I’m all for getting freebies when they are available but come on, it’s only £8 to get in and see your local non-league football team (in this case, Colne FC of the Northern Premier League D1 West) and you can stand under cover, out of the rain. You’re just being tight, is all.
My summer holidays reach their conclusion this weekend. The one remaining day, Sunday, is my 49th birthday, so today also marks the end of the 7th year of this blog. So now you know how many days there are in 7 years (with two February 29ths). We came back from Berlin in the morning, but there was no point hanging around doing nothing for the rest of this Saturday so I did what I — and many thousands of people up and down the country — often do in such circumstances, and went to watch a football match. Today’s venue, Ewen Fields, home of Hyde United FC, also brings up a milestone as I make it that this is the 50th football ground to feature on here. But the picture is generic, if you like — I just like the image of the different people on here all doing their thing.
More football, OK, perhaps I am overdoing it. But today’s shot can also get in for its picturesque qualities. Half-time in the West Lancashire League at Haslingden St. Mary’s FC, although the players in yellow are the visitors, Fulwood: 2-0 up at this point, they go on to win 4-0, while the rest of us get distracted by the sun setting over the hills.
Saturday afternoon, 3pm, there are football matches going on all round this country, and the chances are at the moment I will be present at one or other of them. But I don’t always get lucky and capture the winning, and only, goal scored on the day. The blue-clad number 4, Brett Doogan (and there’s a name of the sort only possessed by non-league defensive midfielders) gets the header in for Nelson FC in their match at Chadderton.
It’s that 3pm Saturday feeling again. OK, I admit it, this is actually my second game of the 2018-19 season — you don’t think I went to Rhyl on the 12th just to take the air, now, did you? — but the first to be depicted on here. The balmy weather broke definitively, particularly over Gretna, which is just over the border in Scotland and was whipped all day by a very chilly wind coming straight off the Irish Sea. Under this grey blanket Gretna FC, in white, and Edinburgh University FC trot out for their first game of their seasons, in the Lowland League, all full of optimism and hope, something that 90 minutes later the students probably maintained better than their hosts, seeing as they deservedly won 3-0.
McGlynn’s pub in Bloomsbury declares this afternoon for the French, before their game against Peru in the World Cup: note the tricolour in the window. What gets me about this shot though is how much Roy Keane looks like a little orange animated version of himself, sort of like Max Headroom….
Today was even more uneventful than yesterday, but I have been doing stuff, starting by sorting out all my season’s football programmes. There are some games missing here, either because there was no programme available or I lost or didn’t buy one, but the 31 in view here give a nice cultural cross-section of my movements over the last 11 months despite the lack of any real photographic quality. Although it will always bug me that I got the Leeds and Hassocks ones the wrong way round.
It is undeniable that there have been a lot of football matches on this blog this season, 2017-18. But today was definitively the last. The players of Ellan Vannin — a.k.a. the Isle of Man — warm up before their ConIFA World Football Cup tie with Barawa — a.k.a. the Somalian diaspora in London. If you want to be a country and play international football, ConIFA is the place to do it. But this did not diminish the day: like most of the other 39 games of my season (not all depicted on here….) it’s been enjoyable. But less football for a while now. I promise.
37 competitions into my football season and this was the penultimate one today, Division 1 the West Lancashire League, where I saw champions Poulton FC lift the trophy. The post-match — and post-season — celebrations are about to start here. It’s been a fun way to spend a season but it’s getting tiring and I’m a little glad we’re moving into summer: but by late June I’ll probably be missing it.
The football season comes to its many and diverse ends, each club finishing in different ways with different emotions. Raith Rovers of Scottish League One have managed to blow their hopes out in the last three games, promotion hopes have disappeared and at the final whistle today all was over. It was a very melancholy place all round — club, and town (Kirkcaldy in Fife). Maybe this picture captures something of that.
Being 42 