Saturday 21st September 2024 ko 14:00

West Wales Premier League

PENLAN AFC 0

L Edwards sent off 86 (serious foul play)

T Waters sent off 88 (2nd booking)

Hudson sent off 90+3 (2nd booking)

ROCKSPUR 1 (M. Davies 40)

Jones sent off 22 (serious foul play)

Davies sent off 86 (2nd booking)

Att 332

Entry £3

Programme £2 (!)

The final two games of our Saturday in the West Wales Premier League saw us in Swansea and its environs. The first was a trip to Penlan, by reputation the roughest estate in the area. You may find this surprising but I was far less concerned than one or two others.

We’ve run hop events to no end of supposedly troubled areas, Berinsfield is one that springs immediately to mind and often the staging is superb. My take on it is that there’s often an element of siege mentality, an attempt to show the outsiders that they are more than their reputation.

Mynydd Newydd Playing Fields is a huge expanse of pitches served by an large block of changing rooms and a cafe. The latter did a roaring trade in food and drink and I hope the club saw at least some of the money they brought their way.

It helped that this was massive local derby further swelling the attendance. League rules preclude teams groundsharing and that included the pitch that Rockspur were using some distance from Penlan’s. They moved away, we’ll be visiting them next season if they’re still in the league.

But in the present historic the big issue facing Penlan and all the spectators was and is the distance from the clubhouse to the pitch. At least it was obvious which pitch we were aiming for, it was the only one railed off, and the club has put up a fence allowing them to take a gate, and put up a shack selling beer, cider, snacks and non-alcoholic drinks.

That produced ire on the part of the referee’s assessor, who successfully demanded it’s closure. That of course is the league’s call not ours, although I’m bound to comment that for plenty there the choice of artificial stimulant wasn’t booze; I’ve picked my photos with care! That shouldn’t detract from Penlan’s hosting, I enjoyed their company, and scholars of Brutalist architecture loved using the block of flats as a backdrop for their Instagram shots.

Ah yes, the game. Let’s go back to that Berinsfield analogy, back in the day the North Berkshire’s League would never have let me have them host Saxton Rovers on hop day, it was just too much of a derby. That shouldn’t be seen as any criticism of the West Wales Premier, more of an acknowledgement that when you put two rivals together in front of a large crowd there will be fireworks.

And so there were, and yes 5 red cars were the result. My regular reader may recall I have seen worse, six in a dead rubber game at Caernarfon and more recently a quite horrible 5 dismissals at Whitehawk, the latter the worst game of football I have ever seen. This was more like the Caernarfon game, entertaining in a car crash kind of a way. To sum it up the game may have seen the referee risk R.S.I. issuing 12 cards but both teams chatted happily to each other as they walked back to the clubhouse. You can read plenty into that, I’m sure.

Rockspur’s win consolidated their position as league leaders and I saw enough here to suggest that if we do visit them, it’ll be part of an Ardal League event. Now who do we contact for that?