Sunday 2nd March 2025 ko 11:30

North West Counties League Premier Division

ABBEY HEY 0

PRESTWICH HEYS 0

Bardsley-Rowe penalty saved 81

Bardsley-Rowe sent off 90 (violent conduct)

Att 610

Entry £7

Programme £2.50

For Sunday’s fixtures on the North West Counties Hop we returned to suburban Manchester and a club who in my eyes we owed a game to. Abbey Hey had been the visitors at Stafford Town, Wythenshawe Town and even featured on the very first NWCL Hop at Maine Road. That was on 2017, so no withstanding the break due to Covid, Abbey Hey were certainly due!

We knew we’d have one problem with a visit to the Abbey Stadium. The ground lies at one end of a cul-de-sac Goredale Avenue so the potential for parking and traffic problems would be similar to that when we visited Cheadle Town. The solution in the short term was to get there early and the club were notably proactive at getting people parked within the ground rather than risk choking the access road. It set the tone for an excellent hosting.

We were watching one of those ties that sounds like a local derby but really isn’t. My favourite of the genre will always be the Cwmamman derby but how about the Heys Derby. The name is Old English for “Enclosed Field” so we’ll imagine field as pitch and as for anything else let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story! For what little its worth there’s 15 miles between the two clubs.

It was a very easy morning to be a groundhop organiser. It was genuinely a case of sit in the bar, read the programme and half an hour before kick-off head to the secretary’s office to pick up a team sheet to tweet out. In every other sense it was simply a case of let the club do its thing- and it was rather good!

We had a link back to the Stockport Georgians game. Alan Mair is originally from Scotland, and is unusual in both liking a spot of groundhopping and being a qualified referee. He ran the line in both this and the Georgians’ game and could have easily made a third appearance on the Scottish Hop. That though is a story for then..

Now when you attend a football match you do so on the basis that you (hopefully) don’t know what you’ll be getting. Here the game was awful, two sides whose styles completely clashed. You hoped that somehow there’d be something to break up the tedium but sadly it was clear that despite Max Bardsley-Rowe managing to both miss a penalty and be sent off a dull stalemate was inevitable.

You can’t watch a classic every time, however good the hosting.