Saturday 4th May 2024 ko 14:00

Thames Valley Premier League, Premier Division

SLOUGH HEATING LAURENTIANS 2 (Aragrez 55 Lovering 77p)

HOLYPORT RESERVES 1 (Brinsden 8)

Att c30 at Polish Club, Stoke Poges

The weather was warm and sunny, and I had a lovely double lined up. Yet for all of that I felt conflicted, I’d made a fairly major decision in my footballing life, and that evening was when I was going to have to make that choice public and deal with the consequences. I wanted something beforehand that was low-key and relaxing.

In fact, so preoccupied was I that I didn’t even make the connection between my name and the club’s suffix. The club as you may have guessed is a 2015 merger between Slough Heating and Slough Laurentians with the latter having its roots in the Laurentians Church in Upton Slough. Oddly both clubs date from 1921. The Laurentians are an Irish Roman Catholic Society named after Saint Laurence O’Toole, a former bishop of Dublin, and Slough Laurentians were based at Lascelles Park, in Slough. Well, my name is Laurence, but I’m certainly no saint….

The merged club made use of Slough Heating’s base at Slough Polish Club in Stoke Poges. There is the oddity that the football club’s use of the club actually predates the site becoming the Polish Club. The former Vacuna Club was the works sports and social club for the PB Cow Ltd, who were producers of rubber items, particular gas masks during the Second World War. The Polish Club bought the Vacuna in 1976 and renamed it “Gryf,” Polish for Griffin an allegory of finding life after the flames, given the number of Polish people at the time making a new life for themselves away from communism in their motherland.

The game itself was something of a dead rubber, no pun intended. Slough were destined to finish second-from-bottom and Holyport’s second string 9th from 12. Notwithstanding that it was an entertaining game to watch with Slough bucking the form book to come from behind to take a morale boosting win. It was, by any standards a highly enjoyable afternoon, but it was time to bite the bullet.