Archive for 2022

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Millwall v Middlesbrough, Saturday 12th March 2022, 3pm

March 16, 2022

At the start of this season, I still had four of the current Championship grounds to tick off with a first visit. One of them was Millwall’s New Den, or as it is now getting on for thirty years old, just The Den again.  Harry was busy with a rugby tournament, so I only needed the one ticket which I was able to get fairly easily.

I booked a seat on the supporter’s club coach. I’d looked at travelling by train but that was a hundred quid more expensive and I’d have had to travel for about an hour and a half on various underground trains once there. I also thought about driving but the lack of parking and the cost and chew on of paying both a congestion charge and an emissions fee put me off. In the end the coach was the easiest option for a day trip. It was a long day though with a 7.30am departure from the Riverside and a midnight return.

The journey itself wasn’t too bad. I was fortunate that, unlike the last game, nobody was singing Boro songs at top volume. I took a book and bought a newspaper which was the first printed copy I’d read for a long time. There’s something more enjoyable about reading a real paper. Maybe I might have to start doing it more.

It took us almost seven hours to get to the Den. We passed through Greenwich towards the end of the journey, and it looks a lot smarter and more tourist-friendly than it did when I lived nearby in the mid-eighties.

The Boro had the upper tier of one of the stands behind a goal. The lower tier was kept empty except for those in wheelchairs. I spotted Paddy below me and had a half-time chat with him. He’d done it properly and driven down the day before. Maybe I should have done the same and had a mooch around Greenwich.

A benefit of having a whole stand with only the upper tier full was that the concourse area was big enough not to be crowded. I was able to watch the end of the televised lunchtime game without being jostled or having beer thrown over me. Stuff you think that you’d be able to take for granted.

I thought we performed ok. Djiksteel was a big miss going forward and we never really looked like scoring. However, we were solid at the back and on the basis that Millwall would have overtaken us if we’d lost, I was happy with a point and a clean sheet.

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Brandon United v Chester-le-Street Town, Wednesday 9th March 2022, 7.45pm

March 11, 2022

I had a couple of options for games this evening and if I’d gone to Washington instead, I’d have witnessed a world record penalty shootout that finally ended up with a 25-24 winner after 54 kicks. I imagine that the shoot-out will probably have taken around three-quarters of an hour to complete though and so at times people would have been wishing that it had just gone to a replay.

Instead, I went to Welfare Park for the Northern League game between Brandon United and Chester-le-Street Town.

It was a fiver in and I picked up a programme for a quid. I’m always impressed when clubs of this size produce programmes. With average crowds around the sixty mark I suspect the sales might be in single figures, which is a shame as it was exceptionally well done. I learned from it that Brandon started out as a Sunday League side in the sixties and have the FA Sunday Cup on their list of trophies. They have won the Northern League too, although they are currently struggling in the bottom half of the second division.

Welfare Park looks as if it’s as old as the club. There are some benches behind one goal that are rotting away and the covered seated stand has areas in front of it that have been fenced off, presumably for safety reasons. With perimeter fencing that looks to date from the sixties as well it’s a bit like being in a time-warp. If they do get around to upgrading anything, I suspect that Beamish might be interested in the old stuff. It’s a pity that this was a night game as there looked to be a great view across the pitch to what might have been Durham. In the dark though, it was just a cluster of distant lights.

Brandon were in all red with visitors Chester-le-Street in yellow and blue. Imagine it as Wales v Sweden. Both sides appeared to struggle with the cold and the wind and a lot of first touches seemed to go straight to an opposition player. Brandon broke the deadlock not long before half-time with a header after some penalty box pinball and that was enough to take the points and move them a little further towards mid-table.

