Saturday 30th December 2023 ko 15:00

Northern Counties East League Division One

SWALLOWNEST 1 (Spick 84)

SHIREBROOK TOWN 6 (Macaskill 17 38 Day 44 54 Skelton 49og K Watson 80)

Att 135

Entry £6

Programme £2 (reissue from 12/09/23)

On the way back from Warrington we’d pondered ideas for our last game of 2023. I must admit we’d rather neglected the Northern Counties East, I’d more or less completed the league when the groundhop was based there, but that event finished at Selby in 2017 and there’s been plenty of club churn since then.

And to a bloke from Oxford a trip to South Yorkshire is always an education. You are in former coal mining territory, and growing up in the time of the Miners Strike of 1984 the lot of the issues more or less passed me by save for the coal merchant’s notice bemoaning his lack of stock on “the (insert expletive) miners.” You want to understand it all? Go visit, look, and listen.

Swallownest is a village in Rotherham’s environs, and those with longer memories might remember Swallownest Miners Welfare playing in the Yorkshire League, one of the precedent parts of the NCEL. You’ll pass by the fields where the Waleswood Colliery once stood and do take time to have a pre-match meal at Aston Springs Farm- both food and service are excellent.

Park up at the Miners Welfare and you soon find that Swall-Siro, as the club call their home isn’t a place of niceities, do get your photos taken while there’s natural light, but the welcome is fulsome, and there’s character by the bucketload. Just look at that backdrop over Sheffield beyond the far goal with the industry juxtaposed with the farmhouse nearby.

They’ve got a good pitch here too. We knew Handsworth nearby on 3G would be on if this game had fallen to the national deluge so had kept an eye only in this game. We arrived, and the contingent of groundhoppers arriving having diverted from locally waterlogged pitches told its own story.

The problem from a home perspective was that we caught Swallownest riding along on the crest of a slump. With just Ollerton Town below them in the league the worry of demotion to the Sheffield & Hallamshire League is clear, and the tragedy of it was that the team was nowhere as bad as the scoreline would suggest. It was a game of fine margins, it was just that Shirebrook Town were the right side of that imaginary line each and every time.

You hope that Swallownest will find that little bit extra to survive at this level, and I saw enough in them both on and off the field to suggest they just might.