Seven Days and Counting

Who'd have thunk it?  When we were being regularly turned over by the likes of  Bromsgrove, Stamford, Redditch, Spalding, Alvechurch, Harborough and Leiston in the build-up to our enforced damp mid-winter break that we would be in the play-off mix come April?

Over the next week we have three home games, all against play-off rivals.  The finish to the season is truly in our own hands.  The West Midlands triumvirate of Worcester City, F*cking Redditch and Halesowen stand between us and an unlikely late run for the play-offs.  Play-offs we'll lose, naturally.  Personally speaking I can't wait.  Games that MEAN SOMETHING. Prospect of a few big crowds.  Decent away followings.  Plus the usual half dozen angry inbreds from F**king Redditich of course.

Win all three and Liam has performed a bona-fide miracle.  We fall short and, although we'll be disappointed, it's been a great run to have something to play for over the last few weeks of the season.

The only slightly negative feeling niggling away at the back of my mind is this is almost exactly what happened when we were relegated from National North a couple of years ago.  We're still haunted by the run of three home game in a week in the last fortnight of the season against Darlington, Peterborough Sports and Scarborough, where had we squeaked a single win we'd still have been a National North outfit.  For at least another year anyway.

Even knowing this was likely to be the case Lee Glover set out his teams for these three games with nine across the back and a sweeper.  We bored our way to three draws and the rest is history.  Relegated by a single point.  One win from those three games would have lifted us 4 places into almost mid-table respectability.  All water under the Town End corner of Latimer Park now, of course.

Pretty sure Liam won't make the mistake and if we don't make it it won't be for the lack of trying.  Good luck lads.

Go on, Go on, Go on, Go on, Go on, Go on, Go on, Go on, Go on!

We may have given the impression that Patgod takes a dim view of the roughly half a million football content creators currently plying their trade on Youtube.  Is it because as a written "Blog" we see ourselves as somehow a more legitimate outlet for non-league nonsense than just poncing around taking pretty pictures and videos?  

We might have mentioned from time to time our horror anytime "Mullered" is spotted within a mile of wherever we are playing.  Mostly because his attendance usually presages either an under-par Poppies performance, a defeat, and usually both.  But "Mullered" is only one of any number of vloggers filling Youtube with hours of content wrung from most levels of the game, but mainly from non-league football, and mainly from the levels below the National League structure.

But no, despite our oft-grumbling, we mostly enjoy watching all manner of unofficial Poppies related footage of a Saturday night.  Some of the creators come across as quite personable, while others seem to seek to encourage the wearing out of the fast forward button.  Nevertheless, the sometimes crisp, sometimes wobbly footage gathered from the army of amateur and semi-professional filmmakers is the only sight a lot of supporters get to see of their team's away games.  So, it can be very useful.  Even if you are at the filmed games, the videos can show action and goals from different viewpoints.

The missus and I once sat at a hospitality table at Latimer Park with the vlogger Fusion Josh and his mate Ryan and they were good lads.  The video he made at Latimer Park that day is well worth a look. 

Fusion Josh - YouTube

Likewise, GamingBlomp has covered us home and away a few times and his vlogs are very well made.  He even managed to catch the Poppies earlier this season when we played well AND our pitch behaved itself!  And even though he is a Hereford fan he seems sound.  

GamingBlomp - YouTube

Some of  Away Days footballing adventures need to be seen to be believed, while Stuntpegg is equal parts knowingly guileless, easy on the eye and daft as a brush.  

AwayDays - YouTube

StuntPegg - YouTube

The Padded Seat seems to do nothing except get invited to fill their boots with hospitality at every sports ground in the country - nice work if you can get it!  

The Padded Seat - YouTube

The aforementioned Mullererd probably watches the Poppies more times in a season than the average Kettering fan, and must surely commit 90% of his waking hours to travelling to and watching non-league football at all levels.  

Mullered Sports - YouTube

And these guys are only the absolute tip of the vloggosphere iceberg.  Sad perhaps but not as sad as any other number of hobbies that may or may not include a thermos flask, notebook, and train timetable.

You won't need to spend much time trawling the thousands of hours of amateur Youtube footballing footage before two things become startlingly obvious: -

Firstly, the exponential increase of Youtubers, suggests that within 5-years fully 90% of people at games will be there ostensibly to create online content.

Secondly, and this is far, far more apparent watching these videos than it is when attending games, is the amount of times supporters spend shouting "Go On!"  "Go On!"  "Go On!"  "Go On!"  Honestly, it's like it's ALL we ever exclaim!  That and calling the goalie a c**t of course.  In a distant second place of terrace utterances is "Hit it!, but this is often mixed in with the mass of "Go On's!"  Boy, do we not come off well.....

Chuck in a few "Fecks" and "Nuns" and you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching an old episode of Father Ted.

A Tale of Two Tuesdays

Well, that was fun wasn't it?  Mostly anyway.  While it's always a treat to see your team run riot and give the opposition a thorough pasting, trousers down - six of the best, a curious, unfamiliar feeling stole over me on Tuesday.  Deep down, a part of me started to feel terribly sorry for AFC Sudbury.  They went from a team we had to beat into a bunch of shell-shocked young boys, far from home, dismally trying to get to the end of the game and escape further punishment.  A rare feeling indeed and one I've probably had no more than a handful of times in decades of watching the Poppies.

How different to the events and thoughts from the Tuesday before when we huffed and puffed to zero effect before meekly losing to Alvechurch.  Have consecutive Tuesday night games yielded such wildly different experiences?

Sudbury were utterly bamboozled by our infinite attacking options and possibilities.  Such was our unbridled variety,  at one point in the proceedings Mensah was playing as a tricky winger, twisting this way and that before whipping in a cross....Yet, seven days earlier we did nothing more to Alvechurch than lift EVERY ball over the puffing Panter as we aimed every single attack at the foreheads of the Alvechurch back four.

While I appreciate Alvechurch are a better team than Sudbury, both teams are flailing away in relegation trouble and should equally have been there for the taking.  We didn't trouble the Alvechurch goalkeeper, whereas the Sudbury 'keeper is looking at years of sleepless nights when he recalls his time at Latimer Park.

It's churlish to complain, given the good run we're on, but had we beaten Alvechurch we could now be in the last Play-Off spot.  How mad would that have been given the season we've had?  The Play-Offs aren't beyond us.  Sure, we've got a lot of crunch matches coming up against teams that are also eyeing up the end-of-season-lottery.  The last thing they will want to see is a resurgent Kettering Town gaining rapidly on them.  A Kettering Town gathering momentum and supporters as we make a burst for the tape.

I mean, how are they supposed to know how utterly awful we are in Play-Off situations?

Coyle lines up his 267th corner, and the closest one he took to the actual corner flag....

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.