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Middlesbrough v Sheffield United, Tuesday 8th March 2022, 7.45pm

March 11, 2022

With Harry getting more enthusiastic by the week about going to the Boro games I thought I’d take him down to Bramall Lane for the Sheff United match. The easiest way was to go on the official supporters coach, and I booked two seats online when I ordered the match tickets. It’s a long time since I’ve been on the bus to a game, official or otherwise and I’d forgotten just how noisy it all is. There were two lads sat directly behind us who sang Boro songs throughout most of the journey. Harry enjoyed that part of it, as you do when you’re eleven, but to me, it was just unwanted racket. I rarely even listen to the radio in the car these days in order to avoid other people’s noise.

The journey took longer than it should have done due to the difficulty in parking the coach. Cars had been abandoned on double yellows on each side of the road to the parking area and it meant a lot of manoeuvring for the drivers. I’d have deliberately knocked their wing mirrors off if I were driving.

We were greeted by a sniffer dog whilst queuing for the turnstiles. He reminded me of the ones that they had in Korea at Incheon Airport. I would regularly arrive with a cold bag in my suitcase packed full of frozen sausages, bacon and lamb burgers from Blackwell’s and the sniffer dogs would ignore it as they were trained for Class A’s only. That’s some discipline. I doubt the beagle could manage it.

Once inside the concourse area was packed. We struggled to get something to eat as young lads bounced about going ‘fuckin’ mental’. As so often at away games it looked as if they were extending their drinking capacity by topping up with coke, presumably before they reached the sniffer dog, although the extent of the queues for the toilet cubicles suggested that some had been successful in bringing extra supplies into the ground.

Our seats were in the back row of the lower tier, bang in the middle. The overhang meant that I couldn’t see much of Bramall Lane but it’s a ground that I’ve been to plenty of times in the past. Mind you, the Sheffield trip I remember the most is one where I didn’t see any of the game as a consequence of my son Tom getting hit by a car on the way to the game. I spent that afternoon and night at a Sheffield Hospital as they operated on his broken collar bone.

The evening got worse as the game went on. We didn’t really compete and relied too much on lumping the ball forward. It was as if Warnock was back in charge and Sheff Utd were well worth their four-one victory. In a final act of fuckwittery someone threw a brick at our bus on the way out breaking the outer pane of a double-glazed window. If it had smashed the inner pane, we’d have had to wait for a replacement bus which is not what you want when you are already scheduled to get back at around midnight. Still, I suppose I should be grateful that neither of us were ran over.

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Burradon and New Fordley v Mayfair, Sunday 6th March 2022, 2pm

March 10, 2022

I’d had my eye on the FA Sunday Cup for a while. It’s a competition that I was vaguely aware of due to Hardwick Social of the Stockton Sunday League winning it a couple of times in recent years. It’s a national competition for Sunday League teams that is ran on a regional basis in the early rounds.

From what I could see, games are usually staged at grounds of bigger clubs to allow a more prestigious venue than school playing fields or a council pitch.

Burradon and New Fordley of the Cramlington Sunday League had made it through to the quarter-finals and their tie with Mayfair was taking place at Morpeth Town’s Craik Park. I drove up from Teesside, parked in the overflow car park and paid my £2 admission. If I’d been inclined I could have got in for 50p as the bloke on the turnstile clearly  had no idea if I was a pensioner or not. He gave both prices, leaving it to me to choose my age category. I suppose it won’t be too long before I may quite enjoy any uncertainty about my age.

Burradon were in yellow and blue stripes with Mayfair in a grey kit. I’d hoped that they were from ‘Monopoly’ Mayfair and might be kitted out in top hats and tails. Sadly, they weren’t from round that way although they did wear grey shirts that would have fitted well with morning suits. I never really see grey as being a football colour unless you’re Dino Zoff, of course. Can you believe that he’s eighty? Me neither. I doubt he ever gets quoted pensioner prices at games like these.

Mayfair were from Liverpool, which according to the programme has one of the strongest Sunday Leagues in the country. I remember that when Hardwick won this cup they had a few Stockton Town players in their side and maybe the strength of a Sunday side depends on how successful you are at persuading players to turn out twice over a weekend.

