Rockingham Road Part II

With the news that the Club have actually nominated a location and date for a new ground (ignoring for the moment pesky details like finance and council permission), this is the obvious time to dare to imagine what will greet us on the first day of the 2012-2013 season.

Curiously, the site nominated is pretty much the same one that Mallinger identified towards the end of his tenure here. Back then he even went as far as producing the most basic looking design for a ground spat out by a Shareware “Design a Football Ground” programme. This crude image was loyally splashed all over the front of the ET on a particularly slow news day. I believe the second top-story was a hard-hitting piece about how pretty kittens and puppies looked.

With regard to a new ground I suppose it would be too much to expect traditional floodlights as they would bother the local residents. We should be aware of the NIMBY effect. Mind you, the same local residents weren’t too bothered when the woods we all played in as kids were bulldozed in order that their breeze-blocked hutches be built. I just hope the floodlights don’t look too wanky. You know – the bog standard lamppost configuration we usually mock, secure in the knowledge of the reassuring monstrously phallus nature of our own floodlights.

Starting a ground from scratch will hopefully permit Imraan and the designers to consider the quality and size of bars within the ground. If there’s one area where the Poppies have trailed most clubs they have played against it is in this area. No matter how poky a ground was or poxy their team, opposition clubs almost always boasted incredibly good off-field facilities. I remember when we lost to Marine in the Trophy a few years ago being amazed by their social club. Various bars in different areas with, if memory serves, an indoor fountain in the lobby. Not bad for a club whose pop side was 4 feet deep, and the opposite side backed straight into their neighbours’ back gardens.

Who can forget Gainsborough Trinity with bar facilities seemingly on all four sides of the ground, and a banqueting hall within the complex. Not bad for a team with only 27 supporters!

Obviously we will need a little more cover at the new ground than Rocky Road currently provides, although I’d be inclined to keep the away fans out in the open. It’s great, when it rains, to see people who have the temerity not to support the mighty Poppies getting drenched for their transgression.

The only worry I have is that the ground be built as an all-seater stadium. Unlikely, but it is a concern if only because a quarter filled all-seater ground can kill the atmosphere stone dead. This is the only reason I can think of why Non-Park has retained one terrace. The silence at that ground if all four sides were seated can only be imagined at with a sense of wonder.

Interesting times then at Kettering, but then again, what’s new?

"Garry, Garry Hughes, Where Are You...

...We've got some work to do now"

Ace programme editor and part-time ex-Poppy stalker, Paul Cooke has let PATGOD know that Moor Green was Garry's next footballing port of call after leaving Rockingham Road.

Does anyone have any further updates? Let us know.

Or not, it's not that big a deal really.

Corby – Is it really part of the Axis of Evil?

There are several certainties in life if you are Kettering born and bred.

You will moan about the town of your birth to everyone you meet, right up until the moment they join in with your criticism, when you’ll punch them in the face.

You will stare into the sky (and possibly point) when you see passenger aircraft taking off and landing.

If you live to a ripe old age you will end up talking like the hideously ungodly offspring of Dave Tailby and Barry Frost.

You will play skittles at least once in your life.

And of course, you will despise the town of Corby until your dying day.


But why? Why do the people of Kettering and Corby not get along? Why does the song “Ebony and Ivory” mean nothing to the peoples of the two boroughs? They refer to us “sheep shaggers” during their occasional footballing lessons at the hands of the Poppies, but generally we gamely resist the urge to call them a chavvy bunch of fried Mars bar chomping, baby-murdering, lazy-taxi-taking, shell-suited, Irn Bru guzzling, pyromaniacs.

At least, we resisted the urge until just then.

We don’t get along as towns, but I, like most of you I guess, have invariably got on with Corby people on a one-to-one basis.

Again, until just then.

Is it because their town full of plastic Jocks has been horribly grafted onto our fair Northamptonshire County, thus giving us a taste of the border tensions which have afflicted the two countries for centuries?

Is it because public funding appears seems to be no problem for anything that the town of Corby wants, or even just has a passing fancy for? A new town centre every 25 years, just when they’ve buggered up the previous one. An Olympic sized swimming pool. As many football grounds as are needed until they finally build a decent one that a couple of hundred fans can rattle around in. More enterprise zones than you can shake a caber at. A new, practically empty train station. A strange, enormous Cube, the purpose of which is not entirely evident yet. Houses are shit? Ok we’ll knock them down and build them again.

All this building infrastructure obviously pales when compared to the 2 ½ million Kettering council are somehow managing to fritter away on the old market place, turning a slope into a slope with a few steps. That should get those empty shops filled!

In the interests of preparing a balanced piece, I have recently returned from a fact-finding mission to the much-heralded Willows Shopping Precinct in Corby to see what all the fuss is about. I first became aware of the Willows when I saw an advertising billboard for the shopping area on display in Kettering. Nice bit of quality control there from our elected officials. Obviously they were too busy presiding over the ghettoising of Kettering town centre that they didn’t notice they were advertising a rival town centre’s facilities!

Anyway I walked down the mighty thoroughfare that is the Willows Shopping Precinct. A minute later and I had walked out the far end of it. Sure it looks nice and clean. It also looks like it could be a wind tunnel shopping street from any newly built town centre in the whole of the country. Still, what it lacks in character it makes up in having the biggest Primark on the planet. And that says more about Corby than I could if I carried on tapping away on my keyboard for a week….

Where the f*ck is Garry Hughes?

There were many memorable moments of the 2001-2002 Southern League Championship win.

The one that comes most readily to mind was the absolutely stunning bird Lee Cowling turned up with at the end of season bash at the KLV. He almost earned a new contract based solely on her arrival in what can only be described as a severely plunging black dress, which (happily) left little to the imagination! Every hot-blooded male, and probably all the lukewarm ones too in the building cursed Lee’s good fortune.

