Use it or lose it

We've all been looking at the comings and goings at Corby Town FC like we're shortly going to be looking at the Boxing Day sales.  Do we want or need any of the items on display or are we purchasing just because they're on offer?  Perhaps we've gone too long since our last brush with oblivion to truly recall the horror that comes with watching your Manager and best players (plus Tyrone Lewthwaite) depart.  None of it at Corby seems acrimonious.  They simply don't have the money to honour contracts and their staff are taking their services elsewhere.  The club will replace departed players and staff and hopefully carry on.  And hopefully budget more realistically in future?

Rarely a week seems to pass when you don't read of another non-league club going to the wall, or re-constituting at a lower level.  In the last couple of seasons we lost Coalville not long after they gave us a good thumping in Leese's last pitch-side, shrugging exercise in Poppies colours.  Bang - they resigned from the league.  A season earlier, the latest club to play out of Nuneaton dropped out of the league part way through the season.  Both demises handed us some good players to boost our own flagging fortunes, but were calamitous to the supporters from Nuneaton and Coalville.  Farsley Celtic, another club we have played against in the past 12-months has also, through complete ownership mis-management ceased trading.  A cursory glance at non-league social media throws up many more clubs, large and small, that have simply thrown in the towel.  Just today, Bedlington Terriers FC have announced their "folding with immediate effect."

Years ago, the news of a single club forced to cease trading would echo around football.  These days such news barely gets mentioned.  Were it not for re-tweets or Facebook posts, we probably wouldn't even know the half of it.  And yet, behind every short social media announcement there are people for whom that club meant everything.  Supporters, volunteers and officials for whom that club held a unique place in their affections.  The next, empty Saturday to be dreaded.  And then the week after and the week after that.  

Most of us don't have to try too hard to remember us being in this position just over a decade ago when we were attempting to extricate ourselves from the shiny, but deadly pit in Irthlingborough and grasping at a lifeline from Corby.  Sure, Corby made a few bob out of the arrangement, but they didn't have to help out.  They could just have just as easily turned away and then what would have become of us?  We may well have hung in there just about, but I very much doubt we'd have enjoyed the promotions and FA Cup run we have had since.

But, such is the nature of football and football supporters that bad times are soon forgotten in the immediacy of a poor performance or other transient disappointment.  I think this is why most of us who are 50+ at Latimer Park seem to be able to take the odd reverse with more equanimity than some of our younger, more hot-headed brethren.  We know the precarious nature of football at this level.  How much everything costs.  How reliant you are on goodwill and volunteers.  How buying that extra Klondike, or pint in the bar rather than a nearby pub, a replica shirt, or bobble hat means so much to the club.  How each interaction gives us a fighting chance of continuing when other clubs struggle or fall.  If you have these thoughts always kicking around in the back of your mind, the odd defeat or under-par performance, whilst annoying on the surface, is very soon put into it's appropriate context.  

As a case in point, after today's game, the Trust Christmas draw will take place.  We've all been badgered into buying tickets, seemingly since last Summer.  Another hand reaching out for our hard earned money.  But, t's not for them.  It's more Kettering people putting effort and time into something that doesn't specifically benefit them.  It's to benefit all of us and hopefully help in some small way to continue to give us a club that we can moan and gripe about for many years to come, beyond the recently celebrated 153 we've so far enjoyed.

Hopefully coming to a non-league ground
near you for a long time to come.

But, what if we HADN'T invented Shirt Sponsorship?

By now you can't have failed to see the new slick promo video the club has released highlighting the 50th anniversary of the Doog-era "Kettering Tyres" shirt - available from reputable outlets the length and breadth of Latimer Park.  In the comforting glow of watching the smooth camera moves, soft-focus loveliness and Dave Singh looking for all the world like a sub-continent George Clooney, few question whether the origin of yet another footballing money-making enterprise is really something to celebrate.  

