LONG THROWS by Graham Jones

Semi regular contributor Graham Jones is annoyed.  And rather than aim a kick at his cat, he has put digits to keyboard and shared his annoyance with us.  We now share it with you. 

Don't forget, if something at KTFC is getting your goat (as if!) you too have the option of tapping out an angry article which we will happily host for literally dozens of fellow fans to see.

Over to you, Graham - 

"Anyone of a certain age will probably remember Rory Delap, the first player to become well-known for having a long throw-in. He of course was copied for a time, but I do not recall the use of the tactic of launching the ball into the penalty area becoming a constant tool in a manager’s armoury. Later, we had our own expert in the exotically named Exodus Geohaghon, who disappointingly failed to recreate his expertise in the recent legends match.

This attacking option is still sometimes used by many teams, even in the top divisions, but is sometimes disapproved of by other managers. This is something I have never quite understood as it gives a team a fairly simple chance to put the ball into a potentially dangerous area. You would not expect every corner to be a short corner so why not treat throw-ins in the same way. I have never been keen on short corners simply because they often don’t lead to the ball causing issues for defenders. In fact, the only goal that I can remember seeing that came from a short corner was when the opposition won the ball after a short pass and then broke away and scored!

This slight rant has been inspired by my current state of frustration when the Poppies. Well, one of them anyway. I don’t know when this constant use of this boring, ineffective tactic started, but it seems as if virtually every throw-in that we have had in the last 4 or so years, and within 30 yards of the penalty area, has meant that currently Rhys Sharpe takes a long throw. This happens even if he has to run 50 yards from the opposite side of the pitch before he takes the unsuccessful throw. The way that referees are seemingly keen to get a claim in for overtime with the amount of added time now being added, it might even happen soon that, if we ever happen to be winning again when near the end of a game, 

Sharpe could be penalised for time-wasting. This would be appropriate as most of our throws are a waste of time. The throws very rarely lead to goals, in fact, they very rarely even lead to a Kettering player heading the ball first. It is easy to wonder whether they are practised in training, given the small amount of time available. At best, the ball might drop in the 6-yard box and cause panic and confusion leading to a melee, as Cookie describes it in his commentaries, but even that usually just leads to a defender booting it clear.

This of course can happen quite a few times in a game as the vast majority of throws-in lead to this tactic. This is certainly not just down to our current manager as the last 3 or 4 managers have all employed this method. I can only assume Paul Cox stuck some diagrams on the wall and they haven’t been taken down yet."

"Back a bit.  A bit more.  A bit more.


A bit more....."

St Ives - Home

And the lessons from the Bank Holiday Monday game?  Firstly, don't leave early.  Secondly, I hope the club are banking plenty of money from the current excellent home gates, because they might not be quite so high in the coming weeks and months....

Redditch - Away

So, what did our latest trip to the Valley teach us?

Other than marvelling again at how a club can continue to thrive with a bare handful of unpleasant fans and even more unpleasant management team the main take-away from Redditch is for Sam Bennett.  Sam, when a goalkeeper obviously has it in for your personally and simply REFUSES to let any attempt by you pass him, perhaps call it a day early and let others have a shot!

Halesowen - home

 So, what did the Halesowen game teach us?

Personally, I learned I really should sort out my free tea and coffee voucher.

The club might have learned a couple of things.  Firstly, the danger of having the pitch play so well is that opposition teams are happy to come along and play us off of it.  And we need to consider the cost-effectiveness of employing new players every week if only debutants are able to score....

Barwell - away

And what did we learn from our latest humbling at the hands of the mighty Barwell (population roughly the same as Desborough).  It might have been, since when did Dan Homan start playing football again?  And why can't we seem to engage this sort of experienced pro?

Or the lesson might have been to wonder why our players seemed to move and react at roughly half the speed of the opposition?

More than likely though, we learned that the betting slip upon which we had staked money on the Poppies to bounce straight back into National North need not be protected and stored as safely now as it was 10-days ago.

Stourbridge - home

If there's one definite we can draw from Saturday's jaw-dropping capitulation to Stourbridge it might well be that is doesn't matter who owns the club, who's in charge, who plays for us, or even where we play our home games - 

- The Poppies will invariably find a way to shit-the-bed in front of a big crowd.

Gary Stohrer Look-a-likes No. 632 and 633

 

"Awright Gazza."
"Awright Gazza."

The other Kettering

Usually, towns enter into twinning arrangements because of some shared feature: size, industry, heritage, physical location. Kettering UK is twinned with Kettering Ohio because they possess the same name – that’s it, period. Not the most imaginative pairing.  However, your favourite Poppies blog couldn’t leave it there, and so at great expense we flew our correspondent all the way to the US of A to investigate further.

Ok, I was there already, but here’s the thing. I had reason to travel to the fine city of Cincinnati, and looking at a map noted that Kettering, Ohio was (by American standards) quite close by. So in a spirit of civic exchange I set off to explore our namesake and in the process discover if we had more in common than a shared moniker.

The first discovery was that Kett, OH isn’t actually a town as we would call it. It actually describes itself as a city, but in reality is an outer suburb of Dayton. There is no obvious beginning or end to Kettering, apart from road signs that mark the boundary from identical areas of townships.

