What, is it 1974 all over again?

It is a commonly held if rather lazy view that the 1970's were unremittingly grim.  A decade stuffed to the gunnels with 3-day weeks, power cuts, beige furniture, the Yorkshire Ripper and flared jeans.  Those of us that lived through the 1970's as a kid tend to hold the decade in a more positive light.  

No, we kids recall more playing football with our mates until your legs ached and / or you were dragged home at dusk.  Penny sweets the size of your fist.  Real Star Wars at the cinema.  Watching Tiswas with your Dad.  I enjoyed the flan-flinging and pop videos.  Dad very much enjoyed Sally James.  If you were posh, i.e. you lived on the "new" Ise Lodge estate, you watched Multicoloured Swop Shop and your Dad had to settle for a disinterested squint at Maggie Philbin.  

Roles were reversed for The Sweeney (basically Life on Mars for real) when we joined parents for a hard-hitting drama where whisky sozzled coppers took on tooled-up robbers armed only with heavy sideburns and an even heavier length of lead pipe.

Music styles in the 70's were brilliant and seemingly every month brought a brand new type of music.  The decade started with the Beatles and went through Glam, Prog, Rock, Soul, Disco and Punk before depositing us with the New Romantics as the 80's dawned.  Take a random look at any singles or album chart from the 1970's and tell me it wasn't a time of musical Titans?  Compare that with the sludge being serve up now.

Football was real football back then of course.  Heavy balls.  Heavy pitches.  Heavy players.  The fighting on the pitch was only just trumped by the amount of fighting on the terraces and in the nearby streets.  It was definitely a different time for football and, to be honest, much of the dickheadedness isn't missed now.

Or so we thought before a wanabee "crew" seemed to have attached themselves to the Poppies over the past few weeks, culminating in the ridiculous scenes at the end of the Telford game.  I mean, what the f*ck is going on?  

Pissed-up would-be hardmen shouting the odds and throwing objects, and themselves onto the pitch.  Stupidity which culminated in the descent into actual violence after the Telford game.  Hopefully the subsequent arrests and naming-and-shaming on the official club Facebook page will deter these arseholes from venturing to Latimer Park again.  

The club, football and society doesn't need these wastes of skin.  Let them go back to acting the hard men in their own pits where they have our complete permission to drink, smoke and inject whatever they want into their bodies while they fritter their empty, preferably not too long lives away.

"C'mon Gary, get the telly onto ITV....."

Yeah? And?

 So, AFC Scum, we've signed your striker.  Tough.  Don't think for a second that we've forgotten about this, and we still owe you.....

 Dog's Bollocks

Dog Sh*t

Five Things You See on TV Football You REALLY Don't Have To Copy

Just because we see bigger fans of bigger clubs doing dumb stuff when we see them on the telly we don't have to ape them like simple-minded buffoons.

(1)  Drums.  Don't.  Just don't.  You won't be able to play it properly.  Everyone will think you are a dick.  And when your team is four down at half time you're going to feel disinclined to use your drum and can't exactly hide it away.  Don't do it.

(2)  Watching the game with no top on.  Admittedly this was more of a fad a few years ago when the ugliest gut-buckets (usually from Newcastle) commemorated the coldest Tuesday evening of the season to peel off their ultra-tight replica top and give us all a good look at yards of blubber and a fistful of ugly tats.

(3)  Throwing stuff on the pitch.  Another blast from the past that seems to be enjoying an unwelcome resurgence.  Even at our lowly level.  For years we didn't see this sort of thing on the telly, except when we saw a bit of religious fundamentalism from north of the border.  Suddenly throwing stuff at opposition players has become popular again.  Players don't always help by running over to the opposition fans every time they score and then collapsing to the ground, stone dead when an empty plastic bottle almost hits them.  Showing the usual, stupid mentality of top-level supporters they have chosen to dust off this particular hooligan trope at a time when every game is covered by a thousand cameras.  

(4)  Running on the pitch.  Other than celebrating winning the League your average fan should NEVER run onto the pitch.  Forget about being thrown out or being banned - that pales into insignificance when balanced against who dumb you look, lumbering around on a slippery surface like an out-of-condition walrus.  Those players you slag off are half your age and weight and are wearing the correct footwear.  You are a middle-aged tubby wearing non-grip trainers and haven't run since leaving school when Thatcher was still Prime Minister.  Have a word with yourself.

(5) Waving a cardboard sign asking for a player's shirt.  Tacky beyond all measure.  If you want a shirt, visit the club shop and badger your parent.  And, assuming Jack Grealish picks you out and gives you his shirt what exactly will you do with it.  By the following Tuesday it will be screwed-up and forgotten at the bottom of the wash basket.  And do you REALLY think the Poppies have enough shirts to waste one on you no matter how much you bellow lager-flavoured spittle at Jordan Crawford on the final whistle?

