The Big One

The importance of  tonight's match-up cannot possibly be overstated.  A match between the forces of light and the forces of shite.  Apparently there's a football game this evening between Kettering and Sudbury, but I'm talking about the clash between the two Tory MP's representing both towns.

On the right, in the blue corner is James Cartlidge.  He has been Sudbury's MP since 2015, during which time has has served  as the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Justice, Exchequer Secretary for the Treasury, and Minister of State for Defence Procurement.  The bugger is still not even 50 years old.

On the even further right and in the even bluer corner is local boy Phillip Hollobone who, despite being in the Commons twice as long as James has never come close to holding any official office.  Even Peter Bone was briefly given a job as the Deputy Leader of the House of Commons FFS!  When you consider how many PM's he has served under, and the absolute shit-show of changes in personnel under them, it takes a special kind of dim-wittedness to somehow be passed over for so long, by so many.

However, he DOES own a rather old union jack coat that, no doubt, he'll be wearing about the town when the General Election comes, when he'll be trying to blame all societies ills on everyone and everything but himself and his party despite being in power for the past decade and a half.

James Cartlidge - Justifiably Smug

Phillip Hollobone simply can't believe
we keep electing him

Trial by Television

It’s hard enough watching us play lately, but for those of a particularly masochistic bent, even more self harm can be derived from the post-match interviews on Poppies TV.

First we had Andy Leese, whose media strategy can be summarised as:

·       If we didn’t lose, it was all down to him and the clever decisions he made

·       If we lost, it was because the players hadn’t followed his instructions

·       And it wouldn’t happen again on his watch (it did)

Initially Jim was a breath of fresh air, speaking apparently from the heart and with a healthy dose of common sense.  But this miserable stretch of results has slowly sucked the life out of him, to the point where he has literally run out of ways to answer the question, why are we so shit?

For fans of the genre of trying to polish a turd, a collector’s item was the opening query after Telford, where Jim was asked if he had seen any evidence of improvement since Long Eaton.  After... a long pause... he suggested that we had kept our shape for the first 20 minutes.

Somehow, despite being demoted to ball wiper and other duties as required, Jim seems to have kept the media gig judging from the latest sorry spectacle.

Possibly the new boss is being kept away from the camera after his debut appearance almost crashed under the weight of so many obviouslys, including six in a single sentence.  

But more likely, Lav was still otherwise engaged delivering the mother of all bollockings and sent Jim out to do the honours.

Unless results improve (please God) can we make a humanitarian request.  Do the interviews have to be so long? There’s nothing to be gained from making the poor man field yet another question to which we already know the answer. Wriggling politicians get off lightly compared to the Poppies TV inquisition!     

Is this the worst Poppies team in living memory?

I suppose it depends on what constitutes "living memory" but there has to be a case for holding up the class of 23/24 as possibly the worst Poppies squad certainly that Patgod has seen.  Sure, we've often assembled teams with shoddy players in it, but it is difficult to look back and identify a whole squad that has so woefully underperformed over so long.

Some of the early to mid 1980's teams were pretty ropey, but they were teams that still managed to avoid relegation from what was the top tier of non-league football.  The team that was finally relegated from the top division in the early 2000's wasn't great, but it won promotion the following year.  Mind you, the team that was relegated again the following season, rock bottom of the Conference was pretty piss poor.  But again, it was a team being relegated from what would now be the National League, so that in itself must garner a kernel of respect, surely?

In the battle to be crowned "Worst Poppies Team Ever" it really comes down to a straight fight between our current team and the last one to be relegated from this division in 2012-13 season where even if we hadn't been deducted 10 points we'd have still finished rock bottom by a further 10 points.

A closer analysis of that season and this one throws up quite a few disquieting similarities.  

Both seasons followed relegation from the National League structure into the Southern League Premier.  Both seasons took place against a backdrop of an owner actively seeking to sell the club.  Both seasons saw a revolving door of players and managers where you rarely bothered to learn new players names as they had a shelf life of less than a month.  And that was if they were any good.

But are we being entirely fair to the class of 2012-13?  During that season we barely escaped from Non Park to Steal Park.  We stopped playing for a month.  We were back in Court facing winding-up orders.  We were literally piecing teams together on a weekly basis.  We had an owner who didn't give a f*ck and a prospective owner about to be handed a 5-year ban from football.  Clearly 2012-13 was a clusterf*ck of clusterf*ckedness.  

We were rightly relegated and were frankly an embarrassment to Kettering Town FC, the town of Kettering, the County of Northamptonshire and the Southern League.  And yet.....

