Minnows Alert!!!

It would appear that the Great-Southern-League-Fixture-Gods have tweaked their fixture-abacus such that we'll be fully testing our promotion credentials over the next few weeks.  In a division where several deep pockets are funding several iddy-biddy clubs in a private battle to see who can be first to bankrupt them, we have a number of the miniscule main runners in our immediate sights.  All of them promoted way beyond their natural level.  All of them shelling out well over the odds for players who would normally laugh at an approach from them.  All of them utterly desperate to be seen to be serious rivals to the Poppies.

First up is the weird little speck of a club called Real Bedford, run like a bargain basement "Welcome to Wrexham" they aren't even the biggest football club at their location.  To be fair though, their Chairman has sufficient self-awareness to refer to himself as a budget Ryan Reynolds.  Their twitter-page may look more like a teenager's Death-Metal fan page than a football club site, but they are at least amusing in their efforts to manufacture some kind of rivalry with us....  Wanabee Poppies Rival Level - 6 out of 10

A couple of days later and Harborough Town drag their swollen, clanging bags of gold over the border to test their collection of mercenaries against us in a desperate attempt at validation.  Wanabee Poppies Rival Level - 12 out of 10.

Just over a week later yet we visit another bumpkin collection of inbreds, wildly over-inflated by obscene cash injections - Spalding.  This assumes they've finished carting in an instant stadium of shipping containers and hopefully employed a few able-bodied stewards to keep their small but angry collection of misfit fans under control for once.  Wanabee Poppies Rival Level - 7 out of 10.

Before September is out we are at home to the last of the "Little Four" in the form of Stamford - yet another club artificially financially bolstered, and, just like the others, still finding it difficult to attract more supporters.  Wanabee Poppies Rival Level - 9 out of 10, or 27 out of 10 if you include Drury and his childish antics.

Even the other fixtures in this period offer interesting challenges, with a home game against surprising league leaders Bishop Stortford and away to returning former non-league big boys, Worcester City, where between us and them we'll barely make a dent in their bloody 12,000 capacity stadium!

One thing is for sure, before the clocks go back this season we're going to have a good idea whether the Poppies 2025/26 vintage has got what it takes to attempt another title charge.

"Please Poppies, choose me!"

Still work to do, alas

The 1970's was a great time.  Don't let anyone tell you differently.  Modern media paints a picture of the 1970's being nothing but a mixture of power cuts, unburied dead and brown wallpaper.  Sure, we had all that but we also had much, much more.  For one, we had the arrival of colour television!  Forget your wall-to-wall online streaming services, NOTHING comes close to the excitement of the first time seeing all the bridge officers in Star Trek in their glorious primary colours!  And there were more musical genres than you can shake a rhythm stick at - Glam, Pop, Heavy, Punk and Prog Rock, Disco, New Wave, Funk and the Wombles.  We had affordable housing and even more affordable beer.  We had the greatest run of brilliant movies ever - The Godfather 1 & 2, The Exorcist, Jaws, Star Wars (and NOT A New Hope....), Holiday on the Buses and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Winning the Football League was pretty much a guarantee of winning the European Cup.  We had it all.

Unfortunately we also had rampant, unapologetic racism in society in general and in football in particular.  Racism and homophobia were, at times, so casual and common place that it would have made even Tommy Robinson blush.

As much as a progressive, civilised society would like to believe that in the intervening years abuse of people based solely on skin colour or sexual preference had receded such that only those on the very outer fringes of our species still harboured (quietly) such views, all too often we are reminded this is not the case.

A Premier League game on Friday was halted for 5 minutes when a Liverpool fan couldn't dredge his imagination deep enough when insulting Bournemouth striker Semenyo to aim beyond the colour of his skin.  We were one game into the season and this was the main news story coming from Anfield.  One guy in a crowd if 50,000 is statistically zero, but it is so dispiriting that such incidents still occur.

Unfortunately it would appear we never truly conquered intolerance and that the worst of it merely slumbered for a few decades until the time was right for it to rise again.  For most of the past 30-odd years your common-or-garden hard-right misanthrope at least had the decency to keep their repulsive views to themselves.  Well, decency might be too strong.  More likely they realised their views were poison and the vast majority of the population would rightly vilify them if they spoke up.

