It’s Saturday, it’s in the region of 3pm, there’ll be a few football matches going on around the place I’m sure. The Marley Stadium in Keighley isn’t the most comfortable of venues but the backdrop’s pretty reasonable.
A Friday night out, for me and for them. And why not spend it at a football match. It was damn cold though: as 5ºC seemed a reasonable estimation I’d say it was about 15ºC cooler than my last one, on Sunday. We all needed some warm food.
Many places describe themselves as the Home of Football or something similar, but Hackney Marshes in London has as good a claim as any. 88 football pitches make this probably the largest single centre for football in the whole world. About 30 of them were being used today by a diverse range of teams including UK Moldova FC, FC Karpaty, Flamengo, Limehouse Tigres. The sun was shining. You have your Mecca I’m sure, perhaps this is mine.
22 men kicking a pig’s bladder (well, originally) around a muddy field, in the rain, up on a Yorkshire moor. But you know I like this kind of thing. Today, courtesy of Denholme United — the ones in yellow.
Wembley FC do not play at Wembley Stadium — though you can see that from their Vale Farm ground about a mile away. Nevertheless, they give good art work, even if the subject matter, going on the dates, is a tragic one.
This is the kind of photo that only really works if I’ve got the pitch truly horizontal; I think I have. There wasn’t much else to this venue apart from this view taken as I was leaving, but it sums it up reasonably well.
I said yesterday that grim as it was, the forecast was for improvement, and the sun duly shone on me and 309 other people who spent their Tuesday evening at the ground of Trafford FC, a few miles west of Manchester city centre. Perhaps not the biggest club located in their metropolitan borough (I’m sure most people could name the biggest if they thought about it for a minute): but a friendly one. I chose this shot today because of the excellent rim-light, but also the woman laughing in the middle. At least — I think she’s laughing.
One to add to the ‘superlatives’ at the bottom of the stats page, the next time I update it. Hallam FC have been around, as the stand says, since 1860, and have always played here, at Sandygate, in the west of Sheffield. According to the Guinness Book of Records, this makes this place the oldest football ground in the world. Hallam are the second-oldest club, after Sheffield FC: I guess it made sense to start no. 2 fairly near to no. 1, after all, they needed someone to play. (What the third-oldest club — Cray Wanderers, from Kent — did at first with their playing time is not as yet recorded.)
What better things are there to do on a Saturday than watch some footie? The dog may or may not agree but it looks interested enough. Taken at Penicuik Athletic FC, and Penicuik, just south of Edinburgh, thereby becomes the 435th different place to feature on here; expect a few more new locations to turn up over the next week…
It’s all over. In the rain that came down for most of the second half, the players of Ashington celebrate with their travelling fans, having won the play-off match 3-0. They get promoted, while hosts Glossop North End are relegated. Number 12 feels the pain.
Being 42 