I liked the Craik Park ground. There was a raised seated stand on the far side with tall conifers behind it. On the side of the pitch where I came in there was another covered seated stand and a raised viewing area that was a sort of balcony to a bar tent. A covered standing area behind one of the goals provided an alternative to seating down or leaning against the perimeter railing.

The initial play was quite cautious with both sides keen to play a short passing game on the artificial turf. Some of the tackles were outrageous and I wondered if there was a Sunday set of rules where you could still wipe someone out with a lunge from three yards away providing you got a slight touch on the ball mid-air.

Mayfair opened the scoring with a direct free-kick, but ‘The Ford’ levelled just before half-time following up from a shot that came back off a post.

Some of the second half tackles were just as ferocious and there were numerous scuffles that rarely received a card. Mayfair got the winner with a shot through a crowd of players that left the home keeper unsighted and flat-footed. Dormans are one of the teams joining Mayfair in the last four of the competition and so I might yet get the opportunity to take in another Sunday Cup game this season.

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Middlesbrough v Luton, Saturday 5th March 2022, 3pm

March 7, 2022

Whilst we are going well in the Cup, we’ve faltered a little in the League lately with away defeats at Bristol and Barnsley contributing to a slip to eighth place. There’d been a good result for us in the Friday night game though with the draw between Sheff Utd and Forest resulting in both of the teams dropping two points.

I’d seen some of that game in the Malleable Club in what was my first visit since attending their Christmas parties as a child. Paul and I had called in on the way to see Altered Images at the Georgian. I’d read mixed reviews of their recent performances, but they did well. It seemed like an enjoyable night for both the band and the capacity crowd.

That draw meant that a win against Luton would allow us to leapfrog both them and Sheff Utd and move back up into sixth place. It’s ridiculously tight at the top of the Championship and whilst Fulham are probably far enough ahead to ensure automatic promotion the other spot could still go to any of the teams in the top eight, maybe even top ten. The play-offs are even wider open with clubs currently below half-way in the table still in with a shout.

Wilder had made two changes from the line-up that faced Spurs, switching out the strikers to allow Connolly and Balogun to start. The high-pressing game that we play makes big demands on the front-men and it makes sense to share the workload.

Luton looked a better side than us when we played them at Kenilworth Road back in October. We’ve improved considerably since those Warnock days though and, providing the Spurs game hadn’t taken too much of a toll, I was reasonably confident that we could take the points. Harry had no doubts. His logic being that if we could see off Tottenham then Luton should pose no problem at all. I was like that at his age.

Harry’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. Luton played a niggly game, trying to break up our rhythm at every opportunity. It’s exactly what we would have tried to have done under the previous manager. Once we’d got the first goal though it was always going to be difficult for them to get back into it and Watmore’s late clincher sealed the win despite an even later away consolation. The win was our ninth home league win in a row. That’s promotion form.

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Middlesbrough v Tottenham Hotspur, Tuesday 1st March 2022, 7.55pm

March 4, 2022

Well, well, well, how good was that? Outplaying Spurs in the fifth round of the FA Cup on a night when the game had displaced EastEnders and the like on national telly. I love the idea of people sitting down to with a cup of tea expecting to watch the Mitchell brothers gurning their way around Albert Square but instead getting a Jonny Howson masterclass and then seeing the Boro defence hardly giving Harry Kane a touch of the ball all night.

I’d switched seats for this one and so Harry and I were in the front row of the West Stand Upper. It’s the same row that Gibbo sits in, albeit around fifty yards to our right. The atmosphere was one of the best I can recall at The Riverside, maybe the best. The Liverpool game in ’98 usually gets a mention in conversations like this but that was in the pre-Red Faction days of just one singing end. When songs are started and taken up at both ends of the ground it makes it much more likely that those down the sides will join in too. And we did.

The performance was so much better than when we rode our luck to beat Man Utd in the previous round. We grew into the game in the second half and took it to them in extra-time. What a finish from Josh Coburn. He’s a fella with an eye for a goal and his strike rate per minute on the pitch must be up there with the best at the moment. Here’s hoping for a home draw in the Quarter Final.