Pride-designed laces and armbands, and taking the knee before kick-off have really been shown-up as the empty gestures they are when the country's most popular and populist politician spouts nothing but unchallenged racist lies, and the supposed "Leader of the Free World" is a tiny moustache, and one testicle away from being a full-blown fascist.  With people like this dominating the public discourse it's hardly surprising their binary views are starting to become common currency again with certain, vocal elements.

This all came to mind yesterday when listening to the tannoy announcements that racist and other intolerant language would lead to lifetime bans.  Leaving aside how enforceable such a ban would be as regimes and club ownership changes over the years, I pondered if ANY threats would deter someone who lives on a diet of social-media conspiracy and echo-chamber, dog-whistle hard-right rhetoric from venting their bile when the mood took them?  Even if they can't be educated about their views, we can only hope they can try to keep their "thoughts" to themselves for the 90 minutes they spend with the rest of us.

This is NOT normal.
Satan usually has higher standards.

Trainspoppies

Choose Latimer Park

Choose a new season

Choose to hope for more of the same

Choose buying the new home shirt, but continue wearing the old one

Choose a slice of pizza in the fanzone

Choose trying to learn all the players' names (if only for when Dave Singh asks you in 3-months time)

Choose returning to your usual spot in the ground

Choose to shout "Freak" at Glennon in an affectionate manner

Choose a carpark pass you've still not seen hide nor hair of

Choose to ignore the odd Burton-bobble

Choose to attend more away games on the supporter coach

Choose not to go down the rabbit hole of KTFC Chat whenever we lose

Choose to believe not every volunteer will jack it in

Chose 5 minute Simon Hollyhead interviews over 15 minute Simon Hollyhead interviews

Choose a Klondike win for the third season in a row after bitching for decades about not winning it, if only to annoy Ken

Choose to wonder why all the millionaire-micro clubs in this division think they're going to boss it in front of their 300 fans

Choose the barstaff who have actually poured a pint before

Choose to applaud the kids taking half-time penalties 

Choose the odd visit to the Hospitality Lounge

Choose to continue to hate Rushden and Diamonds

Choose to use irony and sarcasm on the linesmen rather than anger as they can't process that

Choose Tuesday nights in the rain in Burton rather than Champions League in the warm and dry

Choose to lose your temper, patience and mind with the Poppies

Choose to repeat

I'm not saying Redditch away is an unpopular fixture......

 .....but this was the WhatsApp exchange between my good lady and I within minutes of the new season's fixtures landing!

Enjoy that shite-hole, suckers!  😄

Another Gary down!

Last season I bemoaned the fact that I lagged behind Gary Stohrer, Gary Hooper, Gary Graham and Gary Foreman in a Latimer-Park-Gary-Hierarchy I'd just made up.  Well, we're not looking so Gary-centric these days.

By now everyone will have heard that Gary and Sara were departing as "mein host and hostess" at the Poppies Social Club.  Anyone who has spent any time in the clubhouse in recent years knows how much effort the pair of them have put in to give us an off-field facility to be proud of.  Numerous events, regular pool, darts, bingo etc. evenings are testament to the work they have done.  As much as Gary on the terraces is a noisy drunken buffoon (!) off-field he is the consummate host, relaxing, glad-handing and happily watching as Sara and the other staff do the actual work.

As soon as their sudden departure was announced, on the eve of a new season most of us felt at least a smidgen of unease.  This news had seemed to come entirely from left field.  They were still taking bookings for tables at the next bingo evening at the end of July.  A curious thing to be doing if you knew you were leaving....?

Now the pair of them have been placed on the always homely-sounding "gardening leave".  This evokes a charming image of Sara pottering around her herbaceous borders while Gary watches on from under their patio hoarding, nursing a cold can or two and offering the odd word of unsolicited advice.  In reality, it means your employer has dispensed with your services and doesn't trust you not to burn the entire company down to the ground while you work your notice, so has your keys confiscated and gets his security people to march you off the site. 

How did this situation head south so quickly?  And how closely does this resemble Lavery's departure a few weeks ago.  Never mind the job you've done - you're out.  I have no idea what has happened behind the scenes.  I doubt many have.  But what I do know is something Ritchie admitted to a couple of seasons ago that the social club had made more money for the football club than matchdays attendances had during at least one season.  Stewardship of the clubhouse cannot be an afterthought or left to a couple of the dwindling number of volunteers George still gets on with to run.  It's a serious position for a club of our size.  Having the right person or people in position to run this side of the club is more important to the overall well-being of the Poppies than any showy signing on the playing side.  

