Saturday 9th November 2024 ko 15:00

Isthmian League Division One South East

SITTINGBOURNE 5 (Cosgrove 34 Sinai 45+1 Stevenson 83 Boachie 89 Kingsford 90+3)

DEAL TOWN 0

Att 340

Entry £10

Programme £2

With the organised hop season over you’d have thought the very last place I’d have wanted to find myself was the South East! But then Robyn wanted to tick off Gillingham towards her aim of completing her “92” and Sittingbourne is just that little bit too far away for me to get there midweek after work. Then there’s the which Sittingbourne ground conundrum…

The club played at the Bull Ground until 1990 before selling the ground to move to, and build Central Park. The building costs spiraled and the club sold Central Park to a greyhound racing company, and signed a 7 year lease to remain playing there, sharing with dogs and speedway. The 3-way groundshare proved to be unsustainable, and so in 2002 they moved into Bourne Park, adjacent to one end of Central Park, and once part of their training ground.

Even that measure didn’t solve Sittingbourne’s financial woes so in 2013 they moved to the Woodstock Park Complex to groundshare with Woodstock Sports who promptly folded two years later leaving Sittingbourne as currently the sole tenant. You can still see the Woodstock Sports name at the entrance to the changing rooms.

The ground retains the air of a country park, with one side open to only the dugouts, the rest does the job for the Brickies, but you can see why the club are exploring moving again, as part of a “Garden Village” development at Highsted Park to the east of the town, about half a mile from the current ground. It would offer the club far better facilities than here, but as any football fan will know, proposals are one thing, negotiating past the N.I.M.B.Y.’s quite another! And yes I do speak as an Oxford United supporter!

But oddly I won’t remember my trip here for any of that, no I’ll remember the place for Tarzan the goat. Now I do approach this with a little trepidation as while he has his own Instagram account that doesn’t explain why he was there, or what the point was and the more you research it the more bewildering it all gets! I think I’ll put it all down as part of that long list of unusual things I’ve seen at football grounds!

The game wasn’t quite as one-sided as the score might suggest. I remembered Deal Town from their SCEFL Hop game in 2023 and they’ve made the step up to the Isthmian look reasonably comfortable. It was just that Sittingbourne were sharper when and where it really mattered and had better reinforcements on the bench too. 2-0 would have been fair, but Deal did rather collapse late on.

We dashed off quickly after it was all over. I knew Robyn had seen a truly abysmal game at the Priestfield, and didn’t want to wait around!