I've never heard an opposition fan brag about the fact their club was the first to charge an entrance fee.  Nor have I read of a club giving equal veneration to hosting the first pitch-side advertising hoarding, but someone, somewhere came up with it.   In our case I suppose we hark back to it as it is one of our few claims to footballing fame.  We all love the Poppies, but let's be honest, other than our lengthy, often painful and hard fought continued existence, shirt sponsorship and wishing hard for an early Spurs exit from the FA Cup is pretty much what defines us.

The Doog really was ahead of his time with shirt sponsorship, but in the following half century there must have been hundreds if not thousands of fabulously designed football shirts ruined by jarringly inappropriately coloured ejaculate across the chest.  And I've never quite understood why the shirt sponsor is so slavishly copied onto the supporter replica version.  It's not as if a company logo stretched over the taut paunches of us gurgling half and quarter-wits will enhance the reputation of the sponsor.  At least this season's main kit sponsors at the Poppies are all local firms, so they had at least an idea of the girth and relative glamour of the walking adverts for their companies.  

But why are fans never given the option of opting out of being a shambling billboard?  Any other time you might find yourself carrying around an advert for a company you would rightly be expecting some sort of renumeration?  But not with shirt sponsorship.  We pay through the nose to unwittingly sign-up to whoever the Club gets into bed with for the next year.  It doesn't matter if they have questionable business practices, are run by toxic owners or are content to encourage dangerous levels of gambling (When the fun stops.....yeah, that'll work) we are stuck with them for good or ill.  

And while I'm on a roll, who or what the hell were "Coinweb?"  For 12 months we all blithely walked around with their logo front and centre without a clue who we were tacitly supporting.  They could have been a worthy charity busy alleviating famine, immunising against disease or tackling childhood mortality.  Equally they could have been a gun-running, Southern American Narco outfit, or worse, a firm allied to Nigel Farage.  Who knows?  Not us, that's for sure.

Dave Singh relaxes between takes
getting in the mood for his next cruise

"...Oh, oh I'm Trapped, like a football fan I'm in a cage...."

.....I can't get out, you see I'm trapped, can't you see I'm so confused, I can't get oooooooout....!"

So sang 80's funkster and possible Smurf-wrangler, Colonel Abrams on his dance-floor filler, "Trapped".  And if you've followed the Poppies away much this season you'll appreciate and share the sentiment in the good Colonel's words.

Another tough day at the office yesterday on the road for the Poppies.  Another backs to the wall effort.  Another grisly afternoon's weather.  And yet another segregated game for the travelling reds.  Depressingly, we all know why this is increasingly happening.  Even more depressingly, those among us who are the cause are unlikely to ever read this.  Or read.

Every time a bunch of our Burberry-wearing part-time teenage contingent angrily rattle a fence somewhere, looking for a fight they know they are never going to have, it is noticed.  Each gumped-up piss-head celebrating a last minute winner on the pitch rather than on the terraces is recorded.  These incidents are ruminated over by officials at other clubs or the local plod.  Or both.  The result - segregation for the rest of us.

Invading the pitch is only acceptable (A) when you win the league, or (B) when Ronnie Radford scores from 40 yards in the Cup back in the early 1970's.  We've missed the latter by half a century, and the former seems a painfully distant prospect, so keep off the f*cking pitch you dolts!

But there's the rub - do these fences cause more problems than they prevent?  Are we "rewarding" the tiny percentage of dicks who view a confrontational atmosphere as some kind of validation?

This is non-league.  We've all spent more years than we care to recall mixing with opposition fans, drinking in each others social clubs, and managing to co-exist without fighting each other.  A lot of it comes down to self-policing.  One of yours gets out of hand and someone has a word.  Bad behaviour is coached out of miscreants by those around them.  Tougher these days when some less than savoury 70's attitudes are reappearing and in some disreputable quarters, being positively encouraged.

When you are among fans of another team you soon realise that they are just people like us.  They are just suffering the terrible misfortune of being born elsewhere and wearing a different coloured scarf.  They are not an existential threat to our way of Poppies-supporting life.  They can't help being from a less-blessed place and as a consequence, forced to support a far more moderate football club.  If you want to feel anything for them, perhaps pity is more appropriate than anger?