So far, George and the other new owners have, rightly, been largely seen as a positive and have been supported by the overwhelming majority of us.  They have said all the right things, although, if past evidence is anything to go by, this isn't necessarily the hardest thing to do.  They had the benefit of the best season since Rockingham Road days.  The goodwill is still there.  But goodwill is a finite resource and soon depleted.  Since we last all gathered at Latimer Park we have lost a good Manager, some more than decent players and now the best people any of us can recall running the club bar.

So far George et al have known nothing but sunny days at Latimer Park.  I truly hope they continue, but recent developments can do nothing except frighten the horses, and Kettering Town horses are notoriously easy to frighten and very hard to placate afterwards.

And as for Gary Foreman - better watch yourself on that rickety-looking gantry.....

Ta-ra for now

Don't Mind Me, It's The Heat (Mostly)

Sure, it's the quiet-time of the footballing calendar.  I get that.  No World Cup or Euro's.  There's some kind of "Club World Cup" going on somewhere, but God alone knows what that's all about.  Back in the real world clubs around our level are busy horse-trading for players to pose on their social media cheerily holding a scarf or shirt of their new employer.  As it's meant to be I suppose.  These days there's also the boring interviews to complete, when players have to dredge-up some genuine-sounding reason to sign for Peterborough Sports beyond the truth of "they've paid me a stupid amount of money to play in front of 300 f*cking people".  Or, our new Manager, turning a getting-to-know-you-interview into a cure for clinical insomnia.

Maybe it's just me.  Perhaps the disappointment of losing the Play-Off Final to the pointless skanks of Telford is finally hitting me.  Or the nagging thought that last season was it - that was our BIG chance of getting back into the National League and we blew it.  Blew it to the noncy-London-overspill of sodding Bedford Town for crying out loud!  Oh, and the heat of course.

Or is it the niggling feeling we've made an enormous mistake getting rid of a Manager who gave us our best season for a decade and for why?  I think we all reached the conclusion that he fell out with the Club owners because they were overly handsy when it came to the playing side.  If so, why quit on us?  Was it so bad having George and Fabio saddling Lavery with a few players he didn't want or ask for?  Just don't pick them.  It worked last season!

It is also dispiriting seeing an exciting young player like Luca leave, while re-employing the grimly dependable George Forsyth who was worth a punt when we were struggling, but wouldn't have got a sniff of making the starting XI last season.  A club showing true vision would create a midfield around Luca, not look to loan him, bench him and then get rid of him.

And what of our owners?  Again, the boredom and heat is busy besetting me with niggling worries.  Do they realise just how monumental last season was?  Do they honestly believe the gates will hold up the same next season?  Are they thinking - even for a second - of banking on a comparable FA Cup run?  Do they realise how penny-pinching they are coming across with constant little add-ons, changes, extra costs and price increases.  If they didn't make enough money from the most successful season since Rockingham Road, they are NEVER going to generate enough income.  No matter how much they squeeze the loyal few.  And, as for that new home shirt.....

Anyway, as I stated earlier, don't mind me.  I'm bored, hot and not being wowed by the club's business so far.  Who knows, a bit of drizzle, a few games and a Hollyhead interview under 2-minutes long and I'm sure I'll be as good as gold.

Hot, hot, hot.  In every sense.....!

The Poppies in Pictures this week

So far this week in Poppyland.....

New Poppies coach invented a welcome cure for insomnia with a
13 minute interview that felt like 13 hourszzzz....  

The club unveiled possibly the worst home kit ever laid before the most
critical and expectant supporters in football, with predictable results. 
Fussy, confused and frankly annoying, but enough of us lot!  
Seriously though, it is difficult to understand how this design made it to
the final choice unless all of the other options included images of engorged genitalia.

Leon Loboit has chosen to risk following in the footsteps
of Leroy May, Recky Carter and, more recently, Jonnie Edwards
and put his free-scoring reputation on the line by signing for 
the club known in non-league circles as "the strikers graveyard."