Saturday 13th August 2016 ko 15.00

South West Peninsula League Premier Division

ST BLAZEY 2 (Bello 56 63) Bello sent off (2nd booking) 80

FALMOUTH TOWN 3 (Wearne 20 25 33) Wearne missed penalty 70

Att c70

Entry £5

Programme £1

The convenience of collecting Robyn from Bristol then heading south-west should never be underestimated, and after all there are no lack of hotels to book either! Those in the know will tell you there’s a seemingly inexhaustible supply of quite wonderful football grounds in Cornwall.

St Blazey takes its name from Saint Blaise, martyred in what is now Armenia in 316 AD, and the small town grew up like so many round here around the tin and china clay mining industries. That attracted the railways and the area was a depot to take the extracted minerals to the ports.

Nowadays its the Eden Project that dominates. The eco-attraction, opened in 2001 is one of Cornwall’s most popular attactions. Its based in old clay pit is just over a mile from St Blazey and was used by the BBC as the planet surface of Magrathea in the 1981 TV series of “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s given the town a tourist industry, and it was good to see Eden Project advertising themselves liberally at their local football club.

St Blazey were one of the biggest clubs in the old South Western League, winning the league 13 times including 5 seasons in succession from 2000-2005. Since the creation of the Peninsula League in 2007 and their automatic elevation to the Premier Division they’ve found the going more challenging, never finishing higher than 4th.

Blaise Park reflects the club’s illustrious past with its generously-sized stand, and who couldn’t love a ground with trains trundling past? But this wasn’t a game for train-spotters, this was an afternoon of two forwards, Tornado Bello for St Blazey and Rob Wearne for Falmouth.

The first half was Wearne’s, looking unplayable as he notched a hat trick. But the first 35 minutes of the second half belonged to Bello. He took on the “Unplayable” mantel scoring twice, before Wearne missed a penalty. But for Bello there was a real sting in the tale. He’d collected a daft booking for dissent on the stroke of half-time, and when he went to ground rather too easily in search of a penalty he collected his second booking.

It ended St Blazey’s chances, a shame as the neutral’s sense of symmetry will always make me wonder what would have happened if Bello had managed to last the full game.