Who you gonna call?

 

  

Where's Bill Murray when you need him?

Addendum: Or a referee and linesmen with even 

a nodding acquaintance with the game of football.

The first, last throw of the dice.

Obviously as the weather has calmed down on a Saturday we are away from home.  No storms.  No flooding.  No ice age.  We must be on the road....

Exactly WHO we will be cheering on the road today down at Hitchin is more of a mystery.  We've signed a new spine of a team in the shape of, checks notes, keeper Dan Jezeph, defender Lathaniel Rowe-Turner, midfielder Jack Degruchy, and forward Kane Richard, plus George Forsyth until the end of the season.

If nothing else, the club are setting out their stall about trying to keep us up this season.  Signing actual grown men rather than a succession of kids who were getting well and truly bullied off the pitch by all and sundry.  It hasn't escaped anyone's notice that three of the signings are from the now-defunct Nuneaton.  In fact, I had a "heated debate" with someone who accused the Poppies of picking over Nuneaton's still warm corpse.  Their point of view being it was unseemly to acquire these players.  On the contrary, I corrected them, we've offered the chance of a payday* to three players who were suddenly out of work and had no club.  

*assuming we can afford to pay for new players while simultaneously telling fans we have no money and have all our home games called off due to the vagaries of the new-normal UK winter weather.

Heading out of the revolving Latimer Park door (not that they got to play at Latimer Park particularly) are the exotically named Phoenix Schultz and Neo Dobson.  No great loss except in as much as I never got to post a photograph of 80's funkmeister James DeBarge and pretend it was Neo Dobson.  Well, at least until now....

Neo Dobson takes our thanks with him
as he heads back to the Cobblers

 

Dear Diary

Wednesday 17th January 2024

Weighed into an online discussion about the time we had a large lead at the top of the Conference at Christmas before falling away over the last couple of months.  Different people seem to remember what actually happened in many different ways.  I've heard otherwise sensible Poppies fans claim we were as many as 15-20 points clear after leaving Boston with out customary 3-points.  One today managed to mix something like three different seasons together and claim that we were 10 points clear with 4-games to go at the top after beating Lincoln City and still blew the League.... Reminded me of seeing a video of addled-Gazza telling how he managed Kettering to a relegation during his 39 days here....

Memory is a curious thing.  And another thing memory is, is curious.

Thursday 18th January 2024

After a week of shedding players the news comes through that Nuneaton Borough have resigned from the League.  Not entirely unexpected, but still utterly shocking at the same time.

Feel guilty that after feeling incredibly sad for Boro and their fans for all of two minutes, I wonder how their demise will impact our League standings and chances of avoiding relegation.  Only natural I guess, but I'm not proud to be thinking such thoughts.

Attended the latest Fans Forum where any potential bolshiness from the floor was tempered by the Nuneaton situation.  If them.  Why not us?  Particularly as we seemingly don't play home games anymore.  Oh, and the potential for flashpoints greatly reduced by the fact that our biggest loudmouth keyboard warriors have an aversion to attending Latimer Park.

Meeting quickly adopted the traditional format.  Club bigwig spells out how precarious things are.  Second bigwig makes it clear we need to redouble our efforts to attend off-field club events.  Manager and Captain apologise for team playing crap.  The usual.  Questions requested from the floor, where it takes ages for the first hand to go up but once it has the dam is burst and the oft-asked questions are asked until the meeting is called to an end when the same questions have their second or third airing.  Still can't work up the nerve to ask anything out loud.  Bottler.

Friday 19th January 2024

You can tell that we have a home game this weekend as the temperature has dropped to minus 42 degrees and even polar bears are wearing scarfs.  It seems that the build-up to every home game is greeted by Biblical-level flooding or the dawning of another ice age.

Saturday 20th January 2024

To no-one's surprise the game against Stamford is called off.  Shame, as I was looking forward to

Stamford - lovely town.  Crap people

meeting up again with the pig-ignorant arseholes that seem to make up most of Stamford's support.  Once got offered "outside" by one of their delightful followers for questioning his horribly sexist, racist and homophobic exclamations and then basically told to f*ck off by another Stamfordian when I jokingly asked why he was huddled under an umbrella long after the rain had stopped.  

Bought some Poppies online raffle tickets of some description.  Don't expect to win.

Sunday 21st January 2024

Saw an unofficial League table showing Nuneaton's results removed and, if accurate, we are lifted out of the relegation zone.  The way we are playing this was the only way we were ever going to be thus elevated.  A lot of teams around us have suffered points deductions by having their wins against Nuneaton expunged.  I'd feel wore had the same not happened to us about a thousand years ago when Newport County went bust.

Obviously weather today is 10 degrees warmer then yesterday....