This season we may well have shuffled off an owner and a shed load of managers and players, but we are a far more settled club.  We know, barring the merest hint of rain or the lightest of frost, where we're playing.  We're getting several hundred punters through the doors.  We have a thriving off-field scene.  Our only problem is getting 11 sufficiently qualified and motivated players onto the pitch wearing red and black.  But, here we are, getting regularly thumped by tiny clubs from tiny towns and are reliant on other clubs going bust or being patently not good enough to be in this division to give us even a CHANCE of staying up.  

2012-13 was always going to be a crap season.  2023-24 we started off pondering, if not promotion, at least a good showing and a possible tilt at the play-offs.

We have a couple of games coming up against Sudbury that will go a long way towards deciding our fate this season.  But even if we somehow pull ourselves out of current nose-dive I think we would be hard pushed to award worst Poppies team in living memory to anyone but the current crop.

Now, Lavery, print this article off and pin it to the dressing room wall.  Show it to the players before they take to the pitch.

We've tried everything else....

Beginning of the end?

The Third, Last Throw of the Dice

After drafting in additional players and trawling our back-catalogue of managerial bods with only Richard Lavrey picking up the telephone, the club has taken the further ambitious step of sacking all the supporters and drafting in a replacement crowd for today's game.

Having tried most other permutations to win a home game the Board have taken the bold move of releasing all 700 hardcore Poppies supporters and moving into the loan market for an entirely new crowd for the visit of Leamington.

The previous supporters have taken to Twitter with the following message -

"Our collective time at Kettering Town has come to an end.  We'd like to thank the board and all the managers for giving us the chance to be disappointed most weekends.  Our mutually agreed departure gives us the chance to look at options moving forward that may or may not include trips to B&Q, National Trust joint memberships and lunch with the in-laws.  More than likely though we'll all be spending every other weekend in either Harborough or Wellingborough.  Either way, we're gonna have to get used to wearing an awful lot more yellow than we've been used to...."

Speaking on behalf of our new supporters, former fan Anus McLintock of Brigstock also took to Twitter to say -

"On behalf of the new fan base I can only express how excited we are to be joining the club at this crucial time of the season.  I used to be a supporter back in the day, and can remember as if was only yesterday the day we were relegated out of the Football League, blowing a 73 point lead in the League with only 3 games to go, being denied entry into the Premier League on the grading of the stadium and winning the World Cup at Wembley.  I'm really looking forward to supporting "The Cherries" once again and cheering the lads on at a sold-out Rockingham Castle."

"Kettering Town on hold for Ron Atkinson...?
Sorry mate, wrong number.  Do you need a cab...?"

The Second, Last Throw of the Dice

Another week goes by and a couple more players in blurry photographs appear on social media holding the ubiquitous Poppies shirt, standing alongside an increasingly panicky looking Jim Le Masurier.  That poor bloody shirt has been handled by so many temporary visitors this season it must feel like it's on a table in the entrance of a Primark store on the first day of the sales.  I'm not sure how many more times we'll be welcoming kinda-nothing players who are of a level and quality that the prospect of a handful of paydays at a struggling Poppies side seems like a good career move.  Surely we can only have so many more changes in personnel if not performances before we're all reaching for "deckchair" and "Titanic" cliché.

A look at the League table, best done like my Missus watching a horror film - through fingers or from behind a cushion, squeaking, "has it gone yet?" paints an ugly, stark, but clear picture.  Basically us or Sudbury are going to fall off the footballing map at the end of the season.  As we have yet play Subdury we have no idea how indifferent a team they are.  Were it not for Nuneaton's latest demise they would be sitting above us in the table.  As it is, with Nuneaton's results now a distant irritant, we sit 4-points proud of Sudbury.

We know very little about the club who are standing between us and consecutive relegations.  What we DO KNOW is that not only do they have 3 or 4G pitch, but they now have permission for a second artificial pitch.  TWO artificial pitches to make money out of, while we continue to try to play on our flooded or frozen cabbage patch with, seemingly, no chance of ever getting just the one new surface.  They also seem to have a positive outlook to the remainder of the season, making a big feature on their social media of the run in, grandly calling it "THE RUN IN!"   They also count, switching between the blog and Wikipedia with masterful aplomb, former Poppies players Jamie Griffiths, Bradley Thomas and former Poppies Assistant Manager Dean Greygoose among their less than stellar array of old boys.

What they don't have is a terrific number of supporters or the best of luck when it comes to teams going bust.  They had managed to do the double over Nuneaton and must have been less than chuffed when those results were wiped.  Their attendance against local rivals Needham Market attracted an extra 300 fans (more than double their average gate) to the hotly contested B1115 / B1078 derby.  Nor do they have, unlike us, the very strong likelihood that they'll be playing a 38 year-old defender as a makeshift centre forward for the rest of the season.

But, probably the best thing they have over us is they don't seem to share our almost crushingly fatalist outlook and our world-weary pessimistic self-destructiveness somehow magically allied to a blind belief that we are still some sort of force in non-league football.  The bastards.

