I’m sometimes unsure when a new season starts. The women’s Euros, for example, is that 2024-25 or 2025-26? Pre-season friendlies are a good indication though and as that’s how this game was designated it marked my change from last season to this.
In 2024-25 I got to fifty-three games. That’s relatively low for recent seasons, but I did spend a lot of the season in a remote region of Saudi Arabia. As I’m now working from home, with the odd trip to Sweden, I’ve got high expectations for the next twelve months and by the time the season concludes with the World Cup, I’ll be surprised if I haven’t seen at least a hundred games with maybe sixty new grounds.
This friendly was a home fixture for Percy Main Amateurs at their Purvis Park ground. Visitors North Shields are based just a mile away and so it was an easy trip for their fans. There’s a little more distance between the clubs league-wise, with the hosts playing in the eleventh tier Premier Division of the Northern Alliance League. North Shields are in the ninth-tier Northern League Division one.
It was an easy enough drive north and as I’d paid for a few journeys through the Tyne-Tunnel in advance I’d didn’t have the stress that comes from having to remember to go online before midnight the next day to pay the toll.
I think I most associate the area just beyond the tunnel with Wet ‘n Wild. It’s a mainly indoors water park that I took my kids to a few times in the late nineties. I don’t think that it had ever been cleaned or maintained since it opened and by the time my kids grew out of it you couldn’t swim five yards without encountering cracked tiles, fungus or discarded Elastoplasts. Anyone who pissed in the water was probably improving its quality. A quick check online revealed that it has since closed and been demolished.
It was three quid admission to Purvis Park. There had been some programmes available, but they sold out before I arrived. There was a decent crowd of 365 for the visit of North Shields and I think a lot of them were visiting fans looking to pay their respects to one of their players, Curtis Coppen, who had died ten days earlier. There was a minute’s applause for Curtis before kick-off.
Purvis Park is an odd little ground. There’s a covered stand with tables and chairs, plus a row of single chairs in front of the clubhouse. If you want to see the game though you need to find a spot on the rail that runs around three sides of the pitch. There’s no access to the end behind one of the goals, unless you are the fella given the job of retrieving the ball from the nettles after a wayward shot.
North Shields were much the better side and were three up after twenty-five minutes. I popped into the clubhouse at that point and joined the queue for some food. It’s as well I did as they were just about sold out. I was able to get the last bun for a chip butty. Anyone who chose to wait until half-time will have been limited to chocolate bars.
I hadn’t missed any goals and it remained three-nil at the break. There were plenty of subs in the second half, but they were well managed and didn’t detract from a competitive game. Whilst there were frequent chances, mainly for North Shields, there were no further goals and it finished three-nil to the visitors.
On a groundhopping note, it was my six hundredth ground. That’s a milestone that I’d been hoping to get to before my sixtieth birthday. As it was, I managed it in my sixtieth year, which is almost the same thing if you say it quickly. I’d like to think that I can get up to a thousand before I’m seventy.
Trail of the Lion King 