Wednesday 19th October 2011

Lincolnshire Senior Trophy 1st Round

BLACKSTONES 4 (Barker 9 45 Holmes 67 Nelson 90p)

BOSTON TOWN 4 (Davies 45 Beck 48 Bull 65p James 78)

No Extra time, Boston won 5-3 on penalties

Att 80

Entry & Programme £5

There were few options for a new ground on this day, and I really wanted one, so I could clock up ground number 1200. A minor milestone, but one I will note.

Blackstones play at Lincoln Road, in Stamford, and started life as the works side of the Mirrlees Blackstone Engineering firm based in the ancient town.

http://www.enginemuseum.org/mrindex.html

The firm is long since closed, and the club was forced to take out a long mortgage to buy the ground, and stop it being lost to housing. Today the ground is a pretty, and well appointed place to visit, but the lack of turnstiles would make it difficult, but not impossible for it to stage Northern Premier League football. Most impressive is the bar area. Apart from being large, and spotless, its the huge televisions that you notice. This is a club that’s worked out the way to pay down the mortgage is to place yourselves right in the heart of the community. You can imagine yourself going for a pint on a non-match day.

The advantage of seeing two step 5 clubs (United Counties Premier) in a County Cup fixture is that you can more or less guarantee that’ll they’ll take the fixture seriously, and these two certainly did! For a long time it looked like Stones’ tricky left winger Danny Barker would be the difference, scoring from a tight angle then lobbing the keeper from a full 40 yards! But Boston regrouped after half time and 3-3 would have been fair, but the referee Mr Amess decided to give Boston a dodgy penalty, then compounded the error by evening things up by giving Blackstones an even more dubious one!

The rules of the competition state no extra time, just penalties, and I was glad of that with a 2 hour drive home. The important penalty miss was by Matt Cox, and Billy King converted Boston’s 5th penalty to send them through. It was a shame it had to be settled this way but a replay I suspect would have pleased noone.