The next discovery was there is no discernible centre of our American twin. I headed down what I took to be the main road through town, expecting at some point to see a square, some older buildings, a courthouse, something. I was still looking when passing a sign announcing the next suburb.  So I doubled back by a different route, lured by something called ‘Kettering Towne Center’. Turned out to be a crappy shopping mall – so we have that in common.    

Say what you like about our Kettering, but at least you know when you’re in the middle of it.

This was all the more strange when the streets were lined with banners proclaiming ‘Kettering is home’ to this or that. It suggested a proud community bursting with distinctive features. Perhaps, but not immediately obvious! On our side, yes the town is generally shite but you can’t miss Wickies.  

By now I was curious to find the sporting heart of our transatlantic doppelganger. Google revealed no results for ‘Kettering soccer club’, but ‘football’ worked better. Of course this meant the version with shoulder pads and helmets, but let's take a look.  Down a side road I found the Chester A Roush stadium, home to the Firebirds.  It was basically a school ground, but on an American scale, which means opposing stands with enough seating capacity for League Two at least.

No idea who Chester A Roush is (or was) but the stadium named in his honour was blessed by an old Poppies scarf, left behind like the flag on the moon – and most likely in a trash can by the time you read this. 

So Kettering Ohio, thanks for the memories. It was great to visit, because now I actually feel better about the original version.

Coming up: Lahnstein – is it more than just an excuse for an exchange trip piss up?  

Stamford - away

Don't worry, we're not going to, at this ridiculously late stage, start to write match reports.  That takes a level of attention, concentration and dedication we simply aren't capable of.  No, instead, this season we're going to see if we can come up with at least one observation from each of the Poppies games we see.  It may be a hopefully amusing observation. Or perhaps a curious one you hadn't considered.  More than likely it will be something startlingly, eye-rollingly obvious that, for reasons known only to us, we thought might be in some small way interesting and worth relating.

Stamford.

If the game at Stamford taught us anything it could well have been, if the opposition goalkeeper literally can't save, hold or judge anything resembling a football for fully 96 minutes, and looks like he might shit himself every time we cross the halfway line it might be a good tactic to kick the ball at him a few more times.  Certainly the first thing he cleanly holds all day shouldn't be his win bonus.

See you for the Stourbridge game!

A Tale of Two Chairmen

In the past week (fortnight, I lose track these days?) or so two former Poppies Chairmen have had the barefaced cheek to get involved in the world of football again.  It makes you wonder why.  Surely being Chairman of the Poppies for more than five minutes would put you off being involved in any sort of organised sport ever again, let alone football.

While Dave Mahoney's appointment to the Vice Chairmanship of the Northants Senior Youth League has been pretty much positively received by the Poppies faithful, Ritchie Jeune's joining of the Jersey Bulls Board has been met with a frostier reception.  Admittedly this has been on social media by pretty much the same people who enjoyed hounding him out of the Poppies in the first place, but it made for familiarly depressing reading.

What do they want of Ritchie?  They didn't want him here and made that clear.  Now they're not keen on him being at another club.  Some of the criticism of him came across as petty, some was borderline stupid given the fact he still OWNS our club.  You don't have to bend over and hold your cheeks apart for Ritchie, but considering he can end the Poppies with the stroke of a pen perhaps box a little cleverer when abusing the guy?

looks curiously a lot happier when he puts
a large body of water between himself and the Poppies

Grey Army! Grey Army! Grey Army!

We are constantly being told that us oldsters are becoming ever too numerous and act solely as a drain on society.  We're working longer, keeping young people out of good jobs.  We live too long and eat all the social care budget.  We get too much handed to us free of charge by successive Governments who need to attract the grey vote.

And a good thing too.  Young people are crap at working, they don't particularly need the NHS (except when falling drunk in the street on Saturday night because they also can't handle their ale) and Governments HAVE to appeal to us as young people are too apathetic to trouble voting booths.

And now, we're coming for your sports too!

Historically, sport has been annoyingly dominated by the young, slim and fit.  But, not anymore!  The door has opened a crack and we're going to waddle through and steal this from the young 'uns too!

That's right, the world of sport has finally realised the only people who can truly afford to shell out for all the required equipment are those people no longer physically able to actually play.  The answer?  Adapt the sport to better suit those with the time and funds to get involved.  

Thus Walking Sport was born.

Given how many old gits who KNOW EVERYTHING about football we have at Latimer Park we should be able to attract hundreds of players to these new sessions being held at the club.

Well, your correspondent attended the first session and can report it was good fun.  I sweated my absolute chubby ass off.  I had a laugh with the other guys who were also sweating as much as 1970 Top of the Pops hosts when they received a call from Operation Yewtree.  We kicked a ball about and tried not to break into a stumbling stutter which passes for running when you're staring down the barrel of 60! 

Sure, the next day every muscle in my body teetered on the edge of cramping.  And I have a pain on the outside of my right foot that has made me hobble for a week and swear at the cat.  But I'm going back, no doubt to be one of a dozen people offering to go in goal this week!  

So, if you're over 50, and have the most rudimentary footballing ability (sorry, John Fowler) pop along and see what you've been missing since you last had a full head of hair!