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Billingham Town Reserves v Ferryhill Athletic, Saturday 26th February 2022, 1.30pm

March 3, 2022

I hadn’t been intending to go to a game on this afternoon as I had too many things to do. I knew that there was a game on at North Shore Academy just a few minutes from my house but I reckoned that as it was a school with an artificial pitch dogs wouldn’t welcome. I was looking after the beagle and so thought that I’d save that venue for another day.

Things change though and I found myself driving past North Shore on the way back from the shops. It was at the time when the game was on and I couldn’t bring myself to pass the turn without calling in for a quick look.

North Shore is a school built on the former site of Tilery Sports Centre which was somewhere that I spent a fair bit of time at. As a kid I played table-tennis and five-a-side there as well as failing dismally to progress beyond a white belt at judo. Later it was somewhere for games of squash and seven-a-side football on an outdoor gravel pitch.

Up until recently there had been some tennis courts there too. I can only recall playing on them once, back around ‘84ish. My friend Paul and I had walked past them in the early hours of a summer’s morning after a night out that had concluded around 4am in the casino. We nipped home for racquets and returned to play a few sets whilst everyone else was asleep.

With the casino being long gone and now the tennis courts too, I’ve no idea what people find to do when the pubs shut these days. It’s as well I’m generally in bed by nine.

Anyway, the game. It was a second round tie in the Washington Aged Persons Cup between Billingham Town Reserves of the thirteenth tier Division Three of the Wearside League and Ferryhill Athletic, who play one step higher in Division Two. Billingham were in blue and a goal up when I got there. Ferryhill soon squandered a chance to equalize with a penalty that was hit too close to the keeper.

The ref looked to be in his sixties, but kept a tight grip on the game, tolerating no backchat. I like that. Twenty minutes was all I could spare though, partly because I had a couple of live goldfish in the car, and I left them to it. A quick check later on revealed that Billingham ran out four-one winners to progress to the third round.

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Heaton Stannington v Durham City, Friday 25th February 2022, 7.30pm

March 2, 2022

Jen has been in America for the last few weeks and whilst Harry has been coming along to a few games he was at his Nanna’s for this one. He’s got millions of Nannas and Great-Nannas. Fewer Grandads though as we are all dying off. That’s how it works.

I was dogsitting over the weekend and so Henry the beagle stepped in as a match-day companion. He wasn’t too keen initially as he’d already settled down on the settee for the evening but once we got up to Heaton he perked up. He’s a weird dog. On Bonfire Night he sat on the back steps and watched the firework display. If he’s up for something like that then some lower league football should be a treat for him.

It was a fiver admission at Grounsell Park for humans with no charge for canines. I suppose they usually earn less than we do. My losing raffle tickets this week were for a Heaton Stannington branded coat. That’s marginally better than the usual two bottles of booze if you are a ‘Stan’ fan of just the right size, but I’d have made more use of some screw-top sauvignon.

It’s quite the done thing to bring a dog to Northern League games, more so at this ground than most. There was an airedale, a pug, something that looked a bit like a spaniel with a perm and a long-haired sausage dog. I don’t think I’d ever seen one of those before.

The area near the entrance and outside the bar was packed, so I headed further along to the covered seated stand and we watched the first half from there.

Heaton Stannington were in a skinny black and white striped kit with Durham City in yellow and blue. It didn’t take long for the home side to open the scoring and they were three up within half an hour. The scoreline wasn’t much of a surprise as Heaton Stannington are running away with Division Two of the Northern League whilst Durham City are adrift at the bottom of the table with only two points all season and a goal difference of minus one hundred and twenty-six.

There was part of me that hoped to see a rout. Is that mean spirited? I usually try not to be. Durham City had already lost by ten goals on three occasions this season and back in November were beaten sixteen-one by Carlisle City. You don’t get to witness outcomes like that too often.

At one stage in the season it looked as if Durham City might fold due to debts of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. But, approaching March, they’ve managed to stick around.