When you separate the two groups of fans into separate, caged-of areas the atmosphere becomes immediately confrontational.  It's US versus THEM.  Abuse can be pointed in a specific direction at a specific group of people.  You are stood in an unregulated echo-chamber of a single point of view.  The experience becomes the very opposite of what non-league football has always been and should continue to be. 

Colonel Abrahams, rather on-the-nose with the 
imagery for his song "Trapped".
No signs of the Smurfs though.

No, No, No! Really?

"Attention Season Ticket Holders: Christmas Clash at Harborough Town.

The festive football calendar brings with it one of the most anticipated fixtures of the season: Harborough Town away on Saturday 27 December 2025, 3pm kick-off. And, judging by the early clamour for tickets, it seems Poppies supporters are treating this one somewhere between a cup final and a pilgrimage."

You can't have failed to spot the Harborough ticketing post on the the KTFC Website.  Above is the opening paragraph which has rightly been widely mocked on Social Media.  Not to risk the FOMO we thought we'd pull our size 11's on and join in.....

Christ, where do you start? Now, we don't necessarily believe that EVERY official club statement should be filtered through the prism of PATGOD, but, bloody hell, this one should have been. At least it could then have been read without leaving the taste of a bit of sick in the back of your throat. Unlike the club's attempt, we have taken the liberty of re-writing the above in a way designed NOT to coax stiffies in any readers from over the Leicestershire border.

Attention Season Ticket Holders - you know, you suckers who stumped up for the WHOLE season before we came up with a cracking part-season ticket offer. And, you know, those we screwed out of having a concession price at 60...yes, you lot.

It's bloody Christmas again, when games come far too thick and fast and the missus wants to drag you down to sodding Rushden Lakes so you can spend half a day trying to park the car and the rest of the day being bored out of your mind as 'er indoors looks at EVERYTHING on sale in EVERY store. And then buys all the gifts from the first shop you visited.

Sandwiched within this ruinous run of home games is a trip just up the road to the plastic school-pitch and rudimentary facilities of the painfully over-promoted and over-financed Harborough Town with their squad of expensively assembled mercenaries lorded over by the grinning beard of Mitch Look-at-my-enormous-budget Austin.

Barely one or two people have asked about tickets for this upcoming slaughter. Everyone else is busy cowering and hoping they will go bust before they can slap us all around their joke of a stadium which will look hideously out of place in National North if they manage to piss higher up the spend-what-you-can wall than Spalding before the end of the season.

Now, we know that playing Kettering Town is still more important to these pissant, bumpkin clubs than the air that they breathe, and playing us gives them their only chance of ever nudging a 4-figure gate, so the game will be all ticket. It's not a Cup Final. We've actually played them before. For real. At places like Wembley. It's also not a quasi-religious event. Some of us watched Poppies teams with Billy Kellock, Frankie Murphy, Phil Brown and Carl Alford in their pomp, so we know the difference. Lining-up to watch a half team of former money-grabbers who bottled their big chance last season when playing for us isn't much to write home about.

But we'll buy the tickets. We'll try to park somewhere near their tinny stadium. We'll piss in their portaloos. We'll try to watch the match through the gaps in our fingers. We'll continue to wonder if the Sun revolves around Dolman or vice versa. And we'll still be attending our fixtures in 5, 10, 20 years if spared, long after the private moolah swelling the Harborough Town coffers has been spent chasing the opportunity to take 3 fans on an away trip to Spennymoor and they are back playing park football, assuming they exist at all.

This is how the announcement could have been headed. KTFC - if you want to use this, it's not too late. Please feel free to cut and paste. We only want to help. We've spent decades coming up with pithy ripostes to more would-be rivals than Jason Alexander has made saves this season. And for the love of God, before you write such a fawning piece of sickly guff again, stop for a moment and ask yourselves one simple question, "How would PATGOD phrase this?" Then go for it!

Bloody hell guys, let's not give
Austin a bigger head than he's already got!