Saturday 29th July 2023 ko 14:00

United Counties League Division One

GEDLING MINERS WELFARE 0

BLACKSTONES 1 (Duffy-Weekes 90)

Att 364

Entry £5

Programme £1.50

I must admit I wasn’t particularly looking forward to revisiting Mapperley Plains. It was nothing to do with the club or the ground, it was because I’d visited early in 2011 in the throes of a failed marriage. I was watching games solely to not be sat in an empty house. I visited, I saw the game, and I did little more than exist back then.

Thank god times change, and a different man could have felt valedictory about returning here with someone as wonderful as Robyn sat by me but I’m not one to dwell too long about the past, it isn’t healthy. In fact I was more concerned and pleased about how the club had managed to open up an overspill car park and who earth chooses to drive to a Gedling Miners Welfare game in a Lamborghini?

I plonked myself down in the clubhouse, and since Robyn doing social media for GroundhopUK needed the team line-ups I was grateful to the club for printing me out a teamsheet. It set the tone for the club’s hosting even if I’m bound to say the queue for the tea bar looked lengthy- and yes it is something we will be looking at for subsequent hops.

But any other visitor is unlikely to see such queues, and what they’ll love is the quirky way the club has managed to adapt to create enough seats to keep the ground graders happy. Offhand I can’t think of another club that’s raised a single row of seats like Gedling MW have.

It all rather made up for the game, which could, and probably should have been the coda of the first pair of consecutive hop games to finish nil-nil. Ironically the closest we’d come was in the Nottinghamshire area too. The Notts Hop in 2015 saw a nil-nil at Bingham Town followed by Netherfield Albion and those two games saw us go 174 minutes without a goal. Then as here, the game that did finish nil-nil was the more entertaining and an act of god produced the goal in the second game but here it was in the 90th minute!

Blackstones won it, and it did seem a long time since we visited Lincoln Road, Stamford, come to think of it, that was in 2015 too!