Probably nice guys and may even be able to play a bit of football. 
Unlikely to reach double figure appearances for the Poppies between them 
as we scramble around for a magic personnel formula rather than
try old-school nonsense like playing with heart, passion and fight.

What Just Happened?

At the time of writing, a match report on the Long Eaton game is yet to be added to the official website. It seems fair to assume that whoever was assigned to write this one up has downed tools in protest, or has been unable to get past “shitshow” in the opening sentence. 

There are bad days at the office and there is what we witnessed on Saturday, a supposed ‘must win’ that far from slightly easing our relegation anxieties has sent them off the scale. Did the players expect Long Eaton to simply roll over?  Long before the visitors had the temerity to actually score, we were merrily fluffing chances like it was all going to be a walk in the park – until suddenly crumbling at the first setback.

At half time it was still possible - just - to believe that fired up and attacking the Tin Hat, a win, however narrow, would still be scraped.  As opposed to the bottom of the barrel, which was tunnelled through after about another 20 minutes, followed by about ten feet of Latimer Park clay until finally hitting bed rock.

Pretty much without exception the players out there looked like they’d given up. Against a team that only we seem to have any trouble in beating. A team whose noisy little band of fans were so unused to seeing them dominate a game, one of them forgot to take his flag when changing ends. In front of a crowd mostly stunned into silence, rather than ripping their heads off in fury like many a Kettering crowd of old.

Where on earth do we go from here?  Afterwards, Jim seemed to have no better idea than the rest of us. His post-match interview was part WTFery, part disaster victim being encouraged to relive events as the first stage in rehab. 

The frustrating, maddening thing is the same group of players are capable, not of so much better, but at least looking like they possibly could care less. We have seen this, on occasions. They are even capable of putting in a good collective 45 minutes. But if they think they are too good to go down, think again.

Stripes? Why stripes?

After 151 years our club has finally bowed slightly to that new-fangled democratic malarky and given supporters a say in the design of the shirts we will be expected to rush out and order over the summer in the hope of wearing them in time for the Christmas postponements.  You know.  The sort of thing other clubs have been doing for years.  The great Poppies-supporting public were never trusted to give their opinion when club owners and Chairmen had the opportunity to flick through a sports catalogue and pick a random colour and design, content in the knowledge that they were literally the only person in the club who would NEVER actually wear the final shirt.

The three bland choices the club have given us for next season haven't exactly set pulses racing in this corner of NN16.  Not like the wild "Design a Kit" competition when the Trust hosted the memorabilia exhibition at Kettering museum when kids (and, ahem, older kids) were encouraged to create a Poppies kit from scratch.  Some of those were pretty out-there, and you were left wondering what was being smoked in a number of households.  But, still, it would have been fantastic to have been seen some of the designs made real, adorning an embarrassed looking Henry Eze or a baffled looking Adam Cunnington.

Oh so meh....

No, instead we've been handed a choice of red and black stripes, or red with a bit of black and red with seemingly no black.  Disappointingly, the "traditional" red and black stripes seems to be by far the favourite with the herd-mentality, seal-clapping, Poppies fanbase.  But why?  And why do we consider red and black stripes as our "traditional" kit.

I'm happy to be corrected for this (well, not happy, obviously) but traditionally we have worn red and white with red and black only coming in in the early 1970's.  And for a number of seasons after Big Ron's red and black stripped warriors were a happy memory we reverted to a mixture of red and red and white.  Sometime with a saucy dash of black thrown in - such as the mighty Milas FA cup run shirts of the late 80's.  I'm pretty certain the red and black stripes only made a belated comeback under Mark English's brief but eventful reign.

But, for out-and-out red and black stripery I believe we've probably gone this route for, maybe 15 seasons in our history.  And even then, to my mind, the best stripery kit wasn't even really stripery, but the hoopery kit of several years ago.  Now, THAT was a classic which I'm delighted to continue to model and receive envious glances for on matchdays.  And will continue to do so until it wears out or it shrinks further (!) I doubt anyone will again wear the current horror-show of a shirt an hour after the final whistle of our last game of this season.

It's not that I inherently dislike the red / black combination because I don't.  There are so few teams that use red and black as their colours that it makes us a bit special.  There might be other teams that wear red and black other than us, AC Milan and Bournemouth but I can't think who off the top of my tired head.  It's just, I wish we could be a bit more imaginative with how we deploy the colours.  Red shirts with hooped red and black sleeves?  red shirts with black collar and cuffs?  Red with black side panels?  Red with black pinstripe?  Narrow red and black hoops?  Red and black halves or quarters?  There's so many options ahead of falling back on the red and black stripes.

And why oh why can't we EVER have red and black hooped socks?  Retro or not, I think they'd look dead cool!