Saturday 5th May 2025 ko 15:00

Kent County League Premier Division

METROGAS 3 (Wall 27 Meledje 67 90+1)

PECKHAM TOWN 0

Att 52

Free Entry

The issue I tend to have with some locations is that it can be difficult to predict just how long it is going to take to get there? That goes double for anything within the M25 so with another trip to New Eltham in the offing, I planned a little detour with the idea being that it could be ditched if the traffic misbehaved- on this occasion it didn’t, so we spent a few minutes in Deptford.

Farrer House in the Crossfields Estate could easily be written off as a typical Peabody-style post-war social housing block and in 1977 the estate was deemed as unsuitable for families. That didn’t stop a management trainee for a timber firm and a social worker sharing a flat in the bottom corner. Both John Illsley and David Knopfler were interested in music and when David’s elder brother Mark moved in too there was an impetus to form a band. Add into the mix drummer Pick Withers and the flat became the birthplace of the band Dire Straits, and remained their home until early 1980.

The first two Dire Straits albums, and a fair percentage of the third were written here, and the band’s first performance was on the rough ground behind the flat in July 1977. As Mark Knopfler put it,

“The audience consisted of two and they were both rather small”

I’ve included a photo of that first gig, which I clearly didn’t take- I’d have been aged 6!

Metrogas FC was founded in 1888, as a works team for the South Metropolitan Gas Company two years after the completion of the East Greenwich Gas Works, who produced coal gas on the Greenwich Peninsula until 1946 and nationalisation. The site was converted to oil gas production but the discovery on North Sea gas saw the site closed down and the final gas holder was demolished in 2020.

The sports and social club have continued even though the parent company has long since gone and the football too, albeit with a brief sojourn at Thamesmead’s Bayliss Avenue presumably as to get a suitable ground for a tilt at promotion to the Southern Counties East. These days they’ve settled back in New Eltham and while there was nothing much riding on the game there was a massive surprise.

It was that visitors Peckham Town had been relegated. They’ve long been on my to-do list and I know that the SCEFL has cast an admiring eye in their direction, while knowing that without floodlights at their Southwark Sports Ground home, they’ll never be able to progress to Step 6. I know some of their people and they opined that a lack of ruthlessness in front of goal had been a real issue for them.

So it proved, Metrogas had far fewer chances than their visitors, but Peckham spurned chance after chance and were made to pay. Sometimes the difference between success and failure can be that simple.

But right now, he’s saying nothing at all.