The Best and the Worst

It’s often said that we have the best fans in the league. Admittedly not by independent pollsters, more usually the club when it’s trying to butter us up into e.g. buying a half season ticket or luring undecideds along to a midweek rearranged fixture, but all the same, said with undoubted sincerity. 

We do have wonderful fans, of the type who will spend many unpaid hours forking and sanding the pitch only for the inspecting referee to make a plop sound when he drops the ball. The type who man the turnstiles, pick litter, sell programmes and tickets, host events or just do the everyday stuff like watching games, buying a pint and keep coming back for more. 

And at our best, such as the big Cup games last season and the playoff semi, we are magnificent and a source of real pride.

But let’s also acknowledge that we have some of the worst. We have the idiotic fringe of boneheads who have imposed segregations on the rest of us by their stupid actions. We have isolated racist clowns who have caused games to be stopped and F.A. reports to be filed because of remarks dredged from the 1970s (and it only takes one). And lately there seems to be a third category, the Burberry boys who mix inability to hold their drink / other intoxicant, possibly powdered, with having absolutely no filter. 

Last week at Stourbridge was a case in point. A pallid draw with zero flashpoints. Nothing there for anyone to get worked up about, except maybe our surrendering the initiative to a very weak home side. Yet the Burberry gang, if able to form a shouted sentence at all usually ended it with c***. The ref obviously copped it, because he was the ref. Their goalie copped it even more, because he was nearby. He did nothing to provoke it and did well not to bite back, especially when the neck veins were bulging at the end. It was shaming and hard to listen to.

Ok, we sometimes get some chat from opposition supporters. Generally 14 year olds playing up for their mates, who can be easily dismissed. Our bunch, looking at them, were supposed adults, some almost middle aged. Who are these people? And what did we do to deserve them? 

There’s obviously no easy answer. They pay their money, they no doubt think they are being passionate, “the best fans in the league”. But is this what we want to tolerate as a whole? Is this the way to attract people who come to non-league football for the supposedly friendly, non-toxic vibe? Do we want our proud name to be tarnished by these chumps? 

We can all do our bit in some small way by calling out bad behaviour, having a quiet word (if influential), if necessary reporting if it gets too obnoxious. Racist chanting used to be normalised, now it’s totally unacceptable and taboo. Can we achieve the same with mindless drunken abuse? 

There's No Place Like Home

After the small matter of a 73-day hiatus in home fixtures it was good to be back at Latimer Park surrounded by the familiar sights, smells and tastes of Poppies-land once again.  It was "Happy New Years" all round as we cheerfully filed back into the clubhouse and stadium.

73-days is a helluva big wedge of time in a football season to be denied the comforts of top-priced beer, snarky Klondike sellers, chatting to bumpkins, and listening to some of the dumbest, ill-informed, totally blinkered offside calls in world football.

73-days is longer than the pregnancy gestation period of your household cat or dog.  It's only 30-days less than the gap between the Play Off final against Telford and the first league game of this season at Royston.  Or, to keep my animal-gestation-period analogy going for no apparent reason - 30-days is also the approximate gestation period of your domestic bunny rabbit.

73-days has also had an impact on Latimer Park itself.  Our decidedly hit-and-miss electronic scoreboard was so put out by being cranked-up into life again that it gave up the ghost before kick off, preferring instead to splutter the occasional attempted random re-boot during the game to no useful effect.  

73-days was a long enough gap for the average punter to forget what most of our players looked like.  Fortunately, the team graphic on Twitter is your friend.  Err....except tonight...!

73-days is also long enough, it would appear, to restore and replenish our much criticised playing surface.  Leaving aside the known "problem area" the pitch looked lush and played well.  I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising as we haven't had 22 blokes running up and down on it every few days since December.

