Friday 1st March 2024 ko 19:45

North West Counties League Division One North

FC ST HELENS 1 (Hall 24)

Hall penalty saved 21

DAISY HILL 0

Att 504*

Entry £5

Programme £2

Maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was being in such a groove with Step 5/6 hops another GroundhopUK event seemed little more than a continuation of what had finished last October at Billingshurst. Of course there were massive differences, a shift in locale from Sussex to the North West for one but such is the preponderance now of hop in leagues at that “Sweet Spot” of Steps 5 and 6 as part of the organising team there is usually very little that a club can do that will really surprise us. And yet on this weekend, one club managed to do precisely that.

With a trip to St Helens there was a small matter of who we’d be watching and where? We’d visited St Helens Town at the Ruskin Drive Sports Ground back on the 2019 hop, and seen them lose heavily at Bacup Borough in 2023. That season proved to be a bridge too far for the club, and they were relegated into the Cheshire League and now play in that league’s third tier. That must have been extremely painful for them, as the replacement for them in the NWCFL was in part their former selves!

FC St Helens are a 2014 breakaway from St Helens Town with the aim of providing youth football, and their rise from the West Cheshire League has been nothing short of meteoric. They based themselves at Windleshaw Sports Gorund, once home to St Helens RUFC before their move to the iconic Knowsley Road in 1890. After that Windleshaw became home to St Helens Cricket Club, but you’d be hard pushed to see any evidence of anything but football here now. The development has kept place with the club’s rise through the leagues, and with the club on the cusp of promotion there are plans to double-up both the seated stand, and the cover behind the goal.

Ask anyone who’s organised one of these events and they’ll tell you that they look for the opening host club to be good hosts. You’ll have programme packs and tickets to distribute, and a hotel and a coach to get everyone to. There’s enough to keep even a team like GroundhopUK busy so the best complement I can give the folks at FC St Helens is we could let them get on with hosting and we could get on with our tasks. They even managed to come up with the tweet of the hop.

I need to add a little context. With the weather so wet there the host clubs were bombarded with some groundhoppers sending tweets asking about the pitch conditions. Normally, that is good practice, the idea being to save a wasted journey. Here though so many were doing it, it got to a point where it was getting silly, yet another tweet saying much the same thing wasn’t going to improve anything for anyone so when one hopper’s poorly thought out, and worse worded tweet got sent out he was beautifully put in his place.

You’d think he’d have learned his lesson, wouldn’t you? No, he and others were still at it before the Charnock Richard game…. some folks, eh? Perhaps if they imagined the groundstaff stopping forking the pitch to answer each tweet they’d desist? No, probably not.

What the tweet hopefully does is give you some idea of the wit and charm FC St Helens brought to the hop, in fact the only small issue we had was with the attendance. Craig counted 454, the club 504 and we went with the club’s figure as it was already in the public domain.  In the end, I can’t pretend it mattered too much and Craig, Chris, Robyn, and I have long since learned to look at and accept the bigger picture. It certainly didn’t spoil for us what was a wonderful evening.

Unless you were involved at Daisy Hill it was a fair assumption that the result would be a thumping home win so all credit to the visitors for making FC St Helens work for that win. The penalty was saved not missed, and a smart save at the end prevented the visitors taking a point their second half performance deserved.

But without question the night belonged to FC St Helens. I know I’ve said it before, but my challenge to every host club is to change my perception of them. It goes without saying they did that- in spades!