After being in quarantine for ten days my first opportunity for a game fell on day eleven after our return from Russia. There was an FA Cup Extra Preliminary tie replay going on just up the road at Ryhope and so I thought I’d go along to that. It’s strange, I have very little interest in the latter stages of the Cup these days, unless of course the Boro are involved, but I thought that getting along to the very first round of this year’s competition was much better than watching, say, a semi-final between the reserve sides of two Premier League teams on the telly.
The winners in this Extra Preliminary round will need to successfully negotiate a further five ties before reaching the First Round where the likes of Sunderland will enter the competition and seven more before the big clubs such as the Boro come in. The losers of this game would take home little more than they would on Bullseye or Blankety-Blank with £375 for their trouble, with the winners picking up £1,125.
The fixture was at the Ryhope Recreation Ground. I’d passed through Ryhope on numerous occasions, mainly fifty years ago when visiting my grandparents in Sunderland, but I hadn’t been to the part of town with the ground. To get in you have to walk past a cricket pitch. Ryhope Cricket Club had a fixture the same evening and I passed to watch a couple of deliveries in a light that made sighting the ball difficult.
It was six quid to get in and I took up a position over on the far side facing the dugouts, tea-hut and the covered standing area. The pitch could best be described as undulating, with slopes and troughs in all directions. The grass had clearly been cut recently as the rakings were still littered across the surface, but the groundsman must have used a high setting on his mower as the grass was of a length to make pinging the ball along the ground at pace more difficult than it could have been.
Ryhope Colliery Welfare were in red stripes with visitors Goole in blue stripes, although for both of the teams the stripes only extended to the fronts of their shirts with the backs being a solid block of colour. At times this gave the impressions of there being four teams on the pitch.
Goole play in the nineth tier Northern Counties East Premier Division with Ryhope CW operating at the same level in the pyramid in Division One of the Northern League. Over recent years the Northern League had been considered to be one of the stronger leagues at that level but with promotions of the bigger clubs and the restructuring I’m not sure that it’s currently the case.
Goole opened the scoring after a one on one with the keeper. The striker didn’t connect as cleanly as he would have liked with his shot but then again neither did the keeper who got a hand to the ball but couldn’t prevent it from ending up in the net. That was the only goal of the first half and with rain in the air I switched sides at half-time for a view from inside the covered standing area opposite.
Ryhope equalized in the second half and despite both teams going for it, the score stayed level at full time. In the first period of extra time the home side took the lead, only for Goole to peg it back in the second period.
With penalties looming Goole nicked a winner. In a strange quirk all five goals had been at the same end of the ground, in front of a small, covered stand that appeared to consist mainly of broken plastic sets. Maybe I should have braved the weather and stayed at that end.
Tags: FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round, Goole, Ryhope Colliery Welfare
Trail of the Lion King 
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