Tuesday 30th April 2024 ko 19:45

West Midlands (Regional) League- Division One

GORNAL ATHLETIC 1 (Lawrence 32)

TIPTON TOWN 3 (Holder 35 Clifton 50 Piggott 85)

Att 725

Entry £5

Programme £3 (special commemorative issue)

For many years those in the know venerated Garden Walk. You made sure you visited as the West Midlands finest example of a classic non league ground. I’d made a beeline back in 2011, and was shocked to find out that the club were about to move off. I wanted to visit to say goodbye, and show my wife Robyn the place too, but after the Peninsula Hop I was without a car, the games kept coming and we couldn’t get there. In the end, the new car arrived, and we made for Dudley with just the one game left.

Garden Walk attracts the afficiandos due in no small part to the huge, vertiginous terrace on one side, and this odd topography is due to the ground, and most of the area around it being former coal mine workings. These days you’ll see little or nothing that says mining, and the sadness is compounded by the fact soon enough they’ll be no sign of a football ground either.

The club own the pitch but rent the land the clubhouse and car park sit on, and it’s that land that Gornal are being evicted from, and tragically there’s no room on the club’s land to build to replace these. So the club’s 74 years here were to end, with the club having signed a lease at Burton Road Playing Fields. They’ll need time to bring there up to scratch so the club will groundshare in the short term.

Where is the moot point, with which division they’ll be in a determining factor. WMRL Division One sits at Step 7, and this game was close to being where the decision might be made. Put simply Gornal needed a win to take the title and with it promotion to the Midland League. Tipton Town had 8 ex-Gornal players in their squad and still stood a mathematical chance of promotion too. Or putting it another way it there was far more us being there than saying goodbye to a classic non-league football ground.

Clearly we weren’t the only ones to feel the same way. The huge crowd was pleasing to see, if at the absolute limits of what Garden Walk could cope with, and it does point to the huge potential here. Tipton clearly hadn’t read the script, coming from behind to win. It was a shame for Gornal to sign off here with a loss, but there was a bigger picture. They did get promoted as runners-up and will play next season in the Midland League Division One. In the slightly longer-term though, I’ll look forward to seeing Gornal in their new home. All the best to them.

If you’d like more on Garden Walk and Gornal Athletic there’s a superb article in the latest Groundastic magazine. It comes highly recommended.

Postscript 20th June 2024

It turns out that that won’t be the final ever game at Garden Walk. Gornal will be the first 12 home games there next season before making the move to Burton Road.