It is far more than 73-days since Paul White made his 40 minute second debut for the club at Royston on the opening day of the season.  By playing yesterday he had, by my reckoning, managed to play under three different managers in his last three Poppies games.  Obviously this season he has played under Hollyhead and McDonald with his last game for the Poppies several years ago under either Cox or Culverhouse.  I'd look up exactly which former Boston snake it was if I could be arsed.

Dare we dare to dare to dream?

 

36 hours to kick-off and the 
Poppyfield path ditch is....dry....

Answer - No.

Sun, sun, sun....

Meanwhile, yesterday in St Ives.....

Do not adjust your internet.  The sky is actually blue.

Rain, rain, rain....

The rain it raineth every day.

Well thanks Shakespeare for the weather report – tell us something we didn’t know.

The rain has indeed raineth every bloody day since Christmas and it’s fair to say we are all pisseth off with it. When will it stop?

It’s something to do with the jet stream, apparently. Unbroken crap weather that would normally be funnelled up into Scandinavia is instead being directed like an incessant sprinkler at our green and now sodden land.

And with the forecast predicting more of the same for at least another week, it feels like next Saturday will be another blank and we could be heading into March with as many as 10 home games still to play. Just one late blast of winter and we could be in serious trouble. 

Is it time to consider alternatives instead of another washout? Hereford, with admittedly even more home fixtures still to play (14!), have just announced that they are switching to Worcester for at least one fixture, and probably more as Edgar Street has a major drainage problem. 

Don’t shoot me, but has the club thought about approaching Corby or even Harborough to get a game on? Better half a crowd than none at all. 

And what of Latimer Park longer term? Despite many thousands sunk into pitch improvements, it remains a liability due to the clay base. Home fixtures from December to March are basically a lottery. Chances of being on? 50/50. And winters are getting wetter. 

Saturdays wiped out means midweek rearrangements, likely now squeezed into a few weeks, resulting in depressed attendances and lost hospitality revenue. All round it’s a budget killer. 

So what’s the answer?

A new home remains a pipe dream and feels no closer than when Frenches Field was first announced. So we’re staying at LP with basically 2 options:

1. current plan – get grant funding for a 3G surface adjacent to main pitch, for training and other uses.

2. replace main pitch with 3G, ensuring certainty of first team fixtures PLUS can be used for other purposes.

I’ve never quite understood the logic behind the current plan. Why still be at the mercy of the weather? Yes, a second, 3G surface would open up a revenue stream, but so would having it as the main surface. Just because we have the spare land doesn’t mean we have to put it there. 

And please don’t anyone point out that the Football League still prohibits artificial pitches. Let’s worry about that if we get to it!

Currently about as likely as the sun coming out. 

Yep, another home game.....

I enjoy being proved correct as much as the next man.  Probably more than the next man if I'm being honest.

But when it comes to yet another blank home Saturday I would have preferred to be wrong this one time.  Come the Friday and the heavens open once again and a fallow home game period stretching back to 20th December yawns ever wider.  Tomorrow's game against Redditch has no earthly chance of being played.

Assuming the next home game against Banbury (the other perennially flooded-club), takes place, we will have gone 2-full months without a home game.  God alone knows how the club are budgeting for this inadvertent mid-Winter break, but it can't be long before our perennial nay-sayers will be whispering about the squad not getting paid and players being tapped-up.....

We all have ways of gauging whether a game will be on or not.  Whether wedging a heel into the squelchy back garden to test the softness or feeling your old bones starting to ache, we all have a fool-proof method of gauging inclement weather.  

For me, I find that this path to the rear of the appropriately named Poppyfields estate is my "litmus test".  I cannot recall us ever playing at home on a Saturday if the section of path is at all flooded on the Friday.  This was it this morning. Hmm.

See you all at St Ives next week.....

Yep, another away game.....

 

.....and another fine day and lovely Suffolk sky.
Let's see how the weather looks for our home
game next Saturday.  Hint - we're hosting
Redditch, so it's likely to be crappy in every way.