £3

Programme- None (old copy free)

Bacon & Egg baguette £3.50

I suppose the first question for me to answer is which Sutton?  Its Sutton-at-Hone, a village 2 miles (3 km) south of Dartford in Kent, and should not be confused with the London borough of Sutton of Sutton United fame far to the west. This is the Sutton of the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. The humanitarian order was set up in the Middle Ages to provide assistance for sick of injured pilgrims in the Holy Land. The base in Sutton was established in 1199 and the building is now a National Trust property.

Except, at no point was I actually in Sutton! With the introduction of the Kent Invicta League the club realised that their home at The Roaches Recreation Ground, was never going to fulfil ground grading requirements so the club moved 2 and a half miles across the M25 to Lower Road, Hextable, a village I managed to misspell twice as Huxtable! Clearly the Cosby Show was more of an influence than I thought!

Its tucked away near the end of the lane, so much so I could have easily turned round, thinking I’d missed the place. It’s a work in progress, but a lot’s happened just to get this far. Tonnes of earth and rubble were moved to level the pitch, and the clubhouse and changing-rooms provide the club with an income, and a sense of home too. Future plans include floodlights on 6 pylons, two prefabricated stands on the mound side, a perimeter fence and fully-tarmacked car park. Its ambitious, but at no point did I feel that any of these plans wont come to fruition. One little money spinner that is well worth a mention is their baguettes, mine was excellent, well worth not stopping elsewhere for.

The game was always going to be tough for Sutton, with the opposition playing 2 notches higher in the Isthmian League Division One North. That small fact created a smile when I confirmed this with one of Vickers Crayford Dartford’s (to use their full name once!) officials. Her response was

” Nah mate, we play in the Ryman League!” Ryman of course are the sponsors of the Isthmian League… Oh well!

In sweltering heat, it wasn’t easy to watch a game, let alone play in one! VCD controlled the game, and the wide men Enoch Adeji and Damian Ramsamy were at the start of most good things the visitors did. They rattled in three goals before half time, changed half the team for the second half, declaring in the process. With a few minutes I began to edge towards the car, as the time was against me to get to the next game. The final whistle went, I started the engine and drove away, glancing behind at the dust cloud as I went.

The Long Game

12 Friday Jul 2013

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Friday 12th July 2013

The Old Berkley Golf Course, Boars Hill

If you leave Oxford, heading due south and cross over the A34 and head towards Abingdon, you’ll soon see the turn-off for Boars Hill. There are many reasons to visit, the perpendicular tower of Ripon Hall, once an Anglican theological college, but now rebadged Foxcombe Hall, and now used by the Open University.

There’s also Lord Berkley’s Gold Course, Abraham Wood, and Chilswell Fields, fine examples of acid grassland, immortalised by Matthew Arnold in his poem Thyrsis. Here’s the excerpt I have in mind.

Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,
Up past the wood, to where the elm-tree crowns
The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?
The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,
This winter-eve is warm,
Humid the air; leafless, yet soft as spring,

The tender purple spray on copse and briers;
And that sweet City with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening,

And it’s those dreaming spires that is the reason I’ve wanted to come up here with a camera for years! The view is spectacular, although the elm tree is , in fact an oak! The view is often obscured by cloud, or haze, and all too often I was in the wrong place at the right time. The more eagle-eyed amongst you will note that the compact camera has made a reappearance, as I wanted a wide-angle view that I can’t get with the SLR.

But let’s not get too worried about the technicalities, just enjoy the view. It’s quite something isn’t it?

 

Alfred the Victor

12 Friday Jul 2013

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Wednesday 10th July 2013 ko 19.45

Kevin Sinton & Colin Blunsden Memorial Match

WANTAGE TOWN 2 (Odhiambo 33 Lachacz 54)

OXFORD UNITED XI 1 (Ashby 61)

Att c150

Entry £6

No programme

It’s impossible to think of Wantage without thing of Alfred the Great. The famous king of Wessex was born here in 849 AD and was king from 871 until his death in 899. He is the only English monarch to be accorded the epithet “the Great.”  Alfred’s reputation has been that of a learned and merciful man who encouraged education and improved his kingdom’s legal system and military structure. His statue dominates the town’s square.

The town’s other famous son was born a little later, 1935 to be exact! Lester Piggott was born conveniently for the stables at Ardington, Lockinge and Lambourn nearby. The whole area is notably affluent, even down to the entrance to Alfredian Park being down an easy-to-miss tree-lined lane.