Hitting A Stour Note

Two photographs taken 5 years apart:

2019, moments after Tom Knowles’s thunderous winner at Stourbridge. Last we saw of Tom, he was disappearing under a pile of team mates, never to be seen again. Thanks for the, er, memory.  

2024. Same ground, same opponents, same division.  Very different direction of travel!

Instead of several hundred behind the goal bellowing out our victory songs, a glum few watch in near silence.  Whilst, just out of shot, being mocked by a bunch of potty mouthed ten year olds.  

It wasn’t that we were bad at Stourbridge. They barely threatened apart from the two times they found the net, whilst with a bit more belief in the penalty box we might have had three or four.

Certainly 1000% better than the shitshow at St Ives, which was so limp and disinterested it would surely have aroused police investigation if anyone had actually bothered to bet on the result. 

But the overwhelming feeling was that, like five years ago, this was a pivotal game for our chances and this time it didn’t go so well.  

It seems that we may have been kidding ourselves that the main problem was Leese’s  management style. Increasingly it’s clear that – yes that was certainly a contributory factor – but the plain fact is this squad is too lightweight and inexperienced for this division.  A lot of that is on him too, but not all.

Without Stohrer’s industry in midfield or someone other than Ty capable of scoring, right now it looks an uphill task to avoid another, unthinkable, drop back to a level where we will be closer to park pitch than the Football League.

Whenever a season starts to really unravel the cry goes out for a fan’s forum.  Well, fair play, this week we’ve got one.  However, from information already made available, it feels like optimism may not be high on the agenda. 

Well done to the vocal minority who have been relentlessly harping on about how uselessly run the club has been and predicting village football, starting from when it seemed a distant possibility.

As they show absolutely no sign of shutting up, indeed seem to revel in every setback, they may get to gloat about how right they were. 

Some Good Kettering News For A Change

Being from Kettering can be tough.  Our football club is meekly slithering to consecutive relegations, the town centre is a dismal shop-free wasteland and James Acaster is unfathomably considered the funniest person from the borough.  But not everything is going against the residents of the Holy City.

Buccleuch Estates have today been refused permission to bulldoze some of the few remaining woods and meadows in Kettering to build even more warehouses that would be standing empty for years to come.  It's possible Buccleuch Estates will appeal as there are two things the obscenely rich don't like.  Not getting even richer is one and having the proles telling them what to do is the other.  In this case, the people of Kettering, wonderfully well marshalled by Dez Dell plus many others and their "Save Weekley Hall Wood" campaign have risen up and said a resounding "NO" to our betters.  

I'm sure the Duke will be furious that the peasants have stymied his evil plans, and wishes it was the 17th century so he could round up the ringleaders and have them hunted with his hounds.   But it's not, your Grace.  It's the 21st Century now, so you'll have to go the modern route and consider "fiscally-encouraging" our easily-swayed, tame local council to get your way.  Or, perhaps look to get on the right side of history and consider a different plan that doesn't trash what little of our countryside you haven't already covered in asphalt and tin roofs?  

Green - yes, Greed - no.

https://saveweekleyhallwood.com/

Another sunset.  One we hope we'll continue to enjoy
(c) Dan Whitney

Where do we go from here?

Another away game and another comprehensive thrashing handed out by another team looking better than us in all departments (except goalkeeper, but this is only because I can't rate a player that was untested over 90 minutes of football).  A defeat to a team backed by a town with a population half that of Desborough.

What's worse is there's no obvious way out of our cycle of thumping defeats.  We have conceded 10 goals in our last two matches (as if you needed reminding), but could not have argued if we had shipped twice as many.  There's a strong case for awarding Billy Johnson MOM for both games even though he spent most of them picking the ball out of his net.

The morale-boosting win over Mickleover now seems like a game from a different age.  Since then we seem to have lost a number of grown-up players to be replaced by young boys, playing at being footballers.  It's not their fault to be young and hideously inexperienced, but it does us no good as we fight to stay in this division.

Increasingly I'm reminded of the last time we were dropped into the Southern League Premier division.  We were extricating ourselves from Non Park, didn't play for a month when we really should have been wound-up, and rotated through numerous players who were picked simply because they were available on the day and could get to the ground for 3 o'clock.  We finished rock-bottom of the division and spent the next couple of years rebuilding against clubs who looked on a three-figure gate as a bumper pay-day.

That time we had the backing of Ritchie to help us rebuild.  Now?  Well, don't look at the League Table for the Love of God.  A win in the 6-pointer at Stourbridge next week will still see us firmly in the relegation zone.  And this is at a time when the very notion of 11 players in our shirts beating another set of players in a different jersey feels more like a fantasy than a possibility.

Still, as we wallow in the unceasing dread of another relegation here's yesterday's sunset.  Not as good as the Halesowen one, or indeed, as good the as the sunset at Needham Market when we last played there and strolled to a regulation 3-0 win on our way to the League title....  But then, most things aren't as good now.