Trail of the Lion King

The weather had improved with Storm Amy moving on elsewhere and so I thought I’d take in a Sunday morning fixture. I’ve not really looked too much at the local Sunday League, but a quick search threw up a game in the North Riding Sunday Challenge Cup. It was between South Bank United who play in the middle tier of three in the Langbaurgh Sunday League and Streetlam Farmers who turn out in the lower of two divisions of the Hambleton Combination.

The main attraction for me was that the venue was St Peter’s Catholic College. That’s the modern name for St Peter’s School which was the alma mater of Wilf Mannion. That meant that I might be going to watch a game on a pitch that had been graced by the Golden Boy.

A fair bit of online research, more that some people might consider appropriate, led me to the conclusion that St Peter’s relocated to their current site early in the Second World War and some seven years after Wilf had left school. Oh well. There’s not much distance between the two locations though, so who knows whether he ever had a kickabout on the current pitch.

The pitch wasn’t too bad for Sunday League. There wasn’t anywhere to sit unless, like two ladies had done, you brought your own chair. The goal posts had no stanchions and there was so much net attaching tape stuck to them that it may not have been removed since Wilf’s heyday.

The players were just as you’d imagine. At least one was older than me, some were fatter, and the subs were smoking and vaping. I saw everything that I expected bar some pre-match vomiting.

It was a good-natured game, but one-sided. By the time we reached half-time, South Bank were five-nil ahead. Play resumed after a brief three-minute break, which was barely sufficient time for the lad who went for a piss in the bushes to take up his position. Streetlam had the wind behind them in the second half which made it a little more competitive but it finished up as a comprehensive nine-two win for the hosts.

Tags: South Bank, St Peter's, Wilf Mannion

This entry was posted on November 19, 2025 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.