Looks like Liam Watson didn't get the Manager's memo.....

 "It's a fair cop...."

Click on the link above if you want to see something almost unique.  Liam Watson being far, far too even-handed when being interviewed after Southport's defeat at Latimer Park.  It's almost like he hasn't read the National North League Managers Handbook. 

Doesn't he know that: -

(A) If you lose to the Poppies at Latimer Park it's because of the pitch.

(B) If you lose to the Poppies on your own ground it's because Kettering are always in your face and play a kind of rough, physical football of the type you personally don't advocate.  You are such a football purist that if you can't play the ball 100% on the ground and fizz it around like Barcelona in a pre-saeaon friendly you'd frankly prefer to lose,  Certainly rather than play THAT kind of football.

London Bus Syndrome

Barely hours after we experienced the once-a-generation sight of a Poppies manager doing so well that another club prised him away from our agitated clutches, comes an even rarer Poppies-occurrence.

Another club liked the look of one our players so much they put actual coin of the realm on the table to acquire his services.  Seriously!  We've become so blasé about players coming and going, or leaving after 7-day approaches, that being involved in a bone-fide cash transfer seems like some kind of half-remembered, faintly archaic ceremony.  Like writing with a fountain pen.  Or casting runes.

Genuinely, can anyone recall the last player we sold for money to another club?  Please God, don't tell me it was Andy Hunt?!

We're going to miss Powell for sure.  For every time he held onto the ball too long, or looked a bit stroppy when things went against him he produced far more moments of real quality and penetration.  Such was his skill he has been one of the few players to tame the infamous Latimer Park surface.  The Gold-Standard when it comes to judging a footballer's quality.  His are going to be very big, but also very small boots to fill.

Powell's departure couldn't contrast more starkly with that of his former gaffer.  Cox cunningly wheedled away behind the scenes to sort out the move to Boston with his coaching staff before dropping us like a shitty stick 24 hours before a match.  No goodbye message.  No interview with Jon Dunham.  No "Thank You" for the opportunity of resurrecting his coaching career.  Cox and his cronies did the dirty on us and scuttled across to Lincolnshire like a gang of desperadoes doing a midnight flit.

As far as anyone can tell, Southend approached the club in the correct way about Powell.  The Clubs agreed a fee and Callum took to social media to thank us for his time at the Poppies, even going as far as to be at the Kidderminster game to make the half-time draw.  Disappointing to report that he didn't pick my ticket, but he's hardly alone in this failing....

I think, if we're being honest, we could all see something in Powell which suggested bigger things lay in store for him.  Other than a short stint at Wrexham, prior to joining us he'd done the usual Midlands tour of Rugby, Tamworth, Stourbridge, Stratford etc.  For all I know we've jeered him at every single one of those clubs!  Hopefully his career can only move in a positive direction and soon we might see him over-dribbling on the Football League show and claiming him as one of our "old boys" ahead of the dozens of former loanees we tenuously claim as our own!

I think I've pulled a muscle simply by copying and pasting this image!

In the name of Patgod, go!

Alright, it was just too good an opportunity to miss. Unlike more than a few Poppies strikers over the years, we know an open goal when we see it.

Is a Kettering Town fan site an appropriate forum for political comment?  Well it never stopped us in our firebrand younger days, when many an issue of the paper ancestor of this blog was sprinkled with opinions not shared by all of the readership.  Certainly judging by the continuing re-election of Roger Freeman MP.

Possibly we misjudged our influence on the wider electorate.  Much more likely we knew it was zero but still enjoyed sounding off on the only platform readily available. 

These days of course we are much less likely to inflict our views on you, no matter how exercised we get about parking access to the local garden centre. But something that still has the capacity to boil our p*ss is the spectacle of a former comedy news quiz clown who is a byword for dishonesty trying to blag his way out of Downing St revelry while the rest of us were dutifully following the rules no matter how personally inconvenient or painful.

If you’ve ever seen the film Downfall, remember the party scene towards the end. Boris was there, but only for 25 minutes.

It's my party and I'll lie if I want to

Boston United fans - contain yourselves.....

 

I couldn't quite resist tuning into Coxy's thrillingly entertaining "Hello" to his new supporters.  Other than the nugget of information about the long gestation period of his treacherous move to Boston, the rest of the interview couldn't have been grimly duller.

Back when he talked about the Poppies I hadn't realised how much he boringly repeated himself.  Over and over.  Now I do.

Nor had I fully appreciated how he always wore the distinctly harassed look of a vigorously slapped arse.  Now I do.