Tuesday 4th December 2018 ko 19.30

Leicestershire Senior Cup 2nd Round

NORTH KILWORTH SPORTS 2 (D Laywood 51 90)

KIRBY MUXLOE RESERVES 0

Att 23

Free Entry

These days, I tend to get the most satisfaction from those “Ticks” that are unexpected. Once you push past four figures of grounds visited, your opportunities for easily reached floodlit new grounds rapidly diminish. I’d been keeping an on Cosby-based Saffron Dynamo for a while, the Leicestershire Senior League doesn’t schedule that many midweek fixtures, but when I checked their fixture for this date, I was disappointed to see the game postponed due to a floodlight fault. But I scanned down, and… “Who are North Kilworth?” 

The straightforward answer is a small village just off the M1 on the southernmost tip of Leicestershire. In football terms the football club play slightly counter-intuitively on South Kilworth Lane, and fell out of the Leicestershire Senior League in 2006 after a decade of struggle in Division One. But with the LSL expanding to include a Division 2 for this season, they’re back albeit as one of only 2 first XI’s in the division.

Now if I hadn’t known about the club’s previous stint, the one thing I quickly discovered is they hadn’t left the league in possession of those floodlights. Word has it they arrived from a horse racing track. Whatever the whys and wherefores of that, those lights have opened up a new world for North Kilworth, progress from their current nominal 8th tier of the non-league pyramid.

Because there’s not only lights here, there’s also a rail and a stand; in fact the only major barrier to Step 6 football is hard standing, and you could argue there’s a little of that courtesy of a an approach track on the stand side. Here its the potential that intrigues.

The game saw a side second in the Division 2 table take on visitors second-from-bottom of the Premier Division. It looked like a mismatch, but in a ground that seemed to be mostly groundhoppers noone saw it that way. It didn’t take a tactical expert to work out why, it was genuinely a case of men versus boys, and although it took a bit of huffing, the right team won. And let’s face it, you don’t expect to see squad numbers, and players’ names on the shirts in the bottom division of the LSL!

It was one of those groundhopping oddities, a game under lights at a venue that doesn’t see many. That attracted the hoppers, yes even though there wasn’t a programme, and one of the teams was a second XI. Or course neither of those things worries me in the slightest, so this was an interesting evening out. And there’s still the small matter of Saffron Dynamo too!