Oh, and there was also the last day heroics at Tiverton which won us the league.

Other than Lee’s good lady, the most memorable moment of this season was when the team ended up at Rockingham Road after the open top bus parade. We all filed dutifully into the main stand to worship our heroes (and Darren Collins) for one last time before we stormed back into the Conference. The team were introduced to us one-by-one and took their bows. They posed for photographs and hung around to press the flesh and sign autographs. Of course, being a Peter Mallinger club back then everything was slickly organised to squeeze the most commercial juice from hordes of happy Poppies fans – the club shop was closed, there was no merchandise available and no food or drink bars were open. Nice one Peter!

I had suggested to my better half that it might be a good idea to get all the players to sign their pen pictures, which had appeared in the Tiverton programme. Between us we cornered most of the playing staff and they were good enough to scrawl their names in more-or-less the right area of the programme page. Peter Fear sounded like Mike Read, “Ahwight my Sahn!” and Shutty sounded like Compo from “Last of the Summer Wine”

Steve Wilkinson actually asked, “Who, me?” when I thrust the programme and pen under his nose, and we both spent an embarrassed minute trying to make small talk whilst he duly obliged. I managed not to blurt out something awkward like, “Did you enjoy carrying the water bottles this season?” Or “Has Shutty spoken to you about a new contract”, or even, “we need your signature purely for the sake of completion.”

The one player we didn’t manage to track down was Garry Hughes. Rumour had it that his Winners medal was stolen at the KLV the night before. This may well have been the case because he had vanished as soon as it was diplomatically acceptable to do so. As much as I was sorry he had lost his medal, it was me who was left with a Garry Hughes shaped omission in my programme. Never mind, I thought, we would see him next season and get him to sign it then.

Shutty, however, had other ideas, and Garry was on his way, along with Cowling – what was wrong with you Shutty, didn’t you see his missus?

OK then, I was sure we’d cross paths with Garry at some point in the near future. I had even rehearsed leaning across the perimeter wall to catch his attention whilst he was warming up with his new teammates. I could picture getting his signature while he explained, with an embarrassed air, what was going on to his chuckling colleagues. But, alas, no. Never happened. Never came across him again.

I’m not saying it ruined the season for me, but my anal nature demands that I track him down one day to compete the set of signatures, even if it is at an Eastbourne old-people’s home sometime in the early 2050’s!

Patgod Issue Four (New Year 1990) Part Two - The Magic of the Cup

This piece remains as true today as when it was heavily pounded out onto a second hand manual typewriter 20 years ago.

Worryingly Kevin Shoemake makes it into this article as well as most of the others we’d done at this time (including issue 4’s cover). Makes you wonder if Lorne, Peter and I had a little man-crush going on at the time?

Who Are Yer?

I don’t know whether every club has these kinds of characters, but we often seem to be “welcoming aboard” some new face who is going to reinvent the wheel and take us to the fabled, “next step”. Then they are history before we even have time to remember their names. Usually they arrive at Rockingham Road fully formed, as our new “Commercial Manager” or “Infrastructure Consultant Executive” or “Seedy Nonce in a Cheap Suit”, or some other such bollocks.

They are usually announced to the press as the final piece of some sort of commercial-team jigsaw, which will now, finally, put us on a comparable financial footing to Manchester United.

Also, equally usually, they are gone just before this (or anything else) happens. If we are lucky, they don’t cock us up too much, and if we’re unlucky they are cracking open the fruit machines with crowbars and nicking the pool table.

Towards the end of 2007-2008 season some chap suddenly started appearing at games towards the end of the season, I believe as Commercial Manager. Don’t know what his name was, or if he actually did any commercialing. I recall seeing him ponce around the ground with his bluetooth hearing aid on, because you never know, that important commercial call (which will put us on a comparable financial footing to Manchester United)
might just come in the middle of a game….

I also recall watching him argue the toss with any supporter he came across, and getting into almost every photo I took after the Conference North Trophy was handed over. In his defence, I do seem to remember him stopping short of actually lifting the trophy over his head, but am left with the feeling that it was a close run thing.

Within minutes of the season ending the Club made the painful decision to dispense with this services. Despite this enormous setback, the Poppies somehow managed to carry on. As for him? God knows, or cares.



Do you have a suggestion of who can be added to our newly created list of “Pointless Poppies Appointments?” Indispensable club servants that we, er, dispensed with.

Night at the Museum 2

Saturday the 16th May saw a kind of official opening of the Trust's Memorabilia Exhibition at the Museum. Club legends Trevor Peck, Roy Clayton and Roger Ashby were on hand to look over the exhibits and press the flesh and sign the exposed bodily parts of the enormous number of fans in attendance.

Trevor was reacquainted with his old shirt, and unsuccessfully tried to convince everyone that he could still fit into it!

Roy and Roger took great interest in looking over copies of the 1979 Trophy final programme. It hadn’t occurred that they may never have actually seen one on the day, or in the 30 years since.
Newly installed is a painting of Rockingham Road done by the famous local artist Ralph Hartley. Don’t try looking him up on Wikipedia as all you’ll find is some crusty old American namesake engineer who invented the Hartley Oscillator and the Hartley Transform. And enjoyed naming them too by the sounds of it.

The painting, dating probably from the 1960’s shows a familiar looking scene, showing how little parts of the ground have changed. In fact, if you threw in a white ball and a dozen boneheads in fluorescent jackets confiscating dangerous drinking bottles whilst ignoring harmless distress flares, it could have been painted this year.

If you haven’t made it down to the Museum yet, make it your first port of call when you are next visiting Marks and Spencers. Oops, I mean, Kettering town centre.

The Trust has done a brilliant job with the Exhibition, and should be congratulated for their efforts.