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.