I’ve been to Alfredian Park a lot over the years, Oxford United often send sides here, the welcome is fulsome and the football good, and the North Berkshire League uses the ground for some of its cup finals. In fact my most recent visit was Continue reading →

The Devil Queues For Prada

08 Monday Jul 2013

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Sunday 7th July 2013

Bicester Village, Oxfordshire

There’s nothing new about the outlet shopping centre, where the designer brands sell off their end-line-stock at discount prices. The Bicester Village centre sits on the edge of the pretty Oxfordshire town, and was first opened in 1992. Few could have predicted the colossus that its become, being the biggest tourist attraction in the county.

Continue reading →

An Eye To The Future

07 Sunday Jul 2013

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Saturday 6th July 2013 ko 15.00

Pre-Season Friendly

ARDLEY UNITED 1 (Brooks 74p)

OXFORD UNITED 2 (Potter 48 Smalley 90)

Att 670

Entry £5

Programme £1.50

There are several strands these days to my football watching, its long since stopped being just about the game alone, in fact I suspect that’s the case with many groundhoppers who’ve graduated from the easy-to-reach local grounds. Sometimes I want to travel, sometimes I’m looking for a location, others its the Vulture Job, visiting a ground before the bulldozers move in.

I am of course an Oxford United fan, and a fan also of the local football scene, and Ardley playing fields are just the one exit north of Oxford on the M40, lying virtually adjacent to Junction 10. With Oxford United sending the first-team squad to the Hellenic League Premier outfit for the both club’s first pre-season friendly, it gave me quite a few good reasons to attend. For one, my girlfriend and I were to visit Ash, my Uni pal in Twickenham in the evening so a long distance jaunt was out of the question. With the weather scorching I also knew Dad would fancy a trip out, so I threw a collapsible chair in the back of the car, my mind was made up.

Apart from being the other side of the motorway from Cherwell Valley Services the village of Ardley is now more or less fused with the village of Fewcott (they had a Oxon Senior League side until recently). The conjoined twins sit on a bed of Jurassic limestone, which apart from hosting a colony of Greater Crested Newts, also provided a good base on to build Ardley Castle. The edifice was a motte-and-bailey affair which is believed to have been built during during the civil war of the Anarchy between 1139 and 1154, fought between Empress Matilda and King Stephen.

Intriguingly these castles were Adulterine, or built without Royal consent, this one would have been built by Matilda, and perhaps its unsurprising that very little of it is now left, just some earth banking and ditches.

On arrival at the football club a few strands of my football watching were in evidence. Ardley’s normally attendances are the tens, not hundreds, and even getting everyone parked was going to be an issue. When I’m organising groundhops I dream of clubs like Ardley, who approached their day with a clear head, and so reaped the reward. It was in marked contrast to my first visit here, when I watched Ardley play Adderbury Park. The players changed in the cricket pavilion, and the only other “Facilties” were the pitchside rail and a set of dugouts. The club won Groundtastic’s “Most Improved Ground” award in 2005.

Cars were parked on the cricket field, at no charge so few opted to annoy the neighbours by parking on the road. The welcome at the pay booth was as warm as the ambient temperature, and I wondered if the club had used their experience in hosting a Hellenic League Groundhop game back in 2005. Mind you the crowd that day was 278; this was on another scale altogether. A temporary bar was set up to sell soft drinks, and somehow the burger bar kept pace with the huge demand.

Ardley chairman Norman Stacey managed to combine hospitality with stadium announcements and the needs of Radio Oxford broadcasting live commentary. That created a minor issue when it was discovered that the socket they were using for power was the one the club normally uses for the PA… It summed the afternoon up nicely that the plugs were rearranged, and everything worked perfectly.

For a pre-season friendly at a lower league to work well from a League club’s perspective two things need to happen. Ardley staged the game beautifully, but the team has play passing football without resorting to any rough play.

In the latter respect Ardley won the plaudits on the pitch on the pitch as much as they did off of it. They passed and moved well, and were good value for the goalless score line at half time. A complete change of team for the visitors saw Dave Kitson, a man who once commanded a £5.5 million transfer make his first Oxford United appearance. His impact was almost immediate, chasing a lost cause on the left flank and finding Alfie Potter for him to slot home for the first goal.

Ardley’s equaliser was rather fortuitous. Tom Newey’s contact with Jason Castello looked minimal and outside of the box, but former OUFC youth teamer Ryan Brooks put the penalty away well sending Max Crocombe the wrong way. But with seconds left Deane Smalley’s shot was brilliantly pushed away by Jack Harding. Danny Rose took the resulting corner and his curling effort found Smalley’s head perfectly to give the visitors the win.