There were another two goals early in the second half but to everyone’s surprise they both came from the visitors. Order was restored with a quick response from ‘The Stan’ as we approached the hour-mark.

The final half hour was end to end as both sides pushed for an oddly crucial seventh goal of the game. It was the home side that managed it in injury time to seal a five-two win that flattered them to an extent. The dog seemed to have enjoyed the evening out but was happy to return to the settee.

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Middlesbrough v West Bromwich Albion, Tuesday 22nd February 2022, 7.45pm

February 27, 2022

With the Boro losing away at Bristol City at the weekend this game felt like a ‘must-win’ if the momentum that we’ve built up since Chris Wilder’s appointment wasn’t going to stall. There were more empty seats than normal, but the combination of a mid-week fixture, poor weather and it being on the telly made that understandable.

The ref, as is so often the case in the Championship, was poor. Not just in that his decisions rarely went our way but more in his determination to keep play flowing by rarely blowing for a foul. The consequences were that the tackles got stronger, and more time was wasted by players surrounding him with a list of retrospective complaints every time the ball eventually went dead. He’d have found the players a lot easier to manage if he’d blown for a few early free-kicks and set the tone.

Boro never really got going in the first-half and West Brom were well worth their one goal lead at the break. I thought that we missed the suspended Matt Crooks, particularly the way that he links up with Isiah Jones.

The game turned around in the second half with the substitutions. Watmore raised the intensity level and Tav moving to left wing-back allowed us an extra forward on the pitch. The resulting two-one win was our seventh successive home victory and took us back on track for the play-offs.

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Braintree Town v Hungerford Town, Saturday 19th February 2022, 3pm

February 26, 2022

Every couple of months or so I go to Chelmsford for the weekend for some academic chit-chat. This time my stuff was on Saturday only, but with it being an earlyish start and a few hours drive away it made sense to stay over somewhere the night before. I’d noticed that there was a Friday night game in Thetford and as that made for a good place to break the journey I made my plans to go along to that.

I’d remembered that Thetford had something to do with Dad’s Army and a quick online check revealed that it was the town where they did a fair bit of outdoor filming and where they stayed when on location. That meant that I felt compelled to stay in the hotel that they had used, despite it having a low review score. My plan was to sit in the bar and imagine Wilson and Walker sipping whisky at a table in the corner, Pike nearby nursing a half of shandy with Godfrey knocking back the snowballs.

The reality of the bar in the Bell Inn was that the music was too loud and it was full of youngsters on a big night out. I left them to it.

I dipped out on the Thetford game too as Storm Eunice caused it to be postponed, making my choice of Thetford a complete waste of time. With a full day at school the following day I didn’t expect to see a game at all over the weekend.

I finished being the dumbest person in the room by four o’clock though and with my Futbology app telling me that there was a match twenty minutes away at Braintree I thought I’d catch the last half-hour.

Whilst I could see the floodlights easily enough, the entrance to the Cressing Road stadium was harder to find and there were only twenty minutes remaining when I got inside. At that time there was nobody on the gate to take my money, but even if I’d arrived before three I wouldn’t have had to pay. Braintree had made the game free to attend, presumably to try and give a few potential new supporters the chance to see if they enjoyed the delights of the National League South.

I’ve no idea if it worked, mainly because I’m too lazy to check their attendance records but there was a decent crowd inside spread around the ground. The home fans were behind one goal and in covered stands down either side of the pitch. There were a few Hungerford fans stood on the open terrace behind the other goal. It didn’t look like there was any enforced segregation.

I did check the table though and Braintree are in a relegation battle with Hungerford ambling along in mid-table.

If I’d arrived five minutes earlier, I’d have seen Braintree open the scoring. In the action that I did see it was Hungerford on top as they pressed to draw level. Conditions, as you might expect on a weekend of storm alerts, were bleak with a sodden pitch, swirling winds and enough rain for me to move to a covered stand along the side.

Despite Hungerford sending their keeper up for an injury time corner they couldn’t force an equalizer and Braintree took the points.

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