Not of course anything much need be read into the result. This was about players getting to know each other, and the management to try new tactics and see who works best with who. For everyone else it was a hugely enjoyable afternoon out and one I trust will be repeated. If that does happen, I fully expect Oxford United to be re-visiting a Southern League club.

The Pace of Life

05 Friday Jul 2013

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Thursday 4th July 2013 ko 19.40

Pre-Season Friendly

PRIORS MARSTON 0

SOUTHAM UNITED 7 (Delahunty 30 Tennant 40 65p 74 Doherty 53 Stephans 78 79)

Att 42

80 minute game

Entry FREE

Programme- No ( you are joking!)

Priors Marston is one of those pretty-as-a-picture villages tucked away so you just have to stumble across them! The village is just about in Warwickshire, around 7 miles from Daventry, and is close to the Northamptonshire border.

The Church of England parish church is dedicated to Saint Leonard and was first built in the 13th century. The tower dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, but the building you see today was largely rebuilt in 1863.

The village school, The Priors School was originally a state school opened in 1847. In August 1996 it was forced to close due to a decline in numbers but after a month of intensive fundraising and planning the school re-opened. It still offered free education to village residents, and also accepted fee paying pupils from further afield. The school raised over £1.2m during 15 years of self regulation until September 2011, when it became one of the first of 22 new free schools to open in the UK. This returned the school to state funding but independently managed.

The Priors Sports Field lies on the edge of the village, on the Byfield Road. There’s a tennis club, but the place is by and large a cricket field that stages football in the winter. In the last few years that’s been even more the case as the Saturday football team withdrew from the Banbury and Lord Jersey League and now only play Sunday football, in the depths of Division 5 of the Leamington and District Sunday League.

With a team so obscure, the fixture attracted a gaggle of hoppers, who 10 minutes before the scheduled 7.00 kick-off looked nervous, especially the one who’d travelled all the way from Leatherhead for this game. Eventually the home players arrived in dribs and drabs, with the lack of urgency that the warm weather seemed to inspire. It didn’t seem to worry the referee, he just had a chat to the Southam players and warmed up lackadaisically.

I took time to explore the pavilion, taking care to avoid the ladies preparing a barbeque for the players. They’d been banned from serving food before half-time, but when was half-time going to be? I discovered that there are plans to demolish the pavilion and replace it with an altogether grander affair. The issue is a common enough one, funding. I have a feeling the old pavilion will be around for a while longer.

The game kicked-off a staggering 40 minutes late, and unsurprising both sides made a slow start, a mixture of legs getting used to playing, and the visitors playing what appeared to their under-18 side. In a truncated game it took a full 30 minutes for the first goal, Jamie Delahunty firing home, and after that the Midland Combination side passed their hosts to death, and the goals came steadily throughout the rest of the game. Ben Tennant scored a hat-trick from the unlikely position of left back, and quite a hat-trick it was! The first was a blast from long distance, the second a penalty, and the third a delicious curling free kick that did just enough to evade the keeper’s despairing outstretched fingers. Goals from Keiran Doherty and a late brace from Robbie Stephans sealed the straightforward victory.

In the final analysis, of course it really doesn’t matter, but the players got a little fitter, the managements learned a little more and the spectators enjoyed a pleasant evening out in the sunshine.

Johnson Rag

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

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Sunday 30th June 2013

Twinwood Airfield near Bedford

Entry £4

At the risk of a bad pun this place wasn’t on my radar, but Dad’s a proud member of the National Service (RAF) Association, and they organised a day out here. My job was to drive, and plug the postcode into the satnav.

Being ex-forces, and therefore organised, the trip included lunch at the RAFA club in Bedford before a cavalcade of cars made the short trip via the village of Clapham ( a point learned- I thought the only Clapham was in London!) to the airfield.

The base was RAF Twinwood during World War II and is best known for being the airfield where in 1944 Glenn Miller boarded a Norseman aircraft, bound for France, and was never seen again. It seems slightly odd that a museum to him is in the control tower, the last place anyone saw him, but it is a fascinating insight to the time and to a man who, at least initially many thought of as a coward, until it was proven that his concerts were so valuable to morale, it more than outweighed any potential use he would have been as a fighting soldier.

That however isn’t all that’s on offer; there’s more museums on the site, based around the time of the Second World War, including a reconstruction of a WAAF’s hut. That caused a few smirks amongst the veterans,

“We’d have never got away with the stove like this!”

“My blankets were better folded…” and so on.

For those of us with no memory of that time the Summer of 44 museum is a wonderful collection of the mundane, the scales, the pots and pans, and the posters of the time. On their own these things mean nothing, together and in context they offer a viewpoint to the past.

There’s also the only Wartime Fire Service museum in the UK here,  it takes the form of a 1940’s utility station inside one of the Nissen huts, and comes complete with fire truck!

A poignant section is the museum dedicated to aircraft recovery. You see the bent propellers and twisted engine parts, but what stops you in your tracks is the little photo of the pilot and crew with their ages. Few seemed to be over 25, it was something to reflect upon over a mug of tea in the NAAFI.

For me, as is the case with a lot of what I do, its the little things that resonate most with me. Be it the book on 300 ways to cook an egg, or the ARP warden’s hat, these are the things that with a little imagination put you right in the position of those people less than a century ago. That included the black edged postcard sent to inform a wife than in fact she was now a widow. That reminded me that in any war people on both sides suffer, and I have too many German friends to look at it any other way.

http://www.twinwoodairfield.co.uk/

Football At The Belmont

01 Monday Jul 2013

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Saturday 29th June 2013 ko 15.00

Pre-Season Friendly

WHITSTABLE TOWN 0

DAGENHAM & REDBRIDGE 4 (Dennis 21 Elito 40p Goldburg 75 Gale 85)

Att 301

Entry £8

Programme £2

With a mere 15 minutes to drive the six or so miles from Faversham to Whitstable I was pleased and thankful to have Martin Bamforth behind the wheel. We were fortunate, the roads were kind to us, but I was grateful to Whitstable programme editor Andy Short for reserving me a programme; they’d sold out just before I’d got there.

I’ve owed Andy a visit for some time; he uses some of the material on here in his excellent publication, but every time I’ve tried to visit the Belmont Stadium I’ve been thwarted, last time it was by the M25, so I ended up watching an eventful game at Sevenoaks Town. http://wp.me/p1PehW-18S

What Andy hadn’t told me is what a gem the Belmont is. The stand is a wonderful example of an Isthmian League stand, dating from the 1950’s. What makes that remarkable is that the club have only played in the Isthmian League for 7 years! It’s beautifully maintained, a classic of its kind and a must-visit for fans of the Isthmian League.

Of course there’s more to Whitstable than just the Belmont. It’s famous for its oysters, which have been collected in the area since at least Roman times, and in 1830 one of the earliest passenger railway services was opened by the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway Company.  In 1832 the company opened Whitstable Harbour and extended the line to enable passage to London from the port. The railway has since closed but the harbour still plays an important role in the town’s economy.

Perhaps the town’s most interesting quirk involves the football club itself, and I reckon it’s a wonderful pub quiz question too. On 29th May 1985 escaping fans were crushed against a wall in the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, before the start of the European Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool. Thirty-nine Juventus fans died and the backlash saw English clubs banned from playing European football for 5 years, but what was the first club to be affected? The record books show it was Everton, the league winners in 1995 but in fact it was Whitstable Town, playing in the more humble Kent League! The reason was that Whitstable is twinned with Bochum in Germany and the two sides were due to meet for a pre-season friendly in Germany, but the ban made the game impossible.

Andy also managed to answer a question that really needed an answer. Normally only internationals and organised summer leagues are allowed to play football in June according to FA rules. It transpired that both Faversham and Whitstable contacted the FA at Wembley Stadium for permission, and the blazer-wearers simply delegated the decision to the local Kent FA. They had no objections so our two games went ahead, but I do wonder what would have happened if a host club outside of Kent had have asked.

The game proved to be a one-sided affair as the Daggers passing was too slick for their hosts, who defended manfully to keep the score respectable. The visitors stayed in League 2 by the skin of their teeth last season, and they looked a proven goalscorer short of being a good team. That person manager Wayne Burnett will find difficult to recruit, the club has one of the lowest wage bills in the Football League, the Daggers teams I’ve seen over the years have often seemed like an Isthmian League Dream Team. I suspect it will be another season of struggle for them, fighting as they always are against almost impossible odds.

Those are odd well-known to Whitstable and almost every small club, trying to squeeze a pint from a half pint pot each and every season. I’d been greatly looking forward to my trip to Whitstable and both the club and ground managed to greatly exceed my expectations. That’s another club whose results I’ll be looking out for, as a hopper you do tend to